It's Oh So Still

I haven't smoked in what feels like decades. Still, every night, I think to myself, I could drive to town right now and buy a pack of smokes. Then, I watch Clean House instead.

I will touch a hundred flowers/ And not pick one.

Every few days during the past month, I have gone outside to seek out the spring's flowers when I got a particularly bad craving to smoke. I'm not a flower photographer. I'm not really even a still life photographer. But I've really enjoyed my macro lens in this project. And much as I joke here, spending my breaks in search of vivid color and otherworldly petal striations really has helped to distract me. It's been a reverent and meditative exercise. Whereas I might not suggest to someone else that they eat their weight in cookies to avoid smoking, I would definitely suggest that they go on a scavenger hunt such as this one. It's timely. It's sappy. It's the first step in making your own greeting cards.

More Photos: You Can Learn a Lot of Things From the Flowers

These Precious Things

I'm finding that aside from baked goods, naps, crap television and nicotine patches, the best thing for me right now is to focus intently on the minutiae. Hence scouring the property for edible weeds, painting my nails (then systematically peeling the paint off two weeks later while visiting an AA meeting), reading the text on the cans of diet soda I consume by the truckload, etc., etc.

Today, that attention to detail manifested itself in the determination to capture the snouts of farm animals on camera:

More Livestock Schnoz

Cooking with Weed[s]

Here's a suggestion: next time you want to smoke a cigarette, eat a dozen chocolate chip cookies and then a cast iron skillet full of sauteed weeds: lamb's quarters with garlic, olive oil and red wine. You'll forget about the cigarette, until you start blogging about the lamb's quarters being a distraction from smoking. At which point you'll remember and want a cigarette again.

You Know You Woke Me From My Sleep

There's absolutely nothing like shooting things to make you feel better about nicotine withdrawal.

Still going strong. And I'm not a bad shot, either.