SOYOUWANNA ROLL YOUR OWN CIGARETTES?

3. ROLL YOUR OWN WITH TWO HANDS

There are six steps:

1. Set up the paper
2. Measure the tobacco
3. Place the tobacco in the paper
4. Roll the tobacco into a cylinder
5. Roll the paper over the tobacco
6. Seal and complete the cigarette

1. Set up the paper

Get a leaf of cigarette paper and place it on a flat surface or lay it flat on your hand. Cigarette papers are made with folds which create a kind of valley into which you're going to place the tobacco. Therefore, you should place the paper so that the folded parts are sticking upwards, genius. One of the folds will have a little strip of glue right at the top, which you will eventually lick in order to seal the finished cigarette. This strip of glue should be facing you, on the upright fold furthest from you.

2. Measure the tobacco

When you have your paper expertly laid out in front of you, pinch up a small quantity of tobacco. It's difficult to provide exact guidance in this matter; it's something you'll have to get a feel for as you practice. The tobacco companies recommend that you use about a gram and a half (one gram is about one twenty-eighth of an ounce). This might not be too helpful; after all, how many of us purchase quantities of dried plant matter by the gram? Not us law-abiding citizens, we'll tell you that for sure. Anywaya gram and a half of tobacco is a little less than a tablespoon by volume. So start out with that as a guideline and then experiment as you go and see how much tobacco you like to have in your rollies.

3. Place the tobacco in the paper

Once you have your small quantity of tobacco in your fingers, place it in the cigarette paper. Place it so that it is fairly evenly-distributed along the length of the paper and so that there is about a half-inch of tobacco sticking out at either end. If, as you roll, you find that you are one of those people who is forever squishing the stuff in the middle out to the edges, you should compensate by both: (1) Not doing that so much anymore; and (2) Putting a little bit more tobacco in the middle. If, on the other hand, you are one of those people who squeezes too hard at the edges and forces all the tobacco into the middle, you should place less in the middle and more at the edges. Straightforward enough, no?

4. Roll the tobacco into a cylinder

From this point on it becomes rather less straightforward. For once you have placed the tobacco in the paper you must begin the part which will make you feel like you have all the grace of a blind midget trying to juggle fourteen umbrellas. Gently pick up the cigarette paper in both hands, with the index finger and middle finger of each hand on the far side of the paper and with each thumb on the near side of the paper. The fingers and thumbs should be on a forty-five degree angle, with the fingertips facing toward each other, so that if you touched them together they would form a little tent-like shape. They should not, however, be touching each other, as that would interfere with the rolling. With your fingers in place, begin moving the front fold of the paper up and down with your thumb. Don't pack it too hard.

5. Roll the paper over the tobacco

Once you have as nice a cylinder of tobacco as you think you can get (by the way, if you've been rolling the thing for more than a minute, you've been doing it way too long and it's probably about as smokable as a stick of petrified wood), you are ready to finish the rolling. This last part can be rather tricky, and if it is incorrectly executed, it can wreck an otherwise perfectly-rolled smoke. Here's how you do it: roll your thumbs downward until the edge of the paper is parallel with your cylinder of tobacco. Then, instead of rolling the paper back up, use your thumbs to fold it over the top of the cylinder and then start to roll it up. Only this time, with the edge of the paper tucked right in around the cylinder of tobacco, it really will start to roll up and look like a cigarette. Roll it up fairly tightly until only about the top half-inch of the far fold of paper with its strip of glue is exposed above the rolled paper and tobacco.

6. Seal and complete the cigarette

Quickly run your tongue along the strip of glue - moistening it, NOT slobbering on it-- and roll the cigarette together so that the glue seals it into a wee tube. Voila! A cigarette perfectly ready for you to smoke -- apart from you the fact that you almost certainly did it really badly if it was your first time, and from the fact that there is about a half-inch of hairy-looking tobacco sticking out at either end. The reason we asked you to leave the tobacco sticking out at the ends is so that you won't end up with the all-too-common phenomenon of having the ends be too loose or thinner than the rest of the smoke. Once you are finished rolling, you simply pinch off the loose tobacco with your fingernails or cut it off with scissors (not so cowboy-like) or with the bowie knife you carry in your boot (yeeeehah). The resulting cigarette will have a relatively even amount of tobacco throughout its length, and it will look and smoke better than if you had not left the tobacco sticking out. Trust us.

Now that you have a finished cigarette in front of you, pick the end which looks the best and stick that in your mouth. Then light the other end and pass the cigarette over to Uma Thurman. If she doesn't happen to be around, just smoke it yourself and enjoy the smooth taste of your own industriousness. You're going to get some tobacco in your mouth, but you don't care, do ya now, Tex?