I’m not really a heavy smoker any more. I only go through two lighters a day now.
– Bill Hicks
Actually and honestly, I think I’m handling the non-smoking thing okay. I get a little cranky here and there, but it’s a familiar feeling, that short fuse reaction that you have to really stand ready for in order that it doesn’t slide away from you. Quick moments of stress flare up and out, and things aren’t as meaningless and unimportant as they should be.
The real problem that I’m having, I suspect, is the caffeine plus smoking getting cut at the same time. For the past two days — maybe three — my thinking is getting totally strung around itself. Night time is better than day, but neither is particularly easy.
My working theory is that the massive amount of caffeine that I was taking was serving to keep my ADD in check — Ritalin is speed, and so hey, why not? Not to mention that I suspect there to be a tie between ADD / ADHD and depression and bipolar disorder (totally not a scientific theory, by the way); all the shit in your brain is tied together, like it or not. I find myself unable to keep a straight thought for more than five minutes at a time, at best. The post from earlier today? It didn’t come out of me quite so surreal. I mean, yeah, it did, but it seemed perfectly normal and fluid when I wrote it. I’m finding notes to myself all over my desk that I don’t remember writing — some of them are in Latin, which I haven’t touched in years. It’s a little disturbing — in the “found a $20 in the jacket I haven’t worn since last autumn” way, not the “i’m holding a bloody condom, an icepick, twenty Viagra, and a crack pipe that’s still warm, but I can’t recall the last forty minutes or my daughter’s name” way.
See, that last part? The funny part that’s reasonably indicative of my humor? That took me twenty minutes to put together into coherent English.
Thank god for Bree, screaming at me when I mention needing a cigarette. Tough love, kids, is where it’s at with addicts. We don’t fuck around, and neither should you. She emails me:
You can get through this, you know. You’re a tough cookie.
And I know this. It’s a point of pride for me, that I’ve made it through everything I have in my life and emerged relatively unscathed. But it’s nice to hear it from her. Because from my point of view, I’m not a tough cookie in her eyes. I’m a whiny little bitch — I swear, that’s all she ever hears. Richard’ll probably back her up on that (if you do, son, I know where you live…). But it helps. Every little thing does.
I do wonder how long this sort of thing is going to last. I can handle the cravings — hey, ADD is good for that, at least. And I haven’t really felt physically ill since yesterday morning (although any day now, I understand that I should begin coughing up large chunks of things that people thought we lost forever, like my left and right lungs and perhaps even archival footage from some Disney cutting room floor) — I’m certainly glad to be let down over that expectation. But this brain fuzz — it’s like my head has turned into some sort of echo chamber with laser light show and Expressionist painting generator, and while that might be entertaining to watch (and admittedly live in), it makes functioning rather difficult.
Almost difficult enough to break my rule about trapping myself under the weight of psyche meds. But not quite.
As long as I can get some writing done here and there, and pull it together long enough to do the occasional bit of intense work, I think it’ll be okay. But only for another week, tops. After that, I’m going back to smoking the meth. Because who among you can honestly say that you would rather have a handsome set of choppers and all your hair over the ability to string a few words together?
