Doing it

I have just had to empty my favourite ashtray and give it a good wash. It's my favourite ashtray, on the inside it's got a cat embossed. And it's a sweet cat who gets covered in ashes and butts. Cigarette butts. Now my smoking will not taste as good for the next 24 hours, just because my ashtray is sparkling clean. Which is silly, but true. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. I hate my addiction to nicotine and tar as much as the people around me hate it. I worry what my smoking could do to my cats, my dogs and my parrot. And I love my 'kids', but I still can't stop the smoking. It's like a once you pop you can't stop sort of thing. What makes or breaks a smoker is the first cigarette. You either have a coughing fit and dislike the taste so much that you're off for life. Otherwise you do not have a coughing fit and feel instantly dreamy and like it so much that 20 years later you've doubled your filthy habit. It happened to me. And it was enough to put me totally off recreational drugs for a lifetime. I'm clean in that way, squeaky clean, because my nicotine addiction has done it's work. Back in my time (getting older yikes!) when drugs had just become fashionable and when people used to gather near the police station (of all places) to listen to Bob Marley and smoke pot... I was there. But I swear I never touched the stuff, I smoked my own legal ones and watched them in a haze. Being addicted to cigarettes I was shit scared I might get addicted to something else too. So no way, I was the classic good girl spoilsport, and I never did any. Not pot, not anything else. I'm still a smoker, and the price of it (actual monetary price) has gone higher and higher. But at least I get by. If I were to smoke something else, the price would be so much higher, and there's no way I'm letting all that cash go up in smoke... I can taking myself shopping and have a good time. Better that way. And yet my mum is so convinced that I was doing it all, the pot, the crack, the you-name-it-there-it-is that she even once suggested I go into drug rehabilitation. For what? To wash the Diet Coke away? She's still convinced I was doing it in my early teens. Yeah mum of course I was doing it, I was smoking cigarettes all the time behind your back and in the bathroom. I was smoking cigarettes wherever I could, which was everywhere seeing that smoking bans were unheard of. But I wasn't doing drugs...I was doing a something else which did not involve smoking, and yet you still thought it was wrong, still think to this day, and I'm no teen. I'm 35 and still doing it.