Mar 01 2007
Goodbye to a Camel
There was some consternation during last weekend. One doctor claimed I had pneumonia and another diagnosed influenza. Both of them agreed with me that I could hardly breathe so an ambulance was ordered.
The medic measured blood/oxygen saturation levels and decided to cap me with some oxygen for the ride to the hospital. When I got there a team of very fresh and young looking people – who apparently never enjoyed a well blended cigarette in their lives – started poking my blood vessels and wiring me up to a rack of Hewlett Packard boxes which started producing all sorts of highly irritating and alarming sounds whenever some body function seemed out of the ordinary for a second or two.
There was no real panic; not with me nor with the people taking care of me and everything seemed under control, but I felt an overwhelming sense of melancholia, because in my mind I was already saying goodbye to a lifestyle of smoking three packs of Camel regulars a day. (Or ‘Camels without filter’ as they are called during the last two decades.)
You see, not all habits feel as bad as people make them out to be. All the best moments in my life have been accompanied by that moronic Camel I had grown to love. To give a general idea: I am the kind of person who smokes during sex, instead of just after.
To ‘get some sleep’ a nurse wheeled me into a room where two people lay slowly dying and while I was listening to their moans my own fear of dying completely left me. Instead I was irritated as hell. For two reasons: Didn’t I just stop drinking 8 weeks ago? Wasn’t that enough sacrifice to last for a month or six? Saying goodbye to baby Smirnoff and that Stolychnaya bitch had been no easy thing either and they had only been with me for maybe 5 or 6 years. And now I saw that Camel I loved so dearly fade into the horizon — and with it that jewel of a cigarette package of which the design had hardly been changed since D-Day as the Americans landed the beaches of Normandy.
In the coming days I went through all sorts of tests up to a point where I decided that the doctors were overdoing things a bit and decided to leave the hospital without checking out. It did not matter anyway; the message was clear to me; no more smokes. I have fought and lost so many battles in my life that I have become an obedient old fuck. So, I am sucking on nicotine chewing gum since then. I could have stayed a day or two longer, if my wi-fi laptop connection would not have become useless because the hospital was one huge Cage of Faraday — or if I’d had the time to put better music on my portable hard drive, such as ‘These Streets’ by Paolo Nutini.
What bothers me most, with that Camel out of my life, is that I do not even feel like smoking the occasional good old fashioned Amsterdam joint either, because I would pretty soon start smoking them as cigarette substitutes in the same quantities. All this went way too fast for me. Weeks ago my medical data sheet was still labeled “Multiple addictions”, now I have only one addiction left; Benzodiazepine and the detox is already scheduled for next month. How clear can our minds become before the heaps of shit around us will irreversibly numb us forever, I ask myself.