WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO DO ON SATURDAY NIGHT?

Chances are that when you read this, I'll be somewhere smoking a pipe. Or happily slurping a cup of Hongkong-style milk-tea. Seeing as I am very much a creature of habit. Not sedentary, just self-indulgent.
Good pipe-tobacco. Hot hot tea. And someone else.
The third element is missing at present.
Eventually, though.


What would you rather do on a Saturday Night?


Well, many Saturday evenings I end up where there are other smokers. Mostly cigar aficionados, but given how few places allow smoking indoors, a man should not be picky.

Unfortunately, there is a lack of milk-tea there.

It is a baffling oversight.


They also lack comfy chairs, sofas, and loveseats, as well as low tables on which one might place a tea-tray, having opted instead for standard-issue bar-furniture and two large televisions. Which may explain why nice women who could be interested in a pipe-smoking single-man of ready wit and foxy profile -- such as, as just a totally hypothetical example, myself -- avoid the place in droves.

Trust me, not a single one is there.


NICE WOMEN?

Nice women require tea. And a warm comfortable place to sit. Or to recline. As well as clean and convenient surfaces for cups, saucers, handbags, a trenchcoat flung with casual elegance to dry somewhere, and also a spot where they can put their feminine man-purse in which they keep a Peterson or Dunhill for indulging in a bit of Greg Pease's Westminster -- medium full Latakia, precisely what an old-fashioned English pipe-tobacco should be -- when their parents or disapproving colleagues, or even heaven forfend their younger siblings, aren't around to protest.

Plus cookies; nice women love cookies.

Sure, you smoke elsewhere. But it's a furtive puff. A furtive half-hour. Of puffing. Which in this weather is a miserable experience unless you are bundled up. See aforementioned trenchcoat, now add a thick muffler.
Being a hot-blooded middle-aged Dutch-American man (imagine all the hyphenating I could do!), I would offer you a place to do that in peace and quiet, but seeing as my apartment mate is a fervent non-smoker of conviction, the best I can manage at present is an arm to lean on, as we both shelter in an abandoned doorway somewhere along Polk Street. You with your quirkily pungent Latakia mixture, I with my mature Virginia flake. There's probably someplace where we can get warm afterwards. Bob's Donuts isn't too far away. Although it's presently filled with young drunks, barely post-college and fully twitterized.

Might be fun. Nice to be with someone. Still, the weather.

I can bring a big knitted throw, and then we can freeze our toes off, very discreetly huddling just outside the ruined church. I'm sure that the resident raccoons wouldn't mind. They can be bribed.
All they need is pizza and beer.
Rather like frat-boys.


Alternatively, screw up your courage and drop by the aforementioned place sometime where the cigar-smokers are. I'll protect you from the middle-aged British sex-maniac, as well as the "date anything that moves" smuggler of Cuban cigars, plus the "Why Hello There!" creepazoid wearing dubious clothing.
They're easily dented.

And don't worry, I know how to get lipstick off a pipe-stem.
I'll make sure to have extra pipe-cleaners.
And loads more hyphens.


This post is a perfectly clean obscene proposition.

Except for the tobacco odour that adheres to it.

Burnt-leaf fragrances are part of the deal.

Milk-tea. A bite to eat. And Latakia.


Perspicacity is a requirement.


Raccoons are optional.



NOTE: over two dozen hyphens were harmed in the writing of this post. Sorry.



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