oh yeah, i was going to say about the pipe smoke candle r. is burning. it reminded me of dad, how he took up the pipe when he tried to quit the cancer sticks. he looked like a cigarette man. i can see my sister's painting of him turning at the top of the basement stairs to look back at the viewer before descending with his great dane painted red and his cigarette with it's seething red tip. he was grey and blue, bent and cadaverous. i recall he put two paintings in his red brick historic philadelphia office building, but not that one. there was one of me sitting in my blue cinema seat curled like an old gremlin, my crossed leg blurred with nervous motion. he hated his painting. i didn't hate mine, but i wasn't that old, the blue period painting aged me fifty years. but it was a picture of me i admit even back then. 
last night i saw a show on vaping. dad finally did quit smoking too late after decades of puffing from camels to kents to some hideous low tar toxic chemical sticks. i don't imagine he would have been hip enough to vape, but he was as he said a dead man anyway.