August 25, 2008
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The season at Ravinia is drawing to a close, and I am glad because I am tired.
The Backstreet Boys were here last night. I will not miss them.With any kind of luck, I won’t have to see them again, but judging by the turnout,
they’ll probably become a staple.Tired. Tired. Tired.
I’m fighting off some strange infection that I got from who knows where, probably work.
The lymph nodes on my neck are swollen slightly, as they have been for a few weeks now.After the first week, I was convinced it was cancer. No joke. I figured, shit. I’m going to
be one of those kids we learned about in health class; the baseball kid who chewed tobacco for a year and got
cancer of the tongue, a statistical freak. And the pictures of his hairy tongue. Jesus.
Not that I chew, mind you.But I did quit. Smoking.
Like I should have after that first infection at the beginning of the season.
I got a small cut on my hand while cleaning birds nests out of the ceiling.
I woke up the next day with a fever and an angry red streak following a vein
from hand to shoulder. The doctor told me that if that streak had reached my heart, I might have died.
He also said that I should quit and then maybe my body would
be more able to cope with opportunistic infections such as these.I lit up as soon as I left the doctors office, but not in defiance or anything like that. Stupidity, perhaps.
I suppose I shouldn’t call myself a quitter, though. I’m just not currently smoking. Nor was I yesterday. Or the day before. The day before that, I smoked a pack, but that was because I left without a patch that morning.
I never thought it would work, the patch, but it does a good job of killing my physical cravings. It doesn’t, however, kill the craving for a smoke after a beer, for example. Or after a meal. Or after sex. These cravings are the result of habit, and they are very difficult to ignore, but so far I’ve had success with substituting cherry licorice. I’ve gone through a large bag already.
