A Fire on One End and a Fool on T'other

It's been twenty-one days since I last smoked a cigarette. This is less of an accomplishment than it might sound; it's relatively easy for me to go a month or more without smoking. I was up to five or six weeks back in February before I un-quit again. I'm sure there have been spaces of six months or a year since that I have gone without smoking. Everything in moderation, including moderation itself; I quit smoking, and then I quit quitting.

It's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-smoker. When I smoke, I tend to be more nervous. Smoking raises my blood pressure, which is already too high as it is. When I smoke, there is this feathery feeling in my lungs that comes whenever I breathe hard, and while I know it's not lung cancer, it's always difficult to convince myself that it's not. Concordant with this is my even-more reduced capacity for exercise such that I am incapable of walking up a single hill without wheezing. And I swear, although I've never heard of this being a normal side-effect of smoking, that smoking contributes to my migraine headaches. I bet I could accept all the other consequences, aside from this one, because if smoking does cause me to have headaches--and it definitely seems to me that I get a lot more migraines when I smoke than when I don't--it would be downright idiotic for me to voluntarily inflict that kind of torment on myself.

But it's not as if I can't see the benefits of being a non-non-smoker, either. I don't get pronounced withdrawal symptoms when I don't smoke. Even when I do smoke, I rarely have more than three to five cigarettes a day, which doesn't seem to be enough to cause me to physically addicted to nicotine. No; the withdrawal is mental more than anything else. When I smoke, I have a need that must be satisfied every few hours. I can satisfy that need, and then I'm good for a while again. I think it's the regularity and ease of satisfaction of this need that attracts me most to smoking--I should wish that all of my needs should be so scheduled and so simply met. And when meeting this one need, it's possible to ignore other needs--like my needs for companionship, comfort, reassurance, and touch. Those things, in my experience, are very hard to get. A pack of my preferred brand of cigarettes, on the other hand, is available at most gas stations and grocery stores for about five dollars.

Given my very moderate tobacco use, and given that brief, dizzying rush of stimulants to the brain that allows me to forget, for thirty seconds, whatever else might be bothering me, it's been difficult for me to convince myself that smoking is really harmful to me. I *know* that it is, but it's difficult to do the assessment and find that smoking is more of a drawback than a benefit.

Do you know, gentle reader, what the best part of quitting smoking is? It is, most assuredly, that first cigarette after you unquit again. True, the experience is tainted by guilt, but the physiological sensation of those pathways in the brain that have gone extinct coming crackling back to life in a minute of intense sensation not unlike orgasm--it almost makes it worth it. Repetition deadens the sensation as the brain becomes accustomed to nicotene, but if one can leave off the chase for the dragon for a few days or a week or a month or a year and then resume the chase, it's as if you've got the dragon by the tail all over again. After a day or three of repeated exposure, though, the experience becomes mere mechanics--no real rush, just a feeling of irritability and dullness without the drug.

And that small, stupid, completely legal high is only a single smoke away. And it's sad that'd I'd throw away three weeks of sobriety--or better to call it three weeks of relative calm, with clothes that did not stink and a tongue that did not taste of tar and stale ash--for a minute of craving satisfied. But I would.

I guess I'm waiting for some definitive, conclusive experience to forever purge me of the desire to smoke--because that desire still persists, even if I do my best to deny it satiety. I don't know if it's possible to hit that fabled "rock bottom" with respect to cigarettes, though. In faith, there have been moments when I felt the muscles in my neck constrict and red pain seared through my skull like some breed of contained organic lightning, and in these moments I swore "Never again." There have been a number of such moments. And, with the possible exception of the most recent iteration, I have broken that vow every time. I am apparently very bad at being operantly conditioned. (It should be noted, though, that it only required three or four such comparable incidents to forever purge me of the desire for being very drunk). Will this time be the last time I need to quit? Hell if I know. I think maybe keeping track of the individual days as they pass by might be helpful; it's harder to throw away twenty-one days of progress than it is to throw away some while of progress, and it's easier to congratulate oneself on resisting that temptation that comes multiple times a day if one reminds oneself that one has been clean for twenty-one days, rather than clean for a good while now. Ticking off that calendar in my head does seem to have both a positive and negative reinforcing effect.

Nietzsche says something about resisting temptation that I wish I could find now, but I can't. But I remember the essence of the quote being something like "There are two ways to conquer temtpation: the first is through regular indulgence, and the second is through surfeit." Oh, Hell, I don't know if Neitzsche said that, but it sounds like him. Anyway. I wonder if the means for conquering my addiction to smoking would not be to smoke so much as to make myself so absolutely sick that I can never ever want to smoke again, or to accept that occasional indulgences are less costly than the stress of spending a significant portion of my day thinking about not smoking. Or else, if there is some switch I switch I can find and then flick that will make me want to smoke no more forever. Until then, instead of enjoying the satiety of a cigarette, I content myself with the much colder comfort that it's been twenty-one days since I last lit up.

Tomorrow will be twenty-two.