Allowed today: 20
Smoked today: 0
Smoked yesterday: 18

•

I haven’t smoked yet today and it’s 12:30. And I want to, but since I can hold it off, I am; I kind of want to see how long I can go just for the hell of it. I can feel the nic fit, but I’m not dicky or twitching or pissed off or really much of anything. I can feel the fit deep in my chest but I’m Just Saying No. Quitting smoking as an exercise in autosadism. Automasochism? I can never keep them straight.

(UPDATE: At 2:30, I crack.)

My old man smoked until I was, shit, 25? Whenever the last time the gub’ment jacked the taxes up. He quit on Thanksgiving, because the tax kicked in the next day or something—that’s how I remember it, anyway, I could be wrong. My dad, were he an action figure, would come with a nine-iron and a pack of Marlboros. There would be a little accordion pump on the figure’s back that would puff out sugarclouds of play-smoke. The My Dad Action Time Superfun Playset would be an ashtray that transformed into another, bigger ashtray. My Dad was a smoker, goddammit, sacrosanct and old school. One of my favorite images of him is from some summer Sunday a hundred years ago when I was trying to replace the battery in Anna's car with Dave. The garage door opened and there he was, pappa freak-man, afternoon light hitting him from the feet up, automatic door crawling up slow, turing it into a 2001 monolith shot. And there he is: Dad, ready to Help Fix A Car, the cigarette in his mouth, of course, acting like the punchline. He could always work with a live one off to one corner or the other of his mouth; I never really could.

(We waved him off. No, no, we've got it, we've got it. Later, in the emergency room, I'm sure both Dave and I thought, man, if only we'd have let him help.)

Anyway. My first thought was that he was sick, and the quitting was a prelude to a Cancer Ordeal. I asked, point blank, are you sick? No, no. He wasn’t. He was just quitting. The government is raising cigarette taxes tomorrow, and you know what, son?

What, Dad?

Fuck the government.

He hasn’t smoked since.