When sad, happy, angry, bored, or puzzled, we reached for a smoke. We probably experienced a trigger every ten minutes or so. But the trigger was in the same relation to the smoke as that of the old ladies to the Indian threat: the addiction demanded we address it and left us to explain our actions to ourselves as individual occurrences (excitement, boredom, loneliness, confusion), each of which we addressed, reasonably, by reaching for a smoke. Americans do not now universally smoke, but the seven-to-ten-minute period persists, hardwired in our preconscious. Now (when bored, anxious, excited,
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