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The Best Cigarette by Billy Collins (1)
There are many that I miss
having sent my last one out a car window
sparking along the road one night, years ago.
4 years ago today I quit smoking. That’s over 29,000 cigarettes I have not smoked, saving around $6k and gaining about 15lbs. (12 of which I’ve lost in the past 2 months)
If I had known when I lit my first cigarette how hard it would be for me to quit 8 years later I hope I wouldn’t have lit it. The first cigarette was easy to not smoke. Heck. The first pack wasn’t easy to smoke. I only smoked if I had been drinking. After enough of those it became easier to smoke even when I hadn’t had a drink.
I quit several times using the patch and I have to tell you… that was my favorite way to quit but not the most effective way. As I said… I quit several times that way. The patches dose of nicotine gave me almost hallucinatory quality dreams. I don’t take hallucinogens so I’m only guessing but the dreams that were a side effect of the patch were interesting and fun. Surprisingly if I could go back to smoking I wouldn’t, but if I could go back to a patch that would give me the dreams I would in a minute. Sadly, I’m so unused to nicotine at this point that I am sure I would feel nicotine poisoned and sick with even the lowest dosage. So, I don’t use the patch and I don’t smoke… and haven’t for four years today.
I see kids start smoking today and know that nothing anybody says could have talked me out of smoking and I know that nothing I will say will stop them from smoking, but I say it anyway. I won’t buy their smokes and I don’t let them smoke in my car (I’m 40, when I say kids smoking that age goes way higher than it did when I was a kid of 20 so don’t think I’m talking about 10 year olds!).
It’s been a strange four years. I moved from Des Moines, IA to Memphis, TN and then from there to Ft. Dodge, IA. I got a promotion, then a demotion, and changed office locations 4 times. My Dad had brain surgery to remove a tumor, and the company I worked for changed ownership 4 times. In all that time and with all that stress I didn’t smoke.
So, if you’re out there now thinking about quitting smoking. Do it. Don’t wait for things to get better or for their to be less stress. Life’s not like that. Just quit now. This might not be the quit that sticks, but it certainly won’t be if you don’t try it. It’s OK to quit more than once as long as you keep quitting. There will come a point when you’re tired of it and when the switch inside your head is thrown and at that point you’ll be quit and later you’ll be able to sit and have a morning cup of coffee without reaching for the pack. You’ll hear the crinkle of cellophane without thinking it’s a new pack. You’ll be able to get in your car and start it without cracking the window to let the smoke out. You CAN quit, all you have to do is start quitting.
(1) Billy Collins’ poem, “The Best Cigarette.” Read the rest of his poem here or you can listen to it here.
The The Best Cigarette is the unlit cigarette. by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
So very, very impressive. Congratulations!
Give Stilton Cheese a try. I’ve been wanting to give it a try myself, but I haven’t got the money together to buy some yet. But a UK study confirmed that it gave 85% of participants wild dreams.
I quit smoking about six months after you, about a week and a half after you came out here actually. I still have dreams where I smoke, and they’re happy dreams.
The tongue piercing helps alot, it gives me something to play with in my mouth when I’m bored.
I never thought the patches and the gum was a good solution though. Taking more nicotine doesn’t seem productive towards getting rid of an addiction. The only other drug you would do that with would be drugs that have a physically addictive quality that makes it almost mandatory for a person to be taken off in steps rather than all at once. Despite some propoganda claims, that isn’t the case with nicotine, and kicking heroine or meth is 100 times worse.
I hit my one year aniv on the 12th. I still think about smoking once in a while, specially sine I live with smokers…but so far the temptation hasn’t been strong enough.
On the other hand, I’ve been thinking about cigars again…that *is* tempting…more than cigs right now.
Anyway…I hope I’ll get to 4 years, meanwhile, congrats!
2 months, 3 weeks, 5 days, 6 hours, 32 minutes
4363 cigarettes not smoked, saving dollars 1090.75
Life saved: 2 weeks, 2 days, 15 hours, 56 minutes.
I would say I am doing good for the first time ever to quit. I used the patch and really it helped me. (dreams
)
Being in the hospital for 6 days helped also !!! lol
@Chris – how goes your quit with the evil weed?
@Rob – Stilton cheese eh? that’s not code for hashgouda is it? I’ll have to see if I can dig some up. Thanks for the heads up and congrats on your quit!
@Dave – Yeah, you totally cheated with the surgery thing to scare the smoke out of you
.
@Vox – Congrats on the year! I never got the cigar bug. I’ve thought I should catch it but it just never did anything for me.
The one thing I forgot to mention…I quit coldturkey…just decided to stop smoking and that was that…no patches or anything like it
According to my Quitter iphone app, I have saved about 1.1k USDlls (a bit over 15k pesos) so…not bad at all
The last time I quit, the one that stuck I literally threw the last cigarette out the window half way through it on I80 East in Des Moines while driving for work one day. I was, at that moment sick of being addicted to them and I still had half a pack left. I threw it out, exhaled the smoke out the window and I never lit another one. I still wanted one sometimes, but at that moment something in me snapped, some internal switch flipped and I went from smoker to non-smoker in the time it took the cigarette to hit the ground.
I was coming out from my RHCE exam, after picking up my new car that morning…I smoked the last cig in the pack, looked at the brand new pack and…gave it to one of my coworkers and decided not to smoke anymore.
I don’t know if this is the one that sticks…as I said, I may *decide* to smoke a cigar now and then…the one reason I haven’t so far is that I’m not sure if it’ll make me want a ciggie