i was smoking cigarettes with my girlfriend in the chicago suburbs last wednesday. she's a single mom, a beautiful lady in so many ways i have a hard time enumerating them. and sometimes when i tell her about one of those ways, i get the feeling that i'm telling her the wrong one or that she'd prefer it if i would just be a man or something and shutup or be entertaining. i write about her a lot on this site. i can't help but feel that she can't stand the fact that i smoke, even though she does too. can't blame her if that's the case: smokers mouths taste like shit; although her smoking has never bugged me.

at the end of a long work day for us both, and after putting her daughter to bed, we sat down on the couch to watch a flick on the tube. the density of the smoke was a bit stifling but i just kept wanting more cigarettes. and the more i smoked the more she smoked. i don't know if it's a nervous thing or what. she wasn't exactly feeling amorous, and my brain was tired, so i couldn't think of much else to do. smoking, even if you are loafing, feels like an endeavor -- like changing the oil in your car, drinking or jerking off -- when i'm actually doing it, so maybe that was it. channeling my sexual energy into incendiary poisoning of my body. it just clicked at one point, a sense of disgust i guess, that feeling: i'm ready to quit. i picked up some patches the next morning and put one on. i got the fourteen milligram patches, stage 2, because i thought that and my will would suffice, even though i usually smoke way more than ten cigarettes a day. it didn't work. i s!
moked that night. i decided i'd hold off until the weekend was over and i was back in LA.

so monday i put on another one. it worked fine until i went out with my buddy to watch the NCAA championship. even though you can't smoke indoors in bars in california, i managed to buzz through half-a-pack before heading to bed. damned beer gardens. i came up with a new plan: move to the higher dose patch. but i awoke on tuesday with a half-pack of cigarettes in the apartment. so i smoked them all day yesterday, and bought the higher dose patches on my lunch break (also dropping off some film from my trip to chicago and picking up a birthday card for my brother). finished the smokes by nine last night and fell asleep shortly afterward. i woke up this morning, exercised my bum shoulders (every time i quit smoking i work out more), showeredshaved, then donned my hard core patch. i'll use the fourteens after a few weeks of these. now i have no temptation to smoke, but i'm bouncing off the walls a little (the higher dose makes me goofy the first couple days). i'm loo!
king forward to going for a swim tonight and working out again tomorrow morning.

and that's it. no irony or funnies. no catharsis nor insight. glad i could share this with y'all.