I am the Smoking Man

Well, I hadn't planned to write about smoking as my very first post (we're not counting that nonsense down there), but since I'm chewing on my last coffin nail and about to venture into the cold world to fetch more, it's sort of on my mind.

Okay, thing one, I smoke. I smoke a LOT. At least a pack a day. I'll smoke two or more when I'm stressed enough. It's not something I'm proud of, but I'm not particularly ashamed either. So I have a stinky addiction -- so what? Being a perfect person is not on my list of things to do.

Thing two, I'm kind of crazy. Bipolar disorder, social anxiety, and ADD make a pretty potent cocktail. There is no medication that fixes these things. Most of the meds that make them somewhat better have side effects I can't tolerate -- like making it hard for me to write. I'm not going 'oh poor me' here, I'm just saying.

Nicotine seems to be the only thing that medicates my ADD to any useful extent without making me less creative. I'm on a low dose of bupropion as well (that's Wellbutrin to you folks who pay extra for brand names), which helps a little with the ADD and takes the edge off the anxiety -- enough that I can sleep occasionally, at least -- but if I take a high enough dose to replace the nicotine's effects, I can't write. I seriously can't produce a word. I look at stories I've written and burst into girly tears, because I can't remember how the hell I did it. This, my friends, is Not Okay.

So I smoke. Constantly, stinkily, coughingly. Smoke while I'm writing, smoke while I'm drawing, smoke while I'm thinking about writing or drawing. Am I gonna tell you it's good for me? Jesus no. My lungs are like the bottom of your broiler. I can almost hear them crackle when I take a deep breath. I have no stamina, no wind, and I'm getting fat because of it. But when I stop smoking, which I managed to do for almost a year once, I am no longer a writer, and not much of an artist. Guess I'd rather die of emphysema than let all these stories die unborn.

Someday I'll have to find a better solution. Experiment with medications until I find a combination of doses that'll do the trick. But that's expensive, stressful, and uncertain, and it would require me to be willing to take time off from writing and drawing whenever my cocktail of happy pills turned me nonverbal or whatever. At the moment, that isn't an option. Someday, I'll have to quit smoking, if only because it's hard to make comics when you're dead.

But for now, I'm going to go buy another carton. Yeah, I'm such a martyr to my art. Puff. Puff. Puff.