Emphysema of the lungs, CT scan

So when I weakly stumble out of bed I decide I am quitting smoking. By the end of the day, usually around 5pm, I have lit up another cigarette. I smoke it. I smoke another. Then I smoke another. It starts all over again.

I somehow convince myself, what does it matter, I want a cigarette, so why shouldn’t I be allowed to have what I want. And soon after I hate myself for it.

So I have decided to quit smoking again. And I will throw everything I can at the habit. I quit before, I managed six months, but my weak sense of self got the better of me. It won’t happen again. It is over. I am quitting.

Quit smoking. Dump your friends.

Allen Carr advises in The Easy Way to Stop Smoking to not let quitting smoking mess up your social life too much. Currently my social life consists of a bottle of whiskey and a circle of smoking friends. If I am going to keep up with this sort of social life, I am going to have to buy a better bottle of whiskey. I am sure once my tongue is no longer coated with tar, this no frills variety I have been nursing myself on is going to begin to taste true to the methylated spirits and brown food colouring I mix together in the morning.

But beyond the taste of booze, how am I going to continue participating in the ménage á trois of drinking, talking, smoking without the cigarettes? It would be like returning to missionary style and monogamy. Bland. But maybe if the new whiskey is tasting a little better I might find myself too inebriated to be particularly fussed over the ordinariness of the ordinary in/out. Unlikely. I might simply need to find some new friends who don’t smoke, but still drink and have sex.

So the old sage Allen Carr says to keep up with the old friends. Those old friends who still smoke, well you’re supposed to look at them sideways, because they’re drug addled freaks, and speak to them in a nice polite tone, informing them how good you feel now that you don’t smoke. I don’t think two days of non-smoking is going to have much clout with my boozed up buddies and I don’t think I want to taunt a drunk with a lit cigarette. I have enough scars already from being drunk and taunting myself with a lit cigarette.

So what are the tactics? Well I’ll treat it like a girl I’ve broken it off with.

1. Do not hang out with your ex.

So you’re sitting at a bar with a friend who’s smoking. Say instead that you are sitting at a bar with an ex-girlfriend. The drunker you get the more likely you are going to fuck her for old times sake. Especially if you only just broke up. You will soon forget , or pretend to forget, the reasons why you broke up, because those reasons definitely didn’t involve sex. But your reasons for quiting smoking did involve sex; the orgasmic wheeze is not arousing. So don’t get drunk with your ex. Do not fuck your ex. Don’t hang out with friends that smoke. Don’t smoke. And do not fuck your friends (but that is for another self-help blog)

2. Meet new, more attractive, people

The best way to get over an ex is to meet new, more attractive, people. After your head rises from the numb waters of a monogamous relationship you begin to start noticing things. Noticeably you start noticing attractive people. The same thing happens when you stop smoking. Your sense of smell returns. And attractive people generally smell nicer. Especially nicer than that old bunch of smokers you used to associate with. They smelt like ashtrays, methylated spirits, and rank vagina. (you will notice this after four days of not smoking). So my advice for those quitting smoking is to start hanging out with better smelling, more attractive, non-smoking people. You can meet these people at all those non smoking venues outside of your local with the outdoor pokies and cement beer garden.

3. Do not tell your ex you are better off

When you fall off your high horse you can’t get back on. It is too bloody high. It is also just plain rude to insult a woman you loved in such a way by telling her you are better off. It reeks of desperation and lacks tact. It is better to show than tell your ex you are better off without her. You can do this by hanging out with more attractive people. But you can also do this by grooming yourself. Invest in a face scrub or perhaps even a face peel because once you stop smoking you can strip yourself of that yellow tinge on your skin. Also cigarette smoke tends to clog pores so you could get a facial to clear out those grey lumps on your nose. Start exercising. I’m not insisting on swimming a whole lap, just half a one. But make sure you visit your friends straight afterwards. You will be red, out of breath and wet so they will probably mistake you for a healthy person.

4. Do not talk about your ex

There is nothing more pathetic than talking about your ex. After breaking up with a girl I tend to play a mind trick on myself to help me forget her. If she was called “Cindy” I now refer to her only as “Tammy”. By using a new name, I begin to forget her old name, impress my friends with my ease of moving on so fast, and I begin to get excited by all the fantastic situations Tammy and I get ourselves into. Similarly, I have begun to refer to cigarettes as junk. My friends are impressed that I had a junk habit, let alone that I am trying to kill it, and I find myself in all sorts of fantastical situations asking the guy at the service station for some junk and a lighter.

I have attempted and failed to quit smoking many times.

Each time I am comforted by my friends and familiy as I reach for that cigarette and start sucking it like a pacifier.

“It’s ok honey,” they purr as they stroke my back.

“You’re obviously not ready yet,”

“The time will come when you are ready, and then you will just quit,” they advise me to be reasonable, not to beat myself up too much, that I should just wait for the time when I really want to quit smoking.

This time just didn’t happen to be that time.

So I kept waiting for the right time. The magic moment. The moment when I didn’t want to smoke anymore.

But it was all utter bullshit. I never really wanted to smoke. I just did. It is like a whole list of life habits that I keep up. I never really wanted that job. But I got it. So it’s my job now. I just smoke.

Can’t get off your arse to change the channel, or god forbid turn off the TV, because you are convinced that it is all a load of crap anyway? I call it lazy fatalism. Things will just happen one way or the other so why bother exerting yourself. You could get out of breath. Out of puff. Just sit still. The world will keep spinning without you flailing your arms about.

So I am dying slowly, and it isn’t because my lungs are clogged up and I wheeze myself to sleep. I am dying slowly because I have resigned myself to the fact that the world will keep spinning without me. If I’m not going to try to do things differently I am just going to die slowly. If I don’t start swimming against the current then I should just let myself drown now. I don’t want to end up at the end of the river in a heap of other bodies that just couldn’t be bothered to do things differently. Imagine the end of time conversation. To suffer the utter boredom of a piled heap of lazy fatalists.

So this morning I inhaled and I could feel bits of ash bouncing around in my lungs and I could imagine all these black paper bodies. The bodies of lazy fatalists bouncing around with each breath. And I could hear them. “Dumm dumm dumm der dumm dumm.” I don’t want to listen to their inane nods of agreement, or “why bother”, “why not”.

I have to start making decisions. Choose my own fate. And I am going to start today by not having a cigarette.

[Photo by Aaron Escobar]