How to (easily) quit smoking
By Robert LaFrance
So now we are faced with the impossible task of arranging our 2021 New Years Resolutions, with the thought always in the back of our minds that a year from now we could be in some other plane of existence.
My first one always has to be to quit smoking. I choose that one because it’s an unqualified success, as the phrase goes, because I smoked my last cigarette on February 10, 1973. I refer to tobacco of course. Anything else is none of your business.
That year I was living in the St. Francis Hotel at the foot of Seymour Street in Vancouver. No one in the world is going to believe this, but it’s true; I was paying $15 a week to live in room 218, bathroom down the hall. It was a clean, well-kept hotel right across the road from the CPR station and on the edge of Gastown.
The way prices go in 2021, that same room today would cost roughly $5000 a minute. It’s long gone of course.
Here is the story of how I quit smoking. I got up that morning and had a coffee with my first cigarette of the day. It all tasted like the bottom of a farmer’s boot combined with a tablespoon of campfire ash stirred in with Sunlight soap, carefully mixed with dried dog excrement.
It was time to quit smoking but I didn’t have the will power or strength of character. (Still don’t.) Then I went downstairs to the hotel lobby where my old friend – and I do mean old – Oscar Evoy, 90, was sitting there and puffing on his pipe while watching Sesame Street. Big Bird was his favourite. He grunted at me and at another denizen of the lobby, Cliff Gordon, age 80, who was just sitting there looking grumpy. He preferred Fred Penner.
The first thing I noticed was that Cliff wasn’t smoking his usual Export A cigarette. I’m pretty sure I’ve told this story before, so I’ll make it short. Cliff had quit smoking that morning, he said, so I decided to quit as well. Four days later Cliff, who had smoked since he was fifteen, started up again but I never did.
Cold turkey. That’s how I did it after smoking nine years. I had gotten in with bad smoking company in grade 12 at what was then Southern Victoria Regional High School and couldn’t quit until 1973, in spite of numerous attempts. The bizarre thing is that today many physicians will advise smokers not to quit cold turkey because it’s too had on the system. Apparently, like another weekend when I went to Las Vegas, I didn’t have a system.
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My second resolution – and I knew that wouldn’t be a problem because I had quit serious drinking 32 years ago – was to get rid of alcohol. I lived in the Hamilton, Ontario, area from 1967 to 1972 and broke a few minor records in imbibing Labatt’s 50 and Labatt’s Blue. Take note that I was not behind the wheel of my car at any point during the day during which I drank a total of 22 bottles of beer before supper. I was still able to navigate as long as I walked on my feet.
Some years after this personal record, I quit drinking. That is, I quit drinking Labatt’s products because I had moved to Vancouver (see above) and later the Northwest Territories. Silver Spring was my favourite in Vancouver, and Nitchequon Sharp Ale while I lived in NWT.
Another long story shoot, I quit drinking beer for good when I turned thirty and was infected with being broke. I had all I could do to pay my car insurance.
(NOTE FROM MY FRIEND THE PERFESSER, OF KINTORE): “Bob, quit lying. I saw you drink half a dozen Alpine on New Year’s Eve.”
Oh yeah, I forgot that.
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More on New Years resolutions: I checked and I checked and found that I am so close to perfect that I don’t need to make any more New Years resolutions. If I have any kind of character flaw, nobody tells me. On the other hand, I see more people at the grocery store than anywhere else and because of the masks we all have to (and should) wear and my diminishing hearing I can’t hear a damn thing and they can’t hear me. They could be praising me to the sky or calling me the lowest skunk in Christendon.
“I’ll go along with the skunk,” commented the Perfessor. With friends like that…
To be serious for a minute, I suppose there are a couple of areas in which I could improve, although I can’t imagine what they might be.
Every morning I get up and thank whosoever is in charge for Donald Trump. I, and just about anyone I know, compare favourably with that despicable swamp rat, if that’s not being too nasty and harsh. Well over seventy million Americans voted for that particular swamp rat, but I think a lot of people forget that probably forty million of those were just voting Republican as they must. After this paper comes out though, there’s two more weeks of Trump and his crowd. Will he declare war on Iran in an effort to stay in power?
I wouldn’t put it past him.
-end-
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