more news from nowhere

I am still not smoking. I’m not doing too badly, as long as I have something else to concentrate on which isn’t too taxing. Yesterday, I concentrated on making origami boxes. I also concentrated on walking into town to buy Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds’ new album, Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!. When I got home, I concentrated on listening to that while I made some more origami boxes. Then I concentrated on cooking tea, watching Akira Kurosawa’s Ran, and going out to see the horses with the dog. I was so tired after all that, I went to sleep and didn’t have to concentrate on anything for a while.

Today I have been concentrating mostly on organizing bookshelves and uploading front cover photos over at Goodreads. I have also written a few reviews, but that was hard work. I meant to write the last thing for the next issue of The Elephant Returns this weekend, but even though I know what I want to write, that kind of writing counts as ‘taxing’ so I am going to leave it for a while, maybe till next weekend. That kind of writing is the kind of writing that is guaranteed to make me run out of the flat to buy cigarettes. I know I can write without smoking, because I have done it before. I will do it again, but I am not ready yet — the inside of my head is too busy at the moment with the death throes of the nicotine monster.

Actually, the inside of my head is a bit like Ran at the moment, not ‘ran’ as in the past tense of ‘run’, but as in the Kurosawa film sense of ‘a relentless chronicle of base lust for power, betrayal of the father by his sons, and pervasive wars and murders that destroy all the main characters’. The nicotine monster is like the evil lady Kaede. I am going to chop her head off with a sword in a minute if she doesn’t shut up.

stop me if you think you’ve heard this one before

I have given in. I have made myself read Allen Carr again. My brother took my old copy away ages ago, so on Monday I went to the bookshop and bought a replacement. I like the cover of this new copy better. There is no photograph of Allen Carr (I think I mentioned somewhere before that Allen Carr gives me the shivers, and not in a good way). Also, there is a gold circle with white writing in that says ‘THE ONE THAT WORKS’. Perhaps there was something wrong with the last copy I bought.

As soon as I got home from work yesterday, I started reading the book. I had eight cigarettes left, but I only managed to smoke four of those by the time I got to ‘The Final Cigarette’. As instructed, after I read that chapter I smoked my final cigarette. I shredded the remaining three cigarettes, and threw them in the bin. Then I made an aubergine-potato-tomato salad thing for tea, read a bit of Shirō Hasegawa, and watched Akira Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala, which was very good. I paused the video about half way through and went for a walk with the dog, who is a bit like Dersu Uzala. After we got back and watched the rest of the film, we went to bed and I read a bit more.

I am not overexcited that I have stopped smoking, but I must say I am somewhat relieved. I don’t feel like my life is any better or worse than it was yesterday, but I feel a bit lighter already, and less edgy. Apart from being the start of the rest of my non-smoking life, today for me is the (delayed) beginning of a three day weekend. I don’t have to go to work until Wednesday. I am going to wander over to the shop through the pouring rain in a minute and buy the paper to celebrate.