When the ball dropped in Times Square, everyone raised champagne glasses to toast the prosperous new year. While they celebrated and caroused, I wandered around Bourbon Street cursing both the changes of the new year and the ridiculously inflated cover charges at the bars. Because of state legislation, my New Year’s Eve was less about running wild and looking pretty and more about running out of breath and looking like a disoriented freebaser. I had lost my best friend – cigarettes.

As the clock struck 12, a new law sponsored by Sen. Rob Whoever came into effect prohibiting smoking in restaurants, public places, public buildings and basically anywhere where air is present.

I realized the severity of the situation when I headed into the lobby of a popular downtown hotel to use the restroom and was curtly informed by the doorman that my lit cigarette was not permitted to come with me. So I sat on the concrete with my true love pressed to my lips, cast aside with the other untouchables.

Not even getting checked out on the way to the bathroom could raise my spirits, and as I stood hovered over the urinal, my mind teamed with apocalyptic premonitions of our dying breed’s fate.

It began innocently enough. Smokers were first segregated from non-smokers to the “smoking sections” where even there we were asked by the non-smoking patron to extinguish our cigarettes for the well being of his adorable children at the table adjacent to the smoking section.

Now we cannot smoke at all in restaurants and are forced to retreat to the dark and dangerous streets to have a harmless dinner cigarette or seven, where while our meal is unattended, someone can drop a Commit smoking lozenge in our shrimp creole.

Soon we will receive notices saying that we have to vacate the cities and walk to live in central Kansas for what will become known as the “trail of smoke.” Not long following the relocation, the American government will drop a nuclear bomb on the smoking colony, instigating a world war between smokers and non-smokers, ending with extinction of all life on earth.

But the prophets of the Louisiana Smoke-Free Air Act insist that there are many places where one can still light up, including horse tracks, bingo halls and tobacco stores. Yippee! Just where we smokers belong, with horse poo and 80-year-old women who can’t control their bowel movements.

“This is great, son,” my father exclaimed. “What a perfect New Year’s resolution.”

No Daddy Dearest, the perfect New Year’s resolution would be drinking more water or something. Why do we have to assume there is something wrong with us to change? I can’t mentally compute sums over 20, I like disco and smoke more than a chimney, yet I embrace myself and wouldn’t change a thing.

At least I have the “Flavor of Love” spin-off “I Love New York” and Miss America Tara Conner getting out of rehab to look forward to in 2007.

Happy New Year – I love you.