Tag Archives: freedom

Quotation of the Week

Word Wednesday 9/2/2015

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Only after we've lost everything are we

Just a couple of days before Katrina hit, a friend and I were riding around Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.  On the marquee for either St. Stanislaus school or Our Lady Academy–both private religious school–was this quotation.

I took a picture of it because:

  1. I thought it strange that a religious school would be quoting Fight Club,
  2. Fight Club is one of my favorite movies, ever,
  3.  and I had a disposable camera and needed to use up the shots.  Little did I know that the shots of bridges, beaches, and some of my favorite trees would be the last I would see of them for months or years or ever.

As Doctor Horrible would say, what a crazy random happenstance.

Journey

Independence Day

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“I’m dying!” I yelled at Sherry in a moment of utter thoughtless withdrawal a few weeks ago.

“No you’re not,” she shot right back.

Actually, I was. Just not in the way to which I was alluding. That night, 23 days ago, I smoked my last cigarettes back-to-back.

Nancy the smoker died on January 9, 2008. Nancy the non-smoker was reborn the next morning, full of phlegm and an insanely sore throat. I know that there’s a high relapse rate. I also know that I can never, ever have a single cigarette or a single puff of one or I will relapse. Because that’s the way I’m wired, for better or worse. The only way I’ll start smoking again is if I indulge in a behavior that I don’t want to do in the first place.

And despite the passing twinges, that’s exactly how it should be.

It took me over a year of really, really trying to quit to get to this point.

In about three months, I will be 34 years and one week old as I walk across the stage to get my pseudo-bachelor’s degree. I was thinking about that today and realized that I was close to hating myself for LITERALLY half my life for something that wasn’t even my fault.

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