FUNKY PERFUMES

One of the old dung beetles will be returning from Arizona this week, where he has been for a month in connection with baseball. Naturally, some of us are thrilled to bits by this. I'm not. I'm wondering if he's become even crazier, seeing as he had gone down the rabbit hole and drunk the kool-aid. Full blown rightwing Trumphead. If he weren't Jewish, he'd be a Christian nationalist. No hint of a brain anywhere in his body. Probably left it fermenting on the floor of the basket weaving lab at Tamalpais High when he graduated half a century ago.

The thrilled crowd had no one to talk to while vegetating except sane people.
Even the old military man was absent. And the engineer had covid.
None of them have channelled for space aliens.
Which is a minor blessing.

Also, unwise decisions were made.
Involving interior architecture.

On the other hand, there have been pipesmokers. Whose conversations involved small cars, train lines, dungeons and dragons and other role playing games, food, and sheer insanity of places like Texas, Mississippi, and Florida. So that was in complete contrast to the people in the backroom, and I had a splendid time while the Christian nationalist Jewish person was off involved in baseball in the Republican paradise to the East, enjoying the hundred and ten degrees of heat frying the bacon that sits where his brain should be.
Hey Dan, welcome back. They missed you.

In fact, I spent the entire weekend at work feasting on Cornell & Diehl's Anthology, which is two red Virginias, a blonde, and a measure of Louisian Perique, compounded to celebrate thirty years of splendid tobacco achievements.

Holy g-ddamn' the tin note is funky. Fruity Limburger cheese. Which is especially noticeable when you are drying some on a small saucer perparatory to loading up a bowl. But the taste when you are smoking it is divine.

The blender, Jeremy Reeves had made a masterpiece.

Plummy, peachy, tangy, and slightly tingly on the tongue. Terms like yeasty and pastry-like come to mind. I'm having some with my second cup of coffee this morning, and at present the world seems very far away. I need to stock up on this.


Some people are reminded of citrus and vinegar when smelling the product in the tin, others detect hay, stone fruits, and candy. I get none of that; fruity Limburger cheese, emphasis on the fruit. Like someone decided to put several slices of that cheese on his apricot strudel and heat it briefly in the microwave. But after it's been dried to the right moisture level for smoking and lit up, it demonstrates an entirely different panoply of flavours. Slight suggestion of chocolate, all kinds of dried fruits, the spice rack after the cats have fought in the kitchen, sun streaming in through the window of the drawing teacher's classroom, language classes at school during the first three hours of the day, fine Belgian lambic beer spilled on the old plank floors of a bar in Eindhoven where the students from the technical university congregated, did their homework, and discussed Lenin, buying dusty used books at De Slegte in the centre of town near Stratums Eind on a Saturday afternoon in Spring.

When I was at highschool in the Netherlands I was always made aware that as an American citizen I represented an evil empire far, far worse than the Nazis and the Soviets combined. My classmates were charming that way, and took great pains to "considerately" remind me that everything I read was vile Yanqui propaganda. But at least I had read many of the great works of Dutch literature that they hadn't, as well as Asimov, the English and American poets, Dickens, Faulkner, Nabokov, Tolstoy. I must have been insufferable with my vocabulary.

My vocabulary is insufficient to describe the pleasure this tobacco gives me.
Despite my having many more words than then.
Reading is not enough.


I feel incredibly ancient.
And I feel young.

TOBACCO INDEX


==========================================================================
NOTE: Readers may contact me directly:
LETTER BOX.
All correspondence will be kept in confidence.
==========================================================================