International Pipe Smoking Day (IPSD) 2023

Survive enough years on this Earth and you will come to distrust Hallmark Holidays™ much as you distrust most of what people go on about, since it is gibberish that serves to deflect, rationalize, distract, scapegoat, or submit instead of looking toward what is real and what can be done to make it as good as possible. Over time, The Gods of the Copybook Headings win out in personal experience if nothing else, and you come to believe that there are good people and dysfunctional people, that everyone good should be rewarded, that the only morality is realism, and that you should always be positive, creative, and looking forward with warlike spirit toward maximizing what is real. This comes from the transcendent outlook that emerges when you have seen enough of life to know the bad intimately, but realize that somehow between good and bad, the good always emerges although not universally, so it is your choice to live a good life in whatever niche you find yourself, even though most will fall into neurosis and self-pity and dodge that like a bar tab at a college reunion.

For International Pipe Smoking Day this year, the experienced, warlike, and sensitive pipe smoker may find that although this is a type of manufactured holiday, as opposed to one that arose organically through culture, it celebrates pipe smoking and the enjoyment of pipe tobacco as a natural outpouring of the contemplative and reverent process that allows us to enjoy life, therefore understand it, and by appreciating its balance of order versus disorder, good versus dysfunctional, and sane versus neurotic, come to see the necessity of this undefined space where moral choice (which most call, erroneously, “free will”) can produce better over worse, and therefore we can always choose better, especially if we think about things with a pipe in hand beforehand. This way, we avoid falling into the worst form of disorder, which is repetition or randomness, a condition not unlike the heat-death of the universe brought on by entropy.

This year, I celebrated with some dark English shag and an English blend of my own homebrewing, which you might note for your recipe book is a stout Scots-American English blend that now has almost ten years of age on it:

This one will not put you on the floor, but it ranks up there in the medium-to-strong range and has full English flavor without being dominated by the Latakia, substantially warmed up by the dark Burley which gives it a nutty flavor and with the aged Virginias, turns the herbal smokiness of the Latakia into a smoked honey or molasses flavor over roasted barley, sort of like a beer in bread form. It provides a moment for appreciating just how lucky one is to have this moment, a tautology that like life itself, can only be explained by the experience: the purpose of life is to live it.

The English shag was a classic that was probably smoked by Sherlock Holmes, Dark Bird's Eye:

Summary: a strong, comfortable smoke that varies the sweetness of Virginia leaf with spice and mid-range flavors.

Among the codger blends, the shag cuts often tend to be both the most unassuming and the least likely to take prisoners. This dark shag reveals its origins in smoke curing which transfer the sweetness of Virginia leaf into a broader range of flavors and gives it a smoky tang. The odious Lakeland essence, a cousin of AIDS and funeral home rosewater, burns off quickly and leaves a strong dark smoke with undertones of sweetness and earthy flavor. This is a great all-day smoke for people who enjoy being outdoors.

It mixes well with a little Five Brothers, a whole Burley that with a little age loses the Burley bite and vegetal flavor, and adds a natural sweetness and toasty warmth to the mixture. This preceded the English blend above, which is unnamed because a blender used the same name that I used for its working name, for a day of solid smokes.