Quitting Smoking, Part II

It's a pretty appropriate title for the first post of the New Year! By the way, I am kind of ridiculously sentimental about New Year's Eve, and feel like it could be super-meaningful and everything in my life could be different (and better) because it is now a different year. This is something embarrassing that I have never even tried to hide about myself.

So I quit smoking. And somewhere in there, I turned with relief and affection to the pipe tobacco cigar. A move that can be blamed at least in part, on one regular reader of this blog, who had brought an example of the art over to my house way back in early 2006, where it sat quiescent until in a crazed fit of nicotine craving I started going through my drawers, convinced that cigarettes were hidden somewhere in my house. They weren't, so I smoked that.

The pipe tobacco cigars were pretty great. Enjoyable, but not too much so, and I was leveling off. I could go for longer and longer without one. It was a rebound relationship; it was never supposed to be serious.

Then I turned 30 and I still didn't have a job and I was all pissed off at the world and I stepped up my pipe tobacco consumption in a serious way. I was up to two a day, which is pretty disgusting as you will know if you have ever consumed one. It felt, more or less, like I had fallen back into the pit of smoking.

And then I went away for the holidays, and I was going to stop smoking pipe tobacco cigars, mostly because I was going to be around my family who would be anguished and upset by the sight, since they thought I had quit smoking and all.

When I was stuck in Atlanta, I thought about heading for the pipe tobacco cigars, but decided that this would be good. Better. I would get the cravings out of the goddamn way and would not be visibly trembling.

So anyway, it hasn't been that bad. Which is actually a little unnerving. Life without pipe tobacco cigars is actually a lot like life without cigarettes, which was actually more or less like life with cigarettes, except that the smells are stronger and I am less inclined to vividly colored phlegm. The only thing missing is the anticipation and the guilt. Significant losses, yes, but I'm not sure I'm comfortable with how normal it all seems.

We were supposed to smoke cigars on New Year's Eve, and I couldn't get mine properly lit and I tried for a bit and drooled all over it which was gross and then I think I inhaled some smoke because I felt a little sick to my stomach, so the cigar went out and I put it down, and that was sad, because I had been really excited about smoking something again.