Failure of the Day: tick…tick…tick

Well, here we are, in my final hour as a smoker. Fare thee well, delicious white poison! I will miss you but hopefully not for inordinately long.

Let's call it cautious optimism, this confidence that at this time tomorrow I won't have scabby bald spots on my head and blood under my fingernails. This is a 20 year habit I'm fixin' to abate here, after all, and all the while being faced with the fact that the authors of my two favorite novels on the earth are unrepentant, joyous smokers. Ah, but that is just the periphery and I can't feel authorial kinship with M's Amis and Vonnegut any more than I can with Nicholson Baker and John Updike just because they both have psoriasis.

But that, I suppose, is the magic of Zyban, which, I now believe, doesn't make quitting smoking easy, it merely makes it possible. And that will have to do, won't it? Because short of a medically induced, two-month detox coma, this is as good as it's gonna get.

45 minutes…wish me luck, y'all.