By Sean Sullivan Lagniappe columnist

So I quit nicotine as a New Year’s resolution. I’m still clean and sticking to my promise to get off and stay off the tobacco bandwagon. I’ll be straight with you though, it isn’t easy.

I think about getting back on the bewitching weed every day – about 100 times every day. I’ll be doing my morning radio show and I’ll think hmmm “I could do this better if I had some nicotine.” The same is true for when I order lunch or drive my car or wash my clothes or talk to my wife or watch television or read a book. I think, “Wow this would be so much better with nicotine.” I hope this will eventually go away because thinking about nicotine occupies 50 percent of my daily brain processing. To compensate for my new lack of nicotine other things have filled up my vice jar… and they ain’t pretty.

To clarify, the “vice jar” is something we all have; some people’s jars are smaller than others but we all have them. There’s a big difference between the size of the vice jar belonging to the Pope and the one belonging to Robert Downey Jr., for example, but they both have one. In addition, unless someone is trapped on a desert island, his or her vice jar is always full. Other than G. Gordon Liddy and the Dali Lama, there are few among us who can fight the call of the vice. To get personal about it, my vice jar is huge. Luckily, so is my stubbornness.

So I quit the nicotine, which left a void in the vice jar that had to be filled, and by the laws of imaginary-land physics, the void was filled – with delicious food and alcohol. My will power over a specific vice is powerful. If I decided I’m done with one of the vices, I can handle that and not buckle. But the problem is that attention is going somewhere else. So I’m no threat to the tobacco plant anymore, but I am on a track to eat more food than the country of Ecuador does in a year and drink more than all the English soccer fans do during a World Cup game.

So where does that get me? Well it sends me to the doctor trying to figure out what I can do to shrink my vice jar. That is when I realize physicians with prescription pads have no sympathy for men.

A strange habit has developed in male physicians, especially those in the Deep South, and that is to use one set of medical rules for women and a different set for men. I learned this when I went to the doctor and complained of my new inability to say no to any food item. I realized from the stories I heard from the women of south Alabama that all you have to do is go into the doc and complain of one of a series of ailments and Doogie Howser will write you a script for something that will make it all right. Of course that is only true if you have ovaries.

Women often complain about the double standard; in this case the double standard is alive and working for you, so keep quiet about it. For example, how many guy friends do you have who have ever been prescribed a pill to help them make it through stressful and emotional times? Compare that with the fact that a perpetual prescription of Xanax is a birthright for women born south of the Mason-Dixon line.

If a Southern woman goes to her doctor and mentions that the holidays or a new job or a bad Mardi Gras parade might cause her stress, the physician writes a script for something to take the edge off without a thought. If those same women get off nicotine and start to eat too much, doc has got a pill for that too and if they’re not feeling like themselves there’s, a pharmaceutical remedy for that as well. Now men, try to go into the doctor with those complaints and see what you get. I think it rhymes with “swift kick in the glass.”

I know because I went in to my doctor’s office looking for solutions to my problem of filling my vice jar with snacks in place of nicotine. He weighed me and compared it to my long time weight chart and without any consultation or discussion quickly wrote a prescription for running shoes, wrist and head sweat bands and a “Sweatin’ to the Oldies” DVD, and then he kicked me swiftly in the ass and told me to get lost.

“Hey, where’s the sympathy for my condition,” I asked, to which I got the “lose some damn weight before I have to crack your chest open” song and dance. If I were a woman I wouldn’t have gotten this kind of treatment.

No, I would have had prescriptions a-plenty to fill up the void left in my vice jar. If I was a woman, I could get a script for a little something to take the “edge” off the daily grind, but guys you try to go get that same prescription and the doc will slap the back of your head and say “toughen up, boy!” This kind of double standard isn’t new or foreign to me- as child I learned the amazing healing powers that “walking it off” held for boys. I actually still use this method today. I may walk farther and cuss more, but I still attempt to walk off any injury I sustain. Now try telling a woman to do this. “Those contractions aren’t so bad honey, just walk it off!” Caution though, as those may be the last words you ever say.

So I’ll have to figure out another way to shrink or fill my vice jar. It may be exercise and positive thinking, or it may be reading G. Gordon Liddy books and ritualistically burning myself with sparklers. Either way I think I have this thing beat. Hear that doc…don’t worry about me I’ll be just fine; I can just walk it off.

Sean Sullivan is Lagniappe lagniappe columnist. Contact him at ssullivan@lagniappemobile.com.

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