Word of warning to those who've quit... My father was several years free of both booze and alcohol until one day he took a sip and a drag.

The booze made a comeback that lasted a couple of years, in poorly managed secret, but he eventually got back off the sauce. But the cigarettes never caught on. He smoked one cigarette fourteen years ago, while he was drunk, and it haunts him more than the lengthy alcohol relapse ever did.

He still thinks about it, still has cravings regularly. He considers it one of the biggest mistakes of his life, that single cigarette. Nevermind the alcoholic bullshit that turned him into a worthless father. The cigarette keeps him awake at night.

So... y'know... Leave the hacking and coughing and stinkin and dying to US, you guys. At least when you back peddle on booze or heroin you have oblivion and the warm embrace of death to look forward to.

Oh you never "quit" or ever become a "non smoker" rather you're simply "not smoking"

I haven't smoked in almost nine years but in many ways i still consider myself a smoker. I know that its not impossible that at some point in my life i might smoke again. I don't want to and i hope not to but i understand i have so permanently changed my neurochemistry and psychology that i can never and never will be the same as a person who has never smoked.

And like i told yall, i also still have cravings regularly.

I don't get your story. He had one cig which caused a relapse?

Or he had one cigarette, and felt a lifetime of guilt over that one?

I've been having a hard time giving up scorpion tails.

http://www.odditycentral.com/news/sm...addiction.html

it's the second-- hence the absurdity and the point of the story

per the tale, the guilt is ongoing


being a self in the world is a massive pain in the ass

damn, good luck to all of you!! I found it incredibly hard, but am really glad I got off them.

1 cig many years after quitting smoking, on the same night he hopped off the wagon. Relapsed on the booze, but not on cigs. Yet it is the cig that haunts him to this day.

My father is a fucked up and deeply flawed man.

'This be the verse'

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.

Philip Larkin

I've missed you man.

not having kids is not enough

we need to obsolesce trad biological reproduction completely so noone can
reproduce

it will happen in the future as the bio-body is obsolesced by technical reproductive apparatus that produce offspring that can out-compete it for resources but we should all help make the process as fast as possible.

no life = no problems

You're a weird guy, bro.

im just a radical lesbian in a mans body

good luck to you! really, I mean it.

me, im way too wild to quit. I wish I could but, nothing works unless I go to jail or turn into some basement dweller.

really, nothing works for me unless I have tons of money. being rich and level headed is all that will do and that whole thing is kinda a paradox. so im fucked.

on the bright side....everyone can cut back. now that's fairly easy.

I've told this to my girlfriend the other day....she doesn't doubt me.

so you're in the middle of week 3, or thereabouts--

how is your brain circuitry holding up at this point?

uhm... would it be right to assume that no news is bad news?

im gonna guess yes :(

Ha! Actually, for reasons I have trouble giving myself, I started smoking one or two a day. Started after 8 days or so of none.

Either:

1.) Since "cutting down" was the overwhelming advice before quitting entirely, I'm doing okay. I mean, I haven't returned to 20 a day. No wish to either.

2.) I failed altogether.

I don't feel too bad. I lived through eight days nicotine-free no problem, so I can go back. I was actually planning on "re-quitting" starting tomorrow. Really, the smokes I've been having aren't so wonderful. And I really think that for me, two a day fucks with my head even more than none. What a silly plant.

Thanks for asking.

Im glad to are coming to realize its gonna take a mixed approach. Remember it took months and years to become a smoker so logically it won't just stop in an instant transformative moment

cutting down might be yr only option evollove until you're prepared to quit. that's not such a bad thing so don't be hard on yrself. it's an addiction. it takes time.


look, me myself, I smoke more when working and cut back or eliminate it totally when im home. while at work, if my first thought tells me I can go another hour without a cig, then I do. then, sometimes i go two hours or more. surprisingly, first thought is the best thought. never doubt yrself. go with it. take it naturally and don't force yrself to quit. you are going to die anyway so no need to speed or slow it down but, you do have a say so. kinda like american voting.

think of it more as an habit than an addiction. that's what I do. the addiction part will remind you anyway because you are.....addicted but, there's a trick to it. to cutting back at least. quitting is the hard part.

typos corrected. see, fingers are faster than brain. fingers don't articulate the lazy, horny, tired, beat up, disappointed mucus filled brain well.

I've been smoking 2 a day for a while, and I went to the dentist the other day -- full of shame and guilt and dread about the "so you're a smoker" conversation -- but after my cleaning, I mentioned that I was cutting back, and they thought I was kidding. The hygienist actually laughed. She didn't believe I was a smoker.

I'm apparently really kicking ass at covering my tracks, cause that bitch had her hands all up in my mouth hole.

Then again, dental hygienists aren't known for having above average intelligence. They're not even known for their knowledge of dental hygiene. I think I might actually have a DH certificate lying around somewhere that I picked up on accident. (Nah, I'm sure they're fine people)

I felt like wringing my hands and going "mwahaha! Little do you know my lungs look like microwaved placentae!!!"

kids, don't do drugs! you could wear a tie and have a family and take vacations and tell other people what to do. or you could rough it out and live in the gutter and survive day to day pay check to pay check and not send the kids to private schools and collage and struggle and shelter them. then you can call hard workers and loser drug addicts without knowing yr just as fucked as they are, to do your dirty work.

see, with money, you dream and can't wait for that party time while you sleep and rest up.

poor people party every night without a damn. either way, we're all going to die. flat out DIE a hedonistic death.

It's college, dude. The word is college. Collage means something different entirely.

Sorry. That one just really bugs me, on account of how stupid it sounds.

I had a friend who kicked heroin and said that was easier that cigarettes. Don't know how true that is - or if it's across the board - but damn.

I smoked from like 18-28. Then quit. Until I was 30 and started again. Now I'm 35.

The weird thing is, when I'm at work, I go all day w/o one. I get up at 6am, and don't have one til I get home after 6pm. But on the weekends, I have my first around noon or 1pm. And when I quit, I craved them all the time. Ugh.

no way can I go all day at work without one. that is weird. well im in construction so. it's mandatory. matter of fact, Im going to work now. this old lady wants me to install a floating floor. so I have to snatch out her stinking dirty dog piss stained carpet and my allergies are already kicking my ass. fun stuff eh?

I pretty much have the exact same thing going on over here, my friend. Except I started at 17 and never quit at 28 (or ever). Once I was in the hospital for two weeks and I couldn't smoke because I was fucking completely bedridden. So technically I have had breaks here and there, but I had a patch on each arm — seriously... not sure how that's ok, or why they allowed it but they did... Maybe one of them was fentanyl ... I was pretty fucked up so could be!

But I don't smoke during the day and I don't smoke in my car or in my house.

Once I tell myself I'm "trying to quit" thouhh, all I can think about is smoking. I have never lasted a day without something medical (bronchitis, freshly removed wisdom teeth, a wretched migraine) getting in the way.

oh, good to hear. from 20 to a steady 2 is massive progress, and an easier jumping off point should you decide to quit completely

i had a prof in gradschool who smoked 1 or 2 a day (always during his class break). he said his doctor told him it wasn't an issue in such amounts (he smoked marlboro lights if i recall). sort of like the fumes you'd get by living in hellay or new york i suppose.

of course 2 is also a jumping point to full addiction, ha ha ha, so if you can cap it there it would be awesome. i think once you escalate to 3 or 4 is when it starts to get a little unwieldy. inflammation IS a thing, and you need to heal up your tissues.

these days i can't smoke more than 1/2 a cigarette without getting nauseous, so i don't smoke cigarettes, but i still can get a bit of nicotine through other means on choice days (e.g., when doing taxes)

anyway, good to hear you've tamed the beast--best wishes with what's next.

see, your 35. im 36. we only got about 20 more years or less of good health maybe. when you turn 40, which isn't long from now and considered middle age, 20 years before that you were 20. you remember being 20 right? im sure you remember 30.

fucking freaky ain't it?

anyway, this not smoking at work thing is crazy. are ya'll scared to offend co-workers. I wouldn't give a shit. fuck em. they don't like it?......... eat a dick. eat a mutherfucking dick. cuz that's how I roll. bitch!

kids don't know nothing about that these days. eating dicks and all.

Yep. And it happened pretty quickly. The escalation didn't seem to stop. Yesterday I had 7.

So, today going for zero. Not sure why, but it's really sucking. Wept for moment this morning. I forget why. Stubbed a toe or something.

I'm tempted to smoke. "I'd rather smoke than be this depressed" is a statement which makes sense. Of course, "I'd rather get cancer and loose teeth than be depressed" does not make as much sense.

ah yes, we always knew that could happen. it really does suck! sorry. it just does, no real way around that.

one part is the withdrawal, the other is the suck that you smoked to supress in the first place.

might look like a cakewalk but it's really more like the fight in the original rocky. a long slow slog.

maybe look at the wellbutrin thing or something else your doctor might prescribe?

it's trading one crutch for another, but maybe a way to ease off.

eta: and did the exercise thing stick?

I see reality caught up with all that bombastic bluster you had going on a few weeks ago. Kindly remember this most basic of advice. You didn't instantly become a smoker. You learned to become a smoker over time and effort. You also weren't a pack a day smoker from day one. You gradually smoked more,so naturally expect that with time and effort you will gradually quit.

Addiction is a disease. Healing diseases takes time.

whenever you post solid gold like this it reminds me why i like you

I now realize:

Fighting withdrawals lowered my energies, but it would have been a bad day anyway. I sort of hate my mother and was reminded of this yesterday morning. (Also, I'm starting to think that my dental care professionals are more confident than competent. Are good dentists hard to find or am I too picky?)

Nicotine wouldn't help with any of that. (After all, I sort of hated my mother when I was a pack-and-a-halfer.) Just bad timing on my part, to re-quit on a day I wanted to cry and punch walls anyway.

But I eventually fell asleep. New day. Better mood. Glad I didn't cave in because it is so obvious it wouldn't have helped anything. Lesson learned. Quitting is easy, life is hard.

wow, man, that's rough, and i'm sorry.

there's therapy for that though.

as for dentists: they're like shoes. you have to try for the right fit (same with therapists btw).

Most dentists are crooks. Its truly a gamble. Go with a recommendation from somebody you trust.

yeah, I never could just cut down, though I tried it a bunch. Only thing ended up working for me was the patch. After about 4 weeks of patch and then 6 months later, I was clear of them, finally. Great feeling. At about 3 months I started biking a lot, felt good to be building up the heart and lungs after the years of tar

I wonder if EVOLghost quit quitting.

I have a friend who's having a hell of a time quitting. He's getting married this summer and is basically lying to his fiance about having quit.

She had badgered him to quit, he agreed, made it a day or two, and has been sneaking ever since. He's a decent guy, but it's addiction, man. Brings out the worst in people.

potty training should be a training event and a sporting event in the Olympics. a contradiction. my shit explodes like a champagne supernova in daaaa sky. extra points like a free/all you can eat card to burger king for looking deform/retarded and down syndrome-like.

durp!!! * left eye falling out of head* " daddy said poop in the hole or he will kick the other eye out"." he still mad because I stop up toilet with the poo poo paper".