Good News/Bad News

I fucked up.  It was bound to happen.  I just finished a really stressful week.  I was on the road almost all week.  I was driving home last night and I was really tired and stressed.

So I started thinking … I’m an adult.  I should be happy.  If I’m stressed, is it so bad if I have a cigarette every now and then?  Of course, I concluded no and stopped at the next rest stop to buy a pack of cigarettes.  As I stood in line to buy them, for the first time in six months, I was depressed and defiant.  Part of me felt like a loser, and the rest of me felt like: ‘fuck it, I’ve earned it’.  I got over, got outside, and on the road again.

As I put a cigarette in my mouth, it felt really weird.  Oddly smaller and quite more foreign than I remembered.  I lit it and took a pull.  The smoke came slower and rougher than I remembered. I didn’t cough; I’m not a douche after all .  It really made me feel like … this:

I felt exactly like a monkey smoking.

It was gross, it didn’t feel right.  Honestly, I don’t know how I ever did it in the first place.  The fact that I felt sick to my stomach for an hour afterwards only added to this.  Blech.

So the news is:

1. I’m a fuck-up.  But we knew that.

2. I had a cigarette

3. It was nasty.

And all of this got me to thinking about the way that we can idealize things in our minds.  It insane.  I’ve spent six months being intermittently miserable because I missed smoking … and it’s really, really gross and stupid.  How much of the pain that we have, the things that we yearn for, how many of those things would we actually want if we got them?