THE COMMON HERD

Good lord it's cold outside. I went out after fixing myself a late lunch -- meat scraps, veggies, thin rice noodles, with stinky shrimp paste and chilies -- and darn near froze my tender bits off. Discovered that it was long john weather, the internet having lied through its teeth and told me a balmy sixty degrees. It was fifty two.

One friend insists he loves this weather. It's brisk. Reminds him of the upper peninsula and shooting ducks. Personally I think he's crazy and has a thick layer of jelly-like fat all around his squidgies, but I refuse to picture that.

It's bad enough imagining him armed with a bird massacre instrument.
I'm fairly sure he doesn't know how to cook them anyway.
Probably an excuse to get out of the house.
Away from the non-smoking wife.
With a pipe and a stink.


Honestly, the only reason I even went outside was to enjoy a smoke. My apartment mate, like many women, is sensitive to the rugged manly odours of fine pipe tobacco either boldly flavoured with Latakia OR subtly spiced with Perique and a little fire cured leaf.
It's quite inexplicable.

This is the time of year when people (men) in the Midwestern states start posting plaintively on the various pipe forums, explaining that "the heater in the garage is on the fritz, my wife and children won't let me smoke in the house, I'm huddling under a dead polar bear on the front lawn for warmth, it's intercoursing cold out here, how do you guys stand it? Waah!" Whereupon some smart aleck will respond with "dude, I live in Hawaii, and my wife is a he-man who puts up with any amount of testosteronic crap." Or Florida. They live in Florida. Where the wife won't allow them out of the house lest the alligators mistake him for a lump of raw meat and rip the sole breadwinner of a Christian household to shreds. Or sumpin'.


When I was still a wee teenager in North Brabant, you could still head on down to the local cafe for a warm beverage and a comforting smoke if your housemates told you to go play with alligators with your pipe in the beastly cold. Peter, Frans, Pim, and Herman, would all be down there puffing their briars while reading the magazines their moms would not let into the house. Time, Newsweek, Nieuwe Revu, and A Boy's Own Life. Rain, sleet, and hail would blatter against the glass in the double doors, something horrid by Abba would be on the speakers -- softly so as not to rile up brainy young fellows with good aim and strong throwing arms -- and the communal ashtray would gradually fill up with pipe cleaners, burnt matches, shreds and dottles of tobacco, as the polar bears and alligators hunted down the shivering naked people without shelter. Probably starving third worlders and Frenchmen.


At least that's how I remember it.


Peter, Frans, Pim, and Herman probably don't. They very likely became non-smokers after meeting the women of their dreams, and were ripped to shreds outside on the street.

You know, there was a time when pipesmokers were remembered for having shot down Jerry over the South Downs. Instead of lamentably ducks in the bogs of Michigan.
The world has been taken over by wimps and cretins.
People who melt cheese on everything.
Overly sensitive sorts.
Soy cheese.



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