I really need to quit smoking; since I was 18 years old, I've been a veritable smokestack, a compulsive chain-smoker. At times, it seems I am probably single-handedly financing Benito Bo's health care for children, in all those taxes I pay for smoking. I can't even stand an hour-long church service, even a wedding or a funeral, without taking a break circa half-time, to surreptitiously dash outdoors to puff on a cigarette.
My father too had been a chain-smoker, but my mother, and my brothers and sisters, never smoked, much in the same way that when younger I used to tipple rather too much, while the parents and older siblings were teetotalers. And so it's not like the habit was acquired because those older and wiser than I practiced it.
I suspect I smoke simply to alleviate stress.
Being deaf imposes a great deal of stress upon a person born that way, but it seems more than doubled, tripled, quadrupled, when one was raised such as I was, as if deafness doesn't exist, and one should accept no allowances, no breaks, no slack, for being deaf, even if such are offered to one.
I am a great actor, quite possibly as good as John Barrymore, strutting around on the stage that is the world, as if this thing does not exist. (Remember, the absence of ears is disguised by my wearing my hair a tad bit longer than what is usually fashionable for men; if nothing else [but of course there is a great deal more else], God gave me an excellent full head of hair.)
To be as something one is not, is very stressful.
However, as beneficial as smoking has been in alleviating stress, the physical damage is slowly beginning to outweigh the emotional benefits.
At the time the ulcer in the windpipe broke open in early August of this year, I was doing circa three packages of cigarettes a day (as I had been doing for years); since that bloody episode, the past three months I have been doing only a single package a day. One might consider that as "progress" in doing something about smoking, but really, it's not.
My greatest fear about quitting smoking is a possible recrudescence of something within myself that seems genetic. My father and older siblings, while people of outstanding character and integrity, were notoriously hot-tempered. Just really hot tempered, maybe even as bad as Chief S itting Bull, the bird-smacking stoned red-faced primitive on Skins's island.
My mother was the sole exception, practicing the ancient Roman Catholic virtue of fortitude; and I myself have always believed that Fortitude is the greatest of all the Virtues. I would much rather be like her, than be like the rest of them, most especially since I never saw a case where losing one's temper ever helped anything.
If possible, I'd just as soon prefer to remain insouciantly, sometimes insolently, mellow and laid back, which I believe is my real nature, the way God means me to be.
That is the bottom line goal here; for franksolich to be the way God means franksolich to be.
