My students are taking exams today, so I don't teach any classes, so I have time to write a little more than usual.

As reported previously, today begins a new phase in this strange new life of tobaccolessness; that of the 7mg nicotine patch. You know, I just want to pause here to make an observation. At the stores where I got my supply of patches, they had a lot less shelf space devoted to stage 3 products than they did for stage 1 and 2 products. Why do you think that is Beavis? Because not that many people make it to stage 3, that’s why Butthead.

Ok. I apologize for my cockiness. It’s just that today is a big deal is all. On with our story…

This morning I opened my patch packet and was happy to find it was half the size of the 14mg version, which makes sense I guess. Trying to find a hairless bit of skin that I hadn’t patched in the past few days was getting more and more difficult. I was starting to feel like a junkie in search of a fresh vein.

About an hour ago I got the jitters and an attack of dizziness. Right now I feel a little odd, but no odder than usual. It’s still early though. It doesn’t make me crave a cigarette however. If I didn’t know what was going on, I would just think I felt a little weird. I hope this will pass in a day or two and I’ll start feeling more normal again, normal for me anyway. I’m not going to be a hero though, I have some nicotine gum. Even though they recommend against it, if I get truly desperate I will supplement the patch with one or two pieces, but still make sure my total intake is less than 14mg.

* * *

To prepare for this day, I knew it would be necessary to finally do something about the nineteen packs of cigarettes still in my apartment. At this point, giving them to another smoker, supporting someone else’s habit, just seemed wrong. The smokes cost about thirty dollars, but I couldn’t think of it that way. If you found thirty dollars worth of spoiled meat in your fridge you wouldn’t keep it around and think about possibly eating it because you hated to waste the money, would you? You’d throw it out, because the wasted money is not as important as the risk to your health if you ate the poisoned meat. So it had to be with the nineteen packs of cigarettes.

Merely chucking them into the trash wouldn’t do. The packs needed to be spoiled in some way; I guess as a symbolic gesture to show that I was really and truly done with them. An act of violence was called for. Tobaccocide. I grabbed a pair of scissors and the cigarette cartons and dumped the packs out onto my bed, then with a waste basket at my feet commenced to cutting the packs in half. It proved more difficult than I had imagined, and my hand quickly became tired. Laying the scissors aside, I went to the kitchen to get a cutting board and a serrated knife. Perfect. I knelt down on the floor and carved the rest of the cigarette packs as if I were preparing tabac rôti for dinner. Soon I had just one pack left. Here I stopped. Instead of sawing it in half, I felt for the cellophane tab and pulled open the wrapper. I listened to it crinkle in my hand. I flipped open the box and gave the foil a tug. With my thumb and forefinger I pinched out a cigarette like I’ve done thousands and thousands of times before. I brought it close to my nose. It smelled sweet. Without giving myself too much of a chance to think about having “just one more,” I broke it in half and dumped it into the trash, along with the rest of that last pack. As a final act of desecration, I dumped a full glass of water over them.

No murder is complete until after the body has been gotten rid of. I tied up the trash bag, gathered up the carton boxes along with the rest of the recycling, and went out to the elevator. Once in the basement, I gave the trash bag a final fling onto the heap of other trash bags, and thus ended the story of the nineteen packs of cigarettes.

Labels: Nicotine patches, quitting smoking