An Anecdote That Is Likely Also a Metaphor for Something Else.

I might have told this story already.  A month after I quit smoking and also quit the patch, I bummed a cigarette at a party.  (It was a party at the warehouse Lindy and Tina were living in and converting into a feminist collaborative live/work space.  I mention this because I've recently been listening to Lindy's demo CD and feeling the echoes of awe and yearning I always felt around her.  The CD is rough and bare and poorly mixed but her music is still lovely even twelve years later.)

It was not the last cigarette I ever smoked.  But it was the last time that I thought a cigarette would make me feel better.  I smoked to relieve the craving, but it only made me sick.  I was craving something that was no longer available to me.

There's a blog that I used to read regularly, at first because I enjoyed it, but even when the blogger and I started to disagree I kept reading, and eventually it became spite-reading.  I was just reading so I could be glad that I wasn't like that.  And I said as much to a friend who advised me to stop, no really, just stop.  And I did.  Today, I went back.  And it made me mad, as it is wont to do.  And I have a whole list of reasons why it's wrong.  And they are reasons why it is always wrong, and I am done.