PERFUMED DARKNESS

Once you reach a certain age, you no longer have to act strictly rational nor behave according to the expectations of others. You are not a young man anymore, gaily skipping down the street and full of beer, but a sober bachelor with a different drum.

It's past three thirty in the morning, I've had a six-hour nap, there's a hot cup of milk tea on the tray to my left, and a pipe in my mouth. I'll be at work again in less than six hours.

I should be outside, because my apartment mate is in her room, asleep, and any amount of exposure to tobacco is harmful and traumatic according to many self-appointed experts.

On the other hand, it's cold outside, and her sense of smell is buggered-up because of allergies. There's pollens in the air!

Nor am I curious whether the cops have rousted the colony of bums at the end of the block under the acacias.



It's only a half-bowl of tobacco (Elizabethan Mixture), in a pipe I've had since early high school. I can remember smoking this in a wooded park in Eindhoven, on a rainy day when I was skipping classes. That time it was filled with Maryland ribbons ("Baai tabak"). And a few months later it was Balkan Sobranie late at night, or, sometimes in the mornings after that first cup of coffee, when it was still dark outside and autumnal fog blanketed the streets of Valkenswaard, and the drifts of leaves crunched underfoot.
Blend 805 or Trafalgar in Berkeley during my college years.
Much other tobacco since then.

[The briar is a French no-name, Lovatt shape, clean lines.]

Besides fine tobacco, the other constant since childhood has been caffeine. Tea and coffee since my single digits. My mother warned me that it would stunt my growth, but she said the same thing about so many other things, and I was already taller than her by my early teens, and a nice hot cuppa is a valuable part of a good breakfast. Or it's an after school wake-me-up, post prandial pleasure, late night comfort, and pre-dawn peacefulness with a last pipe of the day before the final two or three hours of sleep ...

[Never drink flavoured coffee; it's crap.]

I'm sure those five violent-looking crazy types will be gone when I head out in a few hours anyhow. The Chinese landlords next-door will have called the cops on their little settlement, or the Macanese gentleman across the street might have done so (they were right opposite his windows).



It is quiet, so very much before dawn.
There are no mosquitoes yet.
Still too cool.




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