Quitting Smoking

Well, I seem to have accomplished the impossible...I have managed to go 6 weeks without a cigarette. And although I don't consider myself out of the woods just yet, I think it is a noteworthy accomplishment that hopefully I can stick with.

Here is my advice to smokers looking to quit: DON'T DO IT! KEEP SMOKING! You'll be much happier right up until the point where you need to sneak a puff inside your oxygen tent. Then you'll be dead, and you'll have escaped the pain of withdrawal completely.

Because buddy, I have to tell you...quitting smoking sucks.

The first two days are bad enough--you are edgy and your emotions are all over the place. You'll get headaches. Sometimes you'll feel a little dizzy.

We're just getting warmed up. EVERYTHING will piss you off. Seriously, if Gisele and Fergie got in a fight over your dick, you'd be upset that there isn't enough hair pulling/open handed slapping/clothes rending going on. Then when things settled down you are gonna be pissed that they stopped. You will kick a hole in something or someone.

Okay, now after about a week of this the physical changes kick in. Your lungs swell up like a couple of blimps as they start to reject the years of tar and phlegm which you have caked them with. You become a human loogie farmer, horking your yellow crop across sidewalks wherever you go. And the cough. The cough is bad. Sometimes you'll cough up something solid and accidentally chew on it. Whoops. And forget about sleeping regularly.

Then comes the quitter's flu. This is the absolute worst, because after about a week and a half of feeling like crap, you learn what crap feels like when it says it feels like crap. Your temperature is going to soar into the low 100's, nothing will stay down, and you will not stop coughing because there is 1 piece of something dangling in your lung that won't come loose. "Maybe if I keep coughing it will break free" you'll think. But it won't. It is going to annoy you for another 2 weeks. In the meantime, you'll have fever dreams where Peter Stourmare is chasing you down in a golf cart, trying to steal your 1-Up Mushroom.

If you make through all this, the worst is over, although you'll continue to have good days and bad days. Well mostly bad days. I think a part of you will always want to go back to flavor country. At those times you'll have to catch yourself and say "Well at least I don't have to go stand outside in 4 degree weather."

In any case, I wish you the best.