What Fresh Meadow Is This?

What fresh hell is this? - Dorothy Parker
This could be your lucky day in hell! Never know who it might be, at your doorbell... - The Eels

Um, deliverance? Is that you?
Aw, doood!! Good ta SEE ya, man! The heck was the holdup, dawg? Ahhh, riiight... the bumpy gravel back roads... ooh, man, I forgot to tell you! My bad! Yeah, it's only paved for the first bit. Ran out of good intentions, was the story we got. Highway to hell is just one of those urban legends, I guess. Hey, let's get outta here! You eaten yet?

Deliverance wears many faces/ and grace is
An acquaintence of mine... - David Sylvian

Well, apart from being in a strange state, halfway between giddy and confused, this is going darn well, doggies!!! (For the record, Dear Reader, it is Day 2 of an historic Cigarette Hasta La Vista Fiesta, for those of you joining us late, here).

Specific advice and/or notable signposts for others, may be summarized in a later entry (COUNT those chickens, kiddo! :) Nae worries). But let me just tell you about the previous attempted quit, a year ago. The premise was decent: cold turkey. Nicotine has a very short half life. Get the worst done, on the flights from Toronto to Australia! By the time my father and I get to Australia (and it was quite a tortuous network of flights...), I'll be bog tired (cannot smoke while asleep), and from then on, Easy Peasy Street. None of the triggers of home will be around. No comfy chair. Phone won't ring for me, and its chirp will be different. I'll have three vigilant and interested babysitters in the form of my father, sister and brother-in-law, to keep me on the rails. And we'll be having a blast! How mopey can I get, in 27 degree bliss Downundah with 'roos around the Roo? (Roo is an old nickname of Ian's for Minerva -ed.) (Minerva is a pseudonym. Iz anonymous blog. Sort of. -ed.)

It was a good plan. It went awry almost immediately. I left myself a loophole. No more purchased cigarettes. Surely I could bum one or two. Since bumming cigarettes is actually extremely difficult for the average non-street person, I could count on this behaviour to fade, just help me over the hump.

Careful, young Skywalker. The Force will be with you. Things got very weird, very fast. Long Vancouver layover. I pop out-terminal, to enjoy a luxuriant bummed ciggie. The two flights to this point have gone spectacularly! Not a single craving. Do they disappear when there is no convenience store around, no way to assuage them? I was puzzled and surprised. But I was in Vancouver long enough to have one (despite a true lack of "gotta!"), and it was allowed per plan. I hoofed through the terminal.

Well, would you look at that. Abandoned. On an empty row of octo-siamese-twin airport chairs... virtually an entire pack, perhaps two missing. They are Cambodian cigarettes. Their name is Lucky Dragon. My Chinese sign is the dragon, and I cradle them tenderly. This is not a purchase. It is simply an astonishing windfall: 18 pristine cigarettes, with a "pick these up, kid! they're yours!" label right on them. It is warm, sunny (completely unseasonable surely? even for Vancouver?), and I smoke blissfully, drowsily, on a bench just outside the terminal. Several centuries pass.

We arrive in Singapore, and check into our transit hotel right in the terminal (there are delights in Changi: five hour layovers, a double-storied tropical butterfly pavilion, breakfast in 32 lingua francas at the food court the next day. And grace upon arrival: the best shower ever, in the history of the planet! there are no words). I navigate a little hungrily to the smoking room (Asia, lol, 'nuff said) 20 scant metres from our hotel. But I have forgotten my Lucky Dragon pack! Zoinks.

I approach an airport worker with a sharp plexi badge, and hesitantly ask if he could spare a cigarette. "It's my last one," he murmurs. In Canadianese, that is as flat a refusal as you'll find, and I instantly translate it as such, despite my exhaustion. "But wait here! I'll be right back!" and he is gone, as completely as if he had dematerialized. The room tips a bit. There's his visage swimming through the door glass, opening the door, and theatrical tendrils of mare's-tail smoke escape momentarily from my hazy fishbowl all around him like seaweed: I'm tired, but this is pleasant. Slo-mo. Looking as benign, beaming and pleased as someone who had just received an unexpected birthday gift from me, he proffers an entire unopened pack of Marlboroughs. "From my office! I have many!" Oh, Minerva, you are truly through the looking glass now, my friend.

And you know the rest. Did I mention my sister and brother in law smoke? Oh, very casually. But the remnants of my two packs, coupled with their kind offcasts, and suddenly it is game ovah, people. It's your holidays. You've been smoking for days here! It's soo pleasant. On a patio. In the sun. With a glass or twelve of outrageously good red wine (Mark is quite the oenophile. Is that the word? Dude knows his stuff). And great company. What on earth were you thinking, quit on your vacation? Vacations are about ease and indulgence. No reason you can't cold turkey on the return flights (that bit was a solid enough achievement, coming over).

I find I can't actually remember if I notified anyone Oz-end of this quit. I doubt I had, in advance. Probably wanted to spring it on them all full-blown, like Athena from Zeus. Ohh, hubris. Ohh, loophole le deux.

You will find and exploit ALL the loopholes, like an animal unerringly crossing desert to oasis, easily, with certainty, without ever the slightest flicker of concern that thirst would even appear, much less not be quenched.

I disembark in my home city, gratefully greet my boyfriend. In due time, I bum a cigarette at curbside, guilty and furtive and remorseful, for about a nanosecond that is eternity. But these feelings swallow themselves up, or I might be editorializing. It's hard to remember that part, actually.

It was odd. It was all, odd. I have kept the Lucky Dragon! packaging to this day. It didn't really feel like a defeat. More like an urging or a benediction. Not yet, little one! The day is soon. In the meantime, enjoy. (And I have enjoyed cigarettes. Thoroughly. I've luxuriated in them. They were never something I did by halves, or felt ambivalent about. They weren't coffin nails. My habit was not filthy. I am unusual in this respect, I find. A very happy smoker.)

This time, as many strange cogs have meshed and doors flown closed, as the last time opened. This time, I'm done. There has been remarkably little struggle. I had set my mind to anticipate "a lucky day in hell", a short hell that was lucky and purposeful, one I was going to endure steadfastly.

[Picking daisies. What fresh meadow is this!?!]

The one thing I picked up from last year, was my utter lack of cravings on both plane journeys. It was pointless behaviour, and my mind seemed to understand that, and just dropped them. That had never happened before.

There have been many other quits. Six others? Ten? I don't know. I have smoked a long time. Twenty years. Pack a day. Alot of false starts, alot of quits I wasn't quite behind. Maybe what they say is true, though: the cumulative knowledge is yours, quiet, growing, mysterious, invisible, invincible. One day, the tipping point arrives.

A new jedi mind trick: no more hesitant piercings of an imagined nicotine monster I held fondness for, hesitated to cut with my broadsword as our gazes caught. This time, I had decided I was a phoenix-dyad. A radical discontinuity. Old phoenix, burning. The fire. Endurance. Burn hot, flames, be quick. And a fresh fledgeling, newborn, in wonder, strange feathers, irridescent, every colour, metallic, wings tentatively outstretched, tempering like a butterfly's for a time. I expected a period of overlap and a battle, raucous cries, both eager to live, flames, confusion, pain. A pitched battle.

It was very easy. There was no overlap. There was no demarcation, really. It was just easy. It's still easy. Lucky Dragon, serpent-feathered, Quetzalcoatl.

It's different. It's just different this time. No longer a student laboriously parsing verbs in a non-native tongue, struggling for vocabulary, catching one word in ten on the tapes, always starting in English and mentally flipping dictionary pages to find the alien equivalent. The effort!

(I explained a smoking quit to someone once as being forced to hop instead of walk. "What's so hard about hopping? We all hop! You'll hop too! Just keep hopping! In a few months, you won't even think of walking! Won't even cross your mind!!!" Oh my god, shut UP! Putting the hell in helpful, are we?)

I awake to find I've been dreaming in French. Everything is French! There's just thought. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was! Thinking, musing, a-mused. Just a torrent of elegant sounding ease. Super geniale cette quit!!! Moi j'adore!!!

(happy go lucky dragon!!!)

I think this very softly, quietly, in another language, where my astonishment and pleasure and words will go unheard, misunderstood, embryonic, by those who have previously enforced an English rule, fierce English ears listening for someone to count barnyard chickens before they hatched, in English - oh, metaphors mixing, metaforce - chickens, drag-ons, drag-on-cigarettes, dragging on, no, dragon, no, phoenix! no english.

Seulement francaise ce soir! C'est... fantastique!!! shhh. shhh. shhh. The phoenix is drowsy, the fire is pleasant and warm. This is my nest! It is peaceful. I am mad, but that, too, is OK.

All is well. And all manner of things are well. And all will be well, well-wishers. A demain matin.