Reasons I Will Quit Smoking (Partial List)...

     I’m not one for believing in the quantity of life (I’m sure some of that has to do with the fact that I am still young, but); I see no need to live to be a hundred if I lost interest in being alive about sixty-five years ago. What I do worry about is the quality of life. If I only live for another four years, I want those to be the best four years of my life. I don’t want to spend two of them curled up in a cancer ward fighting for my life wishing my lungs would stop coughing up blood long enough for me to beg for a second chance. I want to still be having wild, cover story worthy, sex well into my senior years. I want people to still be telling me how young I look when I am fifty; not people assuming I should have been dead years ago. I remember a comedy skit I heard once by Rodney Carington; in the skit he had a line that went something like this: “When I die I don’t want people looking at the casket and saying things like ‘he looks so natural’ , ‘he looks so good’; I want people to walk up to the casket and say ‘holy shit! He looks like he’s been dead for years!’” The reason I brought this up is because I am the opposite. I want to look as young and as vibrant as possible well after I’m dead. I want people to walk up to my casket and say “holy shit! Are you sure he’s dead?” Which leads directly into my next reason…

          Vanity.

     I want to have ridiculously reflective white teeth, and zero wrinkles when I am forty. What I don’t what to have is yellow teeth, rotten gums, and noticeable wrinkles around my eyes, mouth, and forehead. There is no other way to define this phobia other than vanity. It is all about looks. I should point out that this has nothing to do with being attractive (I’m not some sort of anorexic model want-to-be), I just don’t want to be repulsive before my time. Someday my tattoos will start to sag, and I will omit a body odor closer to compost than popery, but I would rather have that day be later than sooner.

          Lost Experiences

     I love to cook. And not just random mix-all- the-ingredients-together-on-the-back-of-a-hamburger-helper-box sort of way either. I am a foodie. Which is ironic because smoking dulls the taste buds to the point that I might be eating a three hundred dollar meal at Bobby Flay’s restaurant in Atlantic City or Las Vegas (I’ve ate at both), but I might as well be eating taco bell because my taste buds can’t pick up the subtle flavor profiles over the wretched cigarette taste that is always in my mouth. I would like to taste those subtle flavors; I would like to be the best cook I can be, not somebody who overdoes it with the spices in every dish I cook because I can’t taste anything else.

     This list is in no way comprehensive, if anything, it is just a quick glance at the surface, a glimmer of reason. I will probably update, and add to, the list as I have more time. I have read in one of the many, many stop smoking books I have leafed through over the years that writing down your list of reasons for wanting to quit is very important. It helps structure your thoughts, and focus the mind. I am supposed to print this list out and carry it around with me for those times that my will is weakening and I can’t remember why it is I wanted to quit in the first place and a cigarette is sounding just so damn tasty. I might print this list out; I might not, but I will keep adding to it. I will try to spend the time each day structuring my thoughts and focusing in concrete reason why I want to quit… Did I mention bringing sexy back?

The Beginning of the End...

I have decided I am going to quit smoking tomorrow. That kind of makes me think I should have chosen a better name for this blog, but it’s something I’m going to have to live; it’s too late to change it now.

                There are plenty of reasons I have decided to quit, and maybe tomorrow I will give a more thorough blog post with specific details leading up to this decision. I can say that the decision to quit was easy; the only problem is the decision is the easy part. Not smoking on day two, or twelve, or one hundred thirty-nine… that is the hard part.

                I have been smoking for about eleven years now. That is the first time I have ever written those words, and reading them just now made me cringe just a little. Eleven years. How did I ever let it get this out of hand? Small confession, I was one of those people that started smoking to be cool. There was something intoxicating about openly living on the wild side, cancer be damned. When I first started smoking it was just to be cool around my friends (who were already smoking), but later, it grew out of control, and I was smoking two packs a day of “reds” by the time I was eighteen.  When I joined the Navy it only got worse. I never actually kept count, but there were stretches in there where three packs a day was fairly common.

                I started a little numbers game out of boredom one day while I was deployed. I figured that if there were twenty cigarettes in a pack, and I never smoke less than a pack a day, that would be, at a minimum, 7,200 cigarettes a year entering my lungs. Now, like a stated earlier in this post, I have been smoking for eleven years now, so, at a minimum, I have smoked 79,200 cigarettes. I know this number is on the low side, because for years I smoked way more than a pack a day. How do I not have lung cancer already? It’s no wonder I run out of breath walking up one flight of stairs, and I’m not even thirty yet. I’m so incapable of doing any extended physical activity it’s a Wonder I’m not obese (that probably has something to do with nicotine being an apatite suppressant).  

                I’ve managed to get off topic. The point of this blog entry was originally to be a declaration of war on my smoking habit (not a personal history or math lesson). I guess I haven’t left much more to say; starting tomorrow, I will be a non-smoker. I would say wish me luck, but the truth is, I’m going to need a hell of a lot more than wishes.

My Dream Oven...

I love pizza. I should clarify with saying that I don’t even like the traditional American mass produced garbage commonly referred to as pizza. I love real pizza. The first time I had a real pizza was in Naples, Italy. Fitting, considering that is pizza’s hometown. That is the first time I had a pizza cooked in a wood fired oven, made with minimal, but quality, ingredients.

                I have a few goals/projects I want to accomplish this summer. One of those projects is building an outdoor wood fired oven. An outdoor oven can be used for way more than just baking pizza. You can use them for pretty much anything you would use a gas indoor oven for –minus certain finicky desserts that require a steady constant temperature. I will be able to use it to bake fresh bread, roasting meats and vegetables, roast poultry and other such ilk, but yes, most importantly, firing the most awesome pizzas known to man.

                The oven I am going to build probably won’t look near as rockstar-Martha-Stewartish as the one in the photo above, but damned if I’m not going to try. I have been reading a few blogs around the internet about the adventures some people have had building their own outdoor wood fired ovens, and from what I have taken from all of this research, is that I have my work cut out for me.

                I’m not exactly what some people would call “handy”. I love to cook, and I’m actually pretty good at it, but building things with my hands… well, there are things I’m better at. But, I want this oven more than I can even express in words at the moment, and therefore, I am going to give this project my A-game come spring. Hopefully I will be able to complete it before the apocalypse begins…