Day Thirty Nine

Days Without a Cigarette: 38.5458333
Days Without Nicotine: 0
Dollars Saved: $119.16
Time Saved: 54 hours, 36 minutes

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that I miss being a smoker, but it also wouldn’t be accurate to say that I don’t.

I think I hit on the right analogy last night, but maybe you have to be the same kind of hateful bastard that I am for it to make any sense. Imagine that you’d worked the same job for a really long time and there’s a coworker that’s been there the whole time that you fucking hate. He’s just an embodiment of all the things that annoy you about a human, whatever those things might be. And to make the analogy work, he can’t just be annoying. He’s gotta be a genuinely bad person. Like, you’re pretty sure he hits his wife or something.

But you also gotta imagine that he likes you. As much as he annoys you, he never seems to pick up on the fact that you would rather play “edible or not” with the local wild-berries than talk to him, no matter how many times you turn down his invitations.

And now imagine he died. And since I made up a poor wife for this guy just so he could hit her, let’s imagine she gets a bunch of money in a wrongful death settlement. That isn’t part of the analogy exactly, I just felt bad for the theoretical wife and wanted things to end good for her.

Anyway, the point is that you wouldn’t miss the guy exactly. But once in a while you’d be sitting around the break room and you’d think to yourself, “Usually this is the point when Henry would come tell me a racist joke that I’d asked him to stop telling me”, and you’d be kinda sad. But also kinda relieved that he wasn’t there telling you a racist joke.

And like I said, maybe this analogy doesn’t work if you’re less misanthropic than myself. If you attach humanist values to all people, you should miss the asshole guy, and then the whole thing breaks down. But for me, smoking was a boorish, abusive asshole that wouldn’t leave me alone for thirty years. And I don’t not miss him.