For the past few weeks, I’ve been working closing shifts at the restaurant, which means I go in at four.  The people who work opening shifts get off at four.  Three of the openers smoke, and none of the current closers do.

Ever since I began attempting to quit, every now and then I would give in when I went into work and ask one of my coworkers for a cigarette, and we would go out and have one, and that would be it for me for the day.

Of course, one cigarette a day is far better than the pack and change that I used to smoke, but it’s still one too many.  And as long as I have some sort of acceptance of the habit, it would make it that much easier for me to go back to smoking a pack a day, which is not what I want.

It used to be, when I had a cup of coffee, I wanted a cigarette; I wanted one when I had a beer, when I finished a meal, when I got into my car, when I left a building, after I had sex, and before I went to bed.  I indentifed all of these triggers, and willfully defied them for a little while, adn then they stopped being triggers.  Of course, I wasn’t vigilant, and now I have the new trigger of going into work at 4 and bumming a smoke off someone.

Yesterday I had a day off work, and had no cigarettes at all.  Today, I went in at four, and I did not ask anyone for a cigarette, even though I wanted to, and they left… and that was it! Within five minutes of my smoking coworkers’ departure, I was fine again.  Didn’t feel like smoking, didn’t feel like binge eating because I wasn’t smoking.

The moral of the story is that you can undo all of your triggers for quitting smoking, one of the most important aspects of overcoming the mental addiction to t0bacco.  Identify them, and then when they present themselves, don’t give in.  It’s a very simple process that happens to be incredibly difficult.  But the thing is, defying the triggers gets easier every single time you do it, until you’re doing it without noticing it.

And that’s how you turn from a person who’s quitting smoking into a nonsmoker.

View From Table Rock.

Yesterday, I drove to Table Rock State Park, in Pickens, SC, and I walked to the summit of the Rock, which, at 3124 feet, is either a reasonably large hill or an incredibly small mountain, depending on how you choose to define it.  It was a bit of a humbling experience, and I was kind of glad that I had quit smoking, because otherwise I would probably not have been able to complete it.  I will want to go up again, once my lungs have had even more time to heal from the tobacco damage.

The trail to the top of Table Rock is about three and a half miles long, with an elevation gain of just under two thousand feet.  I got a pretty early start – around 8:45 am – so for the majority of my hike I was alone.   This also meant I got to avoid the worst of the heat, though that didn’t stop me from sweating profusely on the way up because I’m out of shape and still have a smoker’s dimished lung capacity.

About 3/4 of the way to the summit, I saw a bear!  First time I have ever seen one.  It was about twenty or thirty feet in front of me, facing the opposite direction.  It either didn’t notice me or didn’t want anything to do with me.  I didn’t think to get out my camera until it left, because I was kind of scared.  I know, in theory, that as a 6’2″ guy who weights 240 lbs, a black bear is probably not going to attack me, but it was still quite the surprise.

That is one of the advantages, or dangers, of hiking alone.  I doubt that a group of four would have seen a black bear, because they’d be making so much noise that it would have left.

The picture above was not taken at the summit, but a clearing about 2/3 of the way up.  Since Table Rock isn’t tall enough to have a tree line, the view from the summit itself is a little anticlimactic:

But anyway, it was a great damn way to spend half a day, and I will probably go back next week to try out one of their other trails.  They have maybe three or four decent-length day hikes, and Table Rock also serves as the Eastern terminus of the 76-mile Foothills Trail.

The day before yesterday, I had one of those little epiphanies, when I realized how long it had been since I’d gone for a walk in the woods, owing to the fact that I temporarily live in Suburban Hell, and I said to myslef that, wait a minute, I like hiking.  I haven’t been doing it lately.  Why the hell not? And so I went.  The next time I’m tempted to light up a cigarette, I’ll think about the hike, and how it would have been better if it wasn’t quite as strenuous on my lungs and heart, and hopefully I won’t smoke.  And also, when I ask myself, Well, if I’m not going to be smoking, what the hell will I be doing instead, I have a decent answer to that question now as well.

Too Many Lemons.

So I haven’t had a day off from my day job in about three weeks.  It was a nice little run of productivity, but I’m going to be glad for the break.

Speaking of day jobs – Jonathan Mead, the amazing gentlemen behind the amazing Illuminated Mind, no longer has one.  This is not because he got fired; it is because he set a goal to become self-employed, and did what it took to achieve his goal.  Hooray Jonathan!  I plan to join you within two years.

I have big plans for my day off, since I figure I get them with such infrequency that I can’t afford to do nothing with them.  In about forty minutes, I will be driving to Table Rock State Park, and hiking for a while once I drive there, because I’ve lived in South Carolina for about a year and haven’t checked out any of its major natural parks.

Then this evening, it is off to see Bill Maher at the Peace Center in Greenville!  A stand-up show is a luxury that I have never treated myself to before, but I figured, fuck it, I’m worth it, and according to some people in whose best interest it would be for our economy to be getting better, our economy IS getting better!  The university I attended put on free stand-up shows for the students every now and then, but even that was about a million years ago, so tonight’s endeavor is probably overdue.

So when I lived in Connecticut, former governor John Rowland made the national news; current governor Jodi Rell is not.  Now, South Carolina governor Mark Sanford is making the news.  It would seem that, if your state is not in the business of being in the national news, it’s bad if your governor is going to be in the national news.  Between the several stories we were told, the taxpayer dollars spent on the affair, and the fact that it was, you know, an extramarital affair, if Mark Sanford had one ounce of dignity he’d probably resign.  But if he had an ounce of dignity, it’s entirely possible he wouldn’t have ended up in this situation.  He resigned from the Republican Governor’s Association.  But he is still this state’s Republican Governor.  I guess that means he feels more shame toward his party than he does his constituents.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that the universe has a way of working things out, and maybe all this happened because Bill Maher didn’t know what he was going to do with regards to local material at his South Carolina show tonight; now he can make a few jokes about Mark Sanford.  I will write about Bill Maher, and my solitary hiking at “perhaps the most widely recognized natural feature in Upstate South Carolina,” (so sayeth the Foothills Trail Conference), if they are cool enough to be written about.

Nicotine Gum.

So check out snafubar’s diary at the Daily Kos from yesterday entitled “So Obama wants kids not to smoke.  I think I can help.” It’s an account of the diarist’s father and his addictions to tobacco and alcohol.  It’s not really for the squeamish, and if you are looking for a reason to quit smoking and haven’t found one yet, it will probably provide you with a few.

But for me, the problem isn’t not having a reason to quit smoking.  I’ve got about a half dozen of them, and that’s why I’ve been in the process of quitting, with varying degrees of success, for a couple months.

The trouble is that within a few days, my body tells me about a reason to start smoking again.  These usually involve either stressful situations, or my fear of getting fat again if I quit smoking for good.  And if you quit smoking, your body and/or mind, acting out of their addiction, will give you a reason to start again.

Unlike the Kos diarist snafubar, I have never had to watch someone close to me die from smoking, and I hope that I never do, and extend my sympathies to anyone who has.  In the abstract sense, I know that smoking kills, I mean it says it on the pack and I’ve seen it on TV, but then again I’ve also seen people travel in time on TV, and so as a medium it doesn’t have the same immediacy of a flesh-and-bone person.

I think there are two problems one faces with quitting smoking that one wouldn’t face when attempting to stop using nearly any other drug.

The first is societal acceptance of tobacco.  Of course, it’s nowhere near what it was in the past, and if you smoke outside a building you might get a dirty look, or an ostentatious cough, but I mean if you were to stand outside that same building and tie off and shoot up heroin, the reaction would be decidedly less favorable.  So it’s a substance you can be addicted to without being considered a complete degenerate, merely someone with a “bad habit” or a “very bad habit,” depending on who you talk to.  Really, the only drugs that mainstream society accepts more are alcohol (in moderation), pharmaceuticals, and caffeine.

The second problem is that, in the short term, smoking affects you negatively in a remarkably small way, considering how bad things are going to be in the long term.  With alcohol, you can get drunk and get in your car and kill someone.  If you smoke a pack of cigarettes, it won’t render you unable to drive, or unable to work (unless your job involves running).  No one dies of a nicotine overdose, and because of that, people die from cigarettes rotting their bodies over the course of years and years.

There’s a part of me that would like to think these two problems are reason enough to start smoking again, but that is my addiction talking, and I try not to listen to it.

A few days after I tell myself that I’m quitting, the addiction always whispers in my ear, “Look.  Quitting smoking is a very good thing to do.  Someday.  But you’re twenty-three.  Why quit now?  Why not quit at like, what’s a good round number, say, twenty-five?  You can quit at twenty-five and still be fine.  Look at the statistics someday.”  Your addiction is always willing to bargain with you.  Get to twenty-five, it’ll probably try and say you should wait ’til thirty.  And so on and so on, until it starts telling you, “Eh, you’re too old to quit now, it wouldn’t make any difference, what’s done is done.”

I’ve always found that getting over the physical withdrawal is the relatively easy part.  But then it’s a matter of, great, what the hell do I do now?  And when I ask that question, something in the back of my mind says, “What now?  A cigarette, that’s what.”

But I don’t want a reason to start smoking again; I’m working on finding a way to stop, permanently.

If I figure it out, I’ll let you know.

Last I checked, about two hundred fifty people had posted their responses, and they make for pretty interesting reading.

It’s a topic I find particularly interesting, because there is a romanticism one can associate with being able to leave on a moment’s notice if the mood strikes, unencumbered by baggage, physical and otherwise.  Also, just under a year ago, when I moved from a small town in New England to a college town in the southeast (without the benefit of anything in the neighborhood of a reason) I whittled down my possessions such that they could fit in the trunk (and backseat) of a car.

The car in question was my friend Billy’s ’91 Buick Skylark.  I took some clothes, some books, some food (because I didn’t know how long it would be until I had a regular income stream again), my laptop, and that is pretty much it.  The books and the laptop weren’t “needs” in the air-water-food-shelter sense of the term, but hey, isn’t everyone entitled to a few comforts here and there?

The past few years, I haven’t really been buying into the consumer spending thing the way I probably should have, and with the way the economy’s going, it looks like everybody else caught up with me.  For me, the problem isn’t accumulating shit through purchases, but I have a tendency to hold on to various objects whose intrinsic value doesn’t serve me, but to which I have a sentimental attachment.  A lot of people have this, but that really doesn’t make it any less irrational.  I mean, I have my memories; those should probably be enough.

But anyway – back to the comments on zenhabits regarding Leo’s question – the only ones that made me sad were the ones from people who say, “I couldn’t do that.”  Well, not with an attitude like that, you couldn’t.  But most times that people say they couldn’t live without something, what they mean is they wouldn’t want to do so.  Realizing this, one will become less agitated in the event that one of these things is taken from you, by whatever circumstances, because it wasn’t truly necessary.  I don’t know.  Does that make any sense?