...I occasionally smoke a cigar because it makes me happy, and my wife occasionally fails to understand why I must have a cigar to be happy when she can apparently be just as happy without one (and even happier without me having one). But the experience-stretching hypothesis suggests that I too could be happy without cigars if only I had not experienced their pharmacological mysteries in my wayward youth. But I did and because I did I now know what I am missing when I don't, hence that glorious moment during my spring vacation when I am reclining in a lawn chair on the golden sands of Kauai, sipping Talisker and watching the sun slip slowly into a taffeta sea, is just not quite perfect if I don't also have something stinky Cuban in my mouth. I could also press both my luck and marriage by advancing the language-squishing hypothesis, carefully explaining to my wife that because she has never experienced the pungent earthness of a Montecristo no. 4, she has an impoverished experiential background and therefore does not know what happiness really is. I would lose, of course, because I always do, but in this case I would deserve it. Doesn't it make better sense to say that by learning to enjoy cigars I changed my experiential background inadvertantly ruined all future experiences that do not include them? The Hawiian sunset ws an eight until the Hawaiian sunset a la stogie took its place and reduced the cigarless sunset to a mere seven.
