Running Low on Smokes

Someone who I consider a good friend has just recently been diagnosed with lung cancer. I'm not bringing this up to get you down. I mean I'm not into the whole bit where we take death and make it morbid. It's a natural part of life so don't feel bad about this, okay? In fact, my friend's his first statement to his friends after he learned was not for himself. It was for the health and safety of those he cares about, and that's something to commend and exhault.

Oops. Sorry. I used big words. What I meant to say is: That's so cool!

My friend has smoked most of his life but now he's asking those of us who are his friend who also smoke to stop now, because he doesn't want us to share his fate.

I feel a need to be insensitively honest here. As I type these words I have a lit cigarette smoldering in the ashtray.

Now when I started smoking, I was not under the illusion that what happens to other people couldn't happen to me. In the last couple years it has become more and more fashionable to treat smokers like second class citizens and make smoking less and less socially acceptable. When I started smoking over a decade ago, it was generally known even then that smoking could cause cancer, emphysema, and it could complicate pregnancy (particularly if the mother wanted to smoke while in the delivery room).

It wasn't that I thought I could live forever. I figured smoking would increase my chances for an early death, but when you're eighteen, dying before you're fifty doesn't sound like all that bad of an idea.

Now that it's not only generally asssumed that cigarettes could kill you, but blatantly and daily pounded into everyone's heads, I've found myself continuing to smoke if nothing more than in defiance of those who would take away my rights. I mean if I want to slowly hammer nails into my own coffin, that's my God given right!

Still, I'm thirty-one now. And with each passing day I'm getting closer and closer to the age of fifty. And the closer I get to fifty, the less the idea of dying at fifty sounds appealing. Maybe fifty-five. Maybe ninety-nine. Let's face it. I want to live longer than George Burns, and he smoked cigars.

I like the idea of dying very quickly. Like by getting run over by a truck. The idea of a slow and debilitating illness doesn't sound appealing at all.

And more importantly, and in all honesty and sincerity, this friend of mine who is now facing perhaps the most important challenge of his life with a determination and a faith in the universe that inspires me, is a man whose opinion I strongly admire.

Before I learned of his plight, I had purchased two packs of cigarettes. That was a couple days ago. I usually smoke a pack a day. Not anymore.

These two packs are the last two packs. I used to carry a pack in my shirt pocket. Now I have them locked in the trunk of my car. Where smoking used to be a reflex reaction, it's now a chosen conscious decision. And every time I go to smoke it feels inadvertently like slapping a good friend of mine in the face.

Somehow, this has taken a lot of the fun out of smoking. I've weighed the pros and cons over the years, and the cons have finally won out. I promised myself I'd quit smoking when I no longer enjoyed it, and I guess my time is up.

Perfect timing too, because I'm beginning to develop this persistent frog in my throat that won't go away. Just my luck. I'll quit smoking just in time to have throat cancer.

My insomnia is back. Work has recently become more annoying than usual. I just had to spend over seven hundred dollars of my savings in order to fix my car. I was diagnosed by a shrink as a classic depressive who's NOT as funny as he thinks he is. I'm still suffering through a divorce that won't seem to end, and I haven't had sex in almost three months. And on top of all this, I've decided to quit smoking.

Wish me luck.