In which I’ve quit smoking. Yet again.

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hen you get a lung infection severe enough your doctor gives you an asthma treatment five minutes after you present with what you think is just a bad cold, you pretty much quit smoking on the spot.

Quitting is pretty easy, really. You just screw up your self discipline and you ignore every single cell in your brain when it suggests a smoke. You avoid all your normal behaviors entirely. You pretend you’re someone else, someone who doesn’t smoke. Easy peasy!

For awhile.

Actually staying quit is the hard part, if you’re me, because you associate smoking with everything enjoyable: drinking, gigging, even reading. Having great conversations with friends. Road trips, coffee breaks, picnics. Good things, fun things. Happiness in general.

I can not-smoke on my lunch hour for awhile, sure. But eventually I’m so exhausted by not smoking that I just buy a damn pack already and have a cigarette. I can not-smoke at the wine bar for a few weeks, but then I just bum a few smokes off of people because it’s so much easier than constantly fighting the urge to smoke. I can not-smoke at gigs, I can not-smoke at home, I can not-smoke for months and months on end. I can not-smoke under a lot of circumstances, but it’s just so relentlessly, endlessly uncomfortable I just… give in, after awhile.

They tell you it gets better, but it must take years before you really, genuinely don’t think about smoking. I don’t know that I can just want, at a cellular level, for a year or more without giving in.

Yes, I’ve tried NRT. It doesn’t do shit. I don’t want to chew gum, I want to smoke. I don’t want a lozenge, I want to smoke. I don’t care that there’s a patch on my arm allegedly feeding me nicotine 24 hours a day, I want to smoke. (I’d try Chantix except it appears to make people crazy.) I want the visceral experience of smoke filling my lungs, I want that hit of drugs that make my neuroreceptors so fucking happy, I want the prop, I want the ritual, I want the cigarette.

What I don’t want is COPD, obviously, but it’s clear I’m likely to get it anyway if I don’t stop smoking. Every time I get a cold it goes to my lungs. I get more colds than non-smokers. My doctor just prescribed me an asthma inhaler for the flu. Blah blah blah. We can all just agree that I’m on the road to COPD and leave it at that. I get it. I’m addicted to nicotine, not stupid.

Except I don’t want to stop smoking. I want to smoke without repercussions. I want to smoke for free.

Quitting is hard and it sucks. Smoking is gross and it sucks. I don’t want COPD because that would suck. This nicotine patch sucks, and so does this asthma inhaler. I’m so pissed off I could scream.

I mean, I realize that my decision to smoke for all these years has left me not only with deeply entrenched behaviors but also many, many times the number of nicotine neuroreceptors non-smokers have — I mean, I get that it’s my own damn fault.

But it just SUCKS, you guys, how much I want to smoke a cigarette right now, a cigarette that I must not have because, hello, I have a fucking lung infection.

I’ve weaned myself off of so many other things. Co-dependent relationships. Sex as identity. Victimhood as identity. Cocaine. Lying to others. Lying to myself. Laziness. Anxiety. Self-pity. Mind as self. Caffeine. Sugar. Fried potatoes. It’s not like I don’t have discipline, it’s not like I’m not willing to see what’s really there even if it’s gross, it’s not like I shouldn’t be able to quit smoking.

It’s just that it’s so, so much harder than it should be.

Stupid neuroreceptors. Stupid nicotine. Stupid smoking ritual.

Gawd, I want a fucking cigarette.

Update: I was really good and didn’t smoke for a week. Then I bought a pack on Friday because I couldn’t stand it one more minute and I went out and smoked over half of it [while getting very drunk and falling down and getting a ride home from Mark & Emmy. They even hauled my bike along for me and helped me get it into the garage]. I used the patch. Well, I took it off on Friday, obviously, but, yeah, it doesn’t reduce cravings. I don’t know that I’m as addicted to nicotine as I am to smoking, which makes it behavioral more than chemical which makes it more easily beat, right?