false 3 21 true false Tue Aug 18 13:47:46 -0700 2009 Tue Jun 30 15:43:00 -0700 2009 Tue Aug 18 13:47:46 -0700 2009
I love fucking smoking. I love, love, love, LOVE it. Except, Allen Carr's going to tell me, I actually don't. I can't possibly love smoking because smoking's disgusting! All the loving I think I'm doing is actually just the insidious mendacity of addiction that is warping my mind and encouraging me to flood my otherwise gorgeous long-distance runner's lungs with carcinogens and emphysema and all other kinds of gnarly. I totally believe this, he's obviously right, and I know what Carr's gonna say because I've read this before. And it totally worked the first time -- but of course, quitting smoking's easy, it's the staying quit that's a drag.

I don't relate to a lot of quit smoking stuff, because my smoking occurs under pretty specific conditions. I'm not the kind of smoker who smokes every day, but nor am I really a true social smoker who has one or two on special occasions. I smoke when I drink, and when I do then I binge. I can go weeks without touching them, but once I get started, I'll smoke a pack -- sometimes more -- in a night without batting an eye. Drinking gets me every time, as do smoker friends. Also driving. Rock shows. Writing papers. Etc.... Why do I do this? Because I love smoking!!! No, Allen Carr tells me: that is not why. I do it because I'm addicted, and I tell myself all these crazy lies about cigarettes, like that they're fun and make me happy, and that I enjoy smoking them. God, but I believe that. I believe that I love them. I hope he talks me out of that.... it's a tall order!

I do feel pretty ready for Carr to convince me. I'm thirty years old, and I know smoking's gross. I've had two friends my own age undergo intensely difficult, painful battles against cancer, and i've spent these past few weeks watching a man I really cared about suffer in agony, knowing he wasn't going to get all the years he deserved, probably because of this addiction he'd had since age nine. When he was diagnosed with lung cancer about a month ago, he told me he couldn't wait to get out of the hospital so he could have a cigarette. He even laughed about it, and said that he just couldn't imagine his life without cigarettes. He did get discharged, with referrals to radiology, and I'm sure he smoked his face off once he got home.... only he didn't have much time to enjoy that because he was rushed back to the hospital right away, when it turned out the leg pain he'd been complaining of was metastasized cancer. He died just a couple brutal weeks later without getting to smoke again or even go outside for fresh air. One of the many very, very sad things about it all is that I'd watched this man successfully fight addictions to other things that are a lot more serious in terms of their immediate effects on a person's life. Smoking cigarettes doesn't make you homeless (though with NYC's $10 pack, that could change) or exacerbate mental illness (according to some sources, it can actually soothe symptoms), and cigarettes don't estrange you from family and friends and the rest of society. But in the final analysis, smoking cigarettes can obviously have a way bigger impact than any of those other substances, because terminal illness makes all the rest of that stuff completely irrelevant. Homeless people can find housing, schizophrenics can manage their psychiatric symptoms, and people who've lost touch their families can reunite with their loved ones -- I saw this guy accomplish all those things recently, after seeing him struggle so much in the past. But he didn't ever get to enjoy what he worked so hard to regain, because he died of fucking lung cancer right when he'd finally -- and heroically -- gotten his life together.

I guess it's not so shocking that as I get older, I understand all the moralistic hysteria about kids smoking way more than I used to. I'm from a generation for whom there was no mystery or obfuscation about the health risks of smoking, and I was fully aware while choking down my first Marlboro when I was twelve that this was a horrifically unhealthy and addictive substance that almost inevitably caused lethal diseases. I mean, as a little kid I was terrified of cigarettes! They spent so much time at school screaming at us about lung cancer that I was distraught for days after walking in on a parent smoking at late night, convinced I'd be orphaned by what I, in my innocence, had assumed was a cigarette....

But I digress. No, what I was going to say is that -- as we all know -- kids start smoking because they know it's bad, and kids love bad things, and they absolutely don't believe for one second that they'll ever get older, let alone die. They really just don't. It's documented fact. See, but now I've gotten on a bit in years so I'm starting to get that if I don't figure something out soon, someday I will die. The older I get, and the more people I see get really sick and/or die, it does get a lot harder to deny that it could happen to me. That.... well, it will happen to me.

Part of me thinks that's why I love smoking -- there's some adolescent nihilism there that I'm really attached to, some big "fuck you" to the horror of mortality when you light that bitch up and suck in a big drag -- GOD, I love that feeling! But what Allen Carr would say, and what he's going to remind me, is that that's total bullshit. That feeling's just some half-assed, asinine, transparently juvenile rationalization for a dull and simple addiction I've been senselessly feeding for close to two decades. Allen Carr's annoying self-help book is going to remind me that all that romance and glamour, all the emotional and intellectual pyrotechnics I associate with my smoking, are just more sophisticated versions of a drug addict's most pathetic excuses. All those reasons aren't true. I don't really love smoking.

Anyway, even if some of that stuff is true, it's way past time to stop. I'm too old for nihilism, and that's not how I want to go, in horrible pain and all fucked-up on morphine. If I want to make some statement, I should jump off a building.

This weekend I hung out with a friend of mine who just went through the unbelievably awful experience of breast cancer treatment, and she was talking about how when someone gets sick, everyone wants to blame them for it. I'm sure you've noticed this too, that whenever something bad happens to someone, other people just go nuts coming up with explanations of how the sick/murdered/hit-by-a-car person's brought the misfortune on themselves. Susan Sontag talks a lot about this in Illness as Metaphor, and one thing I thought was weird but that I also kind of liked was that she shoved "smoking" in with "unresolved grief" and "pent-up rage" as ridiculous factors that people use to blame other people for getting cancer. It's true that lung cancer is one of the last acceptably stigmatized illnesses -- people can happily pass judgment on smokers who get it in a way that they're just dying to but can't for anyone else who gets sick. And I will be DAMNED if I ultimately give any smug asshole that satisfaction! When I have a terminal illness -- and unless I have some kind of terrible accident, chances are that at some point in the future I most likely will -- I hope it'll be one people can't blame me for giving myself. Or, much more importantly, that I can't blame myself for getting. Because that's not a fun thought.

Anyway, I'm planning to read this thing by the weekend. If I can make it through the Fourth of July without smoking, that'll surely be cause for a huge celebration. And if I can't.... well, then it'll probably mean that I'll have to stop drinking.

And that, my friend, is another can of worms.]]>