Random Date Archeology is supposed to be random enough that I don’t get to complain when the machine gives me nothing, which is why this one took three tries. The first roll landed on Sunday, October 25, 2020, and I had a pretty strong suspicion before we even looked that 2020 was going to be one of those weird dark ages in the archive. I didn’t really have tweets by then, there were no Instagram posts, Gmail was mostly Amazon confirmations and newsletters, and my calendar had nothing at all. So we logged the day as what it was: no artifact found, day unknown, spin again. The second roll landed on Saturday, October 27, 2001, which looked promising until I remembered that Adam At Last had mostly gone quiet by then. Sure enough, AAL stops on September 19, disappears for six weeks, and then coughs up one lonely post on Halloween. Another dark patch. Another spin. And then, after two dead dates, the machine did something stupidly funny and dropped us on Sunday, February 10, 2013, which is only about two months before the April 11, 2013 date from the previous Random Date Archeology post. Random numbers do not owe me good pacing, apparently. They also occasionally seem to be doing a bit.

Twitter, though, was very much alive on February 10. There were twelve tweets, most of them exactly the kind of nonsense that makes this project useful because nobody in their right mind would have thought to preserve any of it as Important Life History. I was talking about the recently reopened Red Onion Burgers in Mountlake Terrace, watching Foyle’s War, making an Instagram joke, sharing some fact about Saturn, replying to people in conversations whose other halves have mostly evaporated. At 8:26 that morning I tweeted, “Listening to ‘Lay and Love’ by Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.” That gets to stay right here, because one of my favorite things about doing archaeology this way is that I don’t have to choose retrospective mood music. The song was actually playing that morning. It was part of the room.

Later that day I posted from a coffee shop that I was “Getting some hot chocolate for the little ladies,” which is how I referred to some of the kids then, and the day before I had tweeted that I was listening to Damien Jurado’s “Rollerskating Queen” while taking Evelyn to her first skate. There are little kid Vines from that weekend too. So, on the surface, this looked like a pleasant, ordinary dad Sunday: kids, hot chocolate, music, television, burgers, Twitter. Nothing on February 10 itself announces that anything remotely consequential is happening. Which is why it took looking a few days in either direction to notice that, underneath all of that perfectly ordinary Sunday debris, I was about sixty hours into one of the most successful decisions I had ever made.

I had quit smoking.

Not “I was trying to quit smoking,” which I had done before. Twitter has evidence of that going back years. In January 2010 I was talking openly about trying to quit. A few months later I had apparently found a quitting buddy and declared June 1 the day I was going to be done. That obviously didn’t hold, because by 2011 I was still describing myself as a smoker, and by January 2013 cigarettes were still part of the background noise of my life. Then, on February 4, 2013, I tweeted, “Like many smokers, I’ve tried quitting before. But I’ve never tried announcing it, and asking friends to help…” and followed it with something that is very recognizably me: I didn’t like the standard “here is what your body looks like without cigarettes” stuff, but I was going to have to tolerate people sending it to me. I had complained about graphic cigarette warning labels before because, as a smoker, I didn’t think shame and fear were actually useful tools. A week into this quit I would put the philosophy even more plainly in a reply to somebody: “Shame don’t make anything easier.”

I had never been an especially heavy smoker, which is one of the reasons it was easy to let the habit hang around for so long. I started with clove cigarettes in the early 2000s, like a good little indie kid. I wasn’t particular about the brand. I would smoke at shows, sometimes outside at work with coworkers, and at first it was really infrequent. Then I moved to Seattle on my own and slowly graduated into regular cigarettes, usually Lucky Strikes or Parliaments because apparently I was committed to the aesthetic. On a normal day by 2013, smoking was mostly punctuation: one with coffee in the morning, one before bed, maybe one or two during the day. I only smoked outside, and I tried not to smoke much during the workday because I didn’t want to come back inside smelling terrible for my officemates. Parties were different. At a party I could burn through an entire pack in a night. My connected medical records are inconsistent in the way old imported medical records often are, but they describe the habit somewhere in the neighborhood of 0.3 to 0.5 packs a day, which sounds about right as a rough average. I also remember one doctor looking at how little I smoked and telling me that, honestly, it probably wasn’t that big a deal, then immediately catching himself and saying something like, “Well, I probably shouldn’t say that as a doctor, but it’s true.” That part is memory, not something I found written in the chart, but it fits the larger picture: I wasn’t quitting because my lungs were already collapsing or because some doctor had handed me a terrifying diagnosis.

I was quitting because of my kids. Finn had been born about ten months earlier. Evelyn, Theo, and Rory were all under eight. I didn’t want them growing up with a dad who smoked, and more importantly I didn’t want them getting older and having to deal with a dad who had lung cancer or some other smoking-related illness because I had kept doing a thing I could have stopped doing. A bunch of people around me were quitting at the time, and that helped too. Smoking had entered my life socially — cloves at shows, coworkers outside, the whole early-2000s indie-kid costume — and in a weird way the social environment helped push me back out of it years later. But the kids were the thing underneath the thing. I wanted to be there.

The archive gets almost absurdly specific on Thursday, February 7. That morning Jen Zug emailed me because she had seen that I was quitting and forwarded a Groupon for an e-cigarette kit. I did not go that direction. Instead, sometime around then I was reading Allen Carr’s The Easy Way to Stop Smoking, and at 10:53:59 that night I emailed Heidi an excerpt with the subject line, in full screaming caps, HELP DURING THE WITHDRAWAL PERIOD. It was the section telling the partner of somebody who was quitting how to help them through the first stretch: don’t minimize it, keep encouraging them, notice that they smell better, keep the praise going after the initial novelty wears off. The email itself identifies the book. The Apple receipt in Gmail is dated February 9 and says I paid $6.99 plus tax for it, although obviously I already had access to the text on February 7 because I was emailing passages out of it. Digital receipts are archaeology too; sometimes the strata are weird.

Four days later, on February 11 at 6:54 PM, I tweeted, “It’s been 3 days 19 hours and 42 minutes since my last cigarette. I’ve saved $11.06.” Do the math backward and my last cigarette lands at roughly 11:13 PM on February 7 — about nineteen minutes after I sent Heidi the withdrawal instructions. I actually remember that cigarette. Carr’s book ends by essentially telling you, okay, now go have your last one. This was not a cigarette that accidentally became the last cigarette because I happened not to buy another pack. I knew. I went outside, smoked it knowing exactly what it was, then logged the time into some silly quit-smoking app I must have been using. That app is almost certainly where the very precise counters in my tweets came from. I finished the book, went outside, smoked one cigarette, marked the line, and crossed it.

The thing I remember most clearly from the book now is not cancer, emphysema, yellow teeth, money, or any of the normal arsenal of anti-smoking material. It was hunger. Carr compared the nicotine urge to a hunger pang. I already knew I could be hungry for a few hours and not immediately eat. The feeling could show up, insist that I do something about it, and I could simply continue with my day. He also used the example of smokers on airplanes. A smoker can get onto a five-hour flight, know perfectly well there will be no cigarette during those five hours, and somehow survive without spending every second writhing on the floor. The brain accepts the condition: not now. That was enormously useful to me. If I could go hours on a plane because I had subconsciously justified the absence of cigarettes, then I could survive the short little pang standing in my kitchen or sitting at my desk. Each one became easier to turn into, “Nah, I don’t need this.” On February 13 I told somebody on Twitter that the physical withdrawal felt roughly like being hungry and that the harder part was when I consciously thought about the fact that I couldn’t have one. It is wonderful to discover that the metaphor I remember thirteen years later is the same metaphor I was using six days after I quit. The archive and my memory agree with each other for once.

And it worked. On March 8 I tweeted that it had been twenty-eight days and I had saved $80. On February 8, 2014, I marked one full year: “1 year ago today I quit smoking. Something inspirational goes here. It’s actually been easier than anyone said it’d be.” The next day I recommended Carr’s book and emphasized that it worked without scare tactics. I even told people not to quit until they had finished the book, because I had apparently become a very annoying evangelist for the method. But I had earned a little annoyingness. That cigarette on February 7, 2013 really was my last cigarette for almost nine years.

Which brings us back to the random date. Sunday, February 10, 2013 is not the day I quit smoking. It is better than that for this project. It is the day when quitting had just quietly become my new reality and nobody looking at the day from the outside would know it. I was about two and a half days past the line, listening to Bonnie “Prince” Billy, watching British television, joking on Twitter, and getting hot chocolate for the kids who were one of the biggest reasons I had walked outside three nights earlier and smoked the designated last cigarette. There is no triumphant declaration on February 10. No giant life-update post. No “THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT.” The important thing is happening underneath the ordinary thing, which is exactly the kind of day this stupid project keeps finding.

I would like to tell you I never smoked again, because that is the clean ending and clean endings are extremely tempting when you are writing about your own life. It is also not true. The cigarette-free run lasted until February 2022, when my life was in the middle of what I have already written about as The Break. On February 24 I was admitted to Rainier Springs, the first hospital that would take me. I had almost none of my normal comforts there. We did have outdoor time, and, once again, everybody was smoking. I remembered the ritual. I remembered that I liked standing outside with a cigarette in my hand. I bummed one from somebody and quietly enjoyed it. I smoked for the week I was there. Then I went to La Ventana for a month, bought some vapes and cigarettes, and smoked through that month too. In that particular moment I am not interested in retroactively scolding myself for it. I was trying to find anything familiar to hold onto. Eventually I stopped again.

That quit held until about three months ago, when I started occasionally bumming cigarettes from Rene at work. Then occasionally became enough that I bought a pack. Then I bought another. Evelyn was getting ready to move in with me, and I promised her I would stop when she moved in. The plan in my head was neat: finish smoking before she arrived, let her moving in be the boundary, don’t buy another pack. Instead she got here early, two days ago, and I had just bought a fresh pack. I was not emotionally prepared to throw the whole thing in the trash. That sounds ridiculous when I write it down, but I know something about how quitting works for me now. I need the last cigarette to be a plan, not a surprise. That mattered in 2013. I finished the book, went outside, smoked the last cigarette on purpose, noted the time, and then stopped. I don’t want Evelyn arriving early to be the thing that accidentally snatches the cigarette out of my hand. I want to decide where the line is and cross it myself.

And here is where Random Date Archeology becomes obnoxiously self-referential. I am writing this on September 7, 2026. It is 11:24 in the morning as I am doing the excavation, and there is exactly one cigarette left in my pack. I am planning to smoke it when I get to work around noon. I am not going to note the exact time in an app this time. But now that this post exists, I am absolutely going to use it to note the date. I also admitted, immediately after saying that, that I might bum one from Rene later tonight, so this post is not allowed to lie and announce that I have successfully quit again. Rene remains a threat to the narrative.

Still, the symmetry is almost too good for a random-number machine that had just handed me two useless dates. In 2013 I had four little kids and decided I did not want them growing up with a dad who smoked. Thirteen years later, one of those kids is an adult who has just moved into my apartment, and I have promised her I am going to stop again. We rolled a random Sunday and discovered that I was sixty hours into the quit that lasted nine years, and then we discovered it while I was sitting here with one cigarette left in another pack, preparing to draw the line again. Future me will not have to reconstruct this one from a quit-smoking app or a timestamp hidden in a tweet. The archaeology itself has become the artifact.

September 7, 2026. One cigarette left.

Unless Rene has cigarettes.