ONE

...... singular sensation.

I quit smoking one year ago today.

Can I have an Amen?

For those of you who may be new here, I smoked a pack-and-a-half a day for almost thirty years. And then I quit. Cold turkey.

One last run of the numbers:

Number of cigarettes I would have smoked between April 3, 2009 and today, had I not stopped smoking on that date: 10,950.


Amount of money saved: $1,952.75. (Just to clarify: I smoked cheap cigs I bought on line. Had I been buying name-brand smokes at the 7-11, that number would have easily been double. I used a figure of $3.56 a pack, since that's what my cigs cost at the time I quit.)


I've owned cars that cost less than that. A LOT less.


I suppose I really should get all introspective up in this space right now, but I'll try to avoid it. I've been posting Nomoblowsmo updates one a month for the last year, so I think I've pretty much said it all by now.


I hope to shit that this is not gonna come off as pretentious, but I do think that if you've got a kid, you may want to print out some of those once-a-months (posted on the third of each month) and show them to him/her. You may want to black out the swear words, but show him/her some of those posts.

Because when I was a kid? I bought all that smoking-is-DEATH stuff they taught us in school - hook, line and sinker. I remember making up anti-smoking POSTERS and parading through the smoke-filled family room, BEGGING my father to quit.

A few years later, I was bumming smokes from him.

When you're young, you think you're invincible. Lung cancer happens to OTHER people; YOU, on the other hand, are going to live forever. And besides, you can quit any time you want. It's easy!

Um, no. It's not. And maybe if you show your kids some of these posts, and they see the way I've struggled for A YEAR to quit, they'll get the picture. Just a little. Probably not, but maybe.

And I just want to mention, real quick-like, The Easy Way to Stop Smoking by Allan Carr. You can get a used copy for less than ten bucks, including shipping, on Amazon. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have been able to quit smoking without it; I don't know that. One of the attractions was that you could smoke while reading the book; honestly, I probably wouldn't have bought it if not for that. I just know that I bought the book, smoked as I read it, put out a half-finished cigarette as I read the last words, and haven't smoked since. I was actually kind of afraid to read it, if you want to know the truth; it was kind of like, holy shit- what if it actually works? What if I actually quit? What will my life be like if I don't smoke? What will I DO without cigarettes?

It works, and I quit. And there was nothing to be afraid of. What do I do without cigarettes? Everything I did before, just without a cig in my hand.


I made it.