The Temple of the Mighty Bague

Almost got caught out by the brain monster this morning while standing waiting to pay for some sugar puffs. The “excuse” was - “Hey, I don’t want to be grumpy with the kids all weekend, why don’t I buy ten cigarettes to cover the weekend then I can get back to not-smoking on Monday?”

Except, of course, I’m not grumpy and my brain wasn’t thinking of the kids it was thinking about itself. I’m still feeling listless and anxious, but generally OK. Needless to say, the cigarettes stayed on the shelf, but it was a near thing.

I think the pacing and fidgeting is probably the hardest thing - the feeling that something is missing. After all, I’ve been smoking for 20 years or so and got into the habit of doing certain things in a certain way. I think this is the bit that the nicotine patch vendors like to use to dupe people into paying exhorbitant sums for their wares. The fact remains that I didn’t need nicotine before I started smoking and I don’t need it now.

9:34am

Ended up going to bed early last night, feeling a bit rough and irritable. Much better today, though. The restlessness is quite annoying - before, if I was waiting for a job to finish or waiting for a kettle to boil or something, I’d go out and smoke. Now I just hover and fidget and annoy everyone. A workmate suggested I get a stress-toy thing to fidget with, but soon learned the folly of attempting to help when I asked if I could make one out of his eyeballs

On the whole, though, it’s ok. There’s no physical pain, there’s just mild annoyingness and an ever present feeling of disconnect.

4:35pm

It’s always handy when a poorly designed and undocumented Oracle implementation distracts you from your other problems for a day The database is resurrected and I haven’t really thought about smoking. There’s been a couple of moments where I’ve been caught off guard - fired some instructions into a terminal and walked to the door before realising I didn’t have to do that - but I guess I’m lucky I work in a building where no-one else smokes. Being handed a lit one would probably catch me out because the habit is so ingrained. I’m getting there though.

9:44 am

Or thereabouts. So, I’ve been up and smober for a couple of hours now and nothing seems to have dropped off yet. Last cigarette was at about 10pm last night so that’s nearly 12 hours (although counting sleeping hours is probably cheating).

Doing alright though - I have the kind of empty, hungry feeling the people generally class as “withdrawal symptoms”, but if I’m benig completely honset with myself, I used to get that fairly often when I was smoking - if I was in a cinema or other non-smoking place.

According to the Alan Carr book (I read it a while back but wasn’t really motivated to stop at the time), these pangs are the death-throes of the little nicotine beast that’s lodged in me. Which is ACE, in a Final Fantasy kind of way, because that means that when I reach for a sweetie in a minute or two, I’ll be STRIKING DOWN that monster with a +2 Jelly Bean of Righteous Smiting!

11:27am

Hey look! I’m still alive! No physical pain of any kind, just the kind of annoying restlessness. Any time now my brain will start attempting to concoct ridiculous reasons why I really need to smoke. I’ll note them here as El Cerebro comes up with them.

12pm

Ok, so technically that’s a half day. Technically Still alive, haven’t clawed anyone’s eyes out, haven’t really been too bothered to be honest. I’m actually looking forward to lunch cos I’m starving.

2:41pm

Aaaaand here comes the grumpiness - probably not helped by being surrounded by huffy buggers who think the world should be entirely THEIR way, but hey - what can you do?

I can stop posting for a while, that’s what - in case I “upset” someone

4:09pm

Here’s an interesting though. Sitting here - there’s still nothing amiss other than a strong sense of something being “missing” (that’ll be the wheezing, spluttering and burning, then) - feeling kinda hungry/empty. Now then - Mr Brain is telling me that a cigarette will make that empty feeling go away. And it would, briefly. But then, so would not having a cigarette. Because the empty annoying feeling I have isn’t caused by not smoking, it’s caused by the last cigarette I had. Does that make sense?

The short version is - I Am Mr Grumpy. So I’m not speaking to anyone. It’s for the best.

Why is it that stopping smoking is so difficult? I man, really - let’s have a think about it.

It tastes horrible.

It’s expensive.

It makes you cough.

It halves your life expectancy.

It gives lots of revenue to the gubbermint.

So really, it does nothing for you! So what is there to give up? Logically, the answer to that is “nothing”, so why am I grumpy, nervous and stressed when I’m just planning to stop?

So - in order to pick my way through this minefield of extreme silliness, and in an attempt to save my own life rather than the life of some pixelated jumping video-game bunny (for a change), I intend documenting the final days of being a smoker on this very blog. Hopefully, during this process, I’ll be able to provide some kind of answers to the wierdness above.

My approach is pretty simple. Rather than replacing a nicotine habit with, well, another nicotine habit, I’m going to forgoe the six-week torture that is patches. I’m also not going to use the gum, hypnotherepy, aversion therepy, drugs, sweetie-substitution (well, maybe some jelly beans), black magic, voodoo or anything else. I’m going to stop smoking using the power of Not Buying Any Cigarettes.

A radical plan, but one which Just Might Work(tm).

It begins…… again. I made the mistake of starting this back in February / March last year when, avid nelefans will remember, I was in the throes of many Castlevania games and Magical Starsign. And then Puzzle Quest came along. Anyhoo, I reckoned it was time to get back to it. Except, of course, I had no idea where I was or what I was doing.

So I’ve started again. As you do. My little gang of sundry heroes have been declared warriors of light by a giant crystal (no, really!) and are out on a vaguely defined mission to save the world from some unspecified darkness. Inevitably, this will involve spending lots of time wandering about engaging in random combat and the likes. As you do.