Once again, I will start with the endeavour. But first I have to continue with the chronology of my addiction. I have not stoped to check in which state my will power was. But in this almost four months that passed since my first documented attempt, I could realize that for achieving some progress in the endeavour I have to accept that, although I can’t say my willpower is destroyed on its entirety, my willpower is certainly fragmented. I mean that I can have very strong willpower for certain things, but the most difficult for me to do is apply my willpower to quitting tobacco. The worst side of this, pertaining willpower, is that with the weakness and the vulnerability that the vice carries with itself I am in a very deep mess because the weakness and its consequences influence negatively my willpower as a whole. Let alone my psyche, body and soul.
Not taking on account the physical, mental and spiritual consequences of the vice, is not only the seediness that the residues lets one in, but also the loss of time spent in buying the cigarettes and smoking them. But I told that I will continue with the chronology of the vice. Following is the account on how it went from late 2000 onwards:
Pipe and cigarettes continued when I travelled to Spain. When I was there I was very, very insufficiently fed. I smoked a lot, still I was not showing the signs of unhealthiness that I before attributed to tobacco addiction. Mainly the signs of tobacco consumption in the face. For some eerie reason my face was not hardened as some times before, even though that I was not eating well and smoking very much.
From Spain, I went to India. In India I discovered three things that captured my attention: one was spicy cigarettes, the other was gutka (hard, tasty, chewable tobacco flakes), and beedis.
I tasted the spicy cigarettes, the gutka and the beedis in that order. At first, I felt the biddies as a long awaited alternative to cigarettes smoking. The gutka, sold on those little bags where it is sold, was a too much repulsive way of consuming tobacco for myself so I did not stick to it. It had a most alien taste, it did not taste as anything I tasted before but thinking on swallowing the tobacco with the saliva was a very disquieting reason why I did not want to be ensnared to it. Besides, I felt that the mandatory spitting out of saliva with the residue of the chewing was repulsive for others and for myself, a degradation and a blatant, lustfully exhibitionist loss of corporal energy.
When I arrived to Ind, at twenty-three, I was doing yoga for the last six years. After all, when the novelty faded away, I felt shame of myself, of still being a slave to tobacco. My first resolve to quit came when I was in Goa, soon after my arrival to India. There, in the middle of Goa’s exuberant nature I felt that I was cheating She by the agency of myself. I tried going cold turkey and it was most unbearable. After four or five days of withdrawal I started to smoke again.
The biddies caught my attention. I felt that they were more practical than cigarettes because they took away the craving and were consumed in less time than a cigarette (something from two to three minutes, depending on the brand) I started smoking biddies and a cigarette occasionally. The two pipes I had... they broke down, and I have not seen pipe tobacco in India neither, yet.
I started thinking that I was nearing to being spared from the tobacco vice. The biddies gave me that confidence. Seeing my change from a cigarette to a tiny beedi I thought of it as progress towards the ideal of quitting. How WRONG I was! But I did not know it yet. The years begun to pass. I smoked only biddies, save a few exceptions. These exceptions were like, say, some day I was by the streets and I bought some or another loose Indian cigarette: Stars, Chancellors, Regents. Or Yaks, if I was in Kathmandu. With the discovery of biddies my selection when I decided to buy cigarettes was always a budget one: they were not an obsession to myself anymore I preferred quantity over quality since quantity gave me the edge of not needing to go to buy often. But besides this idyllic first time with the biddies I was missing to smoke in pipe very much. In one of my trips to Kathmandu I bought seven very cool, inexpensive wood pipes; my pipe smoking started again. Now I was smoking pipe and biddies, but I still smoked some or another cigarette. I almost do not have memories of buying cigarette boxes in India. The cigarette smoking I did there was almost always a loose cigarette, sold by the unit that costed from one to three rupees.
One day, like five or six months before leaving Asia I saw a placard in the street that urged beedi smokers to quit. It showed two or three pictures of the malignant tumors it provoked in the mouth of those who smoke it. Then I started to think about how bad beedi was. With just seeing the conditions of beedi rollers in a tobacco sweat-shop I came to the conclusion that with the beedi I was smoking much of those people’s germs and much of the microscopic pieces of their tissues left on the biddies in the rolling process.
Coming to my rescue, a new brand of pipe tobacco appeared. In fact, it was the first brand of pipe tobacco I saw in Ind, its name: Sailor. I quitted beedi and dedicated myself to the pipe only. This pipe smoking continued until early 2007. When the last of those Nepalese pipes broke down, I picked up cigarettes again; in the scale I was smoking them in middle ‘99: more or less a twenty cigarettes box per day.
Since I remember very well that shift in middle ‘93 of smoking only in the morning and evening to smoking the whole day compulsively, and since I remember that it was with Luckies, I think that symbolically, the farewell from the vice has to be with Luckies. Three are left in the pack, after I finish them I am going cold turkey, this time it is decided. Really decided.
