The Man Who Got Addicted To Quitting Things,
Once upon a time there was a man of bad habits. All day, every day, he would do all kinds of bad things. Soon this lead him to various forms of physical addiction, to alcohol and nicotine and all kinds of illegal drugs, but even to smaller things, like coffee. He found himself addicted to certain foods, then certain social behaviours, and eventually, he even found himself addicted to anonymous sex with strangers.
Every little thing he would turn into a ritual, and every ritual would involve consuming some kind of Thing that forcibly changed his Doors Of Perception. Uppers to wake up, downers to fall asleep, provoking strangers to anger online to feel like he existed, provoking his friends to feelings of guilt or shame, to feel like he had an impact, anonymous sex with strangers, to feel like he had sexual value — Every moment of the day, devoted to drugs. Every aspect of life compartmentalised and facilitated through the injection of a mind-altering chemical agent. Rather than waking up, he took pills to wake up — rather than waking up, he would enforce a state of being-awake.
One day while he was eating forty cakes off the ass of a hooker while also pushing a finger into his left eye, just for the sensation of it, his cocaine guy told him, “you know, they say the sum of addictions is constant, so u exchange a bad one for a good one, but you can’t just lose a bad habit, you have to change it into a different one. So instead of fucking chocolate cakes, for example, you “get addicted” to, like, lifting weights or long distance running or something”
“seems like crazy talk to me”, he said, out of breath from huffing glue. But later, when he was eating ice cream sundaes, watching anti-humor “dark comedy” irony tv shows about being in “awkward misunderstandings” and drinking wine from a jug, he found that the thought kept coming back to him. He couldn’t let it go.
At first, he figured, he’d just try it a little bit. Just a little bit to see what happens. For the novelty, for the experience. Just a one time thing. A cooky crazy summer fling, enjoying the springtime of his youth.
