Regular readers may have noticed that there have been no updates here for the last few days.

The reason for the frozen condition of Cigar Envy since last week is directly related to another freezing event. I’m talking about the ice storm that hit the southeastern United States last week. It has caused hundreds of thousands of people throughout the region to be without electric power and other utilities for several days.

I wish that I was one of them.

Instead, I spent a couple of days in the hospital after an auto accident related to the storm. I was travelling in South Carolina on business when the weather turned foul. I was in a large pickup truck, and having no problems since I’ve lived and driven in places from Michigan to Arizona to New York and know how to drive in bad road conditions.

Unfortunately, that isn’t true of all people.

Just as I was going over a bridge, I was overtaken by a person of questionable parentage driving a large SUV who seemed unaware that simply because you are behind the wheel of a 4-wheel drive vehicle doesn’t make you immune to the laws of nature and physics. As he whipped on past me at high speed, for some obscure reason he decided to hit his brakes.

On ice.

On a bridge.

Perhaps he suddenly realized he was going too fast. Perhaps he suddenly decided to move over into the lane in front of me. Perhaps he was annoyed at the sane speed I was driving and decided he’d throw a scare into me. Perhaps he had a sudden suicidal impulse. Perhaps…

All things considered, I think I’ll go with the suicidal alternative and not wonder any more. No matter what was going through the driver’s mind (and I use that term somewhat loosely you understand), and no matter what that person intended, what actually happened at that point was that his SUV began to spin.

I saw it quite clearly. In fact, I was utterly fascinated by his spinning vehicle.

I’ll admit that my fascination was somewhat selfish. It was influenced by the fact that he was coming directly toward me as he spun. Color me self-centered. I had just enough time to get out the first letter of a short, Anglo-Saxon euphemism for reproductive activity when the SUV spun into the front side of my truck.

The result, had anyone been viewing it from above the bridge, would probably have looked like a bank shot on a pool table.

My truck, with SUV firly attached, headed for the side of the bridge and I instantly became extremely religious. I recall hitting the side of the bridge, and then I recall an unpleasantly loud noise that blended into an unpleasantly loud voice asking me if I knew what my name was and what day of the week it was. I was right on the first question and wrong on the second one.

I’m making light of a serious situation mainly because I’m frankly relieved that I can still make jokes. Things could have been much worse. My truck was totalled, but I hate to think of what would have happened if I hadn’t been in a large, well-made truck. I took the lion’s share of the damage. The other driver had minor injuries. I wound up unconscious for a day and am left with a colorful assortment of bruises, abrasions and bumps in strange places. On the whole, things turned out a lot better than I expected them to turn out when the accident started.

It took me a couple of days to get released from the hospital and get back home after I woke up. Things were complicated by the fact that I was hopspitalized outside of my own state and the weather condition aftermath gave everyone a lot more to think about than just me. However, I’m back now and I’ve got a backlog of articles that will be posted over the next few days.

Plus, while I was comatose, my unconscious mind developed an utterly amazing blend for a new cigar that I’m going to have to talk to a sympathetic manufacturer about producing for me. The secret formula uses filler tobacco grown in the grelb fields of a planet circling the star Zeta Reticuli 1. The blend was given to me by a personable Bigfoot named Floyd who learned about it in an after-death communication from his father who was reincarnating…

…

… you know, on second thought, maybe that tobacco would be even harder to come by than prime filler from a certain Island South of Miami.

…

… and maybe I should be more careful what late night talk radio programs I listen to while I’m driving around the country.

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