Secret Of The Ooze

I love chewing tobacco. It sounds fucking stupid, I know. But, it’s true. I love it. I can’t even tell you why it is that I love it so much. It could be the sensation, that feeling like my mouth is dying and coming alive in the same moment. The mental image of my lips as a phoenix rising from it’s own filthy ashes is such a disgusting bit of hyperbole that it just might work as an advertising ethos. The problem is: I’ve already beat tobacco. I quit cigarettes after five years which, for most smokers who don’t quit until the family doctor finds a Florida-shaped splotch on their chest x-ray, is the equivalent of Michael Jordan’s baseball vacation. I went through the sleepless nights, the lollipops, the toothpicks and the shame in explaining “oral fixation” to hot girls. I rubbed the skin between my middle and forefinger until it blistered and bled. I sat in the smoke-filled rooms, agitated, and bit off the ear of anybody who said a single disagreeable thing. I fucking quit smoking. So now, eight years later, here I sit with a lip full of brown gross. Why? I must hate myself. I constantly find myself indulging in things that I know are knocking my life-span down a year or three. I’m not one of those guys that smoked and drank his way through his teens and twenties without fear of dude-boobs and sexless weekends, i.e. good genes. I’ve lost a good amount of weight in the last few years and it was only because I realized that a man with a slow metabolism can’t successfully pull off 20-beers-and-a-pizza dinner 4-5 nights a week.