CONSIDERING LUNCH: IT SMELLS

Sometimes it's hard to remember that unlike our own balmy weather here, much of the rest of the country is a wintry hellscape straight out of ragnarok. Positively Breughelian. Today it will be sixty degrees or thereabouts in San Francisco. In fly-over territories it will be so cold that they'll kill the family bison and crawl inside for warmth. People will slaughter municipal snowplows for combustible whale oil. Little kiddiewinkies will cluster around their overweight mothers and suck out all of her body heat. Family pets will eat deceased grandpa because they are starving, starving, starving .....

I've never been to Milwaukee, but that's how I fondly imagine it.

It's so cold that Ted Cruz has flown to Cancún.

Where it's mid eighties.


Imagine America's favourite Texan luxuriously smearing sunscreen over his pallid flesh, getting the unguent deep into the pores and creases around the scales lest he develop spiderweb-like sunburns. Become all crackly.

My second cup of coffee is infecting my brain. There are Chinese-speaking working men in the garden next door scraping and chipping away at old paint. Distantly a police siren rises and fades. And now that my apartment has left for work -- she has a normal schedule unlike myself -- with her bedroom door shut and windows open I can smoke my pipe indoors.

Yesterday someone brought up classic pipe tobaccos such as were common in the early fifties, such as John Middleton's Sugar Barrel, a Burley forward blend with some Virginias and a "subtle" molasses topping, or Rum & Maple, plus things like Carter Hall, which is now made in the Dominican Republic of all places, even Lorrilard's Briggs Mixture, a simple slightly topped mostly Burley mixture.

That was the day when American men at least pretended to be civilized: sportscoats and clean shirts, polished shoes, sometimes ties. A pipe, a new station wagon visible in their driveway through the picture window, and neatly combed hair.

They smoked a pipe to drown out the smell of their perky aproned wives in the kitchen cooking up a wholesome meal of tuna pineapple casserole with canned stringbeans.
Or similar nutritious good housekeeping dishes, modern dining at its best.

Neither his nor my mother were good cooks.
I mention this in passing.

Nowadays such strategems are not needed, as vegan cuisine usually contains nothing olfactorily offensive. Nothing at all. No garlic, no shrimp paste, certainly no gluten.


I still smoke a pipe because I'm a dinosaur.



Fine Virginia with a touch of Perique whiffs of carotenoids, plus benzene, arsenic, phenylacetic acid ethylester, alcohols, aldehydes, esters, and terpenoids.
Faintly fruity. A discreet fragrance. Old school stealth tobacco.
Some manufacturers add subtle tweaks.



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