I’d Rather Feel Like Myself Again. Or Do I? [Friday Thoughts With TeeCoZee]

Top of the afternoon to you. Well, not quite the top. Kind of at the mid-section of the afternoon. Let me do that over. Boobs Chest of the afternoon to you. It’s Friday, January 22, Two Thousand and Sixteen. The weather in Brooklyn is 29˚ & Pantone® 427 and somewhere, somebody is putting speed holes in his car, ala episode 2F12. I also have to get laundry out of the dryer some things on my mind.

– It’s been a little over a month now. I missed you. How’s stuff been? How are the wife and kids? Wait, that wasn’t a kid? But I thought–never mind. Oh, me? I’ve been…uhh…okay. Like on a scale from 1-10, I’m good. That’s about it. Hmm…uhh…egh…sooooo…

…

…so I can’t guarantee that this is going to be very funny. What I can guarantee, and what I hope is the only thing that you care about, is that this will be what I always strive for my work to be: honest. So here it is.

I quit smoking 20 days ago and my brain has not been okay.

This wasn’t my first rodeo. I was anticipating the usual stereotypes: the anxiousness, the excessive eating, ravenous cravings, violent mood swings, the excessive eating, the feeling that every important life moment that you will incur will not be able to have the proper punctuation that the burn of a cigarette lends. And trust me, those symptoms prevail. What I didn’t expect was a loss of identity.

They say that in order to overcome addiction, you have to disrupt your everyday routine. So, I stopped drinking for the month of January. That’s not to say that I had full-on alcohol dependency [I know that now, as I didn’t have any physical or severe withdrawal symptoms], but the combination has thrown a brick through the storefront window that is my ego.

I picked up some harmless/unproductive hobbies to distract myself. I impulsively fliffed a cool hundo on a Nintendo DS. Mario Kart 7 is a sublime experience. I started reading comic books. The reboots of Ms Marvel and Howard The Duck are total trophies. Even though these are things that I’m actively engaged in, I find myself socially lost. I never got into these kinds of things in my adult life because I didn’t know anybody that I’d be able to relate with. I got into baseball because I knew it would bring me closer to my friends. Same reason why I started smoking [and drinking, for that matter]. We do things in our spare time because it’s something we can actively engage in or reflect on socially. I don’t really have anybody to play Dr Mario online with. I haven’t met anybody to converse with about the latest issue of Sex Criminals.

In effect, I became kind of a shut-in. Even when I was having fun, there was still a nagging voice telling me that I’d rather be at home, curled up on the couch, safe from all vice and temptation. My need to constantly stuff my face has slowly dissipated. My sex drive is starting to crawl back [hah]. But I know I still have a long way to go. It’s taken me an hour to write this, when really, it should’ve took 20 minutes tops. I keep staring out the window, at everything, at nothing. I know this is all part of the coping process, but I’m still praying that I’ll wake up one morning and be back to my old self.

But do I want to be my old self? The fact that quitting smoking has given me an identity crisis is rather alarming. If one of my most distinguishing features was that I chainsmoked cigarettes, then I would much rather be somebody else. I’d rather be the dude that indulges in teenage hobbies, despite my age. It gives me more character than smelliness, health problems and trying too hard to be Bruce Willis. Just the fact that I’m able to write this to an audience of strangers that I’ve loved and trusted for the past umpteen years only shows that I’m making progress. The road ahead is filled with suck, but I take comfort in knowing that I never want to go back down this road again.

And this, just saying this out loud, it helps.

And seriously, everybody should read Bitch Planet.

This is the part where I try to be funny. You can read this part.

– So there’s a big snow storm coming. I was going to make some coy jokes about storm prepardness, but frankly, I’m already sick of hearing about it. Whenever something bad/dumb/funny happens to New York, you have to get your jokes in within an hour, or else it’ll be too overplayed. It makes living under a microscope kind of tiring and lame. But there is one thing kind of worth noting. The storm pattern looks like a real pussy.

Top 3 Terrible Jokes That I Derived From This:

3) We’re all gonna get way laid
2) It’s not a vagina, it’s a sailboat!
1) I’ve met a lot of buttholes from Knoxville. Everything makes sense now.

The ongoing mania, combined with my obsessive comic reading and increasing sex drive caused me to have a dream last night. In it, the storm ended up being an actual gargantuan vagina hovering over Manhattan. And it was up to me to save it. But of course, with me being so out of practice, I spent the length of my dream freezing up and not remembering how to perform cunnilingus. Upon waking up, I realized that my methods were completely backwards. In order to save the city, I’d have to be a complete turnoff. So I would just have to go up to that scary monster snatch and talk about video games and comic books ad nauseum, thus preventing the snowstorm of the century. Also, I’m sure I can get down to business just as good as the rest of them. It’s like riding a bike, without the fear of being injured/ran over by a horse.

– I was on the Manhattan Bridge last week, because duh. There was a couple jogging towards me. They’re around my age, but completely different, because they’re jogging and life partners and probably make more money than me and whatever. I have to admit, in a fleeting moment, I wished I could be them. But then I noticed the girl was wearing a shirt that said, “I Play For Team Kids”. Who in the right mind plays for Team Kids?!? Kids never win! Also, playing for them as an adult gives an unfair advantage. What the hell is she thinking?!? She’s ruining the whole sport [whatever sport that is]! Then, as they passed me, the guy said, “They seem, like, organic”. I stopped for a good 30 second chuckle. Let that be a lesson: never be jealous of somebody else. They’re probably somehow lamer than you.

– I realize that Will Smith is pissed that the academy snubbed African American actors this year. For starters, I saw the trailer for Concussion and based on Will’s contrived accent and lines, I decided that the movie was most likely garbage and definitely not worthy of an Oscar nomination. Secondly, it’s not the academy’s fault that 90% of the front-running films this year were whitewashed. That’s the fault of the filmmakers, dummy. He can blame The Rock for phoning it in for San Andreas or the makers of Straight Outta Compton for making it too self-indulgent, but you can’t blame the public opinion. Thirdly, please remember that Three 6 Mafia won an Academy Award years before Martin Scorsese did. Actually, that only exemplifies how broken the system is. I take everything back. The Academy is BS. Boycott everything.

– It’s 4:20 somewhere. Wait, it’s 4:20 here! Yes!

– This week’s Letter From Coze went out to Sasha, a girl that “liked” me on OKCupid last year but I didn’t have the guts to speak to, until now, when we matched on Tinder:

“You had me at Potty Queen.”

Naturally, she didn’t respond to me. Come on, if you’re going to publicly display a picture of you pointing at a Port-o-potty on a dating site, you should expect responses from guys who appreciate and respect the convenience of portable human waste disposal pods. Dummy.

Try this trick over the weekend: figure out something to do during a snow storm and email me the results.

Have a Cabin Feverish weekend, everyone!

-TeeCoZee