When you’ve decided to quit smoking and are working on writing a novel that encourages you to peer into all the strange corners of your psyche; it’s nice to think the process is getting you somewhere.

“Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go.” T.S. Eliot

That is one of my new favorite quotes, makes it all that much easier to forgive Eliot for penning the lines that inspired ‘Cats’ . . . of course The Hollow Men and The Waste Land don’t hurt either.

Had one of those ever so charming ‘dark nights of the soul’ the other evening. To be totally honest, I’d spent the entire day suffering from a hangover of epic proportions, (never entirely beneficial to one’s self-esteem) and by the time the fog had left my tender noggin it was already late and sleep simply wasn’t going to happen. Nope, time to stare at the ceiling and think those dangerous thoughts about what really matters in this life.

Certainly a good thing I’ve quit smoking, every night like that used to strip a month off my life in carcinogens alone.

What’s strange is how much I seem to enjoy the process. Today I feel like a million dollars despite the fact that I got about two hours of sleep. There is something to be said for staring hard into the face of everything you think you know and confronting the terrible idea that you may in fact be nothing more than a fool.

It’s a learning experience, certainly not the sort of thing you want to engage in on a nightly basis; but when you’ve managed it honestly, when you’ve actually allowed all the little voices in your head to have their say and can still smile when you see dawn breaking through the cracks in your blinds, when you’ve let all the demons out to dance and survived . . .

I think this latest experience came upon me because – well – I’ve noticed that without the steadily distracting process of rolling and smoking cigarettes, the little twitches that compose the idiosyncratic majority of my personality have had more opportunities to exert themselves. I’ll be the first to admit that a fair amount of this is explained by the fact that I’ve been a twitchy bastard without my smokes, but all the same, my perennially loved concept of twitching back and forth across the lines of ’sanity’ has been flirting around the forefront of my thoughts.

“The Edge… there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.” Hunter S. Thompson

I like trying to touch it with my toes, the feel of the wind from the unknown on my face, the mental process involved with feeling your way out there. Once you’ve been out there, you can always come back, but you never return the same; and isn’t that what it’s all about . . . is life anything but a series of adventures and ceaseless change?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 2nd, 2006 at 8:15 pm and is filed under indiscriminate, philosophy, quoted. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.