CONSIDER THE OWL

Sometimes you wake up, consider the time, and decide nah, best go back to sleep and get two more hours of rest before taking your pills, making a pot of coffee, and heading out for a morning smoke with your pipe because your apartment mate is, alas, a non-smoker and at too early an hour there are dogwalkers and early morning jogging freaks out there who are convinced that tobacco fumes kill puppies, little children, and the rainforest.
When all you want is some quiet time.

Some creatures are diurnal, some nocturnal. Some are between a rock and a hard place.


San Francisco, as everyone knows, is all about rescuing little puppies, cherishing children, and saving the rainforest. Plus anti-vaxxing, glutenphobia, rabid veganism, and transgender fetishists doing peculiar stuff to food and consenting adults while wearing leather straps.
This city hates tobacco, and wishes us smokers would all die.

Two or three generations ago, if you took the ferry at an early hour the deck would be filled with men in trench or rain coats with hats and newspapers smoking their pipes while perusing the stock market reports, the sporting green, and the society page.

Herb Caen had slithered under a rock to type juicy gossip columns.
After half a century of clacking away he stopped.
Expiring was a factor.

As you would expect, I still have a typewriter. It has not been used since the last century.

For a period when I lived over in Oakland, I would write school papers late at night, until my downstairs neighbor mentioned that it was hard to sleep with that going on. As I recall, every tenant in that building smoked tobacco, ate meat, and read books. Sadly, little kiddiewinikies nowadays do none of that. They grow up to be yuppie joggers, pet owners, and ruddy save the planet harpies living in the North East sector of San Francisco. The only plastic they ever use is a little bag for their dog at six o'clock in the morning and then twelve hours later.
Their precious purebreds are very regular, much like British public school boys.

I've told one of them that tobacco is a spiritual substance and part of my heritage, the pipe is a sacred object to my people, and I've spent years hugging dolphins in the rainforest.
I suspect doubtfulness on his part, damned cynic.


Perique is sacramental.
Potent juju.



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