Not Feeling It Lately

Here’s a shocker: quitting smoking is hard. Not so much because you must stop smoking. More because it sets off a chain reaction of other changes. Many of these unexpected changes – you may not care for.

I’ve broken the habit. But I’m not well-adjusted to the new ones.

Smoking suppresses appetite. Which means, my appetite is now completely unsuppressed. My body doesn’t remember how to make full feelings. Thus, I am hungry all the time. All the time. All. The. Time. While I’m eating, I wish I were eating. How many cheese-steaks could you eat? Eight? Nine? I bet I could eat a dozen. I’d like to try. I’d like to eat a whole head of lettuce with my hands. Right now.

This insatiable hunger means that I can’t eat the stuff I used to eat, because I’d become enormously unhealthy – and enormous. Thus, I am snacking on carrots and celery and crackers. I chain-snack for five hours a day. This daily fruit and vegetable binge adds more unfamiliar material to my system. My miserable digestive system is in non-stop freak-out mode, begging for its life of leisure back.

And that’s not the only dietary alteration. Without cigarettes, sugar and caffeine are amplified. To beat back the life-long specter of insomnia, I’ve had to switch to Sprite, I’ve reduced the sugar in my iced tea, I drink less coffee in the morning. Caffeine aids in focus, sugar aids in motivation and postponing gratification (believe it or not, sugar-rich bloodstreams are more patient, more apt to work toward future goals, because they’re confident they aren’t starving). This adds up to me being fuzzy and unmotivated at work. Work is too much work when I’m on-the-ball. Now I’m slipping behind. Which means I have to stay later. Which means I’m more exhausted when I get home.

Yet, I can’t smoke at the end of a day, so I can’t get that chemical kick-start, that rush of stored-fats released by a cigarette, that magic second-wind. I needed it when my days were shorter, I really need it now that they’re longer. Thus, to replace it, I am walking a mile every evening. Of course, this just dumps more mischief into the chemical cocktail that is my skull.

And on, and on, and on. Everything is shifting. My body chemistry resembles a hurricane. It’s a witches brew that keeps sucking in more ingredients by its own occult powers.

Is it any surprise that my concentration is blown? Or that I feel depressed and trapped? Or that I’m ready to start a whole new life in the field of Occupational Therapy, or as storyboard artist in Connecticut?

My left-brain is struggling for control, teetering around on uneven stilts, trying to keep pictures straight on walls that are crumbling. It won’t give up control, it won’t take a break. It won’t let the right-brain take over. It’s afraid if it steps away, nothing will be left when it comes back. After all, it hasn’t gotten a reward in almost a month. I don’t know how to convince it that we’ll all be okay. I don’t know how to convince it to let right-brain have the wheel a little more often.

I only seem able to write when I’ve exhausted the left-brain completely, late, late at night. Even then it’s a struggle. And it only makes the next time harder, since I’m too tired to enjoy it, and writing becomes associated with exhausted suffering and struggle, instead of right-brain release and peace.

I guess we’ll just have to keep waiting.

It has been 4 weeks, 5 days, 0 hours, 47 minutes since I quit.

What I Did On My Break

I walked aroundthe apartment building hallway, listening to the rain. I ate some grapes and some Ritz crackers with peanut-butter. I watched about half of an episode of Quantum Leap. I haven’t thought of a fun or funny way for Maggie to “come down” with her initial serious cold symptoms, so I’m going to go to bed.

Break Time w/o Cigarettes {1}

It’s 2 o’clock in the morning: I can’t make myself coffee. It’s late, rainy, cold, and Van Nuys: I can’t take a walk. I’ve already had a shower: my skin would get itchy and dry. I’ve eaten more than I should: yet I can imagine enjoying some peanut-butter and Ritz. I could suck on honey-lemon cough drops, drink iced tea, and read John Hodgman from an old-fashion book, or perhaps read something else from my bourgeois Kindle. I could turn on the television, but that seems out-of-character. Are there still fascinating and strange things on television late at night?

Context [Quitting Smoking]

Or “What’s All This Then?” This blog exists to force myself to think through writing problems.

In the past, when faced with a rusted-shut imagination, I’d step outside and have a cigarette. The chemical concoction, combined with a moment of solitary peace and metered breathing, would force my brain to focus and lubricate. Connections would be made. Ideas would stir up from the unconscious. The imagination would start spinning again. Alas, the physical consequences of this method are well known. It amounts to breaking a blockade by plowing the getaway car straight through the line of squad cars. Often, it works. But repetition is not advised.

Rainy Day and Two Weeks Smoke Free

I bought a new lamp. It was too dark and dreary in this room, with the rain (outside) and the lack of progressive (inside). I couldn’t focus. My eyes felt heavy. So, I bought a lamp. It’s on now, and it has illuminated that we put the glass surfaces of my desk back wrong after filming NEGATIVE SPACE. The mug rings and sticky-dust smudges now live on the underside of the glass, preserved like butterfly specimens. I have been resisting the urge to spend twenty minutes cleaning the desk. Resisting that urge has taken up a couple hours.

This is a familiar theme. It has been 2 weeks, 2 days, 21 hours since I quit smoking. It feels longer, in both good and bad ways.

Finally, The Right Tone is Struck

This about captures how I feel about things right now:

Also nice to see that music used at the APPROPRIATE LEVEL OF TRAGEDY for a change.

Dark Knight = Guilty (or Empty?) American Soul

James Howard Kunstler, who predicted the sub-prime housing meltdown well before it happened, not to mention the predominate voice warning of our failure to confront the peak oil crisis, is one of the first smart people I’ve found ANYWHERE that feels similarly about The Dark Knight! However, he misses some of the (perhaps) unintentional right-wing war-cheering (or at least forgiving) in it… He is also clearly of the mind that society’s state simply shapes the stories it tells — but I think it’s a two way street — the stories we tell also shape the society we create. ..So maybe I’ll still have to write my article…

This is his site: http://www.kunstler.com/index.html

This is the article: http://www.kunstler.com/mags_diary24.html

This is a taste of it:

The most striking thing about the new Batman movie, now smashing the all-time box office records, is its emphasis on sado-masochism as the animating element in American culture these days. It must appeal to the many angry people in our land who want to hurt others, even while they themselves feel deserving of the grossest punishments. In other words, the picture reflects the extreme depravity of the current American sensibility. Seeing it all laid out there must be very validating to the emotionally confused audience, and hence pleasurable, in all its painfulness.

The rich symbolism in this spectacle represents the tenor of contemporary America as something a few notches worse than whatever the Nazis were heading toward around 1933. We like nothing better than to see people suffer and watch things get broken. The more slowly people are tortured (including the movie audience) the more exquisite the pleasure derived from the act. Civilization offers no consolation. In fact, its a mug’s game. Thus, civilization is composed only of torturers and their mug victims.

All My Movies

Someone Domesticate Raccoons RIGHT NOW

Voices of Uncertainty

A tribute to the heroes of big media, who soldier on in the face of almost unimaginable financial confusion.