Don’t Tell A Soul

500 miles on my car: I was driving home from work, listening to Tricky covering Public Enemy. I was 31 years old, in Santa Monica California. I’ve been driving for 5 months.

Trying to imagine 5 years ago: I’m 26, and I live with 4 housemates in the Mission Hill part of Boston. They launch fireworks off of the porch. One girl eventually goes crazy on me, and we manage to not speak for about 3 months, despite living in such close quarters. She won’t even let me use her coffee maker. One of them is such an environmentalist that she won’t turn on the air conditioner in the room she shares with her boyfriend. He doesn’t push the issue until August. I rent a lot of videos that summer and watch them in my room that is painted the color of cooked carrots.

The ghost of 10 years past: 21, I must have been going home for the summer from Hampshire. I must have been staying up all night drinking instant iced tea and working on my web sites, from the confines of my mother’s apartment in western Mass. I think that was the summer I ended up going to San Francisco, and had many adventures.

  Lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to quitting smoking. It just gets very inconvenient sometimes, what with all the standing on the sidewalk and such. Of course I smoke in my own house- a lot- and most of the time, I thoroughly enjoy it. I’m smoking right now!!! But when I found myself spending an entire weekend finding the perfect airline ticket from LAX to BDL (no more than 3 1/2 hours per leg, and only changing planes in smoking-allowed airports), I knew I had to make a change.

   I bought a box of patches, and I started taking Zyban. Plus I’ve been reading this book I had been hearing about for years called “The Easy Way To Quit Smoking”. Anything easy is right up my alley.

   So, about two weeks into the Zyban, and close to my “quit date”, I was overcome with panic as I wondered: What do people do when they’re not smoking? I mean, all those moments when it’s so fitting to have a cigarette, what do normal people do with them? What do you do when you’re standing in your kitchen listening to Black Sabbath or Howard Stern in the morning before work? What do you do when 24 is on, and you’re at the edge of your seat to discover the big conspiracy upon which the fate of the world rests, and the real-time is going too fucking slow?

   Well damned if I know what normal people do, because my “quit day” only lasted six hours. And let me tell you, I think I need to seriously reevaluate my expectations of nicotine replacement therapy. But the Zyban is really helping my mood, and those patches were really great on the plane ride.