I don't know if it's the stress of going back to work, or the stress of having to share the commute with roadfulls of idiot Washington drivers, or the stress of quitting Zoloft (this is probably it - seven days without), or the stress of a recent familial event that I'm not yet ready to talk about, but I feel like my brain went bungee-jumping without the rest of my body, and also without the bungee.

Splat. And stuff.

I look forward to a day in the hopefully not-too-distant future when I'm not in withdrawals from one substance or another. Legal or otherwise. I've paid my frikkin' dues. I'd like to stop the paranoid thoughts and incessant sweating, thankyouverymuch.

I've learned a lot about addiction.

As my sister will happily tell you if given the chance, her little brother (me) started smoking around the age of eleven. I don't mind that she shares this information. I find we turn out even after I've let everybody know that her favorite outfit when she was younger was a Strawberry Shortcake top. Right about now, you're probably wondering what's so bad about that. What's so bad is that she didn't wear the matching bottom. It horrified me and my puritanical sensibilities. I would have thrown her in the dungeon, but my dad was too cheap to buy a house with a dungeon, and so I tolerated her savage ways until I was old enough to leave home and find work in the mines as a transvestite prostitute with a big pink pick-ax and all of a sudden this story doesn't sound like my life anymore at all okee-doke.

This early smoking thing was because my mom smoked Vantage cigs, and I thought the filters were cool. That was the extent of my interest, and I doubt I was addicted at the time. After all, I only smoked about eighty cigarettes each afternoon.

I did it because I liked the flavor. That's what all the magazine ads told me to do: Like the damned flavor, you pansy. So I did. It took some getting used to, but eventually I found a place in my mouth for the lovely taste of cig smoke. It had a certain je ne sais quoi, as people are wont to say when wanting to sound sophisticated. It's not true, though - I saised exactly what the quoi it was I tasted: hot-dirt-rotten-egg flavor. With a side order of rooster-ass-ceviche.

Got tired of enjoying so much of the flavor and took a hiatus from my hobby.

Six years later, I started wondering about nicotine and addiction and crap. My friends were hoodlums. The kind of people who, when in their preferred state of mind, would fight you to the death for a bag of Doritos. The other thing they were into was smoking. Lots and lots and lots of smoking.

Over many moons, I came to expect a certain phrase to pop up at any time from any one of them:

    I need a cigarette.

I understood the desire for a thing that burns and that blackens your lungs and that is expensive and that causes cancer, but I didn't understand the need for such a thing. Why did they need cigarettes?

I wanted to find out for myself how one goes from wanting a cigarette to needing one.

It wasn't very hard. I just smoked a bunch.

After a few weeks of constant smoking, I hadn't yet had the need to smoke. I had a need to eat two (2) Burger King Whoppers every day, and I had a need to compliment them with a "large fry" (why always the effing singular?), and I had a need to end my meal with an apple pie, and I had a need to wash it all down with four pints of Dr. Pepper, but this cigarette thing... where was the need?

One day after never having had the experience I was shooting for, I wrote off my experiment as a failure. I had failed to get myself addicted. It was a real punch in the groin for my self esteem. If I couldn't even get addicted to one of the most addictive things on the planet, then what hope did I have of ever achieving something of greatness? Or even something mediocre?

Then it hit me. In the car, driving east down Nevada Court Road in Portland, my whole body flipped out. My brain was sweating, my body was shaking, and my tummy was turning. It was a lot like my second pregnancy.

I spent a good part of the day like that. It wasn't until late that I had my Ah-HAH! moment. What was going on, of course, was nicotine withdrawal. I didn't know it, though, because I didn't know how to recognize it. I expected my brain to say "I need a cigarette," but it never happened. It was up to me to see and establish the connection.

The bits of your brain that crave something have little to do with the bits of your brain that know what that thing is.

The only way the association is made is with a bunch of conditioning. Letting yourself go into withdrawals repeatedly, and always fixing everything up with the substance of your choice.

Despite understanding this lesson and being able to provide in the form of a cute little anecdote, I was taken by surprise again in a similar way recently.

Two nights ago, I developed a craving. That's all. Just a craving. I didn't know what for. It was, simply, a... craving.

I ran through the things I thought it could be. I ate a popsicle to satisfy whatever foody desires I had, but the craving remained. I tried exercising, reading, watching, driving, singing, guitar strumming, and still didn't feel satisfied.

After exhausting my options, I had one clear thought in my head, and it was one I hadn't felt in a while:

    I need morphine. Tons and tons of morphine. The more the better. Screw those cigarettes.

This scared the shit out of me. Morphine scares the shit out of me. Anything at all to which I could become horribly addicted scares the shit out of me. I don't care if it makes me King of the Moon or whatever. I don't want it. Not going through that again.

Yet, here was this thought.

Much of the fear comes from the compartmentalization of the brain. There's a highly (this can't be emphasized enough) intelligent part of my brain that thinks morphine is probably bad for me. Then there's another part of my brain that doesn't "think" at all, and that part of my brain has been trained to react to the presence of certain symptoms (withdrawal stuff) and to try and hijack the rest of my brain to go get the one thing it believes will fix it all, and that's morphine.

If you've ever found yourself moving toward a substance while thinking "No..." but noticing that your legs don't care much about what you think, then you probably know what I'm talking about.

I spent a while trying to determine why, after being without for so long, I'd suddenly want morphine again.

Finally realized it was the Zoloft. The dizziness, headaches, anxiety, paranoia, sweating, nausea, and so on, was all from Zoloft. The symptoms are far milder than opiate withdrawal, but they're similar enough in kind that it makes sense that my brain would think morphine was the remedy.

Addiction is confusing. Sometimes you can't connect the withdrawals with a substance, and other times another substance is substituted out of an association built over a long period of substance abuse.

I'm really tired of it.

At least it's almost over.