the discard ritual and the optimism it buys
because whenever he finished the last of the substances on hand he always threw out all his bongs and pipes, screens and tubes and rolling papers and roach clips, lighters and Visine and Pepto-Bismol and cookies and frosting, to eliminate all future temptation. He always felt a sense of optimism and firm resolve after he’d discarded the materials.
Context
The physical liturgy of quitting, complete with its emotional payoff: everything purged to eliminate temptation, and the reliable lift of optimism and firm resolve that follows the purge — the same lift that makes buying the fresh bong and laying in fresh supplies feel, each time, like a genuinely different occasion. The disposal is not the end of the cycle but a load-bearing part of it. Kate Gompert enacts the identical liturgy at 024 (pp. 76-77) — "No More, This Is It," some fifty one-hitters pitched into dumpsters over the years, a couple of them nice wood-and-brass ones from Brazil — the cross-character proof that the discard-and-optimism ritual is the disease's, not one addict's private tic.