Confused-Shoes

I will begin this reflection by stating that honestly, truthfully, I did try my best to abstain from smoking for a whole day. Was I successful?

The reason for this opening declaration being that I was thinking that it is not very difficult to imagine that maybe some of us didn’t do the activity at all, or maybe, did it halfheartedly, or maybe, did it with a heavy heart. After all, abstaining from something that’s supposed to be integral to a person’s daily well being is hard, but not impossible to do. For my part, I did entertain the thought of not doing the activity at all and forego the experience entirely, because I thought maybe I could make a good fiction thing anyway but in the end my set of morals decided against it.

Thus, I have done the activity honestly.

Let’s see. I wasn’t able to do it Friday, because every school day is supposed to be so stressful. Earlier in the morning I was contemplating about skipping my first Marlboro for the day, but I realized that since I have conditioned myself to smoke while brooding in my throne, that means I would have a hard time inside the toilet. Besides, I thought, I need to unload everything out because it is a very dangerous thing to trifle with the digestive tract on a Friday. I guess have already explained that for me, in the mornings at least, smoking and defecating go together.

I started it Friday night. I did my usual de-stressing regimen: by midnight I had my tuna, my glass of red wine and, guess what, instead of a cigarette, I had a Toblerone. Haha. I didn’t feel so bad about not having a smoke. Anyway. I felt good.

Saturday morning: that’s when the fun really started. I woke up at around 8 and joined Manang Jenny, the lady who cleans the house, for some breakfast of fried eggs, pancit canton, coffee and pandesal. Oh man, after the meal I went to the toilet. I was doing my usual routine: take your shorts off, hang it in the pegs, get the lighter from the drawer, get the pack of Marlboro’s and…then it hit me: I Must NOT, under any circumstances for the whole day, I Must NOT SMOKE. So I closed the drawer and sat down gloomily to brood about my life as I tried to relax myself and let nature do her proper course. I guess it took me longer than usual to do my deed. Longer than usual but I had time to spare. Saturday.

Feeling a little resigned to the fact that I am really doing my lungs a big favor but I was really drilling my brain, I went out to the garage and cleaned my old car instead. Still, I thought I could have used another cigarette. But no cigarette. Instead my cat came to bother me with incessant purring and petting, so I used to hose to annoy it and leave me alone.

Surprisingly, I reflected about the activity just as I was washing the undersides. With a soapy sponge in the right hand and hose in the left, I contemplated Sir Valero’s question. What does it really mean to seek the I in me minus my physical traits, my sociological constructs, my emotional baggage, and my life history? Then, magically, it occurred to me, hey, maybe David Hume was right. All that was left was a bundle of perceptions in my head and, as I added for some sake, an empty shell for a body. I didn’t know if I had to be happy because I got some answer, or be depressed because I certainly didn’t agree to everything that Hume says. If at all, I am not a Skeptic, nor was I an optimist. I did think that I considered myself a Pragmatic Relativist. Sure pragmatically speaking I could have used a Marlboro right then and there, but relatively speaking I had to stick to this challenge. It was not even noon.

After lunch, I took a bath and slept like a log. Like a log and a hog who was in dire need of a drag. I was really being pressed hard in my head. It was shouting smoke smoke smoke. I knew it wasn’t easy, but I never though it would really be so hard. But I had no desire left in me to abstract and philosophize that horrifying experience, that of having a want and having all the means in the world to secure that want because it s only a door and a drawer away but because of some moral imposition your want gets repressed just to prove that your want isn’t all there is to life. Oh great. I went on sleeping.

Then, come 6 pm, that was it, I gave up.

I went to the toilet, took a seat over the cover, and, almost sadly, smoked my first cigarette in almost 22 hours. Not bad, I thought. I thought to myself, maybe I should have tried more, stuck it longer out there against the voices from within me that kept telling me to smoke. In the end, I guess, I lost. I wasn’t able to complete the journey towards the end of the road that had an arc saying ’24 hours of self-control, man! Good job!’ I felt kind of funny. Nostalgic, even, but still funny. I realized that half of completing the journey is taking the journey itself. I don’t know. I really was sad and lost and quite lonely, for some reason and another. But as I’ve always told myself, the cigarette is loyal. It keeps you company. It keeps me sane. It has kept me sane.