Returning After So, So Long.

Let's skip all the formalities about how I haven't written in this journal for a very long time. A lot has happened, so let's get straight to summary.

I've been living in Asheville again for three years now. David and I broke up last year and will be finalizing our divorce soon. It was complicated for a while, but now it's not.

I finally quit smoking.

I am now almost eleven weeks pregnant with my boyfriend Andor's child. How and why we decided to have a baby is another story entirely. It's weird news to tell anyone who knows me well since I had NEVER wanted children before I met him. Anyway, we're prepping for this next adventure a little bit every day.



What made me think about returning to writing here is the fact that I am headed to Philadelphia next weekend for a very unique sort of...um...vacation. I expect to have photos and stories to share from my experiences at the Occupy convention, where Clan Destiny Circus will be performing on the street and campaigning for the Circus Party.

I am psyched.

I was going to post a bunch of photos of things I've been up to, but Blogger fucked up my formatting and I am so frustrated I can't really deal with it again. I'll be back soon.

Is There a Ghost in My House?

I was just thinking of that Band of Horses song. But seriously, a few days ago I had a very creepy dream that I was house sitting and there was a sort of poltergeist, except that its way of haunting was to overtake people's brains and make them hallucinate that horrible things were happening. It was kinda like that movie The Craft. Things crawling on me, my limbs turning into granite, and so forth. I'm not sure what to make of that, but the dream was surprisingly willing to let go of my emotions when I woke.

In fact, my inner emotional landscape has changed dramatically since I quit smoking. All kinds of things that would normally penetrate my psyche all the way to through are only thumping against the surface. I can barely hear the noise. It's not at all like despair, although it results in waves of a sort of anguish and guilt about how truly cold to and distant from the rest of humanity I feel (or, you know, don't feel). I was just telling my dear roommate about how relatively easy it would be to watch things die right now. Let me know if you need help slaughtering a bunch of Thanksgiving turkeys; I'm your man. Got some baby bunnies that need drowning? Call me up.

...I jest. Nevertheless, it's super weird to feel like all the empathy has evaporated out of me. Also, nothing really excites me at all. It's like my average operating mood is leveling out at slightly below neutral, and the only way I can go is down a bit more. I wonder how long I can take it. Personal effectiveness at the cost of joy is not a fair trade.

The nicotine monster has such elaborate schemes for worming its way into a person's head. What a bastard. It can actually make me think that I may never be a person I would like to hang out with again.

On a completely different note, I just finished reading a lovely book by Naeem Murr called The Perfect Man. When I tried to describe it to someone recently, the best I could come up with was that it is sort of like To Kill a Mockingbird written for an adult audience by an acolyte of William Faulkner. I imagined the main character as a more grown-up version of this beautiful, charming, and wildly talented Indian child who practices at the dojang with me.

That's it for today. I'm headed off to first wedding anniversary dinner #1. Mmmm Thai noodles.

The Big Quit

I am writing on the fourth full day of my quit. Yep, that's right, I've quit smoking. I think that I knew that it would happen this way; thus, I've never bothered to really try to quit before the precise moment when it happened.

Most smokers have had the occasional experience of looking down at the stinking little death-stick in our fingers and felt a sense of bizarre alienation from the act, wondering how the hell it came to be that these stupid little things run our lives and boss us around all day as they slowly kill us. It has happened to me many, many times, but I've always managed to eventually shrug and decide that now is not the time to deal with it. Just take another drag and be done with that little flight of fancy, I said to myself, because you can't quit.

And then Monday night, with no warning, I suddenly knew with objective and detached certainty that the cigarette in my hand as I drove home from work was the last one. I only enjoyed it as much as any other cigarette. I looked at it a bit. Rolled it around in my fingers, slowing down time, giving myself the opportunity to withdraw the motion. But it never passed. I waited a few more hours, and at the end I was still certain. So I calmly handed my cigarettes over to David and told him to do something with them because I am done.

I'm done. For today. And the next day. And the next day...

The AA approach--"I will always be an addict"--is actually proving to be helpful. The whole one day at a time method is also working. There are a few other tricks I'm developing to help ease the process too, such as vividly imagining the nicotine monster as this nasty little asshole that whispers horrible things in my ear, since I then have the option of ignoring it after telling it to fuck the fuck off.

Nighttime is terrible. Everything has turned upside down; I used to hate mornings and look forward to the hours after dark, and now I loathe the dark. It surrounds me with restless boredom, fills me with nervous irritation, and explodes in angry, frothing shrieks of self-loathing that almost reach my throat. I hope that I don't decide to start blogging on a particularly horrible evening, but if something really snaky and cruel appears for a day, please know that it's the little monster talking. Maybe I'll leave it up so I can remember what a little bitch it is.

More to come later.

A Bee Lectures Me in Marxism

I had a dream about just that. A dust-covered bee in its last gasps of life told me its deepest political convictions, but the only precise beewords I remember are, "For me, [the problem] is less about power and more about alienated labor."

Unsurprising, after the conversation I had with David about work, health care, and other domestic (as in national) gripes until much too late last night/early this morning. We're going to Turkey or Morocco or Algeria within the year, somehow or other. Your imagination is more qualified to fill in the gaps than is my ability to explain how we arrived at the conclusion.

I keep hyperventilating and yawning. That is an issue for the 'quitting' thread. Without having to see a doctor, I can pretty well infer that if this isn't walking pneumonia (somewhat unlikely, given my age), then it's chronic bronchitis, which is usually exacerbated, if not directly caused, by smoking.

The first problem with the obvious answer--'Quit smoking right-fucking-now, dumbass'--is that I am certain that the last time I had a lingering respiratory infection like this in April, the situation was actually complicated by my attempt to quit smoking at the same time that I was trying to purge the illness. It was too much for my cilia to handle without laying me up totally useless for a couple of weeks, even with the whole giving in to taking antibiotics thing.

That's exactly what happened. I became so sick that I could not possibly have done anything productive for several weeks, which made me really depressed and generally got me into a funk that took a long time to get over. This is something that I cannot afford right now. It is not that I don't believe quitting is worth my time and effort, it's just that I would have to plan for the inevitable illness that would ensue, unless, of course, I start the quit project when I am relatively healthy in the first place. I know that this logic sounds counterintuitive or plain silly to a nonsmoker, or maybe even a lightly-addicted smoker, but the people who know what I mean will know what I mean.

...Which brings me to the next thing I have to think about. I want to try Chantix this time. I could spend hours explaining how I got from my general anti-pharmaceutical stance to this particular conclusion, but I've already done the work of thinking really hard about it, and so I won't. Suffice it to say that the resolution stems from observation of facts about my past attempts to quit. The problem with making it happen is a money issue.

I have the prescription already. I got it when I still had insurance from the public school job, and the doctor was happy to give it to me, even when I explained that I was not sure if or when I would want to have it filled. However, in my current insuranceless situation, enough of the drug to get me started would cost at least $100. This is another expense that I will need to plan for, and that cannot happen right now.

Looking at the research I can find about treating whatever chest crap I have going on right now, it appears that I may have enough Cipro left over from the neurotic doctor, (different one from the Chantix lady, who was awesome) who gave me way too much of it before I left for Guatemala, to self-medicate in the event that I get desperate to breathe more easily. I don't think I will need it, because the whole thing seems to be on the outs, but this is still a small comfort. I need to get a little better before I can think about going through the taxing experience of quitting.

This has been a brain-dump about bumblebee comrades covered in white dust and microbes covered in smoke. It is not yet time to set a quit date. I'll let you know when I get the memo.

Decision Day: A Smoker's Story

I will try to be as prosy about all this as my English major constitution can handle. I am going to try to quit smoking (again). There, I said it. I have this diary going now, so that I can do things differently this time. The ways I have already tried don't work, and God is made up so he can't help me either.

I don't know anyone who once was as much of an addict as I am and has become a successful quitter--only lots of people who have quit many times, or who don't even think about quitting. Be back soon--gotta cook dinner after I smoke a cigarette. *Groan*

--------------------------

Damn, that was some good kale and butternut squash. Too bad you weren't very hungry, David.

So here's the deal. My mother is a cancer survivor. My father is an asthmatic. They both smoke--a lot--and have since I can remember. I know mom did not smoke while she was pregnant with me, but she may as well have, since by the time I was three or four they were smoking in the house. I grew up in rural-as-fuck eastern North Carolina, where the entire local economy is based on tobacco and people sport bumper stickers that say, "Tobacco farmers are survivors, not killers." And you know, on a very important level, that is true.

Anyway, back to the sordid family medical history. I never met my aunt, my dad's sister, because she died of skin cancer before I was born. My dad's father, Grandpa Zeke, died of a heart attack when I was still a toddler. His bereaved wife, my grandmother, is currently incapacitated by a stroke, the function of which (we all know but cannot say) was to make manifest her despair, as our bodies will do. My dear, dear grandfather on my mother's side died five years ago of gut cancer while reading in his favorite white recliner after a full day of work. He was a doctor--and not some specialist either, but a military medic turned goddam bona fide family practitioner. I loved him. Shit, I loved him. Anyhow, his wife, my grandmother, had died of encephalitis when my mom was seven. Suddenly. Bam. Dead. Three young children left behind with a bunch of pretty pictures in sepia of this magical woman who had made paper dolls and written songs for money during the war...

Gus's dad and Gus are both loonies. That's my distant cousin, my former kissin' cousin. But to look at us, I wonder if there isn't some doubling back in the family tree somewhere. Anyhow, those two are totally crazy, and Gus is bound to end up in a place with clean white walls like his dad, if he doesn't off himself first.

Point being, the prognosis is not good for me. The problem with this is that I want to live to be old. Preferably really, really old--as long as I can remember my name and go to the bathroom alone. With all the genetic shit I have to worry about, it's unlikely that smoking is a sustainable part of my eighty-year plan.

I have to set this aside for now, because David and I have an after dinner date to arrange a country punk version of "Hard to Be Human" by The Mekons...

----------------

Back again. I am on a roll this evening. It feels like bloodletting that needed to happen. Songmaking went well. I had practiced this simple little bass line so many times that I almost had it, so David seemed impressed. He is the soul of patience and other virtues. But I'll get back to him.

My little home village in eastern North Carolina was, shall we say, a tobacco-positive environment. It was expected of youngsters to pick up smoking at some point, and although I rarely hung around immediate neighbors--they tended to end up married and with child within a year of graduating high school, so I rarely found much in common with them--the force of the particular smoker-y aspect of local culture had its effect on me. I have trouble thinking of anyone from that town who isn't a smoker. And there I grew up, climbing magnolia trees, watching ants, riding horses, reading books, and often watching entirely too much television. (Once I moved out of my parents' home, I would not have a TV around me. I still haven't owned one in seven years, and have no plans to revisit that mind-suck.)

Around age thirteen, I started hanging out with older boys. I mean, to be fair, there were girls around too, but all those girls ever talked about was the boys we hung around. My cousin Derek initiated me into this weird world of future high school dropouts where guys sat around in their bedrooms, smoked pot, played video games, and stared at their tie-dyed curtains. And being thirteen, I thought that these practices must be very cool. It took me until college to enjoy smoking pot, but while associating with those boys, I certainly started (socially) smoking the occasional cigarette like I had been born to do it.

I loved the screen it provided between me and the world, me and my boredom, me and the crashing disappointment of The Other. Once I started making friends who were old enough to buy me cigarettes, it was on. I never had to be bored or anxious again! No more waiting, scratching my elbows, trying to figure out what to look at without being noticed by the wrong people in the wrong way. No need to come up with some lame excuse for why I want to go outside and get away from all these people; "I need a cigarette" is such a perfectly acceptable excuse! I never had to feel uncomfortable during those long, awkward waiting periods between the time when we arrived at some punk show (the youngest people there, and invariably, my friend trying to hook up with some boy) and when it actually started, or between sets, or on the drive home when there were way too many people in the car! I would always have something to do with my hands, a little glowing point to stare at, a slightly harsh sensation in my lungs to keep me rooted in the present spatio-temporal matrix. Or something like that.

It may not fit into this tidy narrative I am weaving. I am suspicious of my own story, because I know that nothing is so simple. Perhaps over time I will tell fifty conflicting stories that are all true. And I still haven't gotten past middle school/early high school! So many half-lies to tell to arrive back at the conclusion: it's nearly time to quit. And that's the truth, Routh. Until next time.