THE AGE OF ROMANCE

Recently I've been passing my memory cells over stuff I've smoked, particularly the cigarette brands with their colourful packages that once were common. English brands, Germans, and even obscure Dutch brands. Most of which no longer exist, because huffing coffin nails no longer has the romance and suggestion of refinement and adventure it once had.

Imagine unwrapping a fresh pack of Horses™ Virginia Filter Kings over coffee, and offering them to your crew. You had just finished an airdrop delivering teddy bears, tinned milk, and phosphor bombs to the rebels in Pongtaun, across the mountains, ensuring their continued resistance to government troops for another week. Life was good. Incendiary but good.
It was incendiary AND good.

And at least the engineer, Feodor Feodorovich, appreciated them.
Normally he chained Mahorka Shorties™.
Throat-rippers.


Jeanne with Senior Privileges calling about updated Medicare plans just got quite an earful.
I doubt that she was expecting a surreal lecture on the differences between flue-cured blond leaf versus sheer gavniok shreds from a factory in Komsomolsky, Akmesdjit. The first adds a saveur to that cup of Java (actually Celebes). The latter makes everything that enters your chewing hole for the next several hours taste like fertiliser. Camel fertiliser.

(Advertisement)

MIGHTY FINE SMOKES

You too could be smoking what manly men wearing Van Heusen wrinkle-free shirts used to smoke! Whether they were investigating squidgy bits or lab samples, OR flying contraband for an American government organization not listed in the telephone directory. Adventure!

[Let me point out that my recent chest scan showed no nodules or lesions. So I'm fine for another year. A great disappointment to the healthnuts reading this, I'm sure, as they scratch their nicotine patches pensively.]

Smoke premium quality leaf, Jeanne, not that orkskiy garbage that Ivan huffs.
It will leave your frilled gills feeling ever so much better.
Or whatever your breathing organs.

Years ago you got off the train at Schinkengehirnebourg Station. Stretched, then headed for the coffee shop at the end of the platform. Something hot, and a fresh pack of cigarettes, perhaps a foreign brand, probably made by Douglas Egbertson in Joure. Ah, heaven! The smoke and steam rising in tandem. Dustmotes dance in the shaft of sunlight slanting in from the louvers, businessmen in suits murmer at tables near the counter. A disabled veteran sits quietly near the toilet door with his crutches and pickelhaube showing his former life, as do the medals glinting dully, unpolished in so long, on his chest.

Yeah, I kind of miss the old days.

As well as the advertising.

Unabashed, class appeal.


You knew what kind of person you were when you smoked fags from the Heroic Leningrad Tobacco Factory. You were sure that it was healthier than that garbage the capitalists sold.



One thing that hasn't changed in modern times is the local news media concentrating almost entirely on news of interest to the white middle classes in the Bay Area. Almost like a small town newspaper still running columns by tired hacks like Herb Caen and Stanton Delaplane.
San Francisco is fifty percent "ethnic" now, gentlemen. Many of us don't care about French Restaurants, California Cuisine, or fabulous skiing at Tahoe. The latest musicals as well as fabulous vacations have very little impact on our lives, we're just trying to make ends meet.

We penny-pinch to afford our little luxuries.



Manuka honey, apple cider vinegar, and gluten-free zero carbon footprint delicacies describe a much more Berkeley-Marin-Palo Alto lifestyle. This ain't there.




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