MikeyOpp.com

I haven’t been sick in months, yet for two months now, I’ve had a sore throat. And every morning when I wake up I have to blow my nose. This morning I went for a light jog through a nearby park and within five minutes of running my lungs began to hurt and loads of thick, suffocating stringy spit began to launch into my mouth, from an abyss somewhere inside of me that I cannot pinpoint, but I can always feel.

After finishing my jog home, my lungs continued to burn and I have been clearing my throat like an old man for the last hour and a half. My throat hurts when I swallow a lot of the time. This pain in my throat does not occur often enough to warrant calling it a sore throat, but the pain is nevertheless there, and I know what’s causing it.

After a vigorous exercise routine, followed by a large glass of water and a shower, I neglected to feed my body with food, because, well, “priorities call” and it was time for that blessed first cigarette of the day.

I don’t care anymore as to whether or not I’m going to die young, which is a ruse I have often used in my past in order to justify my habit of smoking cigarettes. I no longer care about this because I’m actually beginning to feel the unhealthy side effects of smoking right now, in my youth. And so I have recently come to terms with the fact that the powerful, ominous threat of nicotine addiction is no longer a threat; it is my reality.

I’ve never been more stupid (I wanted to write stupider, but worried that someone would fail to catch the joke) in my whole life, about anything, than I have been about smoking cigarettes. I’m totally serious. Even at the height of drunkenness, I’ve never made a more stupid decision than the decision I make ten to twenty times every day, which is to light up, puff away, and ruin my good health.

I don’t care what non-smokers think about smokers. This is not some kow-tow to the non-smokers wherein I beg for your forgiveness and ask you to take me back on your team. No matter how long I live, smoker or non-smoker, I will always have a soft spot in my heart for smokers because I understand the mentality that accompanies smoking.

Smoking cigarettes is a great way to say “I don’t care how beautiful my life can be, I care about how great life is RIGHT NOW.” Personally, one of my biggest problems in life is the fact that I have trouble existing in the moment. I’m obsessed with my future, but every time I reach that darn carrot on a rope, I don’t even remember the joyous process of getting there.

Smoking is one of the only things I’ve ever discovered in life that stops me from the clock watching, future thinking, forward counting, and constantly anticipating hysteria that is my life. For a few, precious moments, several times a day, when I am smoking, I don’t think about anything else. And this is good for me.

What isn’t good for me is the fact that I want to be able to walk up several flights of stairs in my forties and fifties, and smoking could give me emphysema, which in turn could render me dependant on an oxygen tank for the remainder of my days. I guess what I’m trying to say here is that the thought of cigarettes killing me is far less scary than the thought of cigarettes severely disabling me from leading a normal, healthy lifestyle.

Look, I don’t care about how cigarettes make me smell, and if some dream girl out there wouldn’t date me because I’m a smoker, than she doesn’t have enough compassion to be my dream girl, so I’m not quitting to become “more attractive.” I’m also not a big fan of social stigmas, and the anti-smoking establishment of this country actually angers me enough to make me want to continue smoking in order to spite them, in spite of what it’s doing to me.

But I’m slightly (read: barely, just barely) mature enough to separate my vehement hatred for bandwagon peer pressure from the collectively negative toll that smoking is taking on my personal health in order to be mature about this. I think.

I say “I think,” because as many of you know, I have “successfully” quit smoking for more than three months at least five times in the last nine years that I have been a smoker. I’ve quit for over a month about two other times. As a matter of fact, I’ve never once been a smoker for an entire year; I always quit for some period of the year, each year, because deep down, all my life, I’ve been very afraid of the consequences of smoking.

But the addiction one gets to cigarettes is only believable and relatable to someone who has, well, actually been addicted to cigarettes. So you either get it, or you don’t, and there’s no use in wasting your time or my time in trying to articulate how tricky cigarette addiction is.

The only think I can think to say about nicotine addiction is that it operates by making you think that you are actually choosing to smoke, when in all reality, it’s your reward center in your brain that is constantly pumping you with lame excuses that you are willing to buy in order to continue to be in denial about your addiction.

The only thing more frightening to me than being a smoker who is in denial about their addiction is becoming the type of smoker who has acknowledged their addiction and given up on fighting it; for these men and women are resigned to die from smoking, come hell or high water. These same people tend to be the people who buy cartons of regular filtered cigarettes and smoke indoors (as opposed to those who purchase individual packs of light or ultra-light cigarettes and only smoke outdoors).

My personality is such that I can never convince myself to join the brigade of “die-hard” smokers in the category that I just described, and yet, as of only very recently, I have been unable to continue to remain “a smoker in denial,” because I can no longer believe that I am “in control” of my smoking, in a long-term sense. And what this means for me is that, since I do not believe that there is a possible third category that lies between denial and acceptance, I have no choice left but to quit smoking, right now.

And I don’t care who does and does not believe in me, because what really matters to me is that I’m trying. And trying to quit smoking is one of the most ironic events in a person’s life; because you usually quit things that are hard to do, not the other way around. So I look forward to the awkward challenge that is trying to quit (again).

I was about to write a really entertaining and funny conclusion to this column, but I forgot what I was going to write because I just had another coughing fit. How apt.

I suppose that the moral of this story is that we all create burdens and struggles in our lifetime, and quitting smoking cigarettes is my personal burden to carry. I do not feel that this burden is all that great; it’s just a personal struggle that I have to face, accept, and then do something about. What I cannot accept, however, is just how stupid I feel for ignoring so many adults who tried to convince me, when I was young, curious, and convinced of my own invincibility that opting to smoke cigarettes would be a horrible mistake. They were absolutely correct. Smoking has proven to me that there is a lot of truth to the adage “you live and learn.” I just hope that I am able to follow through on my decision to actually live.