this blog began as a section on my site called “Infinite Diarrhea” which I took down very shortly after starting it because … people were reading it. This, in turn, was causing problems in my already failing marriage …
Messed about with cigarettes again, recently.
I’ve been mooching around 3 a week from a fellow down at the record store but hadn’t fully slipped until my birthday when I made the foolish mistake of buying a pouch of Drum, along with a bottle of Buffalo Trace as a sort of present to myself.
Yeah, great.
I only rolled around 5 or 6 smokes over a two and a half day period before leaving the works on a bench in front of the supermarket. I just set it down and walked away, figuring I was done, that was it.
Well, last week I bought yet another pouch of Drum and this time I kept it quite a bit longer – at least four days – then, this Tuesday when we picked up Mom at the airport, then went to Sharon’s orthopedic appointment, I found myself in the uncomfortable position of jonesing for a cigarette around two people whom I didn’t want knowing I smoked. So, when Sharon went in to have the bandaging removed for the first time since the accident, I begged off, claiming a very real squeamishness, then slipped downstairs for a surreptitious smoke.
It wasn’t very good, doing little more than making my weakish hangover swell in strength, increase my unreasoning hunger, and shorten my breath, so I stubbed it out before it was even done and went inside for an americano.
Back inside the orthopedic waiting room, I sat next to a fake plant in a large ceramic base and watched as an old woman shuffled in, clutching desperately to a walker. A tank of air rode before her in the walker, its gaseous output snaking via a plastic tube up the old woman’s nostrils.
After her daughter helped her to sit, I watched as she gasped silently, as if having just finished a hundred yard dash instead of a ten-foot walk; a withered fish beached and reminding me so much of my own grandmother who suffered a similar fate.
What the hell was I doing smoking again? Did I want to end up like this helpless old woman, wheezing over an oxygen bottle she was likely too weak to pick up without assistance?
I reached into my pocket and grasped the pouch of Drum, dropping it behind the plastic plant’s porcelain pot to lie hidden until they decide to rearrange the waiting room.
I felt a thrill of triumph. Once again I had managed to overcome my weak will, my foolhardiness. Once again I had triumphed over the demon nicotine.
Today I mooched a cigarette off Vern.
