breaking the habit

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.

why

"If you don't mind me asking," said Siegfried, "why did you decide to stop smoking?"

I don't answer.  Earlier, eliptically, earlier, I did.  But now that I could expound upon it, I don't, choosing instead to recapitulate earlier points from the same list of reasons.  So I don't say the real, 100% #1 reason for quitting smoking.

Because I have to stop self-isolating.  Smoking is a self-isolating, self-segregating activity.  It separates you from others, and it is a choice to be separate.  This process of selection is actually useful, in a lot of ways, because [the majority of] people need to find reasons to be selective with their company.  Nobody needs to, or wants to, be around generalized, undifferentiated Everybody all the time.

There are far better, far smarter ways to do this.  Carrying a book or newspaper, some kind of reading material.  Keeping a journal or notebook, writing in it regularly.  These are pretty foolproof props for self-selecting what company you want to keep.  A book is a Big Signifier:  the company a reader wishes to keep is one that's not a font of ceaseless chatter.  It doesn't say you don't like words, or speech, but it gives the observer, the observant, a guide to what type, kind, or mode of communication you'd prefer-- which of course goes a long ways toward indicating the content you prefer to be immersed in, and is a politer way of doing so than blasting your favourite drill rap on the train.

I have been self-isolating, and self-segregating, for my entire life.  I did it in the south as a form of survival strategy.  But there is absolutely no need for it now.  Smokers are--  listen, what I'm about to say might sound mean, but I'm allowed to speak for everyone in my former clan, since I've been finding ways to relapse into that camp for twenty-something years, and they were always only too happy to have me  --smokers are miserable cunts.  Only a miserable cunt wants to be around other miserable cunts, because that's where they're happiest.  They like a fag, and being around other smokers, and not much else.  If they're the sort that calls themselves a smoker, that's the brand.  A smoker is always looking around for indicators as to whether they can smoke, where they can smoke, the distance between themselves and having the next smoke, etc.  It's all in relation to the habit.  The context for the smoker is the ability to smoke, or the ability to remark on the inconvenience of doing so.  It's a grim state of necessity, not dissimilar to that of other types of addiction except inasmuch as it's had some measure of Cool, Roguish, Counter-conformity attached ever since before James Dean got his shit soundly mortalized.

Also, it's fucking expensive.  Whether you're talking tobacco or toking.  Which makes the chronic smoker, the lifelong jones-er, evaluate the smokeability of every butt in a locale.  Which is a really disgusting detail, which SHOULD shame me, but I was sidewalk surfing for so long there's no point trying.  Sidewalk surfing is the lowest of the low.  It's homeless turf, addict turf.  It's demoralizing, ultimately.  And it eats up a fuck of a lot of time.

Because, if--  as stated earlier  --the point, the goal, is to separate (as opposed to distinguish) oneself from the greater mass of humanity, well.  The moral of smoking is that it's there to pass the time until your time passes.  A smoker smokes because they like smoking, and sometimes what they love most about it is that it's bad for you.  In terms of health, and in terms of society.  The smoker is the Perfect Capitalist labor unit.  They work so they can smoke so they can die on their own terms.  If they articulate it.  And the most insufferable of us do articulate it.  It's why smokers venerate deeply abrasive comedians like Lenny Bruce and Bill Hicks and (shudder) Dennis Leary and Doug Stanhope as basically saints.  The saints of the death drive.

I started smoking because of / with my first boyfriend.  But I kept smoking because I wanted to die.  That's not an exaggeration.  I had been suicidal, was prone to persistent suicidal ideation, and dying was the ultimate loner move.  If the goal was isolation, then it doesn't get more sealed-off than choosing to give your lungs more pinholes than a voodoo doll.  So yeah.

That's probably enough Why to justify quitting, to anybody.  Let's see if it convinces me?

giving yourself permission

It's not the physical satisfaction, it's the physical habit.

Having OCD & quitting smoking is...  I don't think I can tell you.  The physical habit is the thing.  Being a smoker causes a whole series of physical tics that the Art Brain becomes conditioned to; these manifest as tics and tendencies that are a bastard to get on top of.  They become determinants.  They determine the amount of time one spends doing anything.  They structure the day.  But no more.  It has to be me, not the habit, that does these things.  It was always me.  It must be my volition, not my addictive tendency, that organizes my day.  How else am I to admit joy into my life?  Where is the room for it to grow?  So.

Long story short I threw away my one-hitter this morning.  I've been using that thing over a decade.  Its case had been physically reshaped by the constant use; its base had been machine-level when purchased, but after ten years plus its posterior surface more resembled a well-tempered anvil than anything resembling flat.  A constant companion and witness to my degenerate addiction, that device.

Walked up to the end of Kathy Osterman pier and slung it as far as I could into lake Michigan:  my last act of pollution in this life.

With it I gave myself permission to let go of the behaviors I had taken on, in my adoption of the habit of smoking from my first boyfriend, Cameron, when I gave him money to buy a pack of cigarettes but then insisted on smoking half.  Just to be petty.  Made myself sick doing it, like a natural born idiot.  Smoking was a thing gay boys in the South did.  It became a socialization thing, a homosocial bond, especially at the time I adopted the habit, in the 90s.  It became part of being closeted, too.  And once the act of smoking became attached to my fondness for marijuana it became this ingrained, criminal, furtive behavior associated with a whole life that ended decades ago.  I am not a criminal, I am not a closeted scared kid, I am a well-adjusted angry old faggot who has to let the bad go along with the habit.  I'm holding onto a whole world that doesn't HAVE to exist, for me, in this life, any longer, by holding onto smoking and the little rituals of addiction and the self-segregation that smoking causes.  So today I gave myself permission to let it go.

And then did the little act of necessary defiance and sacrifice and consign a physical manifestation of a decade and change of my life to the sedimentary floor of a lake greater than any I have heretofore known.  That part of me can stay there, down deep where nobody will find it but me, when I think on all the little wasted seconds that went into that stuff.  Smoking is a motherfucker.  I won't miss it.

on alcohol

I'm capable of not drinking.  A lot of the world isn't.  I have enjoyed alcohol, within limits.  Most of the world cannot limit itself.  But in the longview?  Alcohol is a waste of money, and it can leave a body & mind feeling wormeaten, AND it's a convenient means of self-deception for most of mankind.

I haven't had a drink in over three years.  It's good.  I haven't had a single craving for one since the accident.  That's baller.  No hangovers, no dumb social obligations that require self-medicating to tolerate, no bouts of doubt or anxiety or fuzzy memories.  No hassles, is what I am saying.

Of course there's a downside.  Friends who don't understand sobriety don't want to hang.  New people who don't understand me react to my sobriety as though I'm in A.A.  Since most of north american society uses alcohol in one form or another I feel less welcome-- in fact I feel like avoiding booze, and people who partake of it, altogether, because alcohol's a convenient excuse for bad & imbalanced behavior.

Ever listen to a couple of drunks discover a punchline?  One person says something, the other rejoins, everybody busts out laughing, then the punchline gets repeated and the laughter redoubles.  Which is great!  Laughter is balm.  But then...  The punchline becomes a slurred mantra as the laughter becomes soggier, and after a few more iterations of The Funny Thing it's like listening to five year olds juked on sugar repeating knock-knock jokes as they improvise percussion instruments from cookware.

All of which makes me sound like an unfun, judgy fuck.  I'll allow it.  I'm not fun at parties anymore.  I probably wasn't to begin with.  But so what?  Most parties aren't that great, and people-- don't get me started on people.  About the sole benefit alcohol has for me, now, aside from sterilizing wounds, is providing an easy read on who & who won't be a good friend.  If someone insists on showing you around a new town and their idea of taking you on a tour of the city is a barcrawl, well...  It's revealing.

There are good drugs & there are bad drugs & there are drugs that aren't for me.  And booze is two out of three where I'm concerned.  If I have any regrets about ever partaking, it's that I wasted time & misled myself.  Most friendships turned out to be acquaintances once alcohol was subtracted from them.  So it goes.

Self-control was the only way someone with my history could survive as a bar employee for a solid decade.  I learned how to become a better artist over those years, owing to the fact that I was the token gay sober man on staff.  Of course I was also closeted and privately miserable and endlessly crusing midtown and never acting on any of it.  So there's self-control & then there's mental illness.  Either way, I would go 3 years at a stretch without having a drink.

I also was the token non-smoker.  Which is a whole other subject-- but then it isn't, either, because what I'm talking about is addiction, and the EASE of suborning oneself to an addictive pattern of behavior.  Smoking was (is) a ritual, for me, as an artist; smoking had become part of my creative process.

The trick, if there is one, is at the outset I told myself the day I stopped enjoying it, I would drop it.  I smoked from 17 (first cigarette) to 26.  In the last three years I had discovered the addiction and was wrestling to quit.  Moderation was not a thing I did.  I had survived murder attempts and near-fatal accidents and backwoods surgery and being a gay teen runaway, so I was smoking and drinking like I had something to prove to death.  I was at two packs of unfiltered Lucky Strikes a day on bad days.  And there I was, making myself walk five plus blocks in hothouse weather to buy a pack of not-inexpensive, somewhat difficult to find smokes, only to light one, take a drag, stub it out, then throw the pack over a random fence on the way home.  To make myself quit.

You might infer from the previous paragraph that I was an alcoholic during that time period.  No.  I was simply given to excess.  I didn't have my first hangover until some red box wine at 23.  First blackout, gin, 23, sealed the deal.  None of any of that, I said to myself.  And the idiots in my life who couldn't make that decision, I became less forgiving of.

If you're going to let the drugs make the choices for you you're not "out of control":  You're abdicating control.  You're making excuses.  I became as unsympathetic to myself on this subject as I did towards others.  I did not want to become a deadass loser.  So the bad habits weren't allowed to take up residence.  I became my own project; I wanted to be less angry.  I wanted to feel relief from stress.  So I began to excise the problems from my diet altogether:  cutting out alcohol, caffeine, nicotine...

One day, despairing at the possibility I might not have the willpower to quit cigarettes, I discovered I did.  I'm going to say something maddening, now.  Some made-up wannabe zazen gibberish, but it's 100% true:

I stopped Wanting To Quit.

& the desire vanished.

Lo, I was quit.  If I was feeling stress, I would dream about relapsing, and my response would be "Well shit now I have to quit all over".  Of course I'd say fuck it and smoke the dream fag anyhow.  But it was a decade between cigarettes, and when I did smoke, it was to see if the desire was still there, because covid-19 had made landfall.  Why the fuck not?

Of course I found a substitute.  We are talking about addiction, after all.

Smoking was hardest to walk away from because of the ritual.  The ritual of smoking pot replaced cigarettes & briefly became more cost-effective a form of stress and pain management than anything I'd heretofore known in my life.  But the difficulty of access to marijuana, the furtive illegality of it, the frustrating parade of dealers & hustlers & slow motion losers, made weed less desirable.  Being around weed also meant being around drunks, and by this point in our little jeremiad you may have inferred I was sick of my job babysitting drunks and telling people to take their drinks off the felt and fucko bazoo me boyo by the time I finally turned in my two weeks notice I was DONE being around alcohol.

But that's like hating guns, in America, isn't it?  One cannot live utterly shut of it.  It's a thing that's always going to be in society.  It's in every grocery store on every block in Chi.  Catholics like a drink!  And so does everybody else.  It's on every billboard train and magazine.  It's as American as applejack.  It's also bone stupid boring and gross despite being (don't get me wrong) a terribly fascinating SUBJECT in terms of its history & utility & the endless innovations Alcohol has resulted in.  The science?  Magnificent stuff.

But fuckoff with booze.

No-where in here have I mentioned my father's part in my mental math on the subject of alcohol.  Not really.  So, a closing anecdote.

My father was not an alcoholic.  Not initially. He was, however, the first male on his side of the family to develop a taste for the stuff, after I ran away.  He was not a drinker when he was beating or strangling or drowning me.  But he was a drinker by the time he got to beating his wife, and a for sure alcoholic after his son & wife had both abandoned him.  He'd built a chicken wire enclosure with a circumference of twelve feet out back of the greenhouse so when he was done downing a can of cheap beer by the stove, he could just chuck it out the back door.  By the time I returned home, in 2007, that fenced-in circle was a literal mountain of beer cans taller than I am.

My mother needed a divorce so she could move on with her life.  The only way that could happen was if I lied through my teeth to my former abuser and tell him I loved him & forgave him.  So I lied, and I helped him clean up the farm some.  I helped him bag up & relocate the mountain of beer cans, and at the bottom of the pile, beneath it all, we discovered the misplaced front bumper of the bus that was rusting in the pasture by the surplus military command center rigs he'd bought...

(You know, those wheel sets they attach to a cargo container so it can be towed like a mobile home? Yeah. He'd just bought some on a whim, to go along with the bulldozers and the machine lathe and all the other toys.)

"So that's where the bumper went," he harrumphed as I bagged up several year's worth of stale-ass beer cans, contemplating how this white trash mad scientist had filled our ancestral barn with rotting electronics.  How he had turned from the 70smonster who deformed my childhood into a pathetic old broken-down horder with an affinity for shitty watered-down american lager.

My diminished monster told me he was planning to build a new house out of bud light cans and old tires, maybe, one day.

That was my thanksgiving, in 2007.

This year?  This year was pretty good.

Happy holidays!