Sagan = Smart Smoker

Found an interesting article: Mr. X by Carl Sagan. You don't even need to be high to appreciate it.

Hiatus? No, high-AM-us.*

Man, I am really bad at quitting - unless you count my blog-entry-writing habit. Since the last entry, things have been relatively boring. The dog-star of Canntabis - Boo - has healed up nicely and races around the park on three legs faster than ever. The other star of the blog - my drug habit - is also thriving, which is not exactly the direction I had hoped to go.

The winter months don't make it easy here in Michigan, either. I'm a diagnosed depressive, and the seasonal-affective aspect of that makes me less likely to give a crap about my bad habits, particularly if those habits alleviate depression. Thus the lack of posting for months - didn't care, didn't quit, not much to write about, and I don't like admitting that I still smoke on this blog. Now that the sun is back and I'm naturally happy enough to care about this stuff, I'm starting to wonder if it isn't time to try kicking the habit again. But, once the rhythm is going steady, it can be tricky to break the cycle.

The usual way things transpire is something like this:

1. smoke weed until sack is nearly gone
2. think about quitting again
3. for whatever reason (fate/coincidence/Providence/Satan-at-work?) end up in a position to obtain more weed
4. obtain said weed
5. go to Step 1

So it's back to the "contemplation" stage for me, apparently. I do tend to take a few "days off" the habit between sacks, partly due to resolve, partly due to the fact that dealers are typically not paragons of punctuality (see also Velvet Underground/Lou Reed "Waiting for my Man"). Of course, taking a few days off here and there is a good idea in general - can't get caught if you don't have anything, better for the lungs, and (from the pro-smoking side) tolerance goes down.

One of the things that makes me wonder if my habit is, in fact, a problem is that if I possess stuff to smoke, I'm going to smoke it nearly as often as possible until I end up at Step 1, above. Which means that unless I'm out of stuff to smoke, I don't take any days off if I can help it - and I can usually help it.

Last week my wife was out of town for a week. I worked from home, and worked on the home (I try to get a few home-improvement things done when the wife's gone - she is understandably less tolerant of the house being a mess for days at a time while things are in progress than I am). Also, I smoked medical-grade blueberry like it was my career. With an ample supply of smoke, and the ability to inhale it in my own home without fear of reprisal, I got a whole lot of fixing/cleaning/improving done.

The bitch of it is that the week turned into a shining example of how the habit seems to be good for me, which makes me less motivated to quit. It's probably just my system trying to justify the habit, but it's hard to ignore the positives when I'm happily working away in my newly-cleaned-for-the-first-time-in-months home office surrounded by a clean, and in some cases improved, house. Argh!

So, for the time being, I'm not smoking, though I am somewhere between steps 2 and 3 mentioned above (i.e. the wheels are in motion, and moving weed toward my possession). I haven't smoked in a few days, and I'll have to take a few days off toward the end of this week since I'll be flying out of town for the duration. I guess we'll see how long the cycle continues.

* Are the word-play titles getting old? Let me know if so, and I'll turn down the "clever" a notch or two...