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.

totes sobers, day four

Marijuana was part of my life.

Is that a sentence?  It feels incomplete.

Marijuana was part of my life for decades.

Yeah, still looks like a sentence.  Still feels lopped-off.

Marijuana was part of my life for decades, even when I wasn't smoking it.

Hmm.  Closer.  I dimly recall, at seventeen, trying (& failing) to smoke my parents' pot.  I wasn't a smoker, at that point.  I hadn't had my first cigarette with Cameron.  My first time smoking weed was with Chris Neal, probably 1998.  Had a little anxiety, got minor spins, but it wasn't any stronger--  or more pleasant --than alcohol.  I had convinced myself that since previous exposure hadn't done anything, what I smoked with Neal was laced.  And of course I was a human party foul because I expressed this anxiety to others, trying to convince them something was awry with the weed.

That put me off it for a bit.  I stuck to alcohol, when I was drinking.  Which wasn't infrequently, but it wasn't an avowed Habit, either.  The only full-on habit was cigarettes.  It wasn't until '99 that pot came back into things.  There was a band kid, James Blackledge, and a friend / neighbor, JoMichael Nelson.  Summer, we'd smoke up and listen to Massive Attack vs. The Mad Professor on the rooftop of the converted motel we were living in...  Take late night field trips to Auburn University's art department, or the practice spaces of nearby churches, and do guerilla recordings.  This was the first (adult?) time I ever flirted with actually Making Music, which speaks to how fuckin' high I must've been.

But still, not really a habit.  I didn't keep weed around the apartment.  In part because every time I ever sold anyone any mushrooms or acid--  my plug was my manager at CheeBurger, CheeBurger  --then every useless teenage waster in Auburn would somehow make their way to my door.  For a while there was a sign on my front door which declared "THIS IS NOT A HIP PHARMACY", to deter the dopers.  Just being around them made me want to be straightedge.  Which became the other extreme of the pendulum, for me.  Either I was amenable to altered states, or I was too wise for 'em.

As you can see, I've not gotten any more personable.  Or concise.

The Richmond & elsewhere years, weed didn't really factor in.  So there was roughly three, four years where drugs didn't happen.  Mainly because in the fall of '99 I overdosed on 'shrooms.  A violently unpleasant bit of psychic fragmentation, there; I got the whole "ego death" thing the heads of my parents' generation used to drone on about.  Put me off drugs almost entirely.  Encouraged me to doubt my sanity more than I already did.  The skittish look in people's eyes might have been projection, but there was no way to be 100%.  So I took it as a given that there was Damage, and to steer the hell clear for as long as was tolerable.

Ut!  But I tell a tiny lie.  There was some weed in the Richmond era.  I lived with a doorman at Bogart's, a lousy mob-run jazz club, and that dude smoked more than anybody you've ever met.  Pete was a True Loser, bombed-out ragged-out from heroin use (which he would never deny), seventy if he was forty-five, and a gross old freak like I've never known before or since.  Kept a television tuned to static in his bathroom, "as an art project", liked to sit and smoke on a stool by the vent fan in the terminally disused kitchen with his feet in the oven, and had an intractable attraction to using my toothbrush, which, given his bog monster dentistry, disgusted me.  I don't know how many toothbrushes I bought him, or why he kept losing them, and using mine.  I couldn't keep much of a stash around because if Pete ran through his, he'd sniff out mine, no matter where I squirreled it.

Eventually he pocketed all my-and-his-son's rent--  he rented an art studio to his kid, who lived elsewhere  --and fucked off to Newport News to try and scam his daughter into caring for him, leaving his kid and me cleaning up that rat's nest and getting kicked out.  Which was half a shame, because I liked the sound of the piano teacher, downstairs, and the widow's walk on the roof was my favourite feature from any home I've ever had.

Pete was an object lesson in what addiction looked like, and sometimes I forget what a warning he was.

But here it is, day four.  And I remember.  Lord.

Marijuana *was* part of my lives.  All of 'em.

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.