Showing posts with label smoking cessation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label smoking cessation. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 07, 2008

Smoking Dreams

One would think that after 20 years of not smoking, the idea of nictoine and cigarettes would be long banished from my brain and one would be wrong.

Last night I had a smoking dream, and I was coughing all night, due to smoking, and how dumb I had been to start again and now I would have to stop which I would do after this pack was finished. Ah, it was about half full so there would be a few more good smokes.

Nicotine has a long memory. S.O. and I both have some weird intermittent hacking cough, which must be environmental or a low grade virus, something that doesn't make one sick, just cough.

The news this morning, coincidentally enough, was that for a woman who stops smoking it takes 5 years to return to some levels, 20 years to return to others, and 30 years before you can stop worrying about lung cancer. My doctor says 20 years, and I'll go with that.

The dreams still come after 20 years and maybe when (if) they stop, I'll be truly cured.

Off to Northern Nevada tomorrow for a shorter than planned trip. Life intervenes. No, I said that yesterday.

Read through the Festival Madness section about Burning Man and I think it's quite good and captures The Man. Probably 30,000 people are writing books about the man and they'll all be published before mine. Think positive thoughts. Yeah, sure.

Onward

Monday, August 13, 2007

Pleasingly Plump

Everyone hates the new first paragraph of Festival Madness, so guess I have to punt that. I always have big problems with the first part of the first chapter, then it falls into place. In the meantime, I write 10 or 15 beginnings. Makes me crazy.

Speaking of crazy, I have a friend who divides the world into fat and skinny and fat is bad and skinny is good. Never mind if you have a skinny butt or no breasts and your face is hanging down around your neck, skinny is still good. My friend is a New York City liberal but she likes Huckabee of Arkansas because he lost a lot of weight and kept it off. I don't know when she became so monomanical about a little extra weight. Old women look like hell when they lose weight. I am speaking not of 100's of pounds but maybe 30 or 40. Actually, have you noticed in all the weight loss ads, the people losing weight are always young. That's because the manufacturer wouldn't want to show the before and after of weight loss among the elderly. I mean they would look like , well, icky. This is something no one ever mentions, just like no one ever mentions the reason so many people are fat is that they stopped smoking.

Sometimes truth doesn't want to be told. Sometimes the truth is bad and isn't going to get any better. Sometimes there are only painful choices when a decision is to be made. Nobody ever talks about these things. Maybe writers that aren't being "inspirational." Chicken shit for the soul. I like that. It's probably not original. Don't think I'll Google it. You may have guessed I'm in a bad mood because everyone hates my new beginning. Maybe sometime I'll write a literary book and make it as weird and obscure as I please.

The cat tossed her cookies 3 times today. She has been having hair ball problems along with her tendency toward bulimia. The other cat is just fat and lazy. How did I get such strange cats? I know. I know. It's Monday and we all understand that FRIDAY is cat blog day.

What I really want to do is to attend a wonderful ENERGETIC celebration of Kerouac's On the Road 50th anniversary in September. Boston, Lowell, New York? Just gotta do it. The road is life. His energy was stupendous. Something I've noticed lately with 50's (not rock) music is that the beat is soooo slow. One wants to hurry the song up. I'm not talking about slow dance music, but sort of zippy songs. Except they don't sound zippy. Life has speeded up or didn't you notice?

Grapeshot