So I'm trying to quit smoking, right. And I'm trying to quit smoking because my lungs finally were showing signs of unhappiness and damage and I couldn't make it up a goddamn hill.
It was all very sad.
It's sad because I love smoking. I love everything about smoking, from the smell to the social disapproval. I love the five minute breaks that take you outside the normal flood of life. I may love that most of all. I love the feeling of doing something self-destructive in a small, self-contained way. Cigarette packaging is a work of art; playing with your lighter is always fun; smoking is great. My life was miserable before I started smoking at 17 -- you can't convince me that's only because being younger than 17 is miserable, although it is.
It's also sad because I hate giving up bad habits. I hate it when other people explain their victories over vice to me; I hate when people describe the internal struggles of giving something up. People who try to give up bad habits and fail sadden me; people who try to give up bad habits and succeed irritate me. We have a model of the "healthy life"; I hate watching people try to achieve it, whether they make it or not.
I hate even more trying to do it.
(For better writing about smoking and giving it up I refer you to Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo. And thanks to n. marie, for initially directing me there.)
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Notes and Short Essays on Modern Life
6 comments:
you should take a picture of yourself every day-- some time, same place-- to document the physical changes of quitting smoking.
If I had done that for the past two days, the pictures would only document the gradual loss of my will to live.
At least your vice wasn't forcibly taken from you.
Life iz suffereing.
Suffering is eyeing the contents of your ashtray to see if any of it is smokeable.
Good habits I'm taking up: responding to comments.
Zeno relates his current life. It is during the time of the Great War and his daughter Antonia (who greatly resembles Ada) and son Alfio have grown up. His time is spent on visiting doctors to cure his supposed imagined sickness. One of the doctors claims that he is suffering from the Oedipus complex, but Zeno does not believe it to be true. All the doctors are not able to treat him. Finally, he realizes that life itself resembles sickness because it has advancements and setbacks and always ends in death. Human advancement prolongs life and it is that which causes more sickness and weakness in humans. Zeno imagines a time when a person will invent a new, powerful weapon of mass destruction and another will steal it and destroy the world, setting it free of sickness.
- Wikipedia
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