That's the trick. Re-orienting my OCD around something other than my addiction to the Act of Smoking, which is a Whole Thing, the performative, social, voluntary ostracism / my formative experiences of queerness being associated with smoking / my hidden-to-myself secret crushes all being smokers, etc. There's a lot going on there. I've been unpicking it all in my mind. I'm pretty close to being Cured of being a smoker, again. I had this struggle in my early-to-mid twenties, during my Richmond years, before I moved down here, and worked in a pool hall long enough that it made me into a fucking smoker, again, only worse: a Smope Doker. Marijuana rekindled the meditative David Lynch thing where you sit with a fag and you stare into the middle distance and you let the ideas congeal and then you start drawing or taking notes or working bits of doggrel into a poem or song or whatever. You don't need weed for that. You don't need a cigarette, either: but there's something to smoking that, once I got into the physical habit of it, I needed it. Not for nothing that my old one-hitter & stash (the one that lives at the bottom of Lake Canada, now) was styled on the dimensions of a cigarette. I really got back into the Habit of pacing with a cigarette and writing when I was working on Painless, during covid lockdown; I had my microcassette recorder and I was raring to go. There's something about the Habit, the muscle memories, the reflexive hands to particular pockets, the furtiveness, the way the habit makes you see the world through the Lens of habit, how the habit weighs you down, forces your pathways & perspective, where you look. In the latter days of my addiction I became a habitual Sidewalk Surfer-- "Just a natural Street Freak, eating whatever came along" --and consequently anywhere my eyes landed I could identify the profile of a joint, a roll-up, a blunt, any partial or even the memory of a jay, any kryptonite green crumb, even ashes. I could smell the remains at fifty yards. I would stop at an arbitrary junction, look down, and lo: the city provided. At a certain point in Addiction, the readiness, the availability of the drug, locks you in. Cokeheads don't get locked into being cokeheads because they're addictive simps, they get locked in because they can't get away from the stuff: all their friends do it, all the places they hang have it around. Weed became that for me because I'm an old gutter punk who's been homeless maybe too often. And it's the easiest available drug, hassle-free, without getting carded, I've ever seen, now. Alcohol was never this available. If this sounds dangerously like some jeremiad about the availability of drugs being the problem, and if only we made everything illegal and made it difficult to get, the world would be better. I don't believe that and never have. But some things, scarcity restores it to sacred. Weed is a sacred thing. But we abuse it. God knows I did. Because I was predisposed to like it because I'd already conditioned myself to be a smoker. If tobacco had never entered into the picture, would I be concerned about my lungs now? Habits are the goddamn worst. They can be useful, until they're damaging. It's hard to pinpoint where the crossover is, sometimes. At any rate I'm pretty sure I've got this thing licked, at last.
