Sunday, July 25, 2010

My lens

Five days of roiling torment and joy.  Five days since my last cigarette or any nicotine at all.  Five days locked up in here by myself, sweating, fumbling, reading, second guessing, searching.  Today begins the sixth day, but it won't count until tomorrow, and the day count only matters until the fourteenth day or so, which is apparently when my dopamine levels return to normal after years of bodily reliance on nicotine for emotional stability in the face of pain and stress.  After fourteen days, I have no excuse.  Two days ago, they say, the nicotine left my body.  Yesterday was a very bad day.  I managed to distract myself with this little computer my cousin gave me years ago.  I got a new hard drive into it, but I could not (can not yet) figure out how to get an operating system into the thing with no CD-ROM.  But I didn't smoke, though I did curse and sweat and eat and finally I, fitfully, slept.

It's all for a purpose.  I don't want to live forever.  Death awaits you, even if you don't smoke.  No, I'm looking for a new clarity that acknowledges this body of mine as a lens, both for looking out and for looking in.  Cigarettes, for me, are a bad way to treat the lens, more so lately.  It's twenty years or so since I first started to smoke, and to try and quit.  Something is different now, something predictable, something terrible and awful.  I can feel the effects on my body growing worse.  I smoked one cigarette last week and felt, without doubt, that my physical capacity was diminished.  More frightening was that I felt my mental capacity suffer also.  Of course, I wanted another cigarette.  That's how they work.  They seek to solve the problem of themselves, and they lead otherwise rational people such as myself to refer to them as feeling, thinking creatures.  Little friends, like elves.

Thursday, July 08, 2010

Long Time No Post

It's been a while. I think as much as anything, I haven't been posting because I was unsure of my relationship to the concept. Still. After blogs have been around this long, I am unsure of my relationship to them. How boring.

So here's to maybe bloging some more. Who knows, I might actually do it this time. Again.

I know I have one good post in the past. Look it up while I think of something else to write.