It seemed like a good idea at the time...

File this under self-directed psychotherapy
My father, bless his well-intentioned heart, quit smoking 40 years ago and worked tirelessly in his own bizarre way to make sure that each one of his three boys never so much as set cigarette to lips.
And despite his greatest efforts, he failed spectacularly.
More of a non-verbal communicator in those days, my father was, and still is, the ultimate scrapbooker — long before the practice became the feminized modern equivalent of quilting.
It was around the time my older brothers were reaching early adolescence and I, a mere child of eight, when my father produced his masterwork. The green binder appeared one day amongst the bathroom reading materials as though it had always been there.
He had titled it 'Beating The Odds' — a sobering patchwork of clipped articles detailing the dangers and evils of tobacco use uncovered in his tireless research.
But the old man wasn't so deluded to believe his boys would take an interest in such obvious fear-mongering without good reason.
He made a decision then that I think held ramifications on our family to this very day.
He descended upon his prized stack of vintage Playboy magazines with a pair of scissors, illustrating 'Beating The Odds' with a minimum of three naked chicks per page.
I can still recite lines of anti-smoking text from that book, though I haven't seen it since I was 15.
The powerful combination of boobies and the smoking taboo ran wild in my pre-pubescent psyche forming an intoxicating association between sex and nicotine. My father had unwittingly sexualized tobacco in ways marketers could only dream of getting away with.
My brothers and I now laughingly refer to the book as 'Beating The OFF'.
We all ended up smoking, one still does.
I can hardly see a pair of boobies these days without patting my pockets for my gum.