Purge-a-tory

Sometimes I crave a cigarette. Don't you guys? I never truly used to smoke; I only did as a teenager very little---just for fun, like trying sushi, not out of "peer pressure" or any madness like that. I didn't care that much about what friends thought of me in that regard. Heck, I think I was allergic to the stuff anyway. At least my nose and eyes went nuts when around it. I just sort of liked the burn in the lungs and the nicotine high, much like eating roast beef, getting it stuck in the teeth, and flossing those bad boys out and making the gums bleed. Sometimes pain feels sort of good, like running until you are sore, or getting a colon cleanse, I don't know. As long as something bad is getting purged, like rotting roast beef, unused energy, you get the idea.

But all that is not a good point. Smoking is not like that, really. I can see smoking a pipe in moderation would be sort of relaxing. Maybe I am having these thoughts because my nasal passages are clogged and the sound of something to "burn" them clear is appealing. Perhaps I need to go eat some hot peppers. And maybe C.S. Lewis thought like me. Or I think like C.S. Lewis. He was open to a sort of purgatory because he refers to it a little in The Great Divorce and has a quote somewhere about how there will be some sort of painful change from the old man to the new man physically once we are to enter into heaven. I don't think the Catholic view is correct, like a suffering for the sins of this life. Jesus paid for that already. I mean from our sinful bodies to the eternal ones. Don't know if that makes much sense, but I can buy that. Like a literal molting. Hey, we do it all the time, sin corrupts things like our showers and we have to clean them continually, and our gardens, the weeds never stop cropping up. I suppose as long as sin is present, life is one big fat purge. Maybe I am a heretic.

And how did smoking get me started on this. I have no clue. Maybe it is the Sudafed in my system. That stuff is possibly like the red-pilled peyote. No wonder they make you sign for it. It makes you a condensed version of yourself perhaps. Which means I am a total freak. I think my point was that sometimes something burning or painful feels good---getting clean is nice.

I knew a guy once that showered very little. After a weekly trip to the shower once, he told me:
"Don't tell anyone, but this kind of feels good."