Tag Archives: smoking

Pet Theory: Barack Obama Sucks Now Because He Quit Smoking

12 Oct

You ever quit smoking?  For a year? Five years? A decade?

No.  No you didn’t.  Because if you ever smoked, you still look at a cigarette in front of you like it’s the other guy on the deserted island turning into a talking hot dog in those old Looney Tunes cartoons. You walk past one of those tall outdoor ashtrays with a nice long butt in it and you turn your head as you walk, track it with your eyes.  And your heart beats a little faster.  You imagine it– the feeling, the tickly rush over your limbs as you take that first deep drag, hold it in; your head takes off with sparkles and stars and suddenly everything’s going to be just fucking fine.  You will never feel that again.  You will never even feel “OK” again.  If anything remotely adversarial happens you will ascend into an ever-escalating paranoid freakout and blame everyone around you for everything bad that ever happened until you want to murder your own children with your bare hands. And you will never, ever be able to do anything about it. You didn’t quit smoking.  You’re just waiting too god damn long for your next cigarette. Fiending for decades while your mind slows and your soul turns into a hard flinchy thing that only knows hate.  Friends, family, society, helping people– who gives a fuck.  I need to glare out the window and mutter about those who done me wrong. Gonna get them back some day.  Once I get the energy.

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How to Quit Drinking and Smoking

5 May

Anyway.  I did not drink to excess last night.  And you know… I feel OK.  I feel better than usual. I also only smoked two cigarettes yesterday.  These are longtime goals of mine– do not drink to excess every god damn motherfucking night, and, as a corollary, do not, having drunk to excess, stand out on the porch and take a couple drags off a fresh cigarette and then put it out, then go back in the house and take a shot, look at shit on wikipedia, then, fifteen minutes later, go back out and relight and take another couple drags off the cigarette until the thing is gone, and you have then smoked four cigarettes that day. And drunk six tall brandies. And you wake up with a fog in your sinuses, you know… some hissing behind your forehead, sour phlegm in your mouth, and a cough that feels like it can’t quite reach the very bottom of your lungs where a couple oysterlike lumps of mucous are sitting in a soup of ashes and tar.

So today is not one of those days. And I feel somewhat better.  The thing is, merely feeling a notch or two physically better does not even begin to address the larger problems in your life.  The day to day, just– suck.  The removal of this small negative does not quite get you to zero.  And that’s all life is, a struggle to get to zero.

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