Quitting smoking (again)

Cold turkey has got me on the run
—"Cold Turkey," John Lennon

Drat-drat-drat-drat-drat.

The remorse runs like a leaky faucet. Nicotine hunger is back. Making shaky that first cup of coffee in the morning. Surging through my keyboard-busied hands. Riding shotgun with clear thought. Amplifying every other hunger.

Dagnabbit. It had been months, most of the year even. And then a cool fall night, the backyard garden of Rudy’s Bar, a few pints, some animated political conversation, and the next thing you know, I’ve bought a pack and I’m inhaling like a tossed-back fish.

I’ve got it under control, I convince myself. I can confine my smoking to the occasional night out. Not a good sign. For the first month or so I limit myself to a pack on weekends. Then one conspiratorially lazy Sunday afternoon I go out and buy a second pack. The rat habit has gone back to the trough. A bad sign. A danger Will Robinson sign.

Why do we smoke? For me, it's two words: Humphrey Bogart. I want to be Rick in Casablanca. I want to be that world-weary cynic with a heart of gold, a taste for whiskey and an unflagging sense of right and wrong. I mean, I named my dog Ilsa, okay? But I don’t want to be like Bogart and die at 58 of throat cancer.

There may yet be an agreeable ending to this particular melodrama. A saving grace of age is recognizing the bad signs earlier on because they’re all so familiar to you by now. I’ve been down this road many times before, some times longer than others. I’ve smoked with a vengeance for 2 or 3 years, stinking up my clothes, my hair, my apartment, sending Ilsa to the couch to bury her nose in the throw. Smoking is not good. Smoking is bad. One of these days it will sink in.

For now I suffer the pangs of withdrawal for the umpteenth time. Is it these pangs or honest anger I feel about the release yesterday, the 41st anniversary of his assassination, of a video game called “JFK Reloaded”? Consider that more than a few people came together to see this thing through from concept to completion and on to the market. More than a few minds bought into the idea that people would pay money to assume the role of a virtual Oswald—to see if they could finish off the 35th president of the United States in three shots as his motorcade swings past their virtual perch on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository. "Blood effects" are left to the discretion of the user.

Don’t get me wrong, I breathe the First Amendment and praise free enterprise. But these are disconcerting times. Artists and the literary elite have no problem creating works that express their death wishes for President Bush. And now we have a video game in which a dead president is resurrected to be murdered at our leisure, on our computers. It almost makes you want to light up.