Update of Sorts

I had to quit smoking on July Fourth, 2007 because I had a heart attack. There's a commercial for Lipitor, I think, where the guy says "I had a heart attack at 57! That's a wake-up call!" Yeah, tell me about it, I had one at 48.

Anyway, as a result of this medical problem, I had to stop smoking, among other things. Stopping smoking isn't easy, even when you have the horror of the heart attack and bypass surgery still fresh in your mind (I can remember what it felt like to have the breathing tube pulled out at though it happened yesterday).

Certain activities become very closely linked with smoking, and people who are trying to quit smoking are often advised to quit or restrict those activities. For my dad, it was the quiet cup of coffee after dinner - the cuppa jo was so naturally teamed with a cigarette that he had to get up from the table and go occupy himself. Other people report that going to bars fills them with a deep urge to smoke.

For me, two activities became deeply linked with smoking, and though I didn't want to give either one of them up, I've almost been forced to. The first is model-building. I've been building models since I was about seven years old, and I've always enjoyed it. At least until I stopped smoking. Now when I sit and work on a model, I don't think about anything but how bad I want a cigarette. It's very uncomfortable and so unpleasant that it's rare for me to work on a model for more than an hour or two before I just have to stop and do something else.

I keep hoping that at some point model-building and cigarette-smoking will disentangle themselves in my mind and I'll be able to regain the enjoyment of working on a model without having to sweat out a nonstop nicotine fit. But so far, no joy. And there my model-building stuff sits, getting dustier and more disordered. I've considered just packing up all my stuff and clearing room in the garage; I'm not using it and we could park the truck in that spot.

The other thing I had to give up was writing. Well, I'll never be able to give up writing. I suspect that when I depart this mortal coil (hopefully a very long time from now) I'll still be taking notes so in the unlikely event that the afterlife has a network connection I'll be able to blog about dying. But I can't write like I used to, where I could batten down the hatches and write in a serious way for six or eight or more hours at a stretch. It's the same problem. The act of writing seems to call naturally for cigarettes, and the stress of having to fight down the cigarette urge finally outweighs the enjoyment of writing and I have to stop.

Nobody ever told me that quitting smoking would cripple my enjoyment of my hobbies. How cruel. What price we pay for health, this sense of slow disappointed depression that sets in every time I look at my dusty, unusued workbench, or have an idea for a novel that I know I won't finish because I just can't write in that way any more.

Is it getting any better? Maybe a little, but it still sucks.

I've been collecting parts, drawings, reference materials and other oddments for what I've come to understand as "The Model Of My Life" (in capital letters, you understand). A fully detailed 1/96th scale Saturn V with tower, based on the old Revell kit and a paper model of the LET that I bought on eBay one weekend. When I first quit smoking the thought of this project was literally repellent - I knew it would take probably a year of detailed and careful work to build this model, and the thought of attempting that without cigarettes literally made me break out in a sweat. But now, I can at least contemplate portions of the model. The whole thing is still too big, too complex, too much work, too sweaty; but at least I can think about building the Command and Service Modules, or the escape tower. Portions of the model are slowly starting to come back within reach, though the whole project remains undoable. So it's better, but still not good.

Whatever. I'm sure my chronic complaining doesn't make very good copy anyway.