PERVERSION AND NUDE DANCING!

Another meeting of the local pipe club is coming up. And despite what you may think, or have heard, there will be NO perversion or nude dancing. We are a temperate bunch. Sadly. These get togethers usually involve a bunch of mostly males in the golden early afternoon of their years sitting around making stinky, and discussing books, pandemics, and food.

Outside. On the grass. In the sunshine.
At presumed safe distances.
Chaperoned.

A few of our members are actually in relationships -- possibly five -- the others are free spirits, hippies, or anti-social most of the time. To the best of my knowledge, NONE of us engage in perversion OR nude dancing. Not since college. A long time ago.
That's what Berkeley and Stanford are for.


Other than discussing books, pandemics, culinaria, perversion, and nude dancing, other points of commonality (a series of Venn diagrams with various overlaps) are briar wood (a material), blends of mostly flue-cured leaf versus air or smoke cured from Asia Minor versus ghastly crap flavoured with the same stuff they use at Starbucks for some beverages that are incredibly sweet and nasty versus air-cured mostly "American" as is much loved by a gentleman in Georgia who will not be there (Haunted Bookshop; a blend by Bob Runowksi produced by Cornell and Diehl, and similar products).

I may briefly bring up the blend that should not be smoked by dewy-faced innocents, and thereby stirr up trouble, before then disappearing in a cloud of smoke.

It might surprise you, but I am not averse to starting a riot.

It is the closest people like me come to naughty business.


Seeing as we're smokers. And there's a pandemic goin on. And the grass tends to be wet. Cold too. What with being bare of comfy blankets, exposed to the arctic wind (especially in the last three months of the year), and on the whole an indiscreet place for such things.

Sadly, there will be no tea. Or cookies.

Which is why on my days off I head over to C'town for sustenance, HK milk tea, and maybe snackies, before dawdling a while puffing a pipe. Waverly is a good place to smoke, as well as Spofford and Ross. Commercial Street, sometimes, when the bowl of tobacco is nearly at an end, and I'm preparing to take the bus. The light is particularly nice after lunch, there aren't too many people about, and there are no Berkeley earth-mothers who will bellyache that I'm destroying their lungs and killing butterflies or puppies.


Barring any chance of perversion, nude dancing, or naughty business, most pipe smokers gravitate towards tea, cookies, golden light, and the absence of disapproving Berkeleyites.

TOBACCO INDEX


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