On the quitting of smoking

How many times have we done this, but this, now six, seven weeks in, it feels like the last. Too tired and too many stakes to start again. One hopes.

Trying to write without smoking is like taking a musk melon, a bag of weeping, badly rotted muskmelons to the prom. And they’ve got a nasty yeast infection, plus the clap, so even if….Similes are forced, like cement through your piss hole, or worse yet, like hot pepper diarrhea through your tear ducts—actually those work too well. I’ll try again: Similes are forced, like a dead sandpiper in your milkshake. Ok?

Even drinking strong beer at nine in the morning, that siren of tumors and metastases, that curling blue, gossamer goddess, that muse of suicides, that doctor before time, your slim white lady with reeking breath, she calls to you, even now, she holds the key.

Well fuck, if not the key, she holds something. After all, we go back to her rank sheets time and time again. Millions of us, kneeling before this dominatrix. No, I have no idea why I’ve cast tobacco as a woman. I think it is just because I am a man and the smoke, she seduces me. If I were a woman, I think I would write of smoking the hot blue smoke-pumping pole, or some such, but I’m not.

In the quitting of smoking there are lessons. Mostly that quitting smoking sucks. Not because you quit some drug, some specific chemical, some brain-wave interloper. You quit yourself. Some idea of you, it wears the clothes you remember, its face is familiar, its eyes you don’t want to meet.

Comfort the shadow hunched on the rock, comfort it and it will go away. Follow it and it will run. Turn and be overtaken.

I want to write about that brittle edge of forgiveness, that stone Jesus, maybe a bench, sheltering and pouring forth hyacinths. It always comes back to hyacinths, and then to number ten sugar fine dust and roots of magnolias, scrub jays and pine duff, thin air crackling with magical intensity and the death of dreaming.

The best advice, the best, so pay attention if you need to know. The best advice I ever got on the quitting of smoking was, "The only way to quit smoking is not to smoke."

No shit. No laughing. That phrase has been, and may be, the only thing that keeps me away from the sweet weed. I only wish I could remember who told me that.

Make it a journey, the recounting. Risk it, risk losing your memory. The life doesn’t seem as bold. We’re all afraid to die. Threaten with sudden twisted evisceration and just about everybody will blanch. But this risk of self murder, this risk of leaving behind what you thought you might be, this hanging out your tender peeled penis and soul and bald eyes and flayed heart, handing it out for the magpies and the jays, your lovers and former lovers, your enemies and the people you despise, this killing the self tastes a little off. Is it supposed to taste this way? Buttermilk kissing underneath the bleachers with mildewed rags and shellfish in the sun. Should you spit it out? A ball of pine-sol burning the tongue and nobody, not one soul, gives a shit if you eat it, not one.

This writing space is a cave. Possibility crawls up the walls, leaving bright green, wet shinings behind. In the weak light we can almost see our fingers as we wash our hands. Reading patterns in bright green stars, these hearts tacked to the stone. The lack of smoke is noticeable in a small, wet cave.

I’ve never known where I stood, she said, so I guess I’ll stand next to you.
Ok, he said. That’s ok. Stand here. I’m sorry my feet stink.