Still smoking. I'll quit (again) one way or another, but not while working on a bike. Too fumble fingered (even with NRT - it's the quitting the automatic reaching for the fags, all the associations, that's hard. Quitting nicotine's a cinch). Anyway the point is the current pack's got a warning about emphysema on it and a picture of, what I suppose is a clogged up lung. Only, from a couple of foot away, and at an angle, it looks like a drawing of Robert Plant.
Tell me about it - giving up smoking that is & not visions of Robert Plant similar to those images of Jesus seen in marmite on toast or crisps or three cheese pizzas. Gave up 5/6 years ago &, as you say, it's the habit pangs that are the worst. Although having said that I do still occasionally hanker after a cold beer with a deep lungful draw on a rollie.
Yeah, I quit in about '03. Lasted 7 1/2 years. I'm not entirely sure it didn't contribute to my crashing the Triumph in late '05. There was still a constant, indefinable, distracting feeling of something being missing (which I appear to have defined anyway!) Eventually it seemed to have gone - but on the other hand I was no longer riding. I won't say riding's stressful but the constant concentration amounts to much the same. And when life did get stressful I started again. Like they say, you're always an addict. I made the mistake of thinking I could quit again in a couple of months time - after all it'd been easy before. I quit in three days before. I could have bought a new bike with what I've spent on fags since 2011. Or, rather, what I've given the government.
I shall look out for the tousle-haired god of rock next time I get that warning on my 30g of Drum Blue/horrid green.
I gave up about 10 years ago and then started again recently because of stresses and strains I’ve already talked about on here. The way I look at it now is I’m going to do everything I enjoy, drink,smoke and eat what I like. I have no desire to live a long boring life especially with the way this country is now.
I'll issue a disclaimer though. I couldn't swear you don't need an imagination as fucked as your eyesight to see it.
I've been quit long enough to consider myself a non-smoker (again). That is, to feel like I've escaped a prison. I still get the curious, false impression, at particular moments, that they won't be rounded off without a cigarette; but they've lost their power now. I've been through it before, of course and, as I recall, like any other thing not thought of in a long time, it fades from conscious memory. But an addict is always an addict because the memory doesn't go completely. That's the temptation and the peril: that one day that persistent notion that to round off this or that experience requires whatever drug, is given in to. I'm coming to believe the idea that our internal monologue is a consequence of language - because it happens in our localised language: that I'm thinking in English - yet it's something we pick up, rather than we're born with. And I've previously thought of smoking as becoming the punctuation of daily life. Combine that with written language being effectively the consciousness we identify as 'me', and that's how deeply implicated smoking is. It comes to represent the punctuation of conscious life. As probably, would any fast acting, short duration drug consumed every half hour or so throughout every waking day, for years on end. Though there aren't any, really: there aren't too many could drink twenty cups of tea or coffee a day for decades.
