Giving Up Smoking Part III: Is There Life After Brain Death?
Times were perilous but I was insensible to the danger.
For the next two weeks, I didn’t do any work (although I did a lot of eating, drinking, running and reading). When I received an assignment by email I’d type some nit-picky question about an inconsequential detail and fire it back, knowing it would be another 14 hours before I’d need to ask another question – or confess that I was no longer to be numbered among the sentient.
One of the advantages of being incapable of thought was that I didn’t dwell on the problem at all. I was in, as they say, a funny place. In addition, I was a better person for it. I suppose this is why lobotomies are so popular amongst a patient’s relatives. When I received this Xmas Greeting card from my local hair salon, I didn’t fall guffawing off my chair at the goofy Chinese English.
Merry Christmas!!
All staff prays for source of wealth to be billowing. In the silver festival has my Man Man blessing leisurely, is only willing you to grasps the abundant happy new year!Here said the sound to you!
In fact, I really took the message to heart. I liked the idea of billowing wealth. I was glad that Man Man (who?) was telling me to get a grip. In my evil nicotine days, I would have sneered unkindly but I was above that now – or way below, it didn’t really matter which.
Yet, I was still able to read the writing on the economic wall when it appeared in four-foot high letters of fire. One day it said: no work = no money = no rent or food, and no more triple shot grande lattes. But before I could explore that prospect far enough to feel uncomfortable I had to take another trip overseas. This time to Bangkok. It was for work but at least it got me out from in front of the computer.
At the airport, I noticed the hunched and guilty looking wretches outside the terminal, puffing at their cigarettes in a mood of sad and lonely desperation. I thought to myself, There but for the grace of God go I – but at least they know they’re hunched, sad, and guilty looking…
Was I in danger of falling off the wagon? No. If my reason existed only with an underpinning of Davidoff Magnums (my preferred cigarette in the bad old days) then it was a frail and ignoble thing and I refused to debase myself merely to preserve it. Better that I should be cast out to wander naked, hungry and brain dead across the limitless wastes of wherever!
If you have detected a progressive hysteria in my internal dialogues, you would be right. By the time I arrived at the hotel where I was to perform the duties of marketing consultant, I was a thin and scatty shadow of my former self. What use I would be professionally I didn’t really know. Maybe I could just go through the motions, after all bookings had been going fine all year…
As coincidence would have it, on the very next day, a group of political malcontents took over Bangkok’s airport, which establishment services an average of 100,000 travelers a day. This was a fatal blow to every part of the tourism industry, including my hotel.
Overnight, bookings fell like shot ducks. The general manager gnawed his nails and said things like, “We need a campaign to salvage the situation!” while I sat at my laptop pretending to be trying to think of one. In fact, I just wanted to buy myself a good book and read my way through the crisis.
After a few fruitless meetings, we ended up sitting in his office. He was talking and I was roaming my eye around the furniture when suddenly it lit on what turned out to be the answer to my predicament… I was saved!
Next up: Pt IV – When Is A Cigarette Not A Cigarette?
