God. This is horrible. The legs have gone rogue and are in perennial state of complaining and revolting. I woke up a couple of hours ago and not a single minute has been worth waking up. I used to do 20 a day at the peak of my addiction and these days I’ve been doing 8-10 before I suddenly stopped smoking altogether 5 days ago. It was probably an extreme decision to give it up all at once, but I tried a lot of times unsuccessfully to phase the habit out and now it had reached a stage only drastic decisions can help and what a drastic one it is turning out to be.

I’ve walked around the house, stood up in a place for a few minutes, slept on the floor stretching my legs and rolling them into a ball around my chest and none of that works. I feel constantly miserable and reading the Alan Carr book to see if he actually says something about how to do it, instead he goes on and on about how stupid people are and how they are tricked into it. I’m about 40% into the book and all I see is repetitions and sermons, frequently written in block letters as if the readers are idiots and miss them when he has been repeating them like a lecturer who feels he can make up for years of his own incompetence with talking down upon imbecile students.

Anyway, the book was least of my problems. Before I even started it I knew it was not going to be helpful. I just read it because I feel it may put forth a way to reduce the addiction and 100 pages into it, the man hasn’t gotten around to it yet. I have a feeling that the remaining 200 pages will be more of the same and that he really hasn’t got any method to the smoking problem and may be he just feels that ranting out the evils of smoking a million times will make at least one of it stick in the minds of his readers. That might even be a way, who knows.

Today is a full day without office or anything else to do. Might be the sternest test. I got a few calls that I haven’t answered but I’m not in a mood to call anyone back. The 10 minutes I spent writing this are the only ones where I was able to do something, and ignore the pangs in my legs, not that they are not there, but I was just about able to manage myself to ignore it. I can’t keep writing forever in the hope that at some stage I don’t have to do it.

Does everyone who quit face all these or a lot of these issues are just in my head. They can’t be for I know how my legs feel. I haven’t ever consciously felt their presence so strikingly as I’m finding these five days. All other parts of my body are all right, may be the legs are taking up for every one of them. The pangs are acute, thought not painful; they make me feel restless, angry, irritable and desperate to do something. That something would involve smoking a cigarette definitely and that is also the reason why the entire exercise is so ridiculous. I know the solution to the problem, yet the solution is the problem.