Been smoking for five or six years, something around that. Took it up while I was the primary caregiver for my mom ill with pancreatic cancer. A while after she passed I tried to quit. Couldn't do it. Tried about five or six different ways: you know, chantix, laser beam, hypnosis, cold turkey, patches, courses, etc., etc. I mean, EVERYBODY knows smoking is idiotic. Time passed. Well, we've always been in money trouble since the Recession started, but last month was worse than usual. There was no money at all for anything whatsoever after about the tenth or twelfth of the month. No milk. No eggs. No gasoline. And, of COURSE, no cigarettes!

Well, SOMEHOW, along with all the other things given up because of absolutely no money, the renunciation of cigarettes just seemed like another item placed on the pile of what we had to give up. I didn't think about it. Just another thing I couldn't have because of money. And I just never thought about it until the following month's check rolled in. And I realized that I'd been off cigarettes for three weeks with NO misery and NO withdrawal and NO cravings. And I figured I might as well take this as a free gift and just continue not smoking. Which is what I'm doing right now when it's almost a month since I had a smoke.

You know, I love smoking cigarettes. I LOVE them!!! As far as my personal experience is concerned (personal, leaving out my brother who died of lung cancer after thirty years of two-packs a day of Camels), I've never had anything negative happen to me in connection with cigarettes. If you leave out all the medical reports and the articles and the books about how smoking is utterly terrible for you, I'm fine with smoking. I love the little suckers. If they told me today cigarettes were okay I'd go back in a flash.

But that article a couple of weeks back, coupled with my undecided renunciatation for three weeks, really made a difference. The article, as you may recall, told us about the inclusion in cigarette tobacco of some radioactive element named something like Polonium 210. Which all by itself kills 40,000 Americans a year. And the cigarette makers knew about this in 1953 and they know about it now and they STILL haven't taken this crap out of the cigarettes. Well, straw that broke the camel's back, I guess. That and my unconsciously having given up cigs for three weeks has me stopped now.

I told Pdoc and he said it's the most important thing I could do now. He said that weight control, blood pressure, cholesterol, all of that means almost nothing compared with stopping smoking. He told me to eat whatever I felt like, do whatever I wanted so long as I kept off the cigarettes. There are unhealthy things to do, he said, but tobacco is up in a class by itself, ten or a hundred times worse than almost anything else you could do.

So I'm drinking gin and eating potato chips which, according to Pdoc, is wonderful when compared with smoking. Tomorrow I might even have French Fries for lunch at 5 Guys, with one of their EXCELLENT hamburgers! Take care.