Malcontent, Hollowed Out, The Sweet Old Life, Trying, An Aside, The Combo, Loneliness, And Quitting Smoking (Again)

Okay, so it is now Thursday, and I hate this quitting-of-the-smoking bit that I have been doing. It is no longer something I want. This does not mean that I am done quitting; this only means that the wanting-to-quit part is over for the time being. It truly, deeply and honestly, sucks stinky feet to be doing this to myself. Until today, I was verily sailing along, quietly patting myself mentally on the back for having made such a fine and mature decision and for following through with it with such decency of attitude in spite of the symptoms of withdrawal. I was an idiot then, and now I am malcontent.

Here is a picture of me sans the popcorn and chips with salsa and whatnot that I use to fill the void that is my physical and psychological addictions.

Surfing about did nothing to improve my poor mood. In fact, I think it helped to worsen it. All I want is a lovely Benson & Hedges Special King Size cigarette and a pint of Sleeman’s Honey Brown. Oh, how sweet such a duo would be, especially on top of a table at my favourite pub next to a copy of some delicious piece of literature.

This isn’t working, this writing out my pain thing. I am really trying. I knew that if I came home and didn’t keep my hands busy, then I would be out smoking in about sixty seconds, so I decided to sit here and blog away. But it is seriously not working.

Here, I am going to turn aside from the main topic and speak to you about something else. It will be much like an aside in a play by Shakespeare, in which a character occasionally turns away from the main action of a scene to relate his or her thoughts to the audience, only my brain will be the main action and my turning around to talk about something else other than smoking will be the aside. You are the audience. Here goes.... I will be starting in a new position at work in a couple of weeks, which is very good news for me. My current position is a term position, which means that it ends in August, so I am quite happy to take a permanent position and not have to worry about unemployment insurance or finding new work for next fall. When I was riding the bus to work this morning, a couple of men sitting across the aisle from me were discussing some research that one of them was doing. It apparently required thousands of miles of travel every few months, pygmies, a lot of camera and video equipment, jungles, and the BBC and National Geographic on a couple of occasions. I found myself growing jealous, and then had to reprimand myself for being overly self-interested and silly, and thankfully had my attention diverted by starting a conversation with the woman next to me, who I have begun talking with in the mornings and who is a welcome alternative to most of the people I have to talk to every day. Anyway, what I am getting at is that while I was feeling all good about experiencing a sense of job security for once and juggling story ideas in my head, these two men were talking about jobs that I can barely fathom but sound brilliant. Maybe quitting smoking causes one to spend extra time re-evaluating one’s life, but I seriously thought to myself that it is about high time I quit thinking so much and started doing. (That’s right, I ended that sentencing with “doing,” and I meant it. Ha). This is not an altogether original thought, and I have thought it before, but it is still important nonetheless.

Still feeling a strong desire, nay lust, for the cigarettes and beer combo. I am imagining myself bellying up to the bar, scanning their backlit menu board, putting an index finger to my lip, and saying:
“I think I will order the Combo #2. Do you accept substitutions? Because I prefer a pint glass over a bottle.”
“Nope, no substitutions. What’ll you have?”
“Then I guess I’ll have a B&H King with bottle of HB, hold the lime. Thanks.”

See, this is getting really pathetic. I am now pretending to order cigarettes and beer in lieu of the real thing, because addiction is desperately sad, and withdrawal is a lonely experience.

Quitting Smoking Links:**
* QuitNet will help you “quit all together.”
* QuitSmokingSupport.com offers free support to help you quit smoking.
* QuitSmoking.com offers information and products to help smokers quit (They rely on people smoking in the first place to make their money, so I doubt that they are really on a rampage to get the world to quit).
* Smoke Away is a complete, three-part standard kit that promises to curb cravings without nicotine or drugs. Nothing like this works. Ask any smoker.
* The Tobacco Information and Prevention homepage offers everything from Surgeon General’s reports to ways to quit smoking to celebrity views on smoking.
*Allen Carr’s The Only Way to Stop Smoking Permanently is supposedly very good and often effective. I own it, it is sitting on my bookshelf right now, and I have not even picked it up. I am in deep denial.

** I have not actually read through any of the above sites regarding the cessation of smoking. I do not care to at this time. As a result, I cannot vouch for their usefulness whatsoever.

The Hazy Days Of Smoking Drum, Achieving Strategy Through People, And Hope For My Survival

I’ve only got a few minutes, so this one will be quick.

My friend, Ladybug, has informed me that the government of Saskatchewan, like the ancient Greeks, officially considers anyone under 30 to be a youth. Good on ya', Saskatchewan!

Yesterday, I was waiting for the bus with this woman that I chat with every morning. She was complaining, because she had forgotten to buy tubes to make her cigarettes, and so she was stuck smoking a hand-rolled cigarette made with blue Zig-Zags. It brought me back to the sweet, sweet days of poverty, when counted amongst my constant companions were Zig-Zags, Drum halfzware shag rolling tobacco, and matchbook covers/business cards. The Zig-Zags were great simply for the little pirate on the cover. The Drum, ah the Drum. It had this wonderful flavour of smoked meats like bacon or beef jerky, and it’s texture was soft and moist when you first opened the package. The matchbook covers, and business cards in a pinch, were torn into small rectangles, curled into a spiral, and tidily inserted into one end of the rollie, serving as modest filters. These filters did nothing about the smoke, but they did stop the nasty bits of whole tobacco from being inhaled directly into my lungs. The memory of its delicious smell (I’m sure this memory is heavily tainted with nostalgia) reminds me of sitting in a blues bar on a Tuesday afternoon, avoiding the whole job scene, and watching my blue and grey smoke whorl through the late-day light as I nursed oily coffee and wondered what the evening would hold.

I saw the worst company slogan the other day on this woman’s work bag: “Achieving strategy through PEOPLE.” I wondered what the hell it was that they did all day. Fifteen people are sitting around a boardroom table, and Nancy enthusiastically yells out “Creativity is the key, think outside the box!” There is much agreement all around, and Mike pipes up “Let’s each come up with one or two words that we think would really help to create an original strategy!” They come up with flow charts and Power Point presentations, they do market studies, they poll their targeted demographic, and then nothing. That’s it. That’s all they do. They strategize. They are a highly trained group of strategizers. And you know what else? They are PEOPLE. That’s the thing that sets them apart – they are a company that strategizes and they’re PEOPLE. Personally, a little implementation here and there couldn’t hurt, but who am I to say.

This week has been a terrible week for my physical well-being. On Monday morning, I was having one of those benumbed Monday morning showers, when for no reason whatsoever that I can make out, I crashed backwards through my shower curtain. My head made a large dent in the wall which extended into a high, arching crack above it, and my elbow went right through the wall, scraping off a good amount of my flesh. I likely had/have a mild concussion, but I went to work anyway, wisely thinking that it would be better for me fall into a coma surrounded by people than to pass into that good night alone at home with no one to check on my breathing. Then, on Monday night, I noticed that my foot was becoming increasingly sore, and I realized that I must have gotten glass in my foot from the bowl I broke on Sunday night. It took until last night for the shard to work its way out, which the pus from the infection helped along. Today, I slammed my hand in a drawer at work. I’m wondering if I should just go ahead and notify my local hospital of my imminent arrival now or surprise them.

Tobacco Facts and Links:
* Here’s more information than you probably thought you ever wanted to know about Drum tobacco.
* A good page on the history of tobacco.
* What’s in a cigarette?
* The evils of smokeless (chewing) tobacco.
* Tobacco Companies must recruit over 3,000 new smokers every year in Alberta to replace all the smokers who have died or quit.
* The tobacco industry spends $286.1 million in advertising every year just in New Jersey alone.