It’s been almost four weeks without an analog cigarette and much longer if you don’t count the one or two I had before and during the power outage. I’m really the last guy you want to take quitting smoking advice from or marriage advice or fiduciary advice from (though the latter I probably have some sound and conservative advice). My track record speaks for itself when it’s not bound and gagged and locked in a closet.
Even in this current incarnation I don’t have much to say about quitting. I keep all the e-cigs charge and I smoke them as I please; no recording of every puff, no self-conscious guilt trip about using them, no tapering off. This could be the way to do it or it could a dangerous fallacy. I haven’t a clue, so please, don’t think of this advice, it’s not, I’d rather you not take my advice if it’s offered and it’s not being offered.
There are tried and true methods of quitting smoking, dieting, gaining wealth, getting laid and just about every other thing people who feel uncomfortable with themselves are dying to find a short cut for. Stop putting things in your mouth and lighting them. Don’t eat so much. Work hard at something that pays well. Ask members of the opposite sex to have sex with you (um, you might want to be smoother about it, but it’s not really much more complicated than that. It’s a pretty safe bet you aren’t the only one. Love is a different animal, soft and cuddly with giant fangs and claws.).
If we really thought of losing bad habits as self-improvement you’d have to examine the self-destructive state that brought you there. That’s never going to be cured by a fad or a trend or some special effects cure. I’ll state for just about any record that I liked smoking, most of the time, I liked it. I assume the same holds true for dieters (they like eating) the poor (they like money) and so on and so forth. I mean this in general terms. Of course I’ve run across fat smokers who wouldn’t bath and didn’t like to be touched because they were sexually abused as a child and the less appealing you are the less likely that is to happen. As a survival technique it’s a pretty good one, as a lifestyle not so much.
I’m just saying quitting “bad habits” as our most dramatic event, well, we should all be so lucky. Ideally we just want to be comfortable in our own skin and think changing this or that is going to lead to the skin fitting well and, ultimately, happiness. Yeah, no, I don’t know. I was a happy smoker, relatively; I mean the things I was unhappy about didn’t have to do with smoking. Opponents of tobacco seem to think everything about a smoker that is wrong has to do with smoking. I like my happy in fits and spurts. I don’t think so well when I’m happy, in fact it’s probably a primary condition of happiness in that my thoughts are dark, I make great efforts to rein in the dark here (yet, still, there are those of you who think I go to great lengths to summon the dark). Here being wherever this entry goes.
If being comfortable in one’s own skin just involved sloughing off the survival habits you developed along the way that no longer work then shrinks work would be limited to the organically mad. It isn’t. Not by a long shot. Not only am I not sympathetic to whining about going off a diet or on the smoke, liquor, the series of bad fiscal or romantic choices ad infinitum, I’m not even sympathetic to my own whining in this regard. Food, drugs, the opposite sex, capitalism, they aren’t the problem, or not your problem; it’s your subjective relationship with them.
One truth is; if you are reading this all your survival techniques, to date, have worked (there’s problems with your bullshit to boredom ratio though). I mean you really might want to consider the whole if it’s not broken don’t fix it thing, duct tape and bondo wreak havoc with vanity and vanity is a poor reason to fix things. I suppose health is an ok reason, not one that’s ever motivated me, and, without dipping my pen too much in the metaphysical inkwell, no one gets out of here alive. However, you can’t really jump in that river more than the once any more than you can stay dry. I just mean eating salad vs. an Outlaw Burger (there’s this place in Playa Del Rey, that has a burger with every god damned thing you have ever seen on a burger; bacon, eggs, kielbasa, jalapeños, Jackson Pollock, roasted boar, buns, etc.) isn’t going to make you immortal and every now and again an Outlaw burger (with extra Pollock, oysters, scallions and secret sauce) might make you smile like a big dog and give your GI tract a full workout.
Either way you’re going to die, and, perhaps like me, you’re a little too late to leave a good looking corpse (not without breaking into the morgue and stealing one). The rest of you --- I was smoking before you were born and none of my problems are smoking related. Huh. I didn’t mean that to sound like one of those ostriches who say “Global warming my rosy red ass, it’s ten below out there!” I’m not advocating smoking or suggesting that smoking has kept me healthy (the outlaw burger logic of exercising the GI tract; Smoking exercises my lungs). I’m just saying I think I’m going to survive that survival technique. And despite the opinion of Mama Ceal I don’t really believe I am too evil to die.
The appeal to vaping is that it addresses my most fundamental sentimental attachment to smoking; blowing smoke from my lungs. It’s not really smoke, but it tastes and looks like it. The problem with the gum is that it doesn’t smoke, with the patch that it’s a patch, with cold turkey, well, there isn’t really problem once you’ve killed everybody in sight. I still have no clue whether nicotine-wise I’m taking in more or less or the same. Nicotine is the addictive stuff, but it’s not the problem. Heroin is addictive to, but you see a lot of old junkies.
I guess what I really mean is that vaping isn’t really like quitting smoking at all, it’s just quitting tar and the hundreds of other adjunct carcinogens inherent in inhaling a factory rolled cigarette. The gum is like quitting smoking only remaining addicted; all the joy removed same jones in there a’jonesing.
Hmmm perhaps this entire entry is an excuse for being sort of weird ass of late, I mean weirder ass than usual. I sure would like an outlaw burger.
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