My day doesn't start until I light my cigar. Sure, the day begins with my partner and me feeding and dressing our two-year-old and sending her off to daycare. Afterward, I grab a coffee and pastry and set myself up on the benches that rim Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. Then my day starts with a cigar.

The cut, the light, the draw. The billowing smoke. The ritual and the nicotine set me at ease. My writerly peers who lean on performance-enhancing drugs tend to favor weed, but I’m old-school with my preference for tobacco. “Cigars are the perfect literary drug,” the novelist Jeffrey Eugenides said in his 2011 “The Art of Fiction” interview with The Paris Review. “I understand why Mann, Freud, and so many durable people smoked cigars. It really focuses the mind.”

Smoking tobacco puts you on

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