One Month off Fags

 

Three days ago, on Friday the 30th, 2017, it was one month since I smoked a cigarette for the last time.

With my old vape pen and my new RTA and mod I am managing and devolving a vice that I was slave to for a quarter century.

I confess that I think that cigarettes are okay, but I’m not really jonesing for them anymore. I’m disregarding any thoughts about them since the first week.

In the first week after kicking them, a friend came to my home and lighted up a Marlboro red. I could bum one, like I ALWAYS did all the time, before quitting, but I didn’t do it.

It’s just that: thoughts, not actual biological cravings that disable me, like it used to be the times I’ve quit before.

In the past, each time quitting, I had to deal with wild cravings. They weren’t just biologic, like the creepy feeling of my body’s cell’s hunger for whatever it was—besides nicotine—that they were addicted to. No… there was more dark stuff to deal with, like a feeling of desperation and a—illusory—certainty that a life of happines wouldn’t be possible without cigs.

I hate myself for loving cigarettes the way I loved them. It was an obsession since my mid-teens, but at the same time it was always a shock to me, how I wasn’t able to live without them. I’m sure it’s because of the environment.

The industrial mixed with residential, noise-contaminated, laborer-filled, eldered and polluted environment in which I grew up made me feel cigarettes as medicine, and not as some kind of horrible vice in the grade of hard drugs like pills of speed, heroine, crack/cocaine or methamphetamine, something which they probably are, due to the freebasing of nicotine that big tobacco corps use in their products.

But to my naive conscience, to pull the top cover of a package of reds in my teens and in adulthood was always a moment in which I thoght that the augmentation of my capacity for well-being and stimulation meant everything if I was to have fun.

I’ve lost many days with the puerile worry of what if I ran out of cigs before the time of going to sleep came, and feeling like that, I’ve prostituted my circadian rhythm to a life living in the night, because they most of the times lasted till around midnight, and sadly enough, they wired me in a way that I wasn’t, almost never, in a mood of going to sleep.

Twenty five years later is great to have stopped, and to feel every day a little more hate for them and for what I was when I smoked them; someone that would beg, bum and even steal for those damned deathsticks.

In the last times, I was even falling asleep with a red in my mouth, only to be awakened by the cherry burning my chest. This totally idiotic thing happend two or three times, like one year ago… I was in the last dire straits of a vice that I fostered into its adulthood for twenty five years.

I loved cigs and saw them not as a vice, but as a remedy. I knew that they were a stimulant, and of course that I valued that quality, but I also saw other properties in them, like their devilish ability to temporarily make hunger disappear. Also, it’s hard to beat them as diuretic and laxatives, at least with something that you can buy in a gas station.

To smoke for twenty-five years, was not just something stupid to do at the health level, it was also something stupid to do at the economic level, roughly I payed around 20000 dollars for almost 7000 packs of cigarettes totalling almost 140000 cigarettes in 25 years.

This was a calculation done on the web, but is not my case since isn’t accurate, taking on account that I consumed other tobacco products in those 25 years, like

• Cigars
• Pipe tobacco,
• Snuz,
• Gutka/supari,
• Indian beedi,
• Patches,
• Gum
• RYO tobacco with MYO tubes…

but it serves to see how much a quarter century vice can take from one’s wallet and, sadly, from one’s personality…