Smokers Life Quotes

Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on them arrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

I quit smoking in December. I’m really depressed about it. I love smoking, I love fire, I miss lighting cigarettes. I like the whole thing about it, to me it turns into the artist’s life, and now people like Bloomberg have made animals out of smokers, and they think that if they stop smoking everyone will live forever.

Lately I can't help wanting us to be like other people. For example, if I were a smoker, you'd lift a match to the cigarette just as I put it between my lips. It's never been like that between us: none of that easy chemistry, no quick, half automatic flares. Everything between us had to be learned. Saturday finds me brooding behind my book, all my fantasies of seduction run up against the rocks. Tell me again why you don't like sex in the afternoon? No, don't tell me-- I'll never understand you never understand us, America's strangest loving couple: they never drink a bottle of wine together and rarely look at each other. Into each other's eyes, I mean.

We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat--not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it's AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there's the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that's fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don't want to eat me. F@#$ck the worms.

There are some souls who develop a penchant and an unhealthy appetite for a certain kind of experience. So, they experience an awful lot of those experiences. These souls are addicted, just like a smoker is, to cigarettes. But it does not make them any less inferior or bad. It just delays their journey.

Why was he laughing? Did he know that he would survive? No. That's impossible. He realized that he would end his life here. He admitted the truth that he would die and laughed. Have you ever seen a pirate laughing on the execution stand?

At times, I had nightmares. What would happen if I manage to outlive my parents (you never know about the smokers, for they can die anytime)? Would there be anyone to cremate my dead body? Or will people discover it after fourteen days, only when they feel the stench? Should I adopt a dog? No! Who will take care of him once I die? Should I adopt cats? They’re independent and self-sufficient, right? But what If I have a stroke and fail to provide them food, would they then eat me alive, bit by bit, in their extreme hunger?

Wouldn’t that be an incredibly stupid thing to do? To say ‘I never want to smoke again’, then spend the rest of your life saying ‘I’d love a cigarette.’ That’s what smokers who use the Willpower Method do. No wonder they feel so miserable. They spend the rest of their lives desperately moping for something that they desperately hope they will never have.

However, you cannot force smokers to stop, and although all smokers secretly want to, until they are ready to do so a pact just creates additional pressure, which increases their desire to smoke. This turns them into secret smokers, which further increases the feeling of dependency.

There are people who can make love standing on a hammock, but it is not the easiest way.

The pen to a writer is like a cigarette to a smoker; they need it to take the edge off.

The moment you stop smoking, everything that goes wrong in your life is blamed on the fact that you’ve stopped smoking. Now when you have a mental block, instead of just getting on with it you start to say, ‘If only I could light up now, it would solve my problem.’ You then start to question your decision to quit smoking.

All non-smokers seem to live in the belief that smokers have wandered naively through life, bereft of the knowledge that their habit is extremely bad for them.

Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs. The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.

If you have smoked since you were sixteen, every time you pick up a cigarette in the day you are also brainwashing yourself. "In this situation I pick up a cigarette" sends a little ripple down through consciousness that adds to the "take a cigarette" mound. That's why cigarettes are more difficult than almost anything else to give up. Aside from their physical cravings, we create mental cravings because the habit is very repetitive. The habit of smoking puts itself into every situation. The triggers to that situation are so many that many smokers still sometimes want to smoke even years after they have stopped because the mound is still there.

There was not a single smoker in Europe before the sixteenth century, because until then there was no tobacco there. Very few women smoked until the twentieth century; now the habit is more popular among young women than among young men. To say that individual differences in smoking are half caused by genes is simply not true. It all depends on the environment in which the individual is living.

Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home.

smokers were three times less likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than nonsmokers.

Here’s something to consider: If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself? You might say: out of loyalty. Well, loyalty is not identical to stupidity. Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly and honestly. Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement. You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. Quite the opposite. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve. If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not. This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner. People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former smoker a cigarette and a former alcoholic a beer. They will become jealous when you succeed, or do something pristine. They will withdraw their presence or support, or actively punish you for it. They will over-ride your accomplishment with a past action, real or imaginary, of their own. Maybe they are trying to test you, to see if your resolve is real, to see if you are genuine. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.

Competing in an Olympics didn't scare her now. The thought of stepping up into the full roar of the crowd, in London, seemed simple and natural and good. It was ordinary days now that frightened her - endless Tuesday mornings and Wednesday afternoons of real life, the days you had to steer through without the benefit of handlebars. Off the bike she was like a smoker without cigarettes, never sure what to do with her hands. As soon as she got off the bike, her heart was expected to perform all these baffling secondary functions - like loving someone and feeling something and belonging somewhere - when all she'd ever trained it to do was pump blood.

I cannot be stopped unless I am dead. Nothing else can stop me. As long as no one has the balls to kill me, I will prevail. Each breath I draw, even if it's followed by a smoker's cough, is a victory. This world will beat me one day, but not today. Not until the day I die.

People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former smoker a cigarette and a former alcoholic a beer. They will become jealous when you succeed, or do something pristine. They will withdraw their presence or support, or actively punish you for it. They will over-ride your accomplishment with a past action, real or imaginary, of their own. Maybe they are trying to test you, to see if your resolve is real, to see if you are genuine. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.

Studies suggest that this process of experimentation—and failure—is critical in long-term habit change. Smokers often quit and then start smoking again as many as seven times before giving up cigarettes for good. It’s tempting to see those relapses as failures, but what’s really occurring are experiments.

Freneuse is an oddball, an idler, without any aim in life! If you ask me, he has smoked too much opium in the East, and that explains his somnolence, his morbid lethargies. It's the hazardous legacy of bad habits! He has been comprehensively undone; the heavy influence of poisonous opiates never ceases to oppress him. Besides which, his steel-blue eyes are surely the eyes of a smoker of opium. He carries the drunken burden of hemp in his veins. Opium is like syphilis' - le Mazel released the word carelessly - 'it is a thing which stays for years and years in the blood, because the body is unable to purge itself. It must be absorbed, in the long run, by iodide.

Fact was, she just wasn’t that same person anymore. Her remaining scar was a reminder of that, like an ex-smoker who kept a pack of cigarettes somewhere as proof she was stronger than that. It was a badge of honor and a marker place for where she was in her life right now. And as it turned out, memories—the good, the bad, and the ugly—really were what made a person.

But when Hitler wanted Professor Blaschke to agree with him that smoking was one of the most harmful abuses of all and had a particularly bad effect on the teeth, he met with firm opposition. Blaschke himself was a heavy smoker, and perhaps therefore more tolerant than he should have been from a medical point of view. He claimed that smoking was positively good for you, because it disinfected the oral cavity and stimulated the blood supply. In a normal context, he said, smoking wasn’t at all harmful. But Hitler wouldn’t hear of it. ‘Smoking is and always will be one of the most dangerous of habits, and quite apart from the fact that I personally find the smell of cigar or cigarette smoke disgusting, I wouldn’t offer anyone I value or love a cigarette or cigar, because I’d be doing him no service. It has been shown for certain that non-smokers live

You’re too old to be open-minded and tolerant,” said Rosie. “I’m too old not to be.” She sucked coolly on her cigarette again, then waved it at Rosie to punctuate her point. Not for the first time, Rosie envied smokers their rhetorical device. “I’ve lived life. I know what’s important. I’ve seen it all by now. You think he’s the first boy I ever saw in a bikini? He’s not. You think your generation invented kids who are different?

It is a sort of quasi-monastic diabolical vision. In a landscape populated with larvae - flowing and undulating larvae called forth like a cascade of leeches by tolling bells - three female figures rise up phantasmally, enshrouded with gauze like Spanish madonnas. They are the 'three brides': the bride of Heaven, the bride of the Earth and the bride of Hell... The bride of Hell, with her two serpents writhing about her temples to hold her veil in place, has the most attractive mask: the most profound eyes, the most vertiginous smile that one could ever see. If she existed, how I would love that woman! I feel that if that smile and those eyes were in my life they would be all the cure I need! I could never tire of the study and contemplation of that hallucinatory visage. "The Three Brides" is very peculiar in its detail and composition. It is the whimsy of a dream rendered with astonishing fastidiousness: the delusion of an opium-smoker composed in the style of Holbein.

Unfortunately, distraction is contagious. When smokers get together, the first one to take out a pack sends a cue, and when others notice, they do the same. In a similar way, digital devices can prompt others’ behaviors. When one person takes out a phone at dinner, it acts as an external trigger. Soon, others are lost in their screens, at the expense of the conversation. Psychologists call this phenomenon “social contagion,” and researchers have found that it influences our behaviors, from drug use to overeating.

I'm profoundly attracted to classical Zen literature, I have the gall to lecture on it and the literature of Mahayana Buddhism one night a week at college, but my life itself couldn't very conceivably be less Zenful than it is, and what little I've been able to apprehend - I pick that verb with care - of the Zen experience has been a by-result of following my own rather natural path of extreme Zenlessness. Largely because Seymour himself literally begged me to do so, and I never knew him to be wrong in these matters.) Happily for me, and probably for everybody, I don't believe it's really necessary to bring Zen into this. The method of marble-shooting that Seymour, by sheer intuition, was recommending to me can be related, I'd say, legitimately and un-Easternly, to the fine art of snapping a cigarette end into a small wastebasket from across a room. An art, I believe, of which most male smokers are true masters only when either they don't care a hoot whether or not the butt goes into the basket or the room has been cleared of eyewitnesses, including, quite so to speak, the cigarette snapper himself. I'm going to try hard not to chew on that illustration, delectable as I find it, but I do think it proper to append - to revert momentarily to curb marbles - that after Seymour himself shot a marble, he would be all smiles when he heard a responsive click of glass striking glass, but it never appeared to be clear to him whose winning click it was. And it's also a fact that someone almost invariably had to pick up the marble he'd won and hand it to him.

If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and relax—makes it more likely they will quit.3.28

Smokers exist in every kitchen. It kills a tastebud or two but we all die, and no one knows better than those who club the fish, clean the guts from the meat, and serve for your delectation a plate from which all blood has been wiped. We cook despite bad pay and sore backs and inadequate sleeps in apartments we can't afford and we wake up choosing again that most temporary of glories that is made, and then consumed: we know. We all die. Whether it comes after thirty years of hard labor or sixty at a desk, whether we calculate or plan, in the end we have only the choice of what touches the lips before we go: lobster if you like it or cold pizza if you don't, a sip of smoke, a drink, a job, a reckless passion, raw fish, the beguilement of mushrooms, cheese luscious beneath its crown of mold. What sustains in the end are doomed romances, and nicotine, and crappy peanut butter, damn the additives and cholesterol because life is finite and not all nourishment can be measured. When I learned to smoke behind a restaurant, my breath curling toward an inconsolable sky, I learned what it means to live by the tongue, dumb beast, obedient to neither time nor money, past nor future, loyal to a now worth living. I took my cigarette to the filter, and for the first time I appraised my employer back. He claimed to have evolved past fear. He lied. Behind the mask was a damp, scared boy. Fear of toxins, fear of carcinogens, tear of flood and smog and protest and entropy and all that could not be optimized, controlled, bought and held behind glass. Fear fueled a country so intent on perfection that they would give up the world.

A lot of us who were from Lizzy in particular, those who were in the front line of leadership, we were not drinkers or smokers. We liked to party and have fun, go to the dance/nightclubs, and we would take our tool [gun]. If we see fellas we had to deal with, then we dealt with them. When you look at it, Scrooge was never a drinker or a smoker. I knew he would drink his Guinness every now and then, but other than that, that was it. Then there was Troit, he never used to drink nor smoke. And I could call off a lot of fellas who never used to drink nor smoke, and yet they were die-hard gangsters. Then he stopped and asked me, Do you used to drink and smoke? I just smiled and answered, No. Satisfied with himself, Apples said with passion, “My point exactly. When we were gangbanging out there, that was our drug. It was the lifestyle itself that got us high. Shelton ‘Apples’ Burrows reform gang leader

Oh no. Not this again. It’s the clothing dream. I’ve been having it for fifty years. Aisle after aisle, closetful after closetful, metal rack after metal rack of clothing, stretching into the distance under the glare of the fluorescent tubing – as gaudy and ornate and confusing, and finally as glum and oppressive, as the dreams of a long-time opium smoker. Why am I compelled to riffle through these outfits, tangling up the hangers, tripping on the ribbons, snagging myself on a hook or button while feathers and sequins and fake pearls drop to the floor like ants from a burning tree? What is the occasion? Who do I need to impress? ___________ There’s a smell of stale underarms. Everything’s been worn before. Nothing fits. Too small, too big, too magenta. These flounces, hoops, ruffles, wired collars, cut-velvet capes – none of these disguises is mine. How old am I in this dream? Do I have tits? Whose life am I living? Whose life am I failing to live?

As they are shutting up Smoker in this unorthodox fashion I catch the image of Ginger that has so stunned and infuriated him. A flash — the spare boyish figure. Dark nipples on pink skin over protruding ribs, red tuft of pubic hair. Arms, legs, and almost nothing between them. She’s looking at me, or rather at Smoker, a faraway, completely impassive look. One arm is twisted, and there’s a reddish sore below her elbow. She licks it. Then lowers her arm, not even attempting to cover herself, and walks inside the shower stall. That walk is imprinted on Smoker’s retinas in a sequence of narrow snapshots, one sliding over the next. (...) She doesn’t care how many people witness her fights with Noble, doesn’t care who Blind is with if he’s not with her. It’s all the same to her whether she’s clothed or naked, a girl or a boy, she’s a social animal, the kind that is best adapted to life in the House. Smoker is right at least in that — Ginger is a monster, like many of us. Like the best of us.

An example: A few years ago, the public health authorities in Canada, where it had been estimated that smoking kills forty-five thousand people a year, decided to supplement the warning printed on every pack of cigarettes with a shock-photograph—of cancerous lungs, or a stroke-clotted brain, or a damaged heart, or a bloody mouth in acute periodontal distress. A pack with such a picture accompanying the warning about the deleterious effects of smoking would be sixty times more likely to inspire smokers to quit, a research study had somehow calculated, than a pack with only the verbal warning. Let’s assume this is true. But one might wonder, for how long? Does shock have term limits? Right now the smokers of Canada are recoiling in disgust, if they do look at these pictures. Will those still smoking five years from now still be upset? Shock can become familiar. Shock can wear off. Even if it doesn’t, one can not look. People have means to defend themselves against what is upsetting—in this instance, unpleasant information for those wishing to continue to smoke. This seems normal, that is, adaptive. As one can become habituated to horror in real life, one can become habituated to the horror of certain images.

It bears repeating that so much of our frustrations in life come from being confused. This feeling that the purpose of life is to be happy is a major source of our confusion. We want to be happy, and we like to think we were put here to be happy, so why aren’t we happy all the time? And why can’t we just choose to be happy? It makes perfect sense to desire happiness, and as much of it as possible. After all, happiness is the reward mechanisms in our brains firing. Remember the rats from the first part of this series? They kept pressing their levers, over and over, because the wires buried in their brains were located inside the reward centers. Pressing the lever made them feel happy, and there’s no better raw feeling in the world, so they would press the lever until they died. Drug addicts, overeaters, smokers, gamblers, alcoholics, and thrill junkies will all do the same thing. The happy chemicals flood our brains, and we believe we have found the meaning of life. I have sad news for you, dear reader. News that is so sad, it comes first with a reminder that happiness arises as we dispel confusion. And the reason we do not want to accept the following truth is because on its face, it seems depressing. But I promise that once we work through all the implications, we will be less confused and far happier on the other side. The truth is this: The meaning of life is to survive, reproduce, and see that our offspring survive. I know that’s quite the bomb to drop on you while we are discussing happiness, but there’s a reason I bring it up now. Because happiness and sadness are not states that our bodies seek for the sake of feeling those things. No, our bodies use happiness and sadness to motivate and reward us for certain

Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of .05 or .10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastesit made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

REFERENCE RANGES FOR GAMMA-GLUTAMYL TRANSFERASE (GGT) Category GGT Normal Range (IU/L) GGT Target Range (IU/L) Men 0 to 65 32.5 Women 0 to 45 22.5 The GGT levels of healthy African Americans are typically twice as high as those of Caucasians. Additionally, GGT may be 25 to 50 percent higher in obese individuals, and 10 percent higher in one-pack-a-day smokers.

This is how it goes in life: sometimes you’re born with a cleft palette or rickets, like my bow-legged Granddaddy, or a touch short on brains, like my Great Aunt Cal who everyone called ‘Stool.’ Me? I’m a double hitter. In addition to being what folks call “large boned,” I came into this world with homosexual tendencies—though back then I thought of it only as my strange, strong affections for some female friends, having no such notion of “homosexual tendencies” as a thing, at least not in Midland, Texas. Notions of this nature found footing in me eight months before I ran away to work in the kitchen at Sugarland Prison, when I got a job at the egg store. The egg store was all wood. Wood floors, wood ceiling beams, wood shelves—that rugged, knotty, reddish wood. The simple kind of wood they used to bury folks in before the floods, when rotting coffins popped from the ground like splinters and dead bodies dropped out in maggoty heaps. The egg store smelled like wood, too, which I liked. That and just the tiniest hint of smoke from Bibby’s metal pork smoker two streets over. I swear he ran that thing day and night, crazy redneck. And that’s where I fell in love for the first time, there in the egg store that smelled like wood and smoked pig fat.

Even those social smokers who only smoke sometimes, are addicted. They just need less of it, but they need it. And occasional smoking is even worse.

Although biopics are mostly based on facts, it certainly highlights some facts and undermines others. Based on what are highlighted and what are suppressed, a worthy biopic can either be motivating or cautioning. A person may end up with cautioning biopic if life has made him ultimately suffer more and enjoy less in his own interpretations

After all, the first target of a strategic influencer is to throw you into a vicious ‘Dilemma.’ As you doubt, you think more, and move steps closer to the trap. As you become more and more aware, any awareness definitely becomes ‘A Curse in Blessing’ for you.

No matter how many choices of paths you have, all may lead you to the fall. Falling may be the only destiny that your fate has ascertained at any stage of your life until you finally get blended into the vastness of the sea, where it makes you float and the current takes over. There is literally no energy left to fight or even struggle. This is your eternity.

But, there should be nothing ‘Right’ unless something is ‘Wrong;’ like an electron-proton pair. Were we told that ‘Wrong’ is what you are not supposed to do but they have the values in defining ‘Right?’ After all, the negatively charged electron is responsible for all the reactions in creations and destructions while the positively charged proton quietly remains in the nucleus, to influence the electron. Life is a mixture of appreciations and dislikes; love and hate. Nobody can deny it. Everything seems ‘Right’ until it goes ‘Wrong.

The most annoying truth of life is: “You don’t know the outcome until it has happened.” In every state of your life, it makes you think “What could you have done differently?” “What could have happened differently?” Is it really the way you wanted to live your life?

When you are really hurt, you can easily hurt someone. The tool called ‘Apology’ may not always work. So you tend to think that political correctness helps. But does it? It may force you to hide the darkest and brightest parts and make the world grey. So, the important parts of the palette will be missing from the society.

The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs about bad habits because it challenged the conventional association of unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness. If you’re overweight, a smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that it is because you lack self-control—maybe even that you’re a bad person. The idea that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply embedded in our culture. Recent research, however, shows something different. When scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control, it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

Another time, you might pull your child close—don’t delay, because most smokers start between the ages of eight and 14—and say, “See that nice young man over there with his collar up in the wind, smoking outside that building? They won’t let him smoke inside, because a lot of people don’t like smoke, and his family is probably worried that he might get sick someday—but forget all that. Here’s his real problem. Those cigarettes he’s become addicted to cost him $6 a day. By now, he’d probably like to quit smoking, but it’s very, very hard to quit once you start. So he gives the tobacco companies $6 a day and probably will for the rest of his life. But if he hadn’t gotten hooked, or could somehow quit, and put that $6 a day into a mutual fund at 7% instead, he’d have an extra $2 million by the time he’s Grandpa’s age.

The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.

If a lot of people are suffering because of a few people, why didn’t the majority do something about it a long time ago? Why’d everyone let it get so bad?” “If you drop a lobster in a pot of boiling water,” Zyrha tells him, “it’ll thrash around for its life.” “Wouldn’t we all?” Darrion smirks. “If you drop the lobster in a pot of cool water and slowly raise the temperature, it’ll die without a struggle. It’ll get used to the incremental increases until it’s too late to know it’s dead. You asked how we got here. The temperature had been rising in the Old States for a long time. People were dying left and right without a struggle. A few leaders had control over everything: money, power, the military, health care, schools, utilities, transportation, laws, courts, and the media. They had everything. Everything except the one thing every person in power needs.” “What’s that?” Darrion asks through a strained quiver. “An enemy.” “An enemy,” he repeats. “The question became which one. There were so many to choose from.” Zyrha claps her hands and gives a sarcastic laugh. “Black people. Brown people. Asians. Mexicans. Arabs. Women. The biracial. The multiracial. Old people. Young people. Short people. The overweight, the underweight, the sick, the helpless, the homeless, the unemployed. The asexual, the bisexual, the homosexual, the transgendered. People with special needs. The neurodivergent. Pot-smokers. Immigrants. Socialists. Communists. Atheists. Jews. Muslims. Intellectuals. Influencers. Athletes. Academics. Writers. Pacifists. Celebrities.” Zyrha pauses to draw in a long breath. “They were all contrived of course. They were invented enemies designed to occupy the amygdala—that’s the brain’s fear center—so the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for rational thought and good decision-making—wouldn’t take over. Anyway, there’d been a lot of manufactured enemies, and, frankly, they’d been done to death.

A 2008 study in Appetite found that the group of volunteers who tried not to think about eating ate more than the group who didn’t. The first group exhibited what is called a ‘behavioural rebound effect’. Similarly, a 2010 study in Psychological Science found that the group of smokers who tried not to think about smoking actually thought about it even more than the group who didn’t. This reminds me of a small piece of advice my driving instructor said to me when I was 18: ‘Steven, the car will go where your eyes are looking. If you want to avoid crashing into the cars on the side of the road, don’t focus on the cars on the side of the road, because you will veer towards the parked cars on the side of the road. Look forwards, into the distance, where you want the car to go.’ This seems like a fitting analogy for breaking and making habits: you will end up doing the thing you’re focusing on, so don’t focus on stopping smoking, don’t fight it; focus on the behaviour you want to replace it with.

nDear smokers, when you burn one stick you not only burn relationships but also burn your one and only life.

Dear smokers, when you burn one stick you not only burn relationships but also burn your one and only life.

Seventy-six for an American male was a number on an actuarial chart that includes men who are obese, smokers and inheritors of deadly family genes.

By a huge margin, AIDS gets more research money per patient than any other disease. Should those dying of other diseases blame their illnesses on this displacement of research funds? Should cigarette smokers who contract lung cancer blame their disease on those who failed to increase funds for cancer research? Since the necessity for self-justification requires the complicity of the whole culture, holdouts cannot be tolerated, because they are potential rebukes. The self-hatred, anger, and guilt that a person possessed of a functioning conscience would normally feel from doing wrong are redirected by the rationalization and projected upon society as a whole (if the society is healthy) or upon those in society who do not accept the rationalization. These latter are labeled homophobes, though it is they who become the objects of hatred. They are blamed for the misfortunes in homosexual life, which are no longer ascribable to the behavior that produces them, but to those who do not accept the behavior as moral, thus discomfiting its practitioners.

The law of cause and effect is a basic law of life. The Bible calls it the Law of Sowing and Reaping. “You reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit” (Gal. 6:7–8 NRSV). When God tells us that we will reap what we sow, he is not punishing us; he’s telling us how things really are. If you smoke cigarettes, you most likely will develop a smoker’s hack, and you may even get lung cancer. If you overspend, you most likely will get calls from creditors, and you may even go hungry because you have no money for food. On the other hand, if you eat right and exercise regularly, you may suffer from fewer colds and bouts with the flu. If you budget wisely, you will have money for the bill collectors and for the grocery store.

Trade and commerce and common sense and common decency prevailed, and men and women availed themselves of all opportunities. New roads were laid; office blocks shot up. And luxury flats stood on crumbling slums like shining false teeth on rotten gums. At the top of the building, whose ground floor is occupied by the restaurant, there is a secret garden. It was planted by the two women who share the garret, where the ceilings are slanted and dormer windows jut out. Outside the windows is a ledge, where the roof meets the exterior wall. The windows are large enough to climb through and it is possible to stand on the ledge. The woman called Tabitha discovered this. She is an intermittent smoker and the other woman, Precious, won’t allow her to smoke inside. Tabitha found that, along the ledge, there are steps and, if you climb the short flight, you come to a flat terrace, sheltered by the adjacent slanting roofs but exposed enough to trap the midday sun. Precious and Tabitha have filled the space with life. It began with a cheap chilli plant Precious picked up from the supermarket. The chillies did better than expected and Precious bought others, then the generic herbs of a kitchen garden: parsley, rosemary, chives. She bought a rose and ornamental grasses.

used to call their moveable gathering . “Come to the Covenant, you’re welcome, brother.” I mean, Jesus Christ, I don’t know how important this is in their terms, but if I’m asked to go, I’ll go. Quite honestly you couldn’t see a thing, the place would be covered in smoke. They used to smoke the chalice, a coconut with a huge earthenware jar on top and about half a pound of weed in it and a rubber pipe coming out the end. It was a question of who could smoke more than anybody else. The daring chaps would fill the coconut with white rum like a hubbly bubbly and smoke it through the rum. You set the earthenware container ablaze, bursting into flames with clouds of smoke. “Fire burn, Jah wonderful!” Who was I to defy local custom? OK, I’ll try and hang in here. This is powerful weed. Funnily enough, I never flaked out. That’s why I think I impressed them. I was a smoker for quite a few years before that, but never that amount. It was just like a dare, in a way. You know, watch whitey fall to the floor. And I was telling myself, not gonna go to the floor, not gonna go to the floor.

Drinkers at social events will tell you they don’t need to drink. But, when the next bit of anxiety comes up, they grab another glass. Smokers will tell you they enjoy lighting up. They’ll tell you they feel better right after a cigarette. And nearly all of them will tell you they really want to quit—they’re just not quite ready yet. Workaholics will tell you they enjoy what they do, or at least feel a sense of purpose, while stretching themselves to the breaking point. They’ll tell you they have to do it. Some will even admit that it makes them feel important. They’ll promise to get control of their schedules… as soon as the next project is done. Compulsive shoppers love to hit the stores. They call it “stress management” or “retail therapy.” For a few hours, they’ll say, everything is perfect. After they get the goodies home, though, some will tell you they feel empty or even disgusted. They’d love a simpler life—but only if they first can buy the best of everything. People who misuse prescription drugs will tell you the pills ease their pain. The pain from a surgery or disease was so extreme that they got prescribed a medication, and soon they had to take more and more to keep the pain away. They’ll say they hate being constantly constipated and forgetting where they are, but it’s the only way they believe they can function and feel normal.

A friend from Boston wrote something to me last week about not having the intelligence to take as subject for his poems anything other than his own life.

Never having been a smoker in my life, I want a cigarette, just for the sense of occupation it would lend to my tongue and my lips, just for the feeling of transgression

In the pursuit of your life, you will soon start to undergo both sweet and sour experiences. So your life enters into music, novels, movies, and drama. All these will let you feel that you, your imagination, and your sentiments fit somewhere in the vastness of this world and its dwellers. These are preparatory training for making you suit in a role of the ‘Reality Drama’ called ‘Life’.

The Smoker would like to call the diplomats, policy-makers, advocates and conspirators as strategic influencers or simply strategists. Without them, the human race definitely would sink but at the same time they put extreme doubts in the minds of ordinary people that they feel sick even without infection.

Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, "No thanks. I'm trying to quit." It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs. The second person declines by saying, "No thanks. I'm not a smoker." It's a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.

Let’s look at a passage from Atomic Habits, by James Clear: “Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the first person says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs. The second person declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.

- Can you keep secrets? - Yesss. - We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam. - Realllllly? - This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people. - I am from Buenos Airessss. - I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses. - There are Jewish people in Argentina too. - I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand? - I guessss. - There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand? - Yessss. - I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess? - Not really. - OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand? - Yesss. - As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand? - Yes. Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand? - Yes. But why? - Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now? - Yessss. - We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret. - I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)

It seemed as if doggystyle was her favorite position because she couldn't see who was behind her. She kept playing Snoop Dogg's song, “What's My Name?”. It seemed as if she was referring to my signature being forged and still being on the club and she knew perfectly. As if she was referring to all the dogs eager to breed in the video running after something after someone had let them out. As Snoop Dogg is magically transforming into a Doberman dog in the music video, just like the kind of dogs the Nazis had. I just realize Martina’s dog, Chicha was all black and her cat Anouki was all black too, just like the night Sky, just like the dark, empty, cold Space. The total darkness the canvas, on which our planet is just a pinhead. This rock. This sizzling rock. Spinning. Turning. Leaning. Following the Sun. Lost in the infinite nothingness. Ain’t like a balloon which has nothing inside. All the nothing is outside, all the cold and dark and wide and empty and vile. All the dark forces all the nights, all the known universe and beyond, is located here, inside. Iron comes from Outer Space, it is not a local material on this planet. Each one of us has iron inside a “kickstart-molecule” located in our hearts. Without iron, there would be no life. Are we locals on this planet? To what degree? Since when? I noticed three members of the Camorra in our street and the street parallel to it, casually passing by. I even nodded to one or two of them, since we already knew each other from the club where I hadn't been since Adam and I had our disagreement. Later that night, while I was waiting for Martina in vain, I noticed two to three of the Camorra's soldiers living a few houses down our street. From the rooftop, and our bedroom that was higher than theirs, I could see into their living room. I couldn't help but wonder whether this was a mere coincidence, or if Adam and Martina had found our new home together, hanging out in Nico’s store, and so we moved on the Mountain of Jews, on purpose, perhaps, knowing that the Camorra’s men were living almost right in front of us. No accidents. When I told Martina about the Camorra’s guys living across the street, Martina couldn’t have cared less. It was almost as if she never considered her life being in danger in Barcelona, Europe, but only mine. I had felt before like Adam had used my skin to make money, while I was the one walking around the streets, spotting tourists usually having fun, not thinking about how I was working hard to make their “unreachable” happiness come true. This time, however, I felt both stuck in our home, feeling helpless to make Martina happy and the outside world offered her much better chances to have fun and find a rich guy or any other smoker club manager with her beauty.

- Can you keep secrets? - Yesss. - We are going to make one of the biggest coffeeshops in Barcelona with my boss, Adam. - Realllllly? - This Adam guy is kind of my friend and kind of my boss, but I don't trust him; he is a bad guy. “Bad to the bone.” His father is an even darker figure. I am pretty sure that both have killed before, hired to kill people. - I am from Buenos Airessss. - I understand honey but you don’t know this kind of people, these f…g desert roses. - There are Jewish people in Argentina too. - I am sure, baby, but these are not regular Jewish people, not regular Israeli people. These people are dark. Hocus-pocus. Criminal minds. Do you understand? - I guessss. - There are a lot of criminals in this town. They will try to take our club away, just like the Camorra is taking away other people's clubs. Just like that. Do you understand? - Yessss. - I know them; they are one of my clients. If there is anyone in the world who could make a deal with them, it would be me and Adam. He cannot cross me and I cannot cross him either. I would never do that. I am not sure about him though what is on his mind, I can tell there is something he is orchestrating I just don’t know what exactly, but he is as fishy as Sabrina. The problem is that only my ex-girlfriend knows about my signature on the non-profit organization, which is the base of the coffeeshop, the marijuana grow and the smoker club. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - We are talking about millions of Euros monthly cashflow. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - By telling you everything now, you are becoming my trusted; your life is in danger too if they manage to find a gap between us. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - I'm not sure what they're up to. They owe me already more money than anyone in this town would murder for. Do you understand? - Yesssss. - Now you know about it, too. Sabrina didn't care; she didn't think I would make it happen. She doesn’t know about the place. Only you know about it and us. But she will figure it out somehow; she will try to take your position, slipping between the criminals. Do you know how to play chess? - Not really. - OK then. Imagine this as a throne, these chairs you are sitting on top of. OK. No one can remove you from this throne being my girlfriend, no one can stand between us. No one can take the club away from us. They have no chance. Understand? - Yesss. - As long as you stick with me, she cannot do anything; no one can mess with us. Do you understand? - Yesss. - Everyone in the world would try to take your place, being my girlfriend, and they will try to push you out from this position, which only me I can give you, with Love. They will tell you lies about me and about themselves who’s club is it. Do you understand? - Yes. But why? - Because Rachel and Tom, the other two founding members of the club, Golan, I signed up with, are Adam's puppets. I don't trust any one of them. If they kill me, they never have to pay me what they owe me already, plus they can keep the 33% of the club which belongs to me. 100% Adam would keep. Do you understand now? - Yessss. - We will pull all the trash out and remodel the place without any permit, under the rug, in secret. - I sssseeee. (Eye. See.)

Of course, Adam was still counting days the old way, as Sunday was the first day of the week, so he was misinforming me as to which day his father actually arrived in Spain, seemingly by accident, by mistake. Perhaps it was a mistake that Adam had confused the European calendar with the Israeli calendar from time to time; perhaps it was not a mistake. Ferran actually arrived the following day, Tuesday, according to the Gregorian calendar and not Monday, when we had all been preparing for his arrival with Martina in vain. I had wanted to introduce her to the old man nicely. However, Tuesday, when he was scheduled to arrive, Mario Larese - Mister Twister - showed up, banging the glass of the store-front door, echoing throughout the entire store and upstairs apartment, as if he was about to break the glass if I did not go down to open it. He was knocking on the plain, large glass of the door with either a lighter or with his metal ring; I don't know which, but it was terrible. I knew Ferran could arrive at any moment, so I told Martina it might be best if she went home to Paola and let me take care of the business. I couldn't ignore Mario, who was almost breaking the glass, seemingly because he had seen my scooter parked in front of the store. I opened the door and he started pushing his way inside, saying, “Let's smoke a joint and drink a coffee.” I replied, “Slow down, cowboy. I've got company, I'm expecting more company, and I just woke up. I have no time now; sorry, Mario.” He kept banging the door because he wanted to smoke somewhere early in the morning, and Canale Vuo was still closed. I was so tempted to slap him. Unintentionally, I let slip that I was expecting Ferran, which only increased his refusal to leave. Theatrical. Dramatic. He wasn't going to get out of my store, my way, my day, my life, my struggle, or my schedule. Meanwhile, the same time, Nico was bugging me on the phone to make sure I delivered a box of 1,000 cones for La Silla because they needed it to make pre-rolled joints for their smokers. They sold 2-3,000 pre-rolled joints a week, ordering two boxes weekly, thus making me waste my time for free. I started to think it had all been planned just to make me lose time every week. They sold 3,000 joints a week and yet couldn't afford more than two boxes of cones to purchase to keep up. Tuesday morning was so urgent for La Silla to get those 1,000 brown cones right then. Just for Nico's 5-euro commission and so he wouldn't be embarrassed in front of his friends at La Silla with his sales performance - no problem. I couldn't kick out Mario, and I didn't want to kick out Martina, who apparently didn't want to leave. I asked them to leave, but Mario was leaning on the kitchen table and unable to look up or turn toward me to meet my gaze. Martina was looking at me angrily. So, I told them both, “OK then, stay here; let the old man inside once he arrives. I have to deliver this box of cones to La Silla right away, but I will be right back. 20 minutes tops.” Adam had also failed to inform me that he had copied a set of keys for his dad at one point, and he had somehow sent them to Israel by mail, I guess. Martina did not need to stay in the store to let Ferran in, but I did not know that. Adam was always secretive and brief with his words, as if it cost him money to say words out of his mouth or dictate to Rachel what to write in an email or what he was supposed to tell me on the phone. I thought that Martina had to stay to let Ferran into the store in case he arrived just when I went to La Mesa to do a favor for Nico. I was on my way back to Urgell from La Silla, when Adam suddenly called me from Amsterdam, screaming on the phone.

As Hippocrates would have predicted, scores of other studies on the effects of physical activity on morbidity and mortality yield similar results.61 That doesn’t mean, however, that physical activity is a surefire Fountain of Youth, and remember it doesn’t delay mortality by preventing aging per se. Instead, physical activity triggers a suite of mechanisms that increase the chances of staying healthy with age by retarding senescence and preventing many chronic diseases that contribute over time to mortality. This logic raises three vitally important insights that help explain the Donald Trumps of the world who don’t die young in spite of being sedentary and overweight. First, and most fundamentally, the mortality and morbidity statistics I have been citing are probabilities. Eating sensibly and exercising don’t guarantee long life and good health; they just decrease the risk of getting sick. By the same token, smokers have a higher risk of getting lung cancer, and individuals who are unfit or obese are more likely to get heart disease or become diabetic, but plenty don’t. Second, advances in medical care are shifting the relationship between morbidity and mortality.62 Conditions like diabetes, heart disease, and some cancers are no longer imminent death sentences but instead can be treated or held at bay for years with drugs that maintain blood sugar levels, decrease harmful cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, and combat mutant cells. In Donald Trump’s case, for example, his reportedly normal blood pressure and cholesterol levels likely reflect the medications he takes to lower these risk factors.63

Sometimes, back when I was a pot smoker, this awful thing would happen. I would be in a social situation, a party, dinner, or just hanging out with friends, and suddenly all of the embedded social dynamics would be exposed to me, like a sheet stripped off of a stained mattress. All the unspoken desires, motives, resentments, and insecurities of everyone in the room would be revealed, on their faces, in their movements and words, emanating from them like body heat. I would tell myself that I was just paranoid, but I wasn’t; I knew that what I was seeing was real and was always there, and it filled me with terrible sorrow. Everyone was so afraid, so needy.

I'm a bartender. How can I stop when surrounded by smoke and smokers at every turn?" I recall attempts where I hoped smoking friends would be supportive in not smoking around me, and not leave their packs lying around to tempt me. While most tried, it usually wasn't long before they forgot. I recall thinking them insensitive and uncaring. I recall grinding disappointment and intense brain chatter, that more than once seized upon frustrated support expectations as this addict's excuse for relapse. Instead of expecting them to change their world for me, the smart move would have been for me to want to extinguish my brain's subconscious feeding cues related to being around them and their addiction. The smart move would have been to take back my world, or as much of it as I wanted. As I sit here typing in this room, around me are a number of packs of cigarettes: Camel, Salem, Marlboro Lights and Virginia Slims. I use them during presentations and have had cigarettes within arms reach for years. Don't misconstrue this. It is not a smart move for someone struggling in early recovery to keep cigarettes on hand. But if a family member or best friend smokes or uses tobacco, or our place of employment sells tobacco or allows smoking around us, we have no choice but to work toward extinguishing tobacco product, smoke and smoker cues almost immediately. And we can do it! Millions of comfortable ex-users handle and sell tobacco products as part of their job. You may find this difficult to believe, but I've never craved or wanted to smoke any of the cigarettes that surround me, even when holding packs or handling individual cigarettes during presentations. Worldwide, millions of ex-smokers successfully navigated recovery while working in smoke filled nightclubs, restaurants, bowling alleys, casinos, convenience stores and other businesses historically linked to smoking. And millions broke free while their spouse, partner or best friend smoked like a chimney. Instead of fighting or hiding from the world, take it back. Why allow our circumstances to wear us down? Small steps, just one moment at a time, embrace challenge. Extinguish use cues and claim your prize once you do, another slice of a nicotine-free life. Recovery is about taking back life. Why fear it? Instead, savor and relish reclaiming it. Maybe I'll have a crave tomorrow. But it's been so many years (since 2001) that I'm not sure I'd recognize it. Why fear our circumstances when we can embrace them? They cannot

The goal of the magician, particularly the chaos magician, is to position his or her life so that it responds positively to volatility rather than negatively. Volatility should make your life better, not worse, just as the thousands of microtears in your muscles during weight training lead to larger biceps. Be the bicep, not the teacup! It’s easier than it sounds, and it gets easier the further you stray from society’s recommended life. As for those who do not consider themselves risk takers, this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of both risk and their own personalities. The appetite for risk exists on a spectrum, it is not binary. You may be so comfortable taking certain risks that you do not consider them risks at all, like smokers at the airport worrying about their flight, or patrons expressing concern over terrorism in the pub before driving home drunk. The other side of this inability to see risks you are comfortable with as inherently risky is the propensity to see risks that make you uncomfortable as much riskier than they are.

Extremely Vivid Dreams of Smoking/Using Stay prepared for dynamic dreams of smoking or using tobacco products. They may be so vivid and so real that you'll awaken totally convinced that you've relapsed to using. Such dreams are normal, expected and are often a sign of physical healing. And it isn't unusual to experience more than one. Picture a horizontal body in which mouth, throat and lung tissues suddenly begin healing and re-sensitizing after years of being marinated in toxin rich tobacco tars. Picture the sweeper brooms lining the smoker's lung bronchial tubes (their cilia) quickly regenerating and beginning to sweep mucus and tars up to the back of their throat. Now throw in a rapidly healing sense taste and smell, a horizontal sleeping body and dreaming. Presto! The tobacco smells and tastes you'll experience are probably real. What better proof could we possibly feel and sense of the amazing healing happening within? The dream that seems to cause the most concern is the one that happens later in recovery, weeks or even months after full acceptance that this time is for keeps. Although nearly always described as a "nightmare," they are sometimes mistaken by the ex-user as a sign that they want to start using again. It's here that we point out the obvious conflict. If a nightmare and not real, then why would any rational person want to invite their nightmare to become a real and destructive part of daily life? As Joel notes, seeing smoking as a nightmare is a healthy sign. And as for having smoking dreams long after ending use, such dreams are normal, yet not nearly as vivid as during the first week or so. We can no more erase from our mind our thousands of old nicotine use memories than we can our name. They reflect who we once were. What's amazing is that they happen so infrequently. Bad Days Ex-users should expect to experience bad days. Why? Because everyone has them, including never-users. But when a bad day occurs early in recovery it can become ammunition inside the challenged addict's mind as it searches for any excuse to use. Blaming a bad day on recovery would never have crossed our mind if it had occurred the week before ending nicotine use. But now, nicotine's absence becomes a magnet for blame. Would it ever occur to a never-user to reach for nicotine if having a bad day? It's a thought process peculiar to us nicotine addicts. As Joel teaches, if the bad day happens during the first week after ending nicotine use then feel free to blame recovery as "it is probably the reason." "But as time marches on you need to be a little more discriminating." Acknowledge bad days but allow your healing to live. "Sure there are some tough times," writes Joel, "but they pass and at the end of the day, you can still be free." Staying free means that, "in the greater scheme of things, it was a good day." If you want to hear about a horrible day, talk to someone

Alain de Botton: And there are areas like self-confidence, you know the placebo effect, there is this capacity to give people confidence, they didn’t know they had. How does that work, how can you make someone more confident? Derren Brown: I think stories are very interesting in life and very important in life. And if you go and see a film and it says at the beginning: “based on a true story” you know when you see those words that what you are going to see is not a perfect telling of the events that happened; you’re going to see a neatened version with a beginning, middle and an end. Perhaps some characters might sort of conflated into one and there will be a clear hero and the rest of it, so you have the natural sort of scepticism that comes into play. Likewise if somebody tells you a story of what happened the other night or an argument they got into or some outrageous behaviour … you know there’s another side to that story. You apply a natural sort of scepticism. We very rarely think of applying the same scepticism to ourselves and the stories that we tell ourselves about our own lives, which of course are the most important stories that we have. And I did a program on placebo where we set up a whole elaborate thing to make people think they were getting a super drug that would do various things depending on the group they’re in, so there was one group, they were told “removes the experience of fear” and so the other group was told that it would stop them smoking and so on. And it was really interesting to me, because what it became clear is that irrespective of what group it is whether it’s about smoking or people with terrible crippling anxieties, or allergies - was another one that responded very well to it- that these things are really tied in with the stories we tell ourselves and if you give yourself permission or sometimes, it’s easier if someone gives you permission, to just change the story, to act out of character, to act as if the thing is no longer a problem, it’s a very simple shift, and with that the people that give up smoking in an instant, and never go back to it, never have any trouble with it, other people decide I am gonna be a non-smoker, so they change their story, they change that sort of identity, that label as opposed to “alright I must not smoke, I must try not to smoke” which of course is stressful and you fail, you give up and when you do eventually have one they are “I failed, it’s all gone wrong. ” Magic is about stories we tell ourselves.

The most notable thing about the show in all its forms was the commercial. Since 1933, when the first “Calllll for Philip Mor-raisss!” spot went over the air, millions of cigarettes had been sold by a four-foot midget with an uncanny ability to hit a perfect B-flat every time. Johnny Roventini was a $15-a-week bellhop at the Hotel New Yorker when a chance encounter changed his life. Milton Biow, head of the agency handling the Philip Morris account, arrived at the hotel, saw Roventini, and had a stroke of pure advertising genius. Roventini was auditioned there in the hotel lobby: under Biow’s direction, he walked through the hotel paging Philip Morris, and he was soon in show business at $20,000 a year. As the brilliance of the ads became apparent to all, he was given a lifetime contract that was still in effect decades after the last “call” for Philip Morris left the air. He was a walking public relations campaign, reminding people of the product wherever he appeared. “Johnny” ads were prominent on billboards and in magazines. Always in his red bellhop’s uniform, he was “stepping out of storefronts all over America” to remind smokers that they got “no cigarette hangover” with Philip Morris. When MGM’s Leo the Lion died, it was said that Roventini was the only remaining living trademark.

It is important to note that though the process of habit change is easily described, it does not necessarily follow that it is easily accomplished. It is facile to imply that smoking, alcoholism, overeating, or other ingrained patterns can be upended without real effort. Genuine change requires work and self-understanding of the cravings driving behaviors. Changing any habit requires determination. No one will quit smoking cigarettes simply because they sketch a habit loop. However, by understanding habits’ mechanisms, we gain insights that make new behaviors easier to grasp. Anyone struggling with addiction or destructive behaviors can benefit from help from many quarters, including trained therapists, physicians, social workers, and clergy. Even professionals in those fields, though, agree that most alcoholics, smokers, and other people struggling with problematic behaviors quit on their own, away from formal treatment settings. Much of the time, those changes are accomplished because people examine the cues, cravings, and rewards that drive their behaviors and then find ways to replace their self-destructive routines with healthier alternatives, even if they aren’t fully aware of what they are doing at the time. Understanding the cues and cravings driving your habits won’t make them suddenly disappear—but it will give you a way to plan how to change the pattern.

He placed a cigarette in his mouth and sat down at his regular spot over in the white gazebo, where all the smokers were supposed to do their dirty business. He patted his pockets, searching for a lighter. Nothing. He’d forgotten to bring it. But it wasn’t his fault. He was expected to forget everything because he was the lucky recipient of life’s final going-away present, that red velvet, chocolate-covered cake of wonderfulness that the doctors liked to call Alzheimer’s. With Alzheimer’s, suddenly nothing was his fault anymore. No fault. No blame. No choice. No freedom.

want to see for yourself. Further, nicotine acts quickly. In an hour it has left your body, so the craving for a cigarette happens almost immediately. This leads to chain smoking and panic when a smoker doesn’t have cigarettes. Alcohol, however, takes between 72 and 240 hours to leave your body.

The harmful effects of smoking are roughly equivalent to the combined good ones of every medical intervention developed since the war. Those who smoke, in other words, now have the same life expectancy as if they were non-smokers without access to any health care developed in the last half-century. Getting rid of smoking provides more benefit than being able to cure people of every possible type of cancer.

Usually the assassination was a suicide attack, as his targets’ guards generally either killed assassins immediately or captured and then tortured them to death. But some managed to escape and return to the lands around Alamut, where they were invited to live a blessed life of paradise on Earth, meaning ample supplies of drugs and sex. It is from this practice of using hashish that they supposedly acquired their name of hashshashin, users or smokers of hashish. It is debatable how much hashish was consumed, and this may merely have been an insult hurled by their enemies to explain their addled thinking. Whether or not it was true, the term took on a new connotation in the West and became the modern word assassin.

For a moment of nearly five seconds Nemed had wanted to correct, to interject with the boasting recitation of a child who has just learned something interesting about the subject at hand and wants to amaze the adults; he had wanted to tell Emer that the Inrisus were not magical or truly evil, and that their medicine was amazing. The tablet suggested that the Inrisus were entirely made of tumor cells; long ago, blue historians believed, the Inrisus had conquered cancer and found a way to separate its resilience to radiation and chemical attack from its malignancy, producing cells both immortal and functional. Their brains and hearts and other parts would keep showing up on medical scans, like blotches in a smoker’s lungs. Carcinogens simply made an Inrisus pregnant. But then Nemed realized that Emer was wearing beaver hide, that no part of his costume even had a zipper; he might not even know what cancer was. He wouldn’t know that it could be treated with radiation or chemicals; he wouldn’t appreciate the Inrisus and their ability to turn cancer into eternal life. He would probably call it necromancy, or a form of vampirism, stealing the life of an unborn infant because that was supposed to be the only way to live forever in the old stories of the Folk. I think less of him, Nemed realized. Him, and the others.

This was fine with Katrina Vross, a weary, short, baggy-eyed chain-smoker with the put-upon air of many Russian bureaucrats whose attitude suggested that any question you might ask was a major imposition on their time, a reflection of your own stupidity, and a confirmation that life was an endless series of debilitating repetitions.

If you don't receive love from the ones who are meant to love you, you will never stop looking for it, like an amputee who never stops missing his leg, like the ex-smoker who wants a cigarette after lunch fifteen years later. It sounds trite. It's true. You will look for it in objects that you buy without want. You will look for it in faces you do not desire. You will look for it in expensive hotel rooms... You will look for it in shopgirls and the kind of sad and splendid men who sell you clothing. You will look for it. And you will never find it. You will not find a trace.

My Aphrodisiac" Now that you are gone, I want to tell you, you are wrong. About everything. Consider perspective as a case in point. You loved to inform me that far-away things appear smaller. I am here to tell you that distant things grow bigger. Missing objects are the largest of all. Their shadows can loom above us and darken an entire universe. In a single instant, they build cities of memory without a misplaced word. I know this for a fact. At a certain point in a life, an absence begins to grow. Your shadow, for example, is now drifting across my sheets and ceilings. Just the other night, you were standing behind me in the mirror and in the department store windows and on the subway and at Arabica’s coffee shop, and when I stared at my eyes to apply mascara, I glimpsed you in the dark glow of my pupils. In desperation, I called to a man walking beneath my window on a summer night, and he became you, answering my call with a grin, opening the door to my apartment with his sleeves rolled up to your elbows, your cold smoker’s fingers. Instantly I caught a whiff of his fragrance, inhaled him as deeply as a summer rose. Such a scent! Call it bliss, eternity, oblivion, seventh heaven, the names of a thousand and one perfumes, the scent of a man in heat. Oh yes, men are in heat, everywhere. Now that you are gone. Nin Andrews, The Prose Poem: An International Journal (Vol. 8, 1999)

The first step is the same for all of us: put down the cigarette, or your preferred nicotine-based weapon of choice. The next step, and the one after, and the one after that, for as long as it takes for the veil of illusion to lift – and lift it will, I promise you, if you give time time – is a walk in the park, compared to your life as a smoker. Just keep on walking. Trust yourself. Trust the process. Trust anything, but the lies your nicotine addiction is telling you.

If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and relax—makes it more likely they will quit. If you identify the cues and rewards, you can change the routine.

If you want to quit smoking, figure out a different routine that will satisfy the cravings filled by cigarettes. Then, find a support group, a collection of other former smokers, or a community that will help you believe you can stay away from nicotine, and use that group when you feel you might stumble.

1 The line separating habits and addictions is often difficult to measure. For instance, the American Society of Addiction Medicine defines addiction as “a primary, chronic disease of brain reward, motivation, memory and related circuitry….Addiction is characterized by impairment in behavioral control, craving, inability to consistently abstain, and diminished relationships.” By that definition, some researchers note, it is difficult to determine why spending fifty dollars a week on cocaine is bad, but fifty dollars a week on coffee is okay. Someone who craves a latte every afternoon may seem clinically addicted to an observer who thinks five dollars for coffee demonstrates an “impairment in behavioral control.” Is someone who would prefer running to having breakfast with his kids addicted to exercise? In general, say many researchers, while addiction is complicated and still poorly understood, many of the behaviors that we associate with it are often driven by habit. Some substances, such as drugs, cigarettes, or alcohol, can create physical dependencies. But these physical cravings often fade quickly after use is discontinued. A physical addiction to nicotine, for instance, lasts only as long as the chemical is in a smoker’s bloodstream—about one hundred hours after the last cigarette. Many of the lingering urges that we think of as nicotine’s addictive twinges are really behavioral habits asserting themselves—we crave a cigarette at breakfast a month later not because we physically need it, but because we remember so fondly the rush it once provided each morning. Attacking the behaviors we think of as addictions by modifying the habits surrounding them has been shown, in clinical studies, to be one of the most effective modes of treatment. (Though it is worth noting that some chemicals, such as opiates, can cause prolonged physical addictions, and some studies indicate that a small group of people seem predisposed to seek out addictive chemicals, regardless of behavioral interventions. The number of chemicals that cause long-term physical addictions, however, is relatively small, and the number of predisposed addicts is estimated to be much less than the number of alcoholics and addicts seeking help.) *

If you want to stop smoking, ask yourself, do you do it because you love nicotine, or because it provides a burst of stimulation, a structure to your day, a way to socialize? If you smoke because you need stimulation, studies indicate that some caffeine in the afternoon can increase the odds you’ll quit. More than three dozen studies of former smokers have found that identifying the cues and rewards they associate with cigarettes, and then choosing new routines that provide similar payoffs—a piece of Nicorette, a quick series of push-ups, or simply taking a few minutes to stretch and relax—makes it more likely they will quit.

Ultimately and obviously, the question of how much is too much becomes a personal decision, just as we all decide as adults what level of alcohol, caffeine, or cigarettes we’ll ingest. I’ve argued here that enough evidence exists for us to consider sugar very likely to be a toxic substance, and to make an informed decision about how best to balance the likely risks with the benefits. To know what those benefits are, though, it helps to see how life feels without sugar. Former cigarette smokers (of which I am one) will tell you that it was impossible for them to grasp intellectually or emotionally what life would be like without cigarettes until they quit; that through weeks or months or even years, it was a constant struggle. Then, one day, they reached a point at which they couldn’t imagine smoking a cigarette and couldn’t imagine why they had ever smoked, let alone found it desirable. A similar experience is likely to be true of sugar—but until we try to live without it, until we try to sustain that effort for more than days, or just a few weeks, we’ll never know.

In October 1949, less than two years after the trial began, Doll stopped smoking. He was thirty-seven, and had been a smoker his entire adult life. He and Hill had discovered that heavy smoking of cigarettes didn’t just double the risk of lung cancer, or triple the risk, or even quadruple the risk. It made you sixteen times more likely to get lung cancer.

These experiments ceased abruptly as far as Picasso was concerned: not only was there the threat of entering the creative artist’s hell forever, but one day the inhabitants of the Bateau-Lavoir found poor Wiegels dead, hanging by the neck from a beam in his studio: opium, said some, ether-drinking, hashish, said others. Picasso was appalled, and one of the reasons for his decision to spend his summer in the uncongenial damp, fungus-smelling north French country was the crippling depression that came down on him after this suicide. Another was his health, a source of constant worry all his life. He smoked far too much, at first a pipe and then Gauloises for the rest of his days, and in the mornings he had a smoker’s cough: he was persuaded that this was the onset of consumption, and when one night his coughing broke a small blood-vessel so that he spat red, the mortal disease became a certainty—he was near his end. He was seized with panic, and André Salmon ran for a doctor, a nearby friend. The medical man inspected his patient, laughed, and said, “He is as sound as a bell.” Picasso did not believe him, and from that time onwards his diet grew more abstemious still and his apéritifs were replaced by mineral water, though he never abandoned either wine or tobacco.

when the ACE study data started to appear on his computer screen, he realized that they had stumbled upon the gravest and most costly public health issue in the United States: child abuse. He had calculated that its overall costs exceeded those of cancer or heart disease and that eradicating child abuse in America would reduce the overall rate of depression by more than half, alcoholism by two-thirds, and suicide, IV drug use, and domestic violence by three-quarters.20 It would also have a dramatic effect on workplace performance and vastly decrease the need for incarceration. When the surgeon general’s report on smoking and health was published in 1964, it unleashed a decades-long legal and medical campaign that has changed daily life and long-term health prospects for millions. The number of American smokers fell from 42 percent of adults in 1965 to 19 percent in 2010, and it is estimated that nearly 800,000 deaths from lung cancer were prevented between 1975 and 2000.21 The ACE study, however, has had no such effect. Follow-up studies and papers are still appearing around the world, but the day-to-day reality of children like Marilyn and the children in outpatient clinics and residential treatment centers around the country remains virtually the same. Only now they receive high doses of psychotropic agents, which makes them more tractable but which also impairs their ability to feel pleasure and curiosity, to grow and develop emotionally and intellectually, and to become contributing members of society.

Aggravation or stress kills—as do many other things in life, such as cigarettes. But stress is worse than cigarettes. Cigarettes at least give some pleasure before they cause the premature death of about one out of every three smokers. Aggravation, on the other hand, only provides pain and probably kills more people than cigarettes.

Stale beer sticks to wobbling tables. The cigarette machine flashes in the corner, mocking smokers who never have any change on them. There’s no natural light in this pub, so it’s dark and gloomy. The pain on the face of the staff tells its own story: overworked, underpaid, exploited and treated as expendable. I feel at home with them. They’re so scared they will be fired from their terrible jobs, every time I order a beer they ask me if I want any peanuts or crisps, in case between drinks I’ve turned into the dreaded mystery shopper. The air is chewy and weighs heavy on the skin. The fruit machines in the corners don’t make a sound, aware this is the last stop saloon for the drunk few who can’t afford to gamble properly. Everyone here is down to their last pint and pound.

There is a very good reason we have historically gotten drunk. It is no accident that, in the brutal competition of cultural groups from which civilizations emerged, it is the drinkers, smokers, and trippers who emerged triumphant. In all of the ways outlined above, intoxicants—above all alcohol—appear to have been the chemical tool that allowed humans to escape the limits imposed by our ape nature and create social insect–like levels of cooperation. We have seen that traditional views about the functional benefits of alcohol consumption find confirmation in modern science. By enhancing creativity, dampening stress, facilitating social contact, enhancing trust and bonding, forging group identity, and reinforcing social roles and hierarchy, intoxicants have played a crucial role in allowing hunting and gathering humans to enter into the hive life of agricultural villages, towns, and cities. This process has gradually scaled up the scope of human cooperation, eventually creating modern civilization as we know it.

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