Tom Waits on cigarettes: The beauty of quitting is, now that I've quit, I can have one, 'cause I've quit.

When the Light of the Endless was drawn in the form of a straight line in the Void... it was not drawn and extended immediately downwards, indeed it extended slowly — that is to say, at first the Line of Light began to extend and at the very start of its extension in the secret of the Line it was drawn and shaped into a wheel, perfectly circular all around. (original in Hebrew)

- Foucault's Pendulum, Umberto Eco, Keter, Chapter 1

Joseph stopped. He stopped drinking & he stopped smoking cigarettes. There was a bacchanal of ugliness, during which he was very aware that it had to stop, and he had committed himself to stopping smoking on the date of the 18th. Publicly, he had professed his commitment, to more than a handful of people. And on the 18th, he woke up smoking and fell asleep without cigarettes. He still had a patch stuck to him.

The Universe gave him a break. It detained him. He was in a room with graffiti on a table that read, "The Truth is Rarely Pure and Never Simple." This is an Oscar Wilde quote, much unexpected for the particular room he was in. There was also a piece of graffiti on the wall that read, "eat geLatin at burger Kings" that amused him. He had a bed, a sink and toilet, and a table mounted into the wall. He had two sheets and two wool blankets, shoes that were not his and a suit that was not his. There was a window high up in the wall that he could see a snow out of.

There was a t.v. outside of the room that he could hear. He could not smoke, he did not have any cigarettes. And so he remained for some weeks. Then, he was in an automobile on a very very long trip to a place that was not so far away, and the drivers asked if he wanted a cigarette. He did not, but the span of time was so unbroken and unpunctuated that he declined to decline. It was a filterless camel. As he smoked it, he looked out at a stream. He wished that he wasn't smoking, and decided that it was a very bad idea. Until the next time that he was offered a cigarette, which was well-timed after a meal.

And so, he arrived at his destination, where he couldn't smoke again, but this time left in 12 hours or so. When he emerged to the rainy day, he really wanted a cigarette to close that chapter. And so the grammatical smoking resumed. Joseph was fond of commas and semicolons, they left things open. Cigarettes seemed similar.

But, he had quit. He did stop. And now he smoked again. And drank too much coffee.