Not Smoking One Day at a Time.

I smoked my last cigarette at 1:00 a.m. on 1 /1. No ceremony, no drama. Just a Camel Wide on my front porch after ringing in the new year at Cam and Meredith's, then off to bed. All done.

I've tried a few of the stop-smoking aids -- patches, inhalers, nasal spray, gum -- to no avail. The idea, of course, is to make an easier, softer way for addicts to go straight. Just gradually reduce your nicotine intake until you can't hear its siren song. It sure sounds easy.

Ask addicts whether they were successful weaning themselves from their drug of choice. Maybe suggest this gradual plan for alcoholics: start out drinking a case of beer. Switch to a 12-pack, and then a sixer, then a 40, then a tall boy and then just stop drinking altogether. That's a mere five steps -- a savings of seven steps.

Yeah, right.

For me, there's no safe level of nicotine; no easier, softer way to quit smoking. A little bit of nicotine makes me want more until I'm back at the gas station, getting my fix from the Marlboro man.

I started smoking 30 years ago last month when I wanted to freak out my Carolina roommate. Our relationship was simple: he smoked a lot and I complained a lot. Until one night, during a daiquiri party in our dorm room, I lit up a Salem 100 just for the shock value. Not that there's a smart reason to start smoking, I still say this one ranks among the dumbest.

I quit smoking for a couple of years, but I was dipping Copenhagen and Skoal instead. Smokeless tobacco cans tell you that, duh, it's not a safe alternative to smoking. They don't tell you that one pinch in your lower lip will give you a cigarette pack's worth of nicotine in about 20 minutes. When I quit dipping I was so nicotine-dependent that I started smoking two days later. I said that I was stressed out about buying our first house. I guess I picked a bad week to quit sniffing glue, too.

Dad quit smoking and then tried to convince me to quit. "Eric," he'd say, with dramatic intensity, "when my doctor said quit or die, it was the easiest decision I ever made." At that point he had already smoked for over 40 years, had two heart surgeries, and was well aware that smoking had killed his father at the age of 60. I laughed almost as hard as when he tried to give me marital advice a scant two days after his fourth divorce. But that was just Dad -- completely irony-impaired.

Then Mom died of COPD this year. For several years it had been an ordeal to walk from her bedroom to the kitchen where she would lean on her forearms over the sink, smoking and coughing, for hours. If you made her laugh you could send her on a two-minute coughing jag. After being released from the hospital she extended her life from May to October by not smoking. But she couldn't overcome 50 years of lung damage. Her alveoli couldn't expel enough carbon dioxide: it accumulated to toxic levels which caused lethargy, then confusion, extreme sleepiness, and death. Last Monday would have been her 72nd birthday. Her mother, who never smoked, lived without assistance until her late eighties when dementia took her. I'm reminded of a line by comedian John Mendoza: "They tell me that every cigarette takes seven minutes off my life. What am I gonna miss out on? Drooling?" I used to think that was funny.

I sometimes crave a cigarette. Not when I smell it, though, and only rarely after a meal. My strongest cravings come after I've completed a task, when my addict's mind tells me I deserve a reward. The power of that entitlement is what has made quitting so hard.

This morning, for example, I cleared away a lot of snow on Wallace, N. Congress and S. Congress. After two hours of shoveling and plowing I stood in my garage, admiring my snow-free driveway and sidewalks while my addict's brain screamed THAT'S SO EFFING AWESOME AND YOU'RE SO EFFING AWESOME, DUDE, YOU NEED TO LIGHT UP A BIG FAT CAMEL WIDE! NO, MAKE THAT TWO CAMEL WIDES! YOU HAVE REALLY EARNED THEM THIS TIME! NO, SERIOUSLY, YOU DESERVE A CIGARETTE! LET'S HOP IN THE CAR AND GO TO SEVEN ELEVEN! NOW! YOU CAN SMOKE ON THE WAY HOME, MAN! NO NEED TO WAIT! LET'S GOGOGO!

My hands reflexively patted my pocket and located my car keys.

So, I thought, what did I really do? Did I rescue a child from the jaws of a saltwater crocodile? Did I quench the flames of a blazing apartment building? No, I moved snow from the concrete to the grass. Because I choose to live in Michigan. Duh. And I don't even live in the Upper Peninsula, where clearing snow might actually affect whether people live or die. In fact, where I live there's an ordinance requiring me to clear my sidewalks within 48 hours of a snowfall, snowfalls which are small and infrequent by Great Lakes lake-effect snow standards. No, I decide, I'm not as effing awesome as this disease wants me to believe. I don't deserve anything. But I could use a drink of water.

And so the reptilian/addict brain and the evolved brain go at it like this for minutes at a time, many times a day, although I see fewer battles every day. The difference for me is that I know the addict brain is lying. It will say anything to get what it needs. I also know that I am separate from my thoughts, my feelings and my desires. I can watch them as though I'm sitting on the edge of the Huron and they're mere flotsam headed for the dam. I don't have to follow them -- especially when I know where they will lead. Lastly, I don't underestimate the power of addiction. I've seen what it can do.

My New Commitment

It's been several years since I signed up with Facebook. Back then, you needed an email address ending in "edu." My job at Michigan qualified me even though I didn't have anyone to talk to. But Facebook opened up to the world at large, which was a spectacularly popular idea.

Now, after several years of trying to keep up with friends through blogs and MySpace and LiveJournal and classmates.com and email, I have a critical mass of friends to connect with on Facebook. I suppose it helps that I'm using my real name (so people can find me) and my main email address (so people can contact me.) My desire for web anonymity crippled my MySpace experience; I see that now. But I also prefer the neat and clean appearance of Facebook. MySpace has democratized crappy web design -- ugly webpages for everybody! No disrespect to my MySpace friends, but there are a lot of pages out there that deserve a Surgeon General warning.

So far, so good. I'm hoping that by directing my online socializing to Facebook that I'll redouble my writing efforts on the blog. But you've seen me hope/promise/pledge/swear to write more before.

If you're comfortable using "friend" as a verb, look me up. And if you haven't joined Facebook, please consider doing so.

August 2, 1983: Auckland, NZ

The USS Texas (CGN-39) was escorting the USS Carl Vinson (CVN-70) from Virginia to California the long way around when we were pulled from the carrier group to wave the flag on a tour of the south Pacific. Tough job, that -- four ports in Australia, one in Tonga, and two in New Zealand. Meanwhile, the Vinson was frolicking in the Indian Ocean. But, hey, someone had to drink all that beer and dance all night to David Bowie, the Clash, and the Eurythmics.

But our visit to NZ, at least, seemed poorly timed, as the country was embroiled in a passionate debate about becoming a nuclear-free zone. Or, maybe the timing was deliberate by someone in the Reagan Administration who thought that having the Texas drop into Auckland and Wellington with two nuclear reactors and a bunch of we-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny nuclear weapons would convince the Kiwis that they should just relax because, you know, everybody likes a little nukie. If that was the plan, it failed miserably: we were the last nuclear ship, and possibly the last American warship, to visit New Zealand. And, by giving the anti-nuclear faction something tangible to rally against, I'll always wonder whether we unintentionally helped NZ to become nuclear-free.

We entered Auckland's harbor on August 2, with most off-duty sailors manning the rails, and were greeted by some two hundred small boats of all kinds protesting our visit. The largest boat, a launch, carried a man with a bullhorn who shouted, "We love you but not your ship! You are welcome, but your ship is not!" over and over. (The NZ Herald said that a member of Parliament was aboard the launch, but I don't know if he was the man with the bullhorn.) Police boats dashed frenetically around us, keeping most of the boats away.

As I stood on the starboard side of the fo'c'sle at parade rest, wondering if we were going to run over some impassioned protester in a rowboat, I saw a brown sphere maybe 8" in diameter pop up against the gunwale and then disappear. It popped up again, moved aft, and dropped out of sight. As it bobbed down the gunwale aftward toward me, I recognized it as the top of a sailing mast. The boat was just too close to our hull for me to see it. The newspaper called it "the dory Mahatma Gandhi"; days later a policeman, laughing, told me that the boat had lost sail and its owner was frantically pushing off our hull, trying to get out of the way.

The NZ Herald from August 3, 1983 ran the story and pictures of the "Conflict on the Harbour." (It's a large pdf.)

And then came Hiroshima Day....

Time was spent on other things.

I was going to apologize to my two or three readers for not posting regularly. I was. But then I'd be taking responsibility for my own actions (or inaction.) Instead, I'm going to model my post after President Bush's thoughtful words:

Where mistakes were made, the responsibility rests with me.

Man, you gotta love the power of that passive voice. Let me try it:

I have been settling into a new job and this here blog has been neglected.

Did you feel it too? It's as though something was about to land on my shoulders but, at the very last second, it dissipated into the ether. It's like a magical incantation, that passive voice.

In the civilian world, what I'm doing is called enterprise content management. In my department, Utilities & Plant Engineering, we call it "record integration" because some of the content I'm managing will be linked to the geographic information system (GIS) that my supervisor is building. I scan, I edit metadata, I write webpages, and I document the process. When we finish working on the records at the Central Power Plant, we'll roll out the process to other groups in Plant Engineering. I like it very much. It feels great to be working for a living organization that expects to grow. I even got to design the Utilities Record Integration logo, such as it is. The manager suggested I do something with the block-M utilities logo; I gave him several designs; he chose this one. Joy was felt.

Tomorrow, my supervisor will be giving a presentation on URI to a group of senior engineers and administrators. And (as soon as I finish it) he'll be able to to present a proof-of-concept project of mine -- a package of engineering drawings in TIFF that is searchable by metadata and linked with html. It's hardly revolutionary, but it's a demonstration of the kind of product we can deliver.

He also has to present our progress -- his progress, actually -- on GIS. I don't envy him because developing GIS takes a lot of time & effort, and upper echelons rarely like to hear why. But he's learning some pretty arcane shit that is in high demand in state & local government and utility companies. Those places have GIS departments, not just a GIS guy doing ojt.

We joke about building an information infrastructure one brick at a time. Sometimes it seems like one handful of mud and another of straw at a time, but we'll get there.

Now, if I can only convince them to hire me permanently. Or rather, when hiring occurs I would like to be the object of that sentence.