It is the first day of 2008 ad by the Gregorian calendar. After fifteen years smoking I came to the ultimate resolve to quit. Just four reds are left in the pack. I came to realize the bad side of smoking, it is a progressive poisoning until one dies because the radioactive chemicals have taken up all the life in the body; replacing the natural fluids of the body.
As a diary of my Becoming I will begin recording the reasons and the emotional side of it, then I will investigate stats about smoking related to health and finally I will try to deepen in the diseases that smoking produces to the body.
I took up smoke when I was fourteen years. No one of my friends smoked but one. With this one, having a sort of genetic affinity I felt in confidence and since he drank and smoked I started to imitate him.
The worst thing that he has taught me was waking up and lighting a red without nothing in the stomach, not even a single cup of water. I think this gesture of damnation has put a serious conditioning in all what my adolescence was.
I remember that I begun smoking on Saturdays when we used to go to the matinee of a club near our district. I remember going to drink wine before going to the club with my friends. By this time, we were all already influenced by this friend with the alcohol. Of this group of friends I was the younger. We were seven or eight friends some of them seventeen and eighteen, some sixteen one fifteen and I fourteen. I have to confess that my first cigarettes were women's cigarettes. I had tasted reds and they were too much for my untrained respiratory system. They were a serious torture for me, even the women's ones, so I got rid of them throwing them over a bus-stop's roof. The episode with the women’s cigarettes where in ‘90, when I was thirteen. The real start of my addiction to this vice was in ‘92.
I think that the dark side of the cigarettes, in my case, is very much the same as what it was when I begun and what it has become. When I took it for the very first time, in a somewhat, serious way was around the same time that near by to my house a video arcade was opened. I think around two months since the opening of the video arcade. I begun smoking on the afternoons when I was alone in my house. Then, by the time my mom returned I used to go out with the remnant of the pack and finish them around the video arcade. I am sure that by December of '92, after six months smoking, I was already hooked to the vice.
Still, by then I smoked only on the afternoons and outside. I remember that I shuffled among three brands: reds, Camels and Luckies thinking I could differentiate their flavors and, sometimes for seasons, having a fishy taste for one out of the other two.
The dark side of smoking, in my case, is the time drain that it could manage to inflict on a viciously compulsive smoker like I was.
I think that the ghosts, spirits, minds and demons that one is exposed to, specially being an innocent kid of fourteen in a bad social cityscape are very much at an advantage for hooking the kid in a vice so violent and deadly like tobacco smoking is.
Returning to the video arcade, I fall in the reckoning that it is very sad of a coincidence that I sacrificed time playing video games for smoking. But it was allowed to smoke inside of the arcade, so what it really was, was the beginning of a slow fall into a life driven by a compulsive and environment-induced anxiety.
As I grew up in an entertainment-wise family, I am not of the ideology of looking down on video games as vices. I think video games are not vices; not even in the cases where they impede a "normal development of the personality and appropriate functioning in the society of the subject."
But tobacco has conditioned my video gaming passion considering that each of the aforementioned cigarettes takes around five minutes with fifteen seconds to be smoked. Start adding cigarette over cigarette and you come to around half an hour dedicated to smoking...
The video arcade did not last much. But I have left it before it closed; when I begun going to a school near the downtown. I had to commute a lot when I was fifteen years. Like three hours per day were lost in buses and subways.
As an aid to the wrong things in my life that were beginning, this of commuting instead of the normal thing of going to a school near my house added to the novelty of beginning to smoke at night in my house and sometimes in the morning.
I think that April or may of '93 are the most likely months that I can say is when I begun smoking compulsively. It had ceased being fun, because after around four months that it became a vice to me, now it became a compulsion.
Wednesday 2nd of January 2008
It is the afternoon. Yesterday I smoked the last red at around nine pm. I did not feel craving for the rest of the day. Yesterday I was supposed to stop, but today, after sixteen hours without touching cigarettes the craving sensation returned.
I was decided to stay without smoking and bearing the craving sensation, but I could not do it. After fifteen years, I have to accept it, I am ensnared deeply in this deadly vice.
Today I needed to go out to make a phone call since I am without the phone for the last two weeks. I think that I can keep myself aloof from the vice as long as I resist the temptation. But once I go out of the house, with money in my pocket and feeling the craving sensation, it begins to be difficult.
Going to the gas station's shop for making the phone call did not help me. There, the temptation to buy cigarettes was so much strong that I bought a pack of Luckies.
I have to learn the ability of depositing all my strength in the force of my will. But the sensation is so overwhelming that it is easier to finish it smoking a cigarette instead of learning to build up my will force. To rebuild it is the proper term, since I feel it destroyed.
For keeping up with the endeavor I have decided the following: I will not go out of the house until three weeks without smoking have passed. I am sure that three weeks is the essential minimum to begin cleaning my body of nicotine and to call it a start. I am sure that if I can stay three weeks clean, I will be able to stay clean three months. I think that three weeks are enough to begin the detox. I know that if I can stay more or less three months without smoking my organism will be completely clean of it. If I manage to keep aloof from tobacco for three years, then when the three years without smoke have passed I can consider myself having a new body free of the vice. Only after three years, because that is the time that the molecular structure of the body takes for regenerating itself, that is like having a new body.
Now I want to resume the reckoning of how my tobacco vice developed.
In those days of '93 when I begun smoking compulsively I smoked less than ten cigarettes per day. But by the end of '94 I had already discovered that smoking a cigarette after eating was one of the main characteristics of the vice. As if it was impossible not having a cigarette for relaxing after talking a meal. I remember that I begun with these brands:
First pack bought by myself: Virginia Slims (middle '90)
First pack smoked in front of the computer: Camel (Early '92)
First cigarettes shared with friends: Marlboro (Early '92)
First cigarettes box that I bought and thought as superb in taste: Camel (after the first season of five or six months buying Marlboro)
In middle '92 I started, as I said before, to shuffle between Camel, Marlboro and Lucky. But mostly Marlboro, since in my country, in the early nineties, the only brand that sold the ten-cigarettes pack was Marlboro, and I did not feel that I needed to smoke more than ten per day.
This shuffling continued through all '92, all '93 and all '94 until somewhere in 1995 when I picked up a brand of black tobacco called Parisiens. Here the story changes since believing that the Parisiens were more healthy than blonde cigarettes I started to smoke around a pack of twenty per day. In these days (all '95 and all '96) I was going to a school near by my house. But when in March of '97 I shifted to a school in the downtown again and I stopped the twenty black tobacco cigarettes per day returning to the old habit of ten blonde cigarettes per day.
For economic reasons I had to quit the cigarettes in December of 1997. But after four years smoking I was ensnared already and the craving sensation was very, very strong. So I have bought a pipe and a pack of Borkum Riff cavendish. In December of 1997 begins my pipe smoking.
I managed to keep myself aloof from cigarettes with the pipe, but till a certain point only. Since I begun with the pipe I could smoke it instead of cigarettes but in my house only. It was enough for me to be somewhere else for lighting a cigarette that I begged from somebody, that I was offered or that I had bought loose because I was away from my house and the pipe. But I was losing my taste for the cigarettes because of the pipe.
This changed in late '98 when I begun to smoke a lot of cigarettes again while I continued with the pipe. I was not able to buy all the time expensive tobacco like Borkum Riff, Clan, Indian Summer, Holland House, Sail and such, so I picked up a very cheap brand of tobacco.
This brand (Richmond) was so cheap that with the money that I bought a pack of reds I could buy a bag of fifty grams and smoke for around a week. Needless to say that I knew how to smoke a pipe. Tasting the smoke and taking it not farther down than the larynx. Never taking it to the lungs as with the cigarettes.
All through '99 the pipe smoking and the on and off mood with cigarettes continued, sometimes not touching a single cigarette for entire weeks. This made me feel proud and confident that I had somewhat defeated the cigarette smoking vice, but it was not so.
In late '99, When I traveled to the US for the first time, after the advice received by my brother, I started stealing menthol Bensons from the pack of my father's girlfriend; because she used to let it in the kitchen at night. I am not sure why I did this, because I have taken my pipes with me to the US and I was smoking the pipe tobacco that was available there: Captain Black and a bigger pack of generic brand aromatic vanilla tobacco.
With the nightly consumption of menthol Bensons I had fallen from all what I have gained of smoking only pipe tobacco. By February of 2000, and back in my country, I had picked up the reds again, letting the pipe for extreme cases.
All 2000 I smoked reds until I returned to the US. I still had my pipes and the cigarettes, in late 2000 in US, were very expensive, something like 4.50 U$D, so I took up pipe smoking again.
This time I smoked only Captain Black, but the pipe smoking culture and discipline had left me. I started inhaling the pipe smoke to the lungs.
Note: this attempt to quit was not successful.
