a weird thought on quitting

So, cigarettes consume about 79.2% of my thoughts of late; more than work, more than dry, more than sex — combined.  I picture myself smoking more times a minute than a teen-aged boy imagines Megan Fox’s tits.  It would make your head spin.  It does mine.

I ought not post this to facebook, because the analogy that will be made over the course of this blog is a pretty terrible one.  But it’s seriously how I feel, if that gives you any idea of how powerful the addiction is.  Especially if you’re in my immediate family, and/or if you’re especially sensitive, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to stop reading.

I told Val that losing cigarettes has felt like losing a family member.  Cigarettes were always there for me — like an emo record to a pale-faced, died-black-hair’d high schooler, they never questioned me, never challenged me, and/but were always there for me when I needed them.   They made me feel better without asking anything in return.  Or, I guess, so it seemed. *Cue horror-film music*  Of course, the obvious point here is that cigarettes, you know, give you cancer, make you stink, give you little red lines all over your nose, turn your teeth yellow and your fingernails brown.  Oh, and they cost a lot of money.  So they want only this: my health, my beauty, my money.  Still, they never made me feel bad, emotionally; in  fact, they always made me feel better.

I’m getting off topic.  Sorry.  The point I was trying to make is that losing smokes is like losing a family member…except that when you lose a family member, there’s nothing you can do; there’s no choice.  [This is the part that some people might find upsetting.]  When my mom died, it sucked.  Every bit of it, from the in-and-out hospital trips, to the really-in hospital trips, to hospice, to that night, to the visitations, to the funeral, and back to “real” life.  But none of it was in my control.  There was literally nothing that I could do to change anything that happened — space knows I would have done “it” if I could have.  But I couldn’t.  It sucked, and I still feel the effects of her loss every single day.  I’m not writing this blog to whine about it: a lot of people have gone through similar and, in many cases, much worse things.  I bring it up here to make an analogy.

I looked forward to talking with mom; I looked forward to smoking cigarettes.  Seeing mom made me feel better; smoking cigarettes made me feel better.  Sometimes being around mom made me feel awkward, when we weren’t on the same page; sometimes smoking cigarettes was awkward, when I was at home, or around kids, or whatever.  Now, obviously, if I could choose between the two, my choice would be obvious.  But that’s not my point here.  The point is, at any moment, I can walk to a gas station and bring cigarettes back to life.  What I would do to bring mom back, but of course, I can’t.  All I have to do to bring cigarettes back, but of course, I shouldn’t.

Then again, bringing cigartettes back to life would only be like brining mom back to life if she were a purposefully-cancer-causing, money-grubbing, life-shortening bitch, which obviously she wasn’t.  It’s probably absurd for me to even compare the two, which is why I’m going to regret posting this.

I guess I would say that if you’ve never been heavily addicted to something, you just don’t know what it’s like to try to give it up.  I would admit that I don’t know what it’s like to give up smoking crack or doing meth: way worse that quitting smoking, I’d guess.  I know for sure that the physical symptoms are much worse for those things.  And that’s part of it: I don’t really feel any physical symptoms: I don’t sweat, my hands don’t shake, my teeth don’t chatter.  I just look out the window wistfully, picturing myself on the stoop, cigarette in hand.  It almost makes, and, a few times, has made me actually cry.  It blows.  Smoking is awesome, in the way that a siren is awesome, and I love it, in the way that Odysseus loved the sirens.  And that’s not past-tense.  I still love it.  But it’s evil.

Well, that’s all the nicotine-obsessed blogging I’m going to do right now.  Hopefully in a few months the new this will become normal — the this of being a non-smoker.   non-smoker. that sounds like another person.