Oh, god, no, not that—this blog is actually going to start being about something.

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So: I’ve decided to quit smoking. I’ve been dancing around it for a while now. The last real shot I took got jacked up by my trip to The Land of the Perpetual Dry Erase Board and the havoc it played on both my circadian rhythms and my willpower. I think going to the gym regularly—which I was for a while there—helped a hell of a lot, but money got tight and the frivolous expenses got cut back.

Gym? Frivolous. Region 3 import DVDs or sixty bucks worth of comics? Essential. Anyway. I should maybe give the Shaw Brothers a pass and hit the gym a couple times a week again.

Xtop quit, not too long back, just by doing it. One day I got in his car and he had all this odd stuff written on the pack of cigarettes he was smoking. And then he was just done. Which is admirable, but I doubt my ability, will, and resolve to do such a thing. The problem wouldn’t so much be the nic-fit, which I’ve had fourteen years of powering through; the problem would’ve been that not smoking turns me into a raging asshole.

So when I went for my yearly physical—yay Team Married—I talked to the doctor. He suggested Zyban. “That should help the depression and the smoking,” he chirped. Apparently, Zyban is an antidepressant (and is still marketed as such under a different name) and when it was being tested as an anti-psychotic on schizophrenic ward, the testers noticed that gradually all of the smoking circles broke up. So now it leads the way in the world of pharmacological multitasking. It’s a sixteen-week long program.

(Something I’ve noticed: I can stay up late, and most nights I do, but most mornings—most—I’ve been getting up around 9, give or take, of my own volition. This is pretty early and pretty remarkable for me, and I take it as a good sign, or at least, as a sign that something in my brain chemistry is working a little better now. I don't know. Leave me alone.)

Two weeks ago, I started. The first day was sketchy, nervous. It felt like bad speed and a buzzing nicotine jag drawn out to a full day. The second day was okay. The third was weird again. Day four is the day you start double dosing. I went up and down for the first ten days, give or take. Now I can barely tell I’m on anything. It hides behind my eyeballs now, quiet and fat and puffy. I can ignore it. I can forget about it.

So now then. I’ve worked out a calendar that reduces my intake from today until my birthday, 78 days from now. Every four days, give or take, I’ll smoke one less. That’ll have me stopped by December 1st, which is the start of week fourteen. I’ll have the last two weeks on the pills with nothing but me and the Z to ride out the last of the nicotine demons. I like that it’s slow. I like that it’s gradual. I like that part of me-quitting-smoking is that I get to smoke.

(Kelly Sue has been pretty supportive, if skeptical, so far. “Are you sure you’re supposed to still be smoking?” Yes, yes, it’s all doctors’ orders. No, I don’t need to call him and double-check. This is medical science and I’m not about to go fucking with it.)

(I don’t want to sound like I’m not taking this seriously. I am. Very much so. Concurrent to this, though, is a genuine fear of trying and failing fast. And then figuring, ah, fuck it, I wasn’t meant to quit, and starting right back up again. So, incremental weaning is fine with me.)

(Interesting to note: today the smoking does not feel so good. Vaguely sick and unpleasant-making.)

I’m more than a little embarrassed that I couldn’t just drop it, that I couldn’t just walk away. That I’m on brain-drugs because my will is so laughable, my ability to keep my shit in check so absent at the first sign of turbulence in my nicotine jet stream. That I am compelled to put all of this out there as a kind of public-shame failsafe.

I guess I’d rather be a huge puss because of how I quit than die at 55. Cold comfort.

I doubt very much that my work schedule, writing schedule, general interest in exposure, or ability to focus on any one given thing for too terribly long will mean that there will be entries every day from now to December. The attendant irony of not being able to commit to a quitting-smoking journal while quitting smoking does not escape me. I’m reading Richard Klein’s Cigarettes Are Sublime. He wrote the book, he says, out of a desire to quit; Sanders recommended it and I liked what I heard so I bought it and will read it as I go.

Here, listen:

“(Cigarettes’) beauty (have) never been understood or represented as unequivocally positive; the smoking of cigarettes, from its inception in the nineteenth century, has always been associated with distaste, transgression, and death. Kant calls “sublime” that aesthetic satisfaction which includes as one of its moments a negative experience, a shock, a blockage, an intimation of mortality. It is in this very strict sense that Kant gives the term that the beauty of cigarettes may be considered to be sublime.”

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