Category: Diary

I am sitting here and I guess it is technically the day that I will quit smoking. I am staring at a pack of Winston Light cigarettes and there is one remaining. I will be going to bed soon, but before that, I will have that last cigarette. When I wake up, there will be no cigarettes in the house. There will be a box of nicotine transdermal patches, 21 mg, the highest grade. I have been trying all day not to romanticize this moment, but those of you who know me, know that it is impossible for me not to romanticize anything. I guess I have thought so many times about how the last cigarette would be. I have thought about who I would like to have it with. Would it be JT, or R, or G… I guess the fight that I am entering into will ultimately be mine to fight, and the addiction that I have developed is my burden, so I guess it is only appropriate that this last cigarette be something that I have on my own as well. I think I may go get it over with now.

It is 6 PM on this Friday afternoon and I have just finished the last cigarette that I will ever smoke in front of the AJC offices here at 72 Marietta Street. I am not quitting my job here at the newspaper, rather I have decided to quit smoking. On this Sunday night, some time before bed, I will have my last cigarette, and when I awake in the morning I will not smoke the morning cigarette, or the one on the way to work, or the one after lunch. I will not smoke another cigarette again.
My friends who have done this tell me of how hard it is going to be, and I imagine I have not even fully realized what I will go through yet, but I am looking for the relief from the burden of smoking. Hell yes I enjoy it. Every cigarette I have ever had has been good – a consistency that I wish other aspects of my life could achieve. However, it is a burden: the trips to the store, the counting of the dollars when the debit card is damaged, the planning my day out in cigarette demarcated spoonfuls.
People tell me that I must find something to take the cigarettes place. G ate carrots, my dad chews gum and exercises. I think I will exercise and write. I will write my way through this thing because writing is what has gotten me through the bad times in the last year. If it can get me through that, it can get me through this. If I can get through all of that, I can succeed at this also. Wish me luck and prepare for the breakdown phone calls.

You did what with whom? Oh, is that right. A hand job everyday in Biology. Mr. Murphy’s biology? He taught us about human behavior, and racism, mostly racism. I cannot remember now. Wendy bit my finger and bit it hard. It was always under the circumstances of a woo. She let me see her breasts once. Why am I telling you this? High school was so fucked up. High school was so beautiful. I cannot believe that I made it.
You were Catholic and getting it from all sides. I guess down South we were all a little more conservative. I guess we knew not what we did. There were denominations with more guilt than those who crossed themselves. I guess sexual congress in biology was okay with the Pope, or at least forgivable. You had confession at least.
There’s a book that holds memories, and we scoured it. How many of those girls that we felt some sort of amorous/sexual emotion toward. Mostly they weren’t pretty. We remembered a moment when they were nice to us, or us to them, and we spawned off fantasies.
Tyler looked old even then. Maybe that is why she dated the guy who was 6 years our elder. I cannot believe now that we limited our future spousal prospects to that place and time. They were beautiful in their on way, but my needs were, and are, so much larger.

I cannot remember if I took my Gingko Biloba this morning.

Oh my god! I am opening up the Samuel within me. I want to make that night so scatological. I want to piss on dreams. To make it real. I read you when I did not know what I was reading. They say Dickens takes experience. Oh, they did not consider you. Through all that piss and shit and fornication I realize that you got to something real. I am glad those books descended and I have learned how to read you. I think love, actually, lies somewhere in those leaves.

I am filled with the spirit, and it very well may be Canadian pop music tonight. It will make you feel better to get outside of your paradigm, and Canada has always been good for that. I want to dance in the streets tonight only if the streets were safe, and it were raining. My arms project from me like antennae. There are crickets tonight. Can you hear them. They are Canadian, and mild-mannered.
Was playing: This Night by Destroyer

Oh, I guess so much has changed now since I last wrote on day 55. I can hardly stand to go back and read those posts just yet. They can easily conjure up what it felt like to live in that dark place and time, and I try daily to convince myself that I am far removed from it.
My car is my car now. The thing that has owned me for the better part of the last five years is now something that I own. Despite needing a bath and an oil change, it seems like the car is doing okay. Maybe I should give it a name. It didn’t seem right to give it a name before I owned it, but I guess it would be okay now. Anyone have ideas? Maybe I should call it Oscar for the rolling trash can that it tends to be most of the time.
I am adjusting to this bachelor lifestyle as well. It’s still not incredibly easy, but I do enjoy being able to do what I want to do just about all of the time. I can sit here at the house on a late weekday afternoon and write while smoking on the porch, or watch ‘Prince of Tides’ and cry and think of becoming a better man. I can think of being utterly transformed. When I look back at that day 55 though, I realize that I am utterly transformed. Those of you that have known me long and well, also well know this fact.
I haven’t made much progress toward finishing the novel yet, nor to my other New Year’s resolution of running a marathon this year. I have readjusted my running goals to aim for a half-marathon. I think just learning to live, and live fully, again is accomplishment enough for right now. All else is really a distraction from that goal.
Oh, and work. I cannot believe that I wrote on day 55 of all hell breaking loose at work. I cannot even really remember what happened that day. All I can say is that I am sure I have had more stressful days recently and they tend to roll right off of me. There has been some fundamental change in my life in the in between months that has my priorities finally set straight.
I don’t fret so much lately. I realize that time provides answers as we need them. I realize that prayer is a great healer. I realize that everything is going to be okay. I believe that my life will be a good one. Something that I will look back on one day and be happy that I did it the way I did. That was not the case back when I wrote the last medication update. As much as the pills have to do with it, I would also thank my doctors, and books, and especially friends and family – old and new. I wish we could all be together on a boat somewhere right now.

Watch ’em go!

I guess sooner or later it comes to this. With all of my attempts at saying I have a serious and valuable profession, sometimes a project like this rolls around and it turns your ethics upside down.
I know I mentioned this to several of you in person or via phone, but I figured this was the easiest way to give you all a link to my latest creation. Hopefully it is at least a little amusing.
Atlanta Braves Stars sing Stadium Jams

Just to prove that I made it

So one night you go to bed and the next day you are year older. I guess it happens to all of us at least once a year despite what one of my friends says. Today I am 32. I have driven now, for as many years as i didn’t drive. I remember the day I got my driver’s license when I was 16. In the photo, which I still have somewhere, I look like a young hoodlum, but I was rail thin. I am more years now than any month has days. I guess birthday’s can be a time for introspection. I have done enough of that lately, so I think I will just try to have fun. Hope you all have a good my birthday as well, but remember it is mine 😉

I don’t know why, but possibly out of restlessness, I strike out after midnight tonight and I see the blooms of the dogwood tree gleaming in the light of the sodium halide street lamp. It is February still, but Spring is already coming to this town. Outside of my house, the singular daffodil is starting its bloom as well, and the smell of burning wood has subsided on this end of the street. Soon there will be weeding to be done. Our hands could be turned bright green before we could even snap our sweaty fingers.
My car, during this early warming, has lost one of its front lights. In high school we used to call it popeye, and upon seeing one you either had to kiss or punch the person you were with. Amongst dudes it usually was a punch; amongst mixed company, the kiss was more popular. I spent the better part of one Spring evening sitting on a stone wall when I was 18 with a woman kissing at the sight of every popeye. One would have thought that every car in town had one headlight extinguished by the passion that we felt for each other that night. Later she would ask me to her prom and I would weasel out. Then she would become a nurse in Minnesota. She would marry and have a child. She would live near the headwaters of the Mississippi. She would see it fed by the meltwaters of spring. I doubt she ever thinks about me, or these things now.
I guess this time of the year brings hope to my heart. Hope springs eternal, or rather, in Spring, hope is eternal. Maybe I am too hopeful. Forever the romantic. It seems like the stars are slowly coming back into alignment. It seems that the world might just slow down to that pace that I can understand. Tomorrow I think I will spend an hour walking around this city, letting my feet get to know it like they never have. They will feel the promise of pollen, pollution and circumstance.
But tonight… oh tonight, I wish I were in cold and windy Chicago, at the Horseshoe or Bierstube with JT. We spent the hour or two talking, or rather me talking, and it would have been better over a beer together, in that city where they truly appreciate the change of the seasons. Where Spring means something so much more. Where it means the snow will melt. The world will turn green. The Mississippi will fill its banks again, and the world, and you and I, stretched out over this great country, will be one again.