Got a Light?

I’ve been thinking lately, and I’m seriously considering taking up cigarette smoking again.

I smoked for about ten years straight. I started up when I was sixteen years old, and quit on Thanksgiving last year. As I’m not one to be largely concerned with long term health issues (I’m of the school of thought that we all die when we’re meant to and I don’t believe in healthy living to prolong lifespan), my main reasons for quitting smoking at the time were:-

• Financial – The price of cigarettes had become astronomical and I’m fairly broke at the best of times.
• Nausea – I began feeling nauseous and queasy all the time, which I suspected was due to the smoking.
• Peer pressure – As most of my friends and family quit, and anti-smoking sentiment became popular, I felt increasing pressure to give up. In fact, I only know one person left now who still happily smokes regularly.
• Fitness – I had simply pathetic fitness levels and cardio performance. I’d get winded just strolling to the mailbox. I was certain this was due to the smoking, despite the fact that many people I know who smoked more than me had far better levels of fitness.
• Addiction – I’ve always had an extremely high tolerance for addiction, but I’d begun to worry that like any other smoker, I was becoming chemically addicted to cigarettes and couldn’t stop any time if I wanted to. I needed to prove for my own sake this wasn’t true, as I’ve always viewed addiction as a weakness.

So, I weighed up the pros and cons, and decided it was time to quit. I weaned down, by one cigarette per day, until I had my last cigarette on Thanksgiving last year. I continued to have the occasional drag of my best friend’s cigarettes until New Years Eve, when I quit outright. I haven’t touched a lit cigarette since.

But now, almost a year later, I’m beginning to wonder if it was the right choice. All my reasons for quitting have proved empty and pointless, and now I’m starting to see a much bigger reason to take it up again – the health benefits.

At this point, you’re thinking that my years of painkiller use have finally caused me to crack. "But smoking is BAD for your health!", you’re wanting to shout. But my research shows, that in one area at least, and one that’s of critical importance to me, smoking – or specifically, nicotine – may actually be good for me.

Nicotine has been scientifically proven to reduce the symptoms of Tourette’s Syndrome.

I’ve begun to notice over the past year, and the past few months in particular, my Tourette’s tics becoming worse than ever before. They are quite literally killing me. My internal organs are being shredded and are slowly starting to fail on me. My muscular spasms get so bad sometimes, that I can’t breathe, I can’t pass a solid bowel movement, and I’m in constant agony from the muscular damage I’ve caused myself. A year or so ago, I broke a rib. To this day, nobody knows how. Short of God punching me in my sleep, the only conclusion is that a particularly bad tic fractured the rib and then the constant unrelenting strain on it finally snapped it. Afterwards, the rib never healed correctly. The neverending pummeling of my torso by motor tics meant that the bone was never sitting correctly long enough to knit and form a callus. In the end, a callus three or four times the normal size formed, and started shredding my muscles and flesh with each tic. To this day, I have constant pain down my right side.

To clarify, there is nothing – nothing – that I wouldn’t do to be rid of this Tourette’s. If I found a magic lamp with one wish left, I’d skip fortune and love and success, and wish for no Tourette’s. If a medical professional proved to me that I could be rid of my Tourette’s by removing my own penis with a piece of broken glass with no anesthesia, I’d do it that same day without thinking twice. If I had to choice between having a harem of beautiful attentive submissive women, and keeping the TS, or being cured of TS and dying completely alone, I’d pass on the harem. I can not emphasize enough how much I despise this condition.

If I have to roll the dice and take my chances with lung cancer and whatever else in later life, versus diminished Tourette’s tics immediately and onwards, there is absolutely no question in my mind about what the right choice for me is.

On top of that, this year has also given me some interesting insight on several other things I used to blame on smoking cigarettes:-

• Financial – I am as broke, or even moreso, now, than I was when I was smoking. I have no idea how I afforded to smoke for so long, but it clearly wasn’t as much of an impact on my budget as I thought it was.
• Nausea – I have experienced more chronic nausea this past year than ever before in my life. I now suspect that it’s a side effect of the constant muscular spasms to my stomach, and also a by-product of the excessive doses of painkillers I need to take as a result of mangling my body with TS tics.
• Peer pressure – I don’t really know what I was thinking here. I’ve never been one to give a flying fuck what other people think of me. The person whom I spend the most time with and whose company I enjoy the most, still smokes, and insists he won’t quit until he’s dead. Why should what anybody else thinks make my mind up for me? I didn’t start smoking due to peer pressure, I don’t see why I should have quit due to it.
• Fitness – My piss-poor fitness and cardio had NOTHING to do with being a smoker, as I once thought. My health, fitness and general well-being has in NO way improved since I quit smoking. Not even slightly. If anything, it’s maybe worse. I’m unfit because I’m an overweight, completely inactive slob. Smoking doesn’t change that. Only exercise will.
• Addiction – I haven’t lit a single cigarette in almost a year, and not one day since then has that been a problem for me. From the very first smoke-free day, to right now, I never experienced one moment of chemical craving tempting me to start up again. And I’ve tried to quit oxycodone cold turkey, so I know what drug addiction feels like! I’ve never been hooked on cigarettes, I was paranoid for nothing.

Now, a couple of people have suggested that I just try other forms of nicotine intake besides smoking (gum, or transdermal patches, for example) for the Tourette’s. And if that were my only reason, I probably would. But the list goes on.

This year, the sheer boredom and inactivity of my life has really started to get to me. I mean, it’s no secret that there really is no point or purpose to my existence. Every day for me is just about finding a way to kill time until I can sleep again. That’s all there is to it.

Lately, I’ve been finding myself bored and despondent almost to the point of suicidal tendencies. Each day for me feels longer than it ever has before. I’m struggling to fill the thousands of hours a day I need to pass before its bedtime again. My ISP gives me up to 48GB/month (yes, forty-eight gigabytes per month!!) of allocated bandwidth, and I still can’t download enough TV episodes to get me through a month without scaling the walls. I try playing games, reading books, but there are just too many hours a day to try and get through.

Last night, when I was lying in bed at 3AM experiencing a particular bad bout of insomnia, I recalled that I used to get up and go and sit outside for a quiet late night cigarette to pass the time when I couldn’t sleep. And then I sat up like a shot with the realization…

Let’s say it takes me about ten minutes to smoke one cigarette (and I’m fairly sure that at a relaxed, leisurely pace, it actually takes longer than that). And let’s say I smoked one cigarette per hour (and I know that’s a relaxed figure, because I definitely smoked more than that in the day). Assuming I sleep for 8 hours (also a generous figure), that means I’m awake for 16 hours a day, and would have been smoking for 10 minutes in each hour. That’s 160 minutes a day, or over 2.5 hours, that I’d be outdoors, in the sunlight and fresh air, relaxing and peacefully enjoying a cigarette, instead of sitting in my dank, dark room, lying on the bed staring at the ceiling, wishing an 18-wheeler truck would plow off the freeway and through my bedroom wall.

And those are really light figures. More likely I smoked 20 cigarettes a day, took 15 minutes per smoke, and only slept for about 7 hours a night, which is 300 minutes, or 5 hours per day, of smoking. Peaceful, relaxing, mellowing smoking. Or, those same five hours of wishing I were dead. Hmmm…

So right now, in all logical objectivity, my pros and cons list for starting up smoking again looks like this:-

CONS:-

• Proven to be bad for long-term health, causes lung cancer, emphysema, brain clots, dead babies, Armageddon, and pretty much everything else you can think of.
• Costs a fair chunk of money these days.
• Kinda smells bad on your fingers and breath.

PROS:-

• Is likely to reduce the debilitating symptoms of my Tourette’s Syndrome, and by default, reduce many of my other problems caused by that:-

• Chronic constant muscular pain
• Dependency on narcotic painkillers
• Severe abdominal pain and inability to form solid stools
• Snapping my own bones at random and failing to heal them correctly for the rest of my life
• Vocal tics continually annoying all around me, inhibiting my social abilities, and interfering with everything from a simple phone conversation, to my ability to enjoy a movie
• Chronic insomnia due to constant tics, exacerbating everything else

At this point, the reasons TO smoke are vastly outweighing the reasons NOT to, for me, both in quality and quantity. Hell, the first two items on the pros list alone are worth at least twice as many of the cons.

So, there’s my situation. The more I think about it, the more logical it seems.

Now, I know there’s a powerful anti-smoking sentiment in society today, and almost everybody, particularly younger people, will shout with near-religious fervor, "But smoking is BAD for you! And it’s GROSS and it will KILL YOU!!". Frankly, I don’t care, so spare me your lectures. I refuse to believe that smoking is any more or less healthy or dangerous than marijuana, alcohol, prolonged use of painkillers, driving a car, or working eight hours a day in a high stress career for forty years. I don’t believe in healthy living, and I don’t believe in forfeiting everything you might enjoy in life just to milk another decade out of your waning years. If I live to sixty or seventy I’ll be happy. Living to be a hundred at the expense of cigarettes, alcohol, salt, fats, red meat, and everything else that’s enjoyable, is a bullshit way to live, in my humble opinion. So that’s not even slightly a factor in my decision, so please, spare me your lectures!

If I do start up again, I’d like to at least wait until Thanksgiving – last the year out, so I can say I did. I’ve always gained satisfaction from trivial things like that, I think it’s my OCD talking. Then I might smoke for another year, and really carefully analyze the differences in my life and health as a result. If they’re no better by next year’s Thanksgiving, then I’ll quit again and chalk it up to getting old and being medically fucked up, with increasing bodily degradation leading to a painful early death. If it seems to help though, in any major way, then I’ll keep smoking until I die – even if that’s several decades earlier due to a smoking-related fatality.

I’d rather have cancer for a year and then die, than spend the next seventy years undergoing this never ending torture.