PLANS! I HAVE PLANS!

My weekend starts tomorrow, and of course I plan to do things. Great things! Momentous things! Well, other than visiting my bank and smoking a pipe once or twice, I haven't a blessed clue. It promises to rain tomorrow. And, being well past my twenties, I am a realist and realize that if I were destined for greatness, I'd be there by now. So I'm probably going to twiddle on the computer, have hot beverages, and fritter the day away fighting loneliness.


Time away from the cigar smokers is time well spent.


Admittedly, many of my fondest memories are tinged with a discrete hint of cigar smoke. The grammar school to which I went whiffed of it, because the headmaster enjoyed his bolknaks at least three times a day( a bolknak is a Dutch-style perfecto, pointed at both ends, thick in the middle), and the town where I lived when I was a child had cigar factories.
Plus years ago some of my favourite people smoked cigars.

But the world has changed a bit.

Many cigar smokers nowadays are balding middle aged Republicans, or reactionary junior fascists. Or callow Marin-raised entitled jugend.


One decent, very likable, cigar smoker I know is a hospital technician of some sort, always has a few cigars to enjoy on the weekend, and is considerably more intelligent than the balding middle aged Republican yutzes kvetching on the terrace out front today.

There's also a retired photography teacher (quirky sense of humour), and a geologist, and one or two other very nice chaps. But they are all exceptions.


One person of whom I am fond is a lawyer with good taste in cigars, excellent taste in pipes, and horrible preferences in pipe tobacco. And given that people's choices of pipe tobacco are formed by buried memories that they have no control over, I cannot hope to change him.
Smells reawaken mood memories.


The same way cigar smoke brings back sunny days during the first few years of grammar school, the odeur of cow pasture takes me back to my teenage years, long bicycle trips through the Dutch countryside, and roasting coffee is the smell of early mornings in North Beach during the years when I lived near the Caffe Trieste. Jasmine tea? Summer nights reading. Hot tar? well, that's spring in Naarden, a nearby factory, and little fragile reddish flowers.
Fish sauce and sandal incense? Southeast Asia. You get the idea.

I doubt that my apartment mate has it quite so keenly.

Women may be handicapped in that way.

Smells! I have smells!



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