There’s a certain flavour to giving up something that’s been with you for so long. It’s acrid but sweet. It lingers like a foul memory. Like young heartache, felt in a weathered and worn adult body. There’s a mountain of ash staring back at me from the ashtray. A sliver of blinding morning light cuts into the edge of the chair, inching closer to my knuckles laid on the arm. I’m in the dark, surrounded by trash. It’s nearly the end of winter. A winter that’s felt longer, colder and sharper than previous ones – like a blade against a teenage wrist. The weather app on my phone tells me there’s a faint promise of spring but it feels like a lie. It always feels like a blatant lie. I want to believe there’s something better over the horizon. That, maybe someday, I can learn what it’s like to be a normal person, if such a thing even exists. But it feels useless to try, and as difficult as, quitting smoking at the end of the world.
Here’s my mourning routine – Wake up, dust my dreams off the pillow, move slowly to the bathroom, check the black hole in my palm for a sliver of light, stare at myself emerging from a hollow husk and recognize that another day is ahead. I’ll brush my yellowed teeth then stain them further by moving to the garage and precisely smoking three cigarettes in the dark, waiting on the sunlight to crawl up my arm, staring straight ahead and pensively working up the courage to start the day. It’s the same routine. Every day. But today, it’s slightly different. There’s only one cigarette left in the pack. I look at it and debate whether to light it now or save it for later. The difference between instant gratification and delayed satisfaction could be mere minutes, could be hours.
Just like when I quit drinking at the beginning of pandemic, I thought the world was ending, and more acutely, my world. Every bit of my identity had been bottled inside that green Jameson glass. I was dependent not only on the poison but the momentary comfort that came with it, despite all the obvious signs that what I was doing was killing myself. And now, with smoking, I’m facing yet another self-imposed crisis. Another question of whether I should continue to slowly deprive my lungs of healthy functionality or let the sweetly bitter taste of charred, cancerous tobacco live in my throat like a bridge troll demanding more and more from me with every pass.
The plan to quit smoking is just as important as the act itself. I have a horde of tools. Nicotine patches, lozenges, gum and even toothpicks doused in nicotine to help me wean off. There’s something funny that happens when you start to think about it. I try to justify a compromise. I tell myself I’ll quit smoking but I won’t quit nicotine. I’ll rid my lungs of black tar but will continue to cut my gums with nicotine laced toothpicks so I can still have the comfort addiction but one that doesn’t seem as bad as a pack-and-a-half-a-day. I’ll start calling it a habit instead of an addiction. There’s always a bargain to be made with oneself when you’re facing a blunt change. It’s like dieting. I will skip that second cookie but I’ll be damned if I give up sugar all together.
All of these changes lead me to something deeper – that I, as a person, and we, as a species, have an insatiable desire for self-destruction. Annihilation, even in small doses, can satisfy a darker hunger within us. One that is directly linked to our mortality. Our finite existence here on this lonely rock in space. I wonder if we’re a species that craves the edge. By the edge, I mean, living with an anxious acknowledgement that we will die and our need for a constant release for it. Are our self-destructive tendencies a mere reflection of our need for, not an escape, but a full-throated purge of that which we cannot control? Of our built up energy desperate to be released?
Maybe it’s a rebellion against the abundance of life I feel. That abundance being that I have so much more life than I really do have. I don’t feel very abundant. I feel stuck. Eternally present. This idea that the future is somewhere out there, the future being something out of reach, makes the present feel even more boundless and endless. And I think the endlessness makes me want to choke on every breath. Maybe I’ve just been duped for far too long, being told that I have so much life to offer that I’ve forgotten it will end. This abundance feels like a curse, in some ways. This abundance feels more like excess and what do we do when we’re a cup spilling over? Where does that excess go?
I recently came across Georges Bataille’s theory of the accursed share. I’m paraphrasing and don’t fully understand the whole concept. I could even be misreading it. But, my simple take-away is he believed we, humans, have a portion of energy and wealth that cannot be used usefully, in the grander scale of a general economy. An excess that must be expended in unproductive ways. There’s more at play here that I don’t fully understand yet but this whole idea of excess made me think about smoking, drinking, and fucking. It made me think about how I feel when I attend a concert. There’s no profit to be made on my end. It’s a call to expend this excess, pent up, energy. A release for release sake. Me, among ten thousand people, all in one arena, blowing out their abundance. And maybe that’s why I feel so empty when I leave such concerts. Hell, even when I leave small gatherings. There’s a tremendous amount of energy I expend when I have to talk with a group of people for more than fifteen minutes. Maybe that’s why people gather on Sunday for Church. The weeks built up excess must be spent unproductively, praying to a God that isn’t listening. It’s a release. Maybe that’s why we’re in times like these. Maybe the world demands a horrifying sacrifice because we’ve suppressed too much energy and haven’t had anywhere to let it out in unproductive ways. Maybe we could find another way. A. kinder way. A more beneficial way that doesn’t require maiming and killing and destroying without cause, with cruelty, with an alleged purpose. Maybe that’s the worst part of us. And maybe, the fact that we don’t acknowledge that part of ourselves is even worse.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Does it really matter? Maybe this essay is just another excuse to expend my energy unproductively. It’s an excuse to talk about smoking and why I can’t seem to quit something so toxic for me, but maybe smoking is just an excuse to release too much built up energy. It’s a pointless act. It offers nothing other than an exhale of every anxiety bubbling in my chest. Maybe living in a world that demands we be productive every moment of our lives means we are craving more and more forms of leisure, of unproductiveness, of doing things for absolutely no fucking reason other than to just let it all out and let it burn.
That damn cigarette is taunting me now. It’s white paper and brown filter. It calls to a youthful ignorance. I was twelve-years-old when I smoked my first cigarette. I stole one from my parents and escaped into suburbia with a few friends whom I’d share it with. We felt invincible. The spring air had curled into our nostrils like the scent of a woman. We were out of breath from running away from our problems, both internal and external. The world felt like a behemoth. That first cigarette started a long dance with death that, come later, I would fully embrace. And the thing about smoking is that it’s easily the dumbest thing anyone could ever do and yet, it’s so undeniably romantic. Even though, I know it’s all marketing. It’s illusion. It’s that dance with death, knowing that I’m harming my future self, a slow suicide, that makes it so undeniable, I think. It speaks to some foolish need to remind myself that I’ll die one day. That this body will continue to float through a series of disappointments and joys, through many more heartbreaks and just as many accomplishments. That I’m tired of being told to be productive. That I’m tired of a general need to always be doing something in the pursuit of something over a horizon that keeps on pulling away.
Maybe that’s why quitting, in times like these, feels so much more difficult. The world is on fire. So, I might as well light up. I feel too much and need to express it. Whether through some form of self-destruction or through art. I worry that I don’t waste enough time, waste enough of my self. The winter isn’t over yet. The spring teases another false promise as the clouds part and a sliver of sunshine curls over my knuckles as I take that last cigarette from its pack, grab my worn-out zippo and…