Day 4

Day 4 today. I’m on the 21mg patches from Walgreens. They were about $45 for two weeks, which is still less than two weeks of cigarettes. That’s what I keep telling myself.

I made it 11 days in January. That time I just stopped buying them, no patch, no nothing. It went fine until it didn’t. This time I’m trying to do it the way you’re supposed to.

The patch dreams are real. Nobody told me that. You’re supposed to take it off at night if the dreams get bad, but then you wake up at 5 and want one right away. So I leave it on. Last night I was doing a party at my old grade school and all the kids were grown men with mustaches and none of them would laugh. The night before, my dad was alive and we were trying to fit a balloon pump in a mailbox. I don’t know.

I called 1-800-QUIT-NOW on Monday. It’s the Indiana quitline and it’s free. I figured it’d be a recording but it was a real person, a lady named Sherry. She asked what my triggers were and I said driving, coffee, after a show, before a show, being bored, and the phone. She laughed a little. She was nice about it. She’s going to call me back next week to check in, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.

Hard: driving. I drove to Tipton Tuesday for a library thing and my right hand kept going for the window button. Coffee’s hard. I switched to tea this week and that’s its own kind of misery.

Fine, actually: the shows. You’re too busy in the middle of a show. It’s after.

My grandson Eli is five. Easter last year he asked me why I smell like a campfire, and I told him it’s because clowns go camping. He thought about it and said “no you don’t.” He’s right. I don’t.

That’s where this all started, if anybody wonders.

Going to bed.