nicotiana

The internet changed after Google. Their algorithm rewarded popularity. Search engine results popped up whatever was trending. This created an echo chamber which intensified demand for a few products and ideas, changing frequently, making it harder to find out about anything else.

Naturally this ramped up into social media. Why even bother with a search engine when you can have a scrolling feed of The New in real time, and “live in the moment” like a 1990s indie-grunge song? That further intensified the pursuit of a few conspicuous consumption trends at the expense of everything else.

That dovetailed nicely into the old bad habit of “keeping up with the Joneses,” where if your neighbor bought a Twitter-enabled digital refrigerator, you competed by getting a better one, maybe with BlueTooth connectivity so you could post photos of your dinner to social media directly from your kitchen.

After a number of things — social security to disincentivize saving, public education to keep you focused on all the wrong issues, diversity to replace organic culture with ideology, and 14A-enforced equality to make sure that you had a social position starting at the zero and needed to draw attention to yourself to “be someone” — changed society, conspicuous consumption camouflaged as culture and activism was all that remained.

Consequently, if you want your friends to take notice of you on the internet, you have to find something rare, weird, with a cool backstory, or absurd in order to draw attention to yourself. This created a pursuit of oddball pipes, antiques, and rare tobaccos that are both expensive and require hours of trolling online sites or driving to far-off B&Ms to obtain.

In my view, this causes a lot of up-and-coming pipe smokers to miss the point. We smoke this way because nicotine brings pleasure, calmness, intensity, and clarity to life, but we do not want to choke our lungs with weird vape oils or gritty particulate pollution. We put tobacco in a pipe, light it, focus on our breathing, and enjoy the whole experience instead of doing things just so we can get more “likes” on Facebook, Twitter, or Deddit.

Let me tell you a story about one day in a pipe smoker's life, and ask you to keep in mind this quotation:

It is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.

This pipe smoker, who shall remain unnamed, was gifted with a tub of Prince Albert. Purchased at a local grocery store, it was unexceptional in every way: mass-produced, from a large corporation, probably anonymous generic Burley from a thousand farms, covered with time-honored standard toppings like whisky, vanilla, and chocolate.

The smoker, delighted with the gift but moreso that someone out there thought enough of him to remember his likes and habits and the things he enjoyed versus the things he was compelled to do to survive, immediately tore off the wrapping, flipped open the tub, and loaded a bowl in a no-name pipe and lit it with a generic lighter.

What happened then, Dear Reader? Was it a moment of bliss, transcendent ecstasy, and having the third eye open to reveal the unitive structure of the cosmos?

No, friends. The pipe smoker simply enjoyed his pipe while he puttered, ran, jumped, walked, and moseyed around doing everyday things. He cleaned the gutters. He fixed the sink. He tightened the screws on the shower door and beat the sealing liner back into place.

But he enjoyed himself. There, independent of what “the world” thought, or any concern for what others thought, he just appreciated life, including its many parts: daydreams, musings, contemplations, activities, family, friends, maybe a little Corelli or Bach on the radio, the tight fit of a seal, a job well done, and, of course, the constant stream of flavor and life-enhancing nicotine from the pipe.

During this time, he was not busy mentally writing his auto-biography or thinking of what he would say to his friends at the next class reunion to prove that he was in fact living a better life than they were. He did not contemplate water cooler conversation at the job, or church chatter over coffee after the sermon droned to heat-death as the audience considered that Jesus was wise but the world has Control. He simply enjoyed his pipe and his life.

He was free for a moment of what Tom Wolfe called the fiction-absolute:

Even before I left graduate school I had come to the conclusion that virtually all people live by what I think of as a “fiction-absolute.” Each individual adopts a set of values which, if truly absolute in the world — so ordained by some almighty force — would make not that individual but his group . . . the best of all possible groups, the best of all inner circles.

We all struggle to be more than anonymous equals in this world. The old social order gave us each a place that we could not lose except through the usual gross transgressions (negligence, murder, theft, assault, inability) and therefore, we were someone even if just to our local area, family, and friends. We had a center, a position, and an immutable identity.

When we connected up the world and abolished all of the old stuff, which like most time-honored things win out by utility and not moral rectitude, we lost a sense of place, and the internet, television, and press tied us all together and made each of us competitors for “the most interesting person in the world” at least during our fifteen minutes of fame.

We are going to need new things to replace the old and the intermediate that came after it. Obviously, the modern world does not work so well for most people, so we turn to our gardens, bird-guides, hunting lodges, homesteads, churches, and pipes. That turning begins with appreciating not just the moment, but its connection to all other moments.

In the bigger picture, that means having the ancient, eternal, and continuous things in our lives. Those may be as simple as being with friends for timeless rituals like the hunt, the fire, the drinking too much Natural Light and waking up in the woods, or as complex as the inter-related dynamics that make a healthy, comfortable, sturdy, and generous family.

It can include the gods — Thor, Athena, and Krishna guide us! — and time-honored wisdom. It can mean simply firing up the tobacco your great-grandfather smoked and enjoying having your pipe with you while you find a way to enjoy other everyday tasks like fixing the shower and cleaning the gutters.

Pipe-smoking cannot be a god for us. I like Esoterica Tilbury, but only when it shows up in my hand because fortune had me show up at our local B&M when it was in stock at a good price. That means rarely, and I am fine with that. I like fine and fancy pipes, or ones owned by famous people that have silver tassels on them, but I reach for a basket pipe with a good draw. There is a great joy in having someone bring you some Prince Albert back from the grocery store, loading it in a battered old faithful, and enjoying the day without complexity because pipe smoking fits into a full life but is not a substitute for it.

When I see people paying absurd prices like $50 for a 3.5oz tin of some not-mindblowing flake, or wasting hours of every week chasing down the last tin of Tilbury, I feel like the point has been missed. Pipe smoking is not here to bring you fifteen minutes of fame to substitute for a life-long feeling of inadequacy, irrelevance, and anonymous insignificance; it is here to be part of what you do to fill this void, which is having a decent simple and normal life in which any greatness you achieve is part of what you do to make that a good life.

For some, that means acts of heroism on the battlefield. For others, being the village plumber or lawyer, or even just the guy in your suburban neighborhood who people come to with the hard problems or the glitchy lawnmowers. (My view of the suburbs: they are generic on the outside in order to hide the inner life, so it can be privately enjoyed without being subject to social pressures. In individual lives and civilizations, increased entropy can be traced to the accumulated influence of social pressures.)

I notice that they have changed the font on the Prince Albert tub to make the “C” look less like a “G.” Salespeople have in the past looked at me quizzically and said, “Pringe Albert”? This led to the the mental meandering that had me wonder if I should not come up with an alternative blend named Fringe Albert, flavored with JP-4, green onions, Cointreau, and the flowers of the African violet. It would probably sell for $50 a tin and make a lot of YouTube videos just pop and sparkle.