Crazy Dream Number Three

I was in a strange room—maybe a classroom, maybe a design studio—but it had an attic. Some of my old bosses were there. I think the premise was that we were working late. I think maybe there was a blackout, I'm not too sure. All I know is that everything suddenly got wacky.

This guy who was never my boss but I vaguely know through graphic design was getting something out of the overhead storage / "attic". He knocked something down and this gas overtook the room. I recently watched Legends of the Fall. If you're familiar with that film, there is a scene when the mustard gas spreads out during some WWI battlefield. This was a similar experience. This gas wasn't mustard gas but some sort of drug, perhaps some sort of super strong marijuana or potentially opium smoke. Why this would happen, I have no idea, this dream is hazy and was really weird. This graphic designer dude mentions that in the eighties he did some job for this drug lord from South America or something, which is why he has all these drugs stored in the attic. Apparently the drug lord guy left them behind, and the job got all fucked up and the designer guy never got paid, and so he kept the drugs as some sort of deposit.

Everyone in the room, primarily former coworkers, were a state of super-stoned paralysis. I was thinking I wished I could get out of the room, but I couldn't. Someone's feet smelled really bad and I was afraid they were mine and I vaguely remember apologizing — it was really hot and I was wearing Keds without socks. I think we all had to sleep there overnight.

Crazy Dream Number Two

Last night I dreamt I was wearing the patch on my face, right below my eye. My skin started itching and my eye started burning so I took it off. When I was a kid I was once stung by a hornet in that area under your eye, and that's where I put my patch in my dream.

stop smoking, day 14

I haven't not smoked for this many days since I was 15 years old. It seems like some sort of major feat. It has only happened as a result of the steady, time-released stream of nicotine that continues to course through my body, provoking crazy dreams and making me forget to eat.

That said, I am in the midst of seriously troubling times. The first week of non-smoking was pretty triumphant. I felt totally happy & healthy and optimistic, food tasted amazing (though I was never hungry) and I started smelling layers of smells again. Not so much anymore. For the last 4 or 5 days all day every day there is this really unhappy feeling in my lungs which leads to an internal monologue. My lungs say time for a cigarette, my brain says time for a cigarette, and the other voice says you can't smoke. Then I'm sad, then angry, then eventually I forget. Twenty minutes later it starts again. There seems to be nothing that can satisfy this craving, not alcohol or snacks or coffee or sweets or a walk or a glass of water. Just big sadness. This cycle runs day and night, from the time I wake up until the time I go to bed. It is brutal and I sometimes find myself fills with an unbearable rage.

After that first amazing week, I somehow started to believe I was almost invincible and I was totally winning. I would phase off these patches sooner than suggested and be done with this junk forever. As week two nears its close I realize that isn't going to happen anytime soon. If things are this bad now, god only knows what will happen after I stop with the nicotine forever. I hope that eventually my lungs will stop making this crazy feeling and my fever will break.

Crazy Dream # One

I just had my first crazy dream. I was terrified throughout the whole thing.

I was driving somewhere to visit with my family, but I was with some of my friends from New York, including some of the people I just went on vacation with. We were in my parents' Chevy Blazer, which I drove around last night, and there were almost-empty FunSavers everywhere. Somehow then my parents were driving, and there were children who may or may not have been family members in the car, and me and my friends were in the back. Somehow the car became my childhood best friend's Dodge Caravan.

I thought we were in California. My friend Chris, originally from California, was in the car, and he recommended somewhere that was good to eat. The sky was a crazy red and purple sunset (you will see this on the cover up the upcoming Fleetwood Mac Power Hour, when Chris puts it up on the site), and there were oil mills and windmills and power lines. In general it looked kind of like Kansas from the Wizard of Oz, but also like driving on Interstate 5 in California. I kept falling asleep. When I woke up everyone was at the restaurant. I tried to go to the restaurant to meet them, but you had to travel through this long farmer's market / supermarket / mall structure, and I couldn't find it. I kept crawling under huge plexi sneeze-glass barriers from salad bars. I gave up.

When I woke up again I was at my parents' house. Everyone else was still at the restaurant. I couldn't contact anyone because my phone didn't work, I didn't know where they were or who was coming. I was freaked out. Finally a caravan of cars started driving down the driveway. All of the minivans and SUVs were full of family members and friends, all mixed together in the same cars. It was now dusk. My youngest sister was a young girl again and a bunch of her friends were coming for a crazy costume party, so everyone was dressed up. I wondered who my friends were with. My grandparents were dressed in their Sunday best.

At one point I realized that my friends were all together in the Chevy Blazer, and somehow there was now a parking spot under the front porch that they were pulling into. There was also some sort of retractable net in the front yard, and my brother was playing some sort of trick on them by pulling down the net so that when the car backed up, it would get trapped in the net. Sure enough it happened and I told him to raise the net, this was ridiculous. When the car got out of the net and pulled into the parking spot under the front porch, we discovered some sort of body under the net on a gurney. Apparently this person had been at the restaurant with them, it was one of the celebration party people, but they were all wrapped up like a mummy so I couldn't tell who it was since I'd missed the party. Then a taxi / emergency response unit that was some sort of fuel efficient hybrid vehicle (almost Smart Car-esque) comes barrelling down the driveway and takes the gurney.

There are so many children, playing and dancing everywhere. There's a girl with lime green hair wearing some sort of satin purple dress. It is a party. Me and my friends go into the house. My great-grandparents are still alive, and my great grandmother is still in her usual chair in the kitchen. I give her a kiss on the cheek. Me and my friends go into the basement to explore. My sister is doing some sort of science experiment with her friends and listening to the Buzzcocks. We are walking around and the dirt floor is now concrete, painted and polished. The basement is slightly different and we are walking around with flashlights like explorers. Eventually we reach the other entrance to the basement and leave.

Nic Fit

Last night, I went to a bar with my recently-relocated-to-NY friend Jason. Actually three bars because I had to leave each one after one drink, when I would customarily require a cigarette. Early on in the reunion drinks, I told Jason I had quit smoking. He asked me if I was ok and said it seemed like I needed a cigarette. It's true. I calmed down after a few drinks.

Sonic Youth / Nic Fit

Stop smoking forever, day 2

I read on some internet somewhere that I may have crazy crazy dreams as a result of either the nicotine patch or not using a nicotine patch and just cold turkey-ing it. These dreams may be extremely vivid. I may feel as though cigarette smoke is entering my lungs. Apparently, I may wake up wanting a cigarette in a pool of cold sweat or something along those lines. I am sad to report I have not had any crazier-than-usual dreams, but I look forward to them coming, prophetically. I imagine the floating into the carpet scene from Trainspotting and maybe hope my dream will be like that.

Day 2 of stop smoking was better than Day 1. I didn't feel too sad or overly anxious or freaked out today, only like something was missing. That "missing" feeling is along the lines of, isn't there somewhere I'm supposed to be going or doing right now? Outdoors, for my break? Then I would realize that I don't do that anymore, sigh on the inside, and get back to work. All in all, more ok than I expected. The plus side of using this ridiculous nicotine replacement stuff is that I tell myself that I will die of a nicotine overdose if I smoke a cigarette because of the patch. Whether or not this is true, I don't want to know. As long as I believe it, this theory is an adequate deterrent.

On the positive side, I don't know if today was particularly fragrant, but it definitely smelled better than usual. This may be some sort of placebo effect. One of the non-smoker things that I am looking forward to most is the return of strong smells and tastes.

Goodbye to All That: Day 1

Get ready for some live blogging of my exciting and somewhat terrifying journey into the world of becoming a non-smoker.

DAY ONE
Today is the first day of the rest of my life, or more precisely, the rest of my life without cigarettes. Please forgive my worse-than-usual grammar and comma placement – this is the first time I haven't smoked a cigarette within 2 hours of waking up for the last 700 days or so. This morning around 10:30 or so I strapped on my very first nicotine patch courtesy of the state of New York and have been spending the past 4 hours or so in a state of semi-panic.



In order to understand how major this is, I will share my extensive and uncomplicated history of smoking.

I am probably one of the more hardcore smokers you know. I am the person that "social" smokers bum cigarettes off because I always have them. I'm the kind of smoker who buys an extra pack when they're down to like 2 cigarettes because you don't want to ever run out and suffer the mild discomfort of an hour or so without cigarettes in easy reach.

Around the age of 14 or so I think I decided that I would become a smoker. My parents don't smoke — my dad smokes cigars and pipes but not cigarettes — so I can't blame them. Early on in my irrational teenage logic, I thought perhaps cigarettes would better prepare my virginal lungs for the marijuana smoke that would be entering them soon and that I would definitely cough less. I had to toughen up my lungs like I used to toughen up the soles of my feet in the summer, when I would walk barefoot for a quarter mile or so on my dirt and gravel driveway in order to develop extensive calluses.

I think I smoked my first cigarette when I was 15, with my best friends Kate and Sam. We were in Sam's basement, and her aunt had left a Kool 100 lying around. We went into a basement annex and smoked the cigarette. I'd have to say I didn't dislike it at all, it was minty and delicious. Kate and I went on to be full-fledged smokers, stealing Viceroys and Kents from her Grandma's carton until we had driver's licenses and could buy them at the stores that didn't card. I would smoke a cigarette a day in the woods and sometimes in my dirt basement after school. Eventually after I got a car I started smoking more - it became a primary form of entertainment at the diners (with cigarette machines!) I hung out in every day with my friends. In 12th grade I used to drive around during lunch with one of the hot, younger football players who was on newspaper staff with me to smoke cigarettes. Those were the best days, the high school days, when I pledged I would stop smoking after cigarettes cost more than $3 a pack.

By my freshman year of college I smoked a pack a day. All those cigarettes gave me something to do when I stayed up all night working. They were also cheaper than (and almost as satisfying as) eating, which came in handy since I couldn't afford to eat very much that year. Now that I had my own dorm room, and eventually my own apartment, I could smoke as much as I wanted. I kept this up for several years.

The first time I started thinking about quitting was when returning from studying abroad in Paris. Smoking in Paris was fantastic — you could do it everywhere and it was cheap. They even sold cigarettes in helpful half-pack increments when I was extra broke (only 10 francs!). Sitting in the disgusting smoking lounge in Heathrow on my way home, I realized that in America smoking couldn't possibly be as fun. When I returned I quit for 3 days, then went back to it.

The smoking ban and subsequent extreme taxation of cigarettes started during my last year of college. I joined many others who started rolling their own cigarettes to save money. This was perhaps when I became a much more hardcore smoker. Everyone was quitting. I just replaced Camel Lights with unfiltered cigarettes but smoked just as much. I could roll a cigarette in 10 seconds. I developed a really bad hacking cough, but kept smoking. Eventually after months of unemployment, I was so broke I had to steal my live-in boyfriend's change for potatoes and Bisquick. Some days I didn't have cigarettes or even rolling tobacco. Those were the really really tough days.

Since then I've smoked pretty consistently. There was one other time in the last 11 years I seriously tried to quit smoking. After weeks of hard work, I had reduced my cigarette intake to one or two cigarettes a day. Then I moved to Philadelphia, where the illicit pleasure of indoor smoking was still legal, and I lasted about four or five days before this initiative ended. I told myself I needed to stop smoking by the age of 26 (my ten year anniversary), but it never happened. At some point I realized that cigarettes were possibly the only constant in my life, that maybe smoking was the only thing that consistently brought me joy and peace of mind. Cigarettes were the ultimate frenemy.

Three weeks ago I developed a bad cough. I had trouble sleeping. I thought it was the result of allergies, but realized that I had been smoking about 20 cigarettes a day again. I also learned of the new cigarette tax that would raise prices to approximately $9 a pack. I decided that now was the time, that I couldn't keep trying to cut back anymore. My free patches arrived two Fridays ago.

I've been making mental notes of all the things that can potentially distract me from the physical urge to smoke. So far these things include: drinking coffee, talking on the phone, fixing things, cleaning. This list is small but will hopefully grow longer. So far, I've learned that when you're accustomed to smoking outside – in my case EVERY time I'm outside – it's hard to walk around without smoking. I've always preferred walking to biking since you can smoke much easier while walking, so perhaps this is a good time to switch primary modes of transit? Stay tuned for Day 2, in which I will report on the effectiveness of the nicotine patch, and surviving a poker night without even one cigarette break.

john mccain game

I am watching john mccain give a speech on cnn. Similarly earlier today, via Carl I learned of the Andy Rooney game on Youtube. I never noticed before, but McCain slightly resembles Andy Rooney. Does this mean that I should become a McCain supporter, now that the democratic primaries are all but over?



Every speech he gives could be like 60 minutes. Every night could be Sunday night. Is this some sort of sign? Could somebody start a YouTube John McCain game?

what i learned from hot 97's summer jam 2008

RE: CRED
claim to be the "first," "best," "only" of something and repeat it many, many times. even if no one else does, you will begin to believe you. and having the right attitude is half the battle. also, fireworks help...a lot.

RE: BEING HUSTLED
a) stay away from 3-card monte
b) don't stand near the trash. that's asking for it.
c) nothing is free
d) "show me what you got" = "hand me your money"

RE: LEGAL ADVICE
the smartest lawyers set up booths at summer jam and have raffles where they give away tv sets. you WILL get a steady stream of visitors.

RE: LADIES CLOTHING
they really need to stop making mini-skirts and daisy dukes in plus sizes.

RE: DRINKING
when you see a dude selling something called NUTCRACKERs, for $5, out of a cooler:
a) do not ask what is in it.
b) know that there is no taste-testing
c) accept the fact that you might be drinking cough syrup and/or roofies.

it wasn't until today that i learned this:

THE NUTCRACKER
made popular in 2000 through barbershops and grocery stores in washington heights.

Ingredients:
1 bottle smirnoff watermelon vodka
1 bottle southern comfort (although one guy was real class and substituted with hennessey)
12 oz can pineapple juice
hawaiian punch (add according to taste)
1 bottle each amaretto and grenadine (optional)