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.