You won't kick the demon nicotine, but you will ensure maximum suffering if you follow my simple method.
Step one: Quit cold turkey. You'll be doing this many times, so it's a good idea to learn a couple tricks -- First trick: Always waste the maximum amount of cash by buying only single packs (preferably inside the Chicago city limits, where taxes on a pack of smokes are approximately $43,500.77), because each one is "the last one, ever." This accomplishes two things: you won't have a big supply sitting around that you feel obligated to smoke for reasons of frugality, and you will feel extra stupid every time you feed your habit, which will reinforce your desire to constantly torture yourself with the quitting process. Second trick: When you finish the pack, dump out your ashtrays as soon as possible (which will invariably make you gag with disgust at the stink and filth you've been imposing on your poor body, but that's normal). Dump them someplace that's hard or embarrassing to get into, such as your apartment building's dumpster. Because chances are good that in half an hour or so you will have an irrepressible urge to raid the trash for smokeable butts. And that's just pathetic.
Step two: While spending the next two or three days fending off drug-withdrawal-spawned suicidal impulses by yelling at everybody and nobody, breaking things, and sleeping 12 or 14 hours a day to escape the sheer hell that life on earth has become, comfort yourself with the knowledge that these physical and emotional symptoms are temporary. Yes, they go away relatively quickly. However, you can make them come back again by following step three.
Step three: As soon as your bronchial tubes clear up to the point where you no longer feel like you're being strangled to death by a tsunami made of roofing tar, and your emotional status is rehabilitated to the point where you almost feel like doing something other than dying alone, broken and dispirited, go to the bodega and buy a pack of cigs. But just one! It's your last pack ever, after all.
Return to step one, abandon all hope, continue to despise your weak self, repeat. Forever.
By the way, this has been yet another "step two" kind of weekend. Feh.
3 comments:
Don't forget...quitting smoking entitles you to get really, really, really, drunk whenever you want to! It's OK, you're not smoking! Whoo!
That's right, what feral mom says. Two words: Jeppeson Malort (or is that Malord?). You can get it at Simon's and some choice liquor stores. In fact, I'll be back approx. June 23 and I'll buy you a cup of that contemporary "green fairy." You won't be able to think about smoking because you'll be sooo fucked up from that Swedish mountainside-posies shit that you'll forget you ever were a slave to the global tobacco giants. The problem will be unhitching yourself from that Scandanavian joy wagon.
Stay Free!Go Swine!
CF
Thanks for the encouraging words, and very very sound advice, which I will be following earnestly. I've cycled thru all three "failure to quite smoking" steps once already since this entry was posted (I had a presentation to do before a bunch of managerial poobahs, and corporate communications make(s) me smokingly nervous), but, as Bullwinkle J. Moose often said, "This time for sure!"
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