THE BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

A quick glance at the Facebook group for old fogeys indicates that many of the people there start their day with coffee and a pipe full of tobacco. Only a few actually eat breakfast. Understandable! Morning food is boring! In the Anglo-Saxon part of the world it's all fried crap and cereal. Whereas tobacco recalls the Levant, Asia, Africa, and getting into your Spitfire at the crack of dawn to fight a wave of Europeans -- scratch that, Huns -- or adventurously hauling in a load of savage codfish from the frigid Northsea.
Messerschmidts, trawlers, herring!

This blogger's breakfast, on his day off, is strong coffee and a cigarillo out on the front steps. In San Francisco that counts as antisocial behaviour. Because smoking kills children, is totally boomerish, and ruins the environment.

At the crack of dawn, this blogger kind of approves of that.
Anyone rational would, at that hour.


The Anglo-Saxon breakfast is ghastly. Except for the coffee. And you people indulging in it are reprehensible. The correct food for that hour is NOT simplistic fried or boiled muck, which reminds you of the severe Protestants in your family trees, but nicely steamed savoury items that should include pork, crustaceans, chives or scallions, vast fields of snow with bodies under it (which is exactly what cheung fun looks like, especially haa mei cheung fun or cheung fun with little bits of meat), plus hot noodles, soup, and perhaps a nice chop. Washed down with buckets of tea.

In theory, of course.

I've never been able to comfortably put that into practice. Even though I live reasonably close to the Chinese part of the world.


The folks at the nearest teahouse or chachanteng would look most askance if someone came wandering in looking all rumpled in jammies and a grungy bathrobe, with or without a lit pipe. How anybody can be awake enough to shave, shower, and get dressed at that hour, BEFORE their first smoke and two cups of coffee, is beyond me. It's scarcely an hour since my apartment mate left for work, and I'm still in my bathrobe. I'm off work today, and solid food is only an intellectual concept at present.

This boomer smells more bad before he's fully woke up.

I'm wondering which pipe first, what tobacco, and how many children that will traumatize or permanently damage. Should I stumble over to the kitchen for that second cup of coffee, how come the Dutch eat cheese and smoked fish at six A.M., and what the weather is like over there now. A nice stinky Latakia tobacco blended by Russ Oullette is nearby, staring right at me, as well as an old Comoy squat bulldog pipe. Such as I would've smoked in the upstairs living room of our house in Valkenswaard after school, if I had owned it then. Bought it from Mary Pulvers nearly twenty years ago.


Sunlight is streaming in. The apartment building is silent. Crisp weather, not too cold. The prospect of heading over to the Chinese part of the world, Stockton and Jackson Streets, is appealing, but still a few hours off.
I'll save the Comoy squat bulldog for after lunch.

I am not a social man yet. Give me a few hours.
This boomer gotta shave and shower first.

The luftwaffe will have to wait.

Start with a Peterson.
And Latakia.

TOBACCO INDEX


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