Your respiratory system takes in oxygen and gives off carbon monoxide, a deadly gas, by a process called “photosynthesis.” This takes place in your lungs, yam-shaped organs in your chest containing millions of tiny little air sacs, called “Bernice.” In a normal person, these sacs are healthy and pink, whereas in smokers they have the wretched, soot-stained, anguished look of the people fleeing Atlanta in Gone with the Wind. This has led many noted medical researchers to conclude that smoking is unhealthy, but we must weigh this against the fact that most of the people in cigarette advertisements are generally horse-riding, helicopter-flying hunks of major-league manhood, whereas your noted medical researchers tend to be pasty little wimps of the variety that you routinely held upside down over the toilet in junior high school.

This is, of course, your heart, a fist-sized muscle in your chest with a two-inch-thick layer of greasy fat clinging to it consisting of every Milky Way you ever ate. Your heart’s job is to pump your blood, which appears to be nothing more than a red liquid but which, according to biologists (this should come as no surprise), is actually teeming with millions of organisms, some of them with tentacles so they can teem more efficiently.

The only organisms that actually belong in your blood are the red cells and the white cells. The red cells are your body’s Room Service, carrying tiny particles of food and oxygen to the other organs, which snork them up without so much as a “thank you.” The only reward the red cells get is iron in the form of prunes, which the other cells don’t want anyway. If you don’t eat enough prunes, your red cells get tired—a condition doctors call “tired blood”—and you have to lie down and watch “All My Children.”