Breathe.

I have long since torn up my NHS scrapyard card. I’m going in the flames – crackle crackle – and I’ll be stuffed with tobacco leaf when I do. Good luck transplanting third hand Leg-iron ashes. Put them in ashtrays to pretend you are cool enough to be a smoker. Someone could make money selling me on eBay one day.

There is nothing wrong with my lungs. Nothing wrong with my liver. Kidneys report no problems, even that prostate thing is okay. My appendix and tonsils are in place, surprising for one of my age. Most of my contemporaries had theirs stolen by doctors. I’ll probably die of boredom, since there seems to be nothing at all wrong with me.

Not one of those organs will be available for transplant. If necessary, if they make breaking for spares compulsory, I will spontaneously combust out of spite. Nobody is getting a damn thing.

Antismokers will say ‘Well we don’t want your filthy diseased parts anyway’ and I’m glad to hear it. No part is filthy and no part is diseased (other than a zit currently in residence on my shoulder, but once it peeks its head out it’s a goner).

The antis are out in force in the comments to the news that smokers’ lungs are as good as anyone else’s. I had heard this before, second-hand, from a White Van Man friend who spoke to a lung specialist he once picked up old furniture from. A lifelong nonsmoker himself, he asked the specialist if it was true that smokers had black lungs.

The answer was ‘Everyone’s lungs are black. That’s down to pollution. You can’t tell if someone was a smoker by looking at their lungs.’

Now, in the comments to that article, here it is again. The specialist was in a very different part of the country. This isn’t him.

Mac McCubbin (for it is he), Canterbury,
As a former mortuary APT in the public service I’ve dissected the remains of over 3,000 people. It is not possible to determine whether or not someone has smoked either visually or through routine microscopy. I suspect the lungs pictured are from a former mineworker or victim of long-term asbestos exposure. Very misleading. As to transplantation, as someone who thoroughly enjoys his tobacco and regularly marvels at the venom and deranged hate-filled comments aimed at people like me, I wouldn’t donate so much as a toenail clipping. My 1975 vintage donor-card was hacked up on July the 1st. 2007. If I’m not fit to mix with, I’ll take my components with me ta very much…

I agree. I will not donate so much as a single cloudy cornea.

Every time I say this, someone comes back with ‘Oh, but if you needed a transplant you’d accept it’ and will not believe that I would decline. I really would decline but that’s beside the point. The entire argument is irrelevant.

As a dedicated smoker, drinker, and ignorer of NHS diktats, the transplant would not be offered. I will never be offered a replacement for anything, not even titanium joints or plastic eye-lenses. Pity really, I’d take the metal joints and even Winslow Leach-style stainless steel teeth right now just to screw with airport metal detectors, and zoom-lens eyes would be wonderful. But I will not be allowed to ever make use of all that money I have paid into the NHS over the years. It was all just a protection racket, a scam to make me pay for my own persecution.

The twisted fuckers are not getting my body parts as well as most of my income. They will use my bits to keep alive those I despise while letting those like me die.

Besides, how can I get into the afterlife when I’m not completely dead? Imagine the gatekeeper of whatever religion you follow telling your shade to wait, because your kidneys and heart are still alive so you aren’t quite dead yet. Oh, you’ll be sorry then, won’t you? You’ll regret filling out the little card then, for sure. Too late. You just have to hope that transplant doesn’t get passed to another, and another, and another. What if… what if your kidney enters immortality and just gets passed on and on forever? Think on that, religious ones.

Ah, if only I could be certain that I could take possession of whoever I was transplanted into, then I would jump at the chance to take over a smug Puritan and bring them down to my level. Now that would be worth dying for.

Sadly, I cannot be sure. There is only one way to be certain of what happens after death and when you find out, you can’t do anything about it. It might be a nanosecond in which you think ‘Oh, bugger’ and then dissipate into nothing. It might be eternal peace – I hope not, it sounds dull. It might be a massive boozer with smoking allowed. It might be Hell, which would have all the pubs open 24 hours but you are only allowed two units a day and can’t smoke in any of them. Oh wait, that’s not the afterlife. It’s this one.

I must get around to writing a will. There will be a proviso for the NHS in there. It will say ‘He’s taken it all with him’.

No NHS Dr. Frankenstein is going to make a new Puritan monster out of my bits. I don’t care if it spoils their targets and brings their income down to merely obscene. Okay, let’s be honest, I won’t care about anything at all at that point because I’ll be dead. Not that I care all that much now.

I used to, you know. I was almost Socialist in my leanings once. Well, perhaps in a Vlad the Impaler kind of equality – everyone needs a spike up their arse. That’s more true than ever these days, I think. Seriously though, I was once one of those who saw the Oxfam ads and felt it terrible that people suffered.

Since the smoking ban I think ‘fuck ’em, they hate me. The sooner they are all dead, the better’.

I didn’t do that to myself. It wasn’t being thrown out of every pub that did it either. It was the realisation that even if I found a crappy shed at the dead-end of a dirt road, surrounded by a nuclear power station, a sewage works and an asbestos disposal facility… even if I called that shed ‘The Cancer Club’ and employed only smokers as staff and allowed no nonsmokers as members… even if it had no windows… even if I had five miles of that dirt road as private so no nonsmoker was in any danger of even coming within sight of our smoky shed…the law states we cannot smoke in there.

That is the level of hate directed at me and I send it back threefold. Furor will know what I mean by that, and for those not familiar with the familiars, well it’s clear anyway. I send back three times the hate directed at me and it is reaching a point where the universe cannot contain that much hate. I will need to find a way into alternate universes simply to hate them enough.

No. None of my NHS-baffling indestructibility will be passed to anyone. The argument that I would accept other people’s bits to spend more time in this life of revulsion is both silly and irrelevant. I will not get the option. I am only expected to pay for it and then supply the spares to keep the revolting ones alive. Again, no.

There must be something after. There must be.

Surely, my poltergeist apprenticeship has not been wasted? Wastemonster doesn’t have one. It certainly doesn’t have one that leaves burning cigarettes in arrogant shitheads’ offices just before their ASH overlords arrive. It must have that. Oh, it must.

If there is no afterlife I’m just going to have to invent it.