The Smoking Diaries: DAY 40 - COMING TO TERMS WITH LOSING YOUR FAVORITE MENTHOL FLAVORED FRIEND

 Over Christmas break I found myself back at home with my parents for a week.  In other words, I had to go without smoking cigarettes for SEVEN WHOLE DAYS.  Seven.   A literal shit-ton.  Technically, I could have excused myself at any time during those seven days to go outside and have a smoke, but I knew how my parents felt about it and I myself would have felt like too much of an asshole to even try it.

I smoked for eight years, starting when I was just 16.  How much I smoked or how many cigarettes I went through always seemed to be changing from year to year.  When I started smoking, I went through one pack a week.  Then it was two or three.  Then I started making my own cigarettes because it was just too damn expensive paying $15 a week.

The “making my own cigarettes trend” lasted about a year since I only rolled them because I had the time to roll them.  I was a senior in college and not working.  This was due to the fact that I worked my ass off all summer on a sausage production line - ten to twelve hour days were a norm.  So, I would spend an hour at night or even in my car between classes rolling my own cigarettes. 

If you haven’t ever rolled your own cigarettes then you have no possible clue how much time and patience it can take to accomplish such a small ordeal.  Sure, after a month or two I was rolling one cig per minute, but it’s still a complicated and meticulous pain in the ass.  Also, when you first start rolling, it literally seems like an eternity to just roll ten or twenty cigs.  An eternity.  I cannot express that sentiment enough.  Rolling your first twenty cigs is the equivalent of watching Rush Limbaugh run a marathon:  after appearing to only move a few feet towards your goal in the first ten minutes or so, your determination begins to be overwhelmed by a hopeless sense of failure.  I mean, shit, why should you spend all this time and effort running when you could just get in your $450,725 car and drive to the destination?

Yet I had the time and figured I might as well save the money.  Unfortunately, I was saving so much money that I was able to smoke almost triple what I normally consumed on any given day.  I would find myself rolling 30-40 cigs per day and sometimes needing to roll even more.  Yes, I was saving money but also smoking excessively at the same time.  Whenever everyone I knew was complaining about how badly I smelled (except for my best friend who was also rolling his own), I began to consider a change of pace.

I stopped rolling my own and kept myself to a pack - to a pack and a half - a week.  I was able to keep at this steady ratio for nearly two years.  Also during those two years, I had to deal with my girlfriend on my ass every single time I lit up.  It sucked.  I’d always have to go behind her back (feeling like an asshole the entire time) or just deal with disappointing her over and over again.

My habit had now been turned into an epic conundrum not seen since the “Is Jesus Really Our Savior?” debacle of the early 0’s.  Unlike Jesus, however, I was getting off that cross.  Hard.

…and I’m going to cut it short here.  I’ve run out of time – unfortunately - but I can say it’s been 40 days since a purchase of cigs (as I revealed in a previous blog, I did drunkenly smoke one this weekend) but I’ll be damned if the cravings aren’t still there, uh, obviously.  Sucks.