Just because
Just because I fall doesn’t mean I can’t get back up and keep going on.
I tend to get obsessive, and think about things too much. For example, all day I have been thinking – obsessing – over this hearing about the denial of my Unemployment benefits that has been scheduled for this coming Thursday. Also in the mail was a couple of coupons for Marlboro cigarettes, and for Marlboro red 72’s, short, full flavored cigs, with the coupon, up the street at Plaid Pantry, I knew a pack of those 72’s would be $2.30 cents. That is a real bargain these days, when those cigarettes are normally $4.05 and "full size" boros are over five dollars.
I have been smoking (what year is it now?) for almost 34 years, since I was 15. I grew up with a smoker – dad smoked and mom did not. I hated cigarettes when I was a kid because dad typically drove with the windows closed, filling the car with smoke. Yuck. We’d beg him to roll a window down – we could not touch the windows without permission. He smoked Parliment cigarettes and then switched to Benson and Hedges in later years. Cartons were much cheaper then – around 4 dollars, and there was typically a carton in his car and at least one in the liquor cabinet. I remember how upset at me he was once, when I was in (I think) Jr, High School, when, as a class project, we were all given a set of "lungs", plastic wrapped foam, with a "neck" that we were to put a cigarette in and push on the plastic to make the lungs "breathe". The "lung tissue" was foam, white foam, and one cigarette would turn the white tan, and a second one would turn them brown,and the third -well, I never got to make my "lungs" smoke that third butt because dad took them away from me and trashed them.
The truth hurts.
I hated cigarettes, up until he died, five months after my mom died, and my brother and I got shipped off to a "military school" and labled "bad kids". I have always been a thinker, and at military school, there was a "smoking area" behind the buidings and looking out onto Lake Elsinore,where that school was located, I had a lot to think about, orphaned at 15 and thrown into what to my upper middle class brought up eyes was Hell.
"Fuck you. If you think I am bad, I will be BAD", I thought, and I took up smoking, mainly because the rest of the family did not smoke, and had, in my memory, looked down on my dad because he did. Standing or sitting out there in the smoking area and looking at the lake and thinking about how my life had been torn down and crushed and wondering what the fuck had happened made me feel a little closer to the man i would never see again, and whom I really didn’t know.
I was not an atypical teenager, in that I was self-absorbed and didn’t pay a lot of attention to the lives of the adults in my life, and smoking was a way of reconnecting with my dad… and of defying the adults that had control of my life and who had condemned me to Hell.
A pack of cigarettes, 20, would last me then a few days – four, sometimes,and they were not nearly as expensive as they are now. (they are more than ten times as expensive now as they were then. 45 cents, ususally, whereas 4.50 a pack is a very good price now). Recently. a pac would last maybe 20 hours.
I went this time three and a half days without any cigarettes, and will get back on the ball… soon. I will not buy any more. Just because I fell down, or off the wagon, doesn’t mean I have failed to quit, which I want to, it just means I got weak and gave in to a three decades old habit.
The best time in my life to quit was after the car wreck. By the time I got out of the hospitals, I had not smoked for over two months, and it was actually two years, almost, before I bought another pack of cigarettes. I did miss, very much, the friendliness of smoking. My friends, who stuck with me when I was down, A and his wife J, were both smokers, but they did not smoke in their house. They went outside to smoke,and I missed the hanging out together to smoke and joke and… I missed it and took up smoking Swisher Sweets cigars. No one in their right mind inhales cigars, especially Swishers, which are the cigar version of hot dogs. Just as hot dogs are made of leftovers of the cow, so are Swishers the leftovers of tobacco, rolled in "tobacco paper" instead of tobacco leaf, and using cut up tobacco shreds instead of whole tobacco leaves. I smoked Swishers for a couple of years, but found that I could buy cigarettes online for cheap, and began smoking those (until the taxes caught up with me. Oregon gets/got $14 a carton in taxes,and eventually, I got a bill form the state for some of the cartons of smokes I had bought online, a bill for well over a hundred dollars, and at that point, I stopped buying them online and just got them at the store and paid the taxes when I bought them. I did hold them off, those people who wanted my tax money for (shhh) a couple of years, but eventually, I had to pay up or there would have been (more) trouble.
I moved from Swishers,as I began working again, to buying real cigars online. I bought a humidor to keep them in, and bought good cigars (and sometimes, very good cigars) to smoke and to keep. Four days ago, I decided "this is my last pack" and I was doing pretty ok with it, except the humidor is full of cigars, and I couldn’t bring myself to throw them away. No one I know smokes cigars, real or Swishers, so I figured well, no more cigi-butts, but I’ll smoke on these cigars until they are gone.
Well, golly. I don’t like the cigars that I have as much as I did cigarettes, so when I saw those Marlboro coupons in the mail this afternoon, the germ of an idea bloomed, watered by obsession over the hearing scheduled next week, into me walking up to the Plaid Pantry and buying a pack of Red Boro 72’s. I came to feel I deserved o
ne. I had dealt with the car insurance and the satellite radio and this and that and, well, it’s easy to justify something when you want to justify it, isn’t it.
I quit for three or four months in 2009, but then I took on that job driving an ice cream truck, and the guy I had to work with was a misongynistic asshole who "drove me" back into that pack of smokes. He smoked constantly, and it got to me, and I got weak and gave in, especially after I walked away from the truck, having found that I was working for an asshole delux.
(told him off, tossed the keys on the floor, and walked away from that situation and never looked back)
To be brutal, I gave in to the pull of nicotine. It is very addictive, and 30 some years of habit turns out to be very hard to break. I dreamed of smoking last night, and woke up to regret, because that cigarette was almost the first thing I did when I woke up in the mornings -do my business in the bathroom, feed and shoot up the cat, put the water on for coffee, and light one up while I wait for the water to boil and for it to steep in the French Press I use for coffee. Do you know what it’s like to wake from a dream into a world where that dream cannot happen? It’s pretty freakin’ horrible.
I didn’t light up a cigar until this afternoon, but I smoked two or three of them and the two Swishers I had sitting here (for half a year). I smoked three or four or five cigars all together, and, after dark tonight, I walked up to the store and bought a pack with that coupon, and there they sit, waiting for me to have another one.
Fuck, I already feel like a loser, so why not.
Why not indeed. Loser.
Well, I console myself with the thought that that it’s my choice to fall and stay down or to get back up and keep going, onwards.
Onwards to the night I don’t dream of smoking, to the day I don’t light one up, to the day when I can really really say "I’m a non-smoker".
I do not smoke in my Caliber. I never but once smoked in the blue one and I have never smoked a cigarette in the black Caliber (even though, with the sunroof, it’s like, the perfect smoker’s car). I am proud of that – smoking and driving used to go together like smoking and drinking. My Caliber does not reek of tobacco and it is still off-white inside, not "tan".
It’s a start. One step, and one step in front of another leads you down the path you’ve chosen. I don’t have to feel like a loser, I can choose not to be one.
Ah, but it’s harder than I want it to be, Those dreams get to me, and if I can’t hide in sleep, well, my god, how fucked is that?
Life is choices. I choose to light this cigarette, and I can choose to not smoke, after this pack is gone.
Oh, but. But but but. It’s a good thing I am pretty much broke, but I am not happy and I feel like a loser, and what’s a loser do? Loses. I don’t believe I will ever be a winner. I just do not believe it. So much has been taken from me ruthlessly that I don’t know whether or nor I can really quit.
I will try, hard. I have to, or I will be, no question, a loser.
God, help me please.
*****
Holy sht batman!!! They are calling, tonight, for the possibilty of 12 inches of snow!!! or a "wintery mix’ Wednesday and Thursday.
I am SOO glad I don’t do that bs newspaper anymore. Twenty dollars a day for risking my life? No Fucking Way
(for future reference, that’s what NFW means, if you see it here again)