nicotiana

What exactly is a “blog”? When Jorn Barger — he and I had some great verbal scuffles on the early net — invented the term, it was a contraction of “web log,” which was like the infamous “dump log,” another feature of the internet. A log meant a recording of events, usually a links list, because back then internet resources were all the rage. Government agencies, corporations, non-profits, and lone wizards were all sticking interesting content online and we were trying to preserve it against the endless flow of advertising and megalomania egotistic drama from the Thundering Herd. But to me, a blog is like that early web: a place to record information.

What is information? It exists in both tangible form and somewhere in the Platonic Cave of mental cyberspace, although its physical form can influence and be influenced by the intangible thing itself. This tells me that it is the core of the universe. We are here to learn, communicate, and share things, even if as a good nihilist I decline to affirm that there are universal truths, values, and communications, because in a relative universe where we all fit somewhere on the Bell Curve and have radically different experiences, expecting us to perceive anything identical is not just silly but blasphemous. Nature consists of variety. Nature loves variety. Humans love centralization, bureaucracy, standardization, and stuff that comes in bubble packs.

Not that all the stuff in bubble packs is bad; I just wish they would use boxes or wax paper instead. All this one-use plastic makes my hippie half nervous, since generally I prefer wood, stone, and steel to that weird material. My hippie half is still left in Tolkien's Shire, thinking that if everyone had a house and homestead, a few cattle, and a good pony to talk to, they might be able to calm down and think clearly instead of being lost in the neurotic delirium that categorizes our time. We live in an empire of death, a failing of civilization, the collapse of a great power; modernity is not a path to health and happiness but to doom, even if our technology is pretty cool and some of (not Gardasil, Thalidomide, or Vioxx) our medicine works pretty well.

That hippie side says that if we are going to make sense of anything, it starts with being willing to share with each other and face dangerous truths. If you are fat, you are fat; the kindest and most compassionate thing in that case is to rip the bandaid off up front, tell you that you are fat, and take you for a long walk. This is metaphorical; I would not do it in real life. However, if humans want to keep existing (good idea) and want to do so above a subsistence level, we also need to keep communication open and share ideas with each other. This is a higher form of love than what you see in most rostrums and pulpits, definitely better than what they sing about in pop music or ramble on about in movies, and probably less controlling than most of your parents. We have to be willing to unite in the quest to be good humans, which means that we adapt without destroying our world. We are at risk of screwing this up now, for sure, but we always are in the technological age; it is a long-term concern that must be managed like all others. Communication of honest and open truths — of all sorts, even if they offend, disturb, upset, and insult us — is the only way forward.

That is my hippie side speaking. My hippie side does not understand why Muslims would kill people for posting a cartoon, Christians would burn witches, Pharisees and Sophists would kill Christ and Socrates, or Communists would shoot dissidents. I understand why people shoot union marchers because those people threaten their livelihood, since the magical money pot does not exist and when the unions take over, they steal everything and drive industry to China. This is why it takes work to find a dishwasher not made in China. Luckily the robots are going to take care of the unions. Digital machines are too pragmatic and detail-oriented to unionize. However, I would rather not shoot anyone. Once you get to the shooting side, you have already lost sight of the roots of the problem. What is it that offends Muslims about a cartoon, Christians about Slayer, or the Sophists about Socrates? All philosophies are conjectural except commonsense realism, and therefore, are threatened by other conjectures. The only way to strength all philosophies is to therefore subject them to those other conjectures.

For this reason, I think of open communication as a duty and a delight, and a blog as a letter to people who are interested in roughly the same stuff that I am interested in. Why is this important? Well, like any person over age twenty-five, I have been accumulating memories. Memories can be torment — I still cannot believe that I asked that one woman if she was expecting at that one party thirty years ago — but they are also conclusions. Like in literature, after an experience we summarize our learning of it, and move forward with that hard-fought and pain-won summary. This could be seen as part of human history, when you think about it; humanity started out somewhere knowing nothing, and someone had to eat the plant with red roots. When his convulsions stopped and he could be buried, we moved on to the plant with blue roots. Every mushroom we know is harmless is a grave marker for someone who found out that it was not, or fed it to some poor dog and then made the checkmark in their journal (an early form of log) to avoid those weird things. But memories are value when they convey learning, so that is what I try to do here.

All of this is prelude to this point: smoke what you like, and like what you smoke. We are in a relative universe, and you are somewhere on a Bell Curve for every trait you have. You are also somewhere on an arc of learning from neophyte initiate to seasoned master. There are going to be some brutal insights here but they are my experience and my analysis, and may be incomprehensible to you now or forever, depending on where you are on those curves. I offer them not in malice but in the spirit of sharing what I have learned to whatever degree my place on the Bell Curve is relevant. Someone said on one of these social media sites that I seemed to “love aromatics,” and we need to face some brutal truths about aromatics.

Most products fit in the Big Mac to Coca-Cola spectrum. That is, you take something, simplify it, add what statistically people like, then reduce the cost (widen margins, translation: cut corners) by padding it with cheaper stuff. Your average pipe tobacco blend is no different. Sometimes this is done really well; Prince Albert is pile Burley with flavoring added. This flavoring dopes out as both chocolate and Perique-ish on the flavor profile, with some vanilla and rum-like notes floating there. It is super tasty. However, there is too much of it because they have to conceal the lack of aging to the Burley, and the Burley is shredded because much of it comes from the leaves that were too uneven to sell as raw leaf. It is a perfect product: take the cheap stuff, add some other cheap stuff, and then sell it at full price. I tend to get some other Burley of a similar nature, like Ohm Natural or the pile Burley available in bulk, and mix it into the Prince Albert to dilute the aromatic topping. Then it is nearly perfect. You just want a hint of the flavor, in my view, but this is after years of smoking and some dietary changes in order to enhance my smoking experience.

So now we get to the meat of the matter: life is a learning experience, and what you need differs where you are on that arc, just like where you geographically, on the Bell Curve, and so on. It is not just how far along you are, but the type of experience you have had. Running a business, both for myself and for others, radically changed how I saw the plight (and threat) of workers. Working in a non-profit radically altered how I saw volunteering and the type of person who usually volunteers, both good and bad. Spending weekends in a soup kitchen doling out warm okay-ish food changed how I saw the homeless issue, as living in Detroit, Los Angeles, Oakland, and Houston changed how I saw the diversity question and the issue of social class. You get white hair in this life because at every turn you are going to be shocked, and in an esoteric sense, the farther you go into experience, the more you will confront how reality is entirely not what you thought it would be or should be. If you are a jerk, you do not pass that information on, and instead smugly profit from it while mocking the “little people.” My mother would consider that very bad behavior, so instead, I opt for communicating, knowing that most of what I will receive is a cold shoulder. My own learning experience differs from yours, so (1) take all of this with a grain of salt but (2) if you can, remember it. At some point, your experience will jive, and then you will find out that I handed you free money in the form of “social capital” or wisdom passed on between generations.

It was a bit shocking to see someone say that I liked aromatics too much; in my view, I do not like aromatics much, but I can see how this leads me to over-emphasize the ones I actually like, such as Prince Albert or Armonia. We should note here that most smokers choose aromatics, they choose almost randomly, and they do not care what The Internet thinks about it. I say: smoke what you like, like what you smoke. Those two phrases keep each other in balance, and basically means smoke what appeals to you, but keep in mind that at some point your tastes may change or you may decide on a quality upgrade. That, too, is legit. We are all seekers, on some level, especially if we deny it, just like your average Buddhist monk or New Age guru is an egomaniac who delights in preaching against the Ego (hint: like the appendix, it would not be there if we did not use it for something important; it turns out your appendix is a vital part of your immune system, but even a generation ago they were routinely removed; again, learning is painful and people die on a regular basis that we can learn something from their suffering).

Your average smoker views a pipe as a treat. That is, after a long day of telling people that their intelligent but vainglorious illusions are in fact illusory, and keeping those who are simply voracious opportunists from doing silly things in the name of their own egotastic self-aggrandizement, you come home to have a little treat. Roast up a dead animal, steam some veggies, feed the wife and kids, then tuck everyone in and head out to the porch. It is time for some Me Time.™ For most smokers, that means a cigar or pipe and a tasty IPA or some smooth whisky. We have all been there. You just want an hour of quiet to let your head sort itself out before you go to bed, since otherwise you might accidentally dream of the stuff that went on in your day. In my view, we should include this time in our calculation of labor, since most people need an hour or two to come back to themselves. This means that since six or seven in the morning, until eight or nine at night, they have dedicated themselves to the job, and only now get some time to actually be a human individual who has to sort out not just the day but existential questions. A couple hours a week at church or watching documentaries will not do it; you need a lot of time to figure out how to be human, and how to be the individual that you are now instantiated as, because these are the Big Questions, the elephant in the room of your consciousness, which you need to sort out because your time is irreplaceable and finite, and you want to get to know yourself before you, too, convulsve and go into the ground.

I know of a great deal of smokers who go through a tin a year. Those 1.76 ounces last them a long time because they smoke a bowl or two a week when not interrupted, and half the time the kids have a bad dream, the upstairs toilet explodes, or your long-lost buddy from that fraternity in college calls you after six pots of beer to talk about that one time you guys did the coolest thing ever and the Fire Department was understanding, too. A smoker of this nature tends to have entry-level technique and still be uncertain about tasting, so they need a wallop of taste. Back to Coca-Cola: it is a good product since it is sugar, water, and flavorings that provide a 400% or more markup. It has massively intense taste, crackling with acid, singing with sugar, and sizzling with a salt-like effect. Is it bad for you? Depends on how much you have. A Coke a week kills no one; sixty-four ounces with lunch a day will give you the 'beetus unless you also commute home on foot through the Scottish highlands. Like I always say, most of the problems of humanity can be solved with daily five-mile forced marches. We would all be slim, healthy, and most of all, clear of thought, since getting the blood pumping and muscles squirting helps everything, even the brain. More importantly, some time alone with the animal body distracted by hiking or marching tends to let the brain settle in for some quality Me Time™ of its own, and it tends to drift back toward the big issues and elephants in the cognitive room.

An occasional smoker needs that blaste of Coca-Cola style taste, so they get pile Burley in two forms: raw and Cavendished, the latter being a clever technique where you put tobacco and sugar or rum in one of those cotton-candy machines that blow hot air through it until it roasts. Cavendish is sweet and slightly oily tobacco that takes flavor well. Spray it with sugar water and flavorings, then add some propylene glycol (a common food additive), and the tobacco sucks up those flavorings and starts to taste like cherries, mint, vanilla, chocolate, flowers, fruit, or some combination thereof. This is not much different than Coca-Cola or those great orange and cherry sodas they have in the vending machines at my day job. If you want a treat, food flavors without the calories work great, and if it tastes like a soft drink, so what. The internet smokers and full-time smokers scoff, of course. You are not tasting the tobacco; why not smoke sugar? There is barely any nicotine. Worse, you have just made a complex chemical formula more complex by adding random stuff that no one really studies to see whether or not it is going to give you Ebola or AIDS. I accept all of these critiques, but point out that for an occasional smoker, it does not matter. They are smoking a tiny bit of tobacco on rare occasions and will barely taste it anyway because of the liquor, so who really cares; they are enjoying it. As their knowledge and ability to taste improves, they might move on, but most of them will be perfectly happy with the occasional pipe.

Same goes for the daily evening smoker. After a long day fitting pipe, teaching high schoolers, or wiring up networks, this smoker wants to have a bowl after dinner while reading the newspaper (on the internet) and thinking about nothing and everything. The grandads of the past who smoked Prince Albert, the various cherry blends, or those great Burleys lightly flavored with molasses and other fun things knew what they were doing. They wanted a tasty bowl a day that was easy to light, easy to smoke, easy to taste, and not too expensive. They did not have huge pipe collections like the internet pipe-smokers, they did not care much about technique, and they were uninterested in options. It worked fine for them, just like that hand-me-down Dell works great for your Mom when she needs to check email and post knitting patterns online. She does not need a top-of-the-line gaming laptop; she needs basic function. A pipe of Prince Albert or Eileen's Dream is going to meet the needs of these smokers. We can argue that they might be healthier with something else, but really they are far more at risk from car exhaust, industrial solvents, soap residue, and cosmic radiation than their once a day pipe habit. They can enjoy their daily pipe and their subsidy of this industry keeps it around for you.

I started out smoking an aromatic of the “black and gold” variety, which usually means pile Burley Cavendish mixed with more pile Burley and soaked in flavorings, sugar, and propylene glycol. Your average pipe smoker needs something like this because an average occasional pipe smoker tends to puff, meaning that he lights the bowl, takes a couple puffs, and then does something for awhile before he has to light again. This is different than how your grandfather who smoked all day long smokes; he was a breath-smoker. He lit the pipe once, tamped, then lit again, stuck it in his mouth, and did not take it out until he tasted guttering and felt the smoke stream lessen. Then he dumped the pipe, blew it out, and reloaded. He probably did not have a huge collection of polished pipes with iconographic histories, either. He probably smoke Dr Grabows, Missouri Meerschaums, or no-brand basket pipes and was grateful for them. He did not care much about what he smoked so long as he liked it, and he would try new tobaccos and keep buying them if at the end of a tin he felt that little pang of loss that you feel at the bottom of a mug of Sam Smith's beer. When I was an average smoker, sneaking outside to have a pipe between life obligations, this was what I did, too. It worked out okay. Over time, knowledge accumulated and with it, my tastes changed.

At that point I gravitated toward the naturals, which refers to pipe tobaccos where any toppings contribute less to the flavor than the tobacco itself does. Your J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis pipe smokers fit into this category. They like Virginia flakes or Virginia-Perique blends like the old Three Nuns, which although it sounds like a pornographic film is actually a tasty rope tobacco cut into adorable little curlicues that load easily and smoke like a dream, although it lives on best as Doblone d'Oro or Dark Twist, although both of those blends need a bit of age for the acidity of the Virginias to quiet down. Many of your old school pipe smokers bought a pound at a time, or bought from quiet country stores that ordered in bulk (before taxation went mad) and could unconsciously age the tobacco in a storeroom, and so they managed to give just about any blend a little age so it mellowed. No doubt a lot of them followed the time-honored tradition of buying what was on sale, throwing it in a closet or cellar, and then digging it out months or years later when it was at its age peak. Just about any blend improves with six months or a year in the wood or brick. Smoking naturals improved my ability to taste; I started out with Englishes, as most of us do, and found Nightcap and Engine #99 pretty quickly. Those are still on my list because nothing handles a blustery damp windy cold day quite like an English blend!

At this point however how I smoked changed. I moved to breath-smoking instead of puff-smoking. I started thinking hard, in those woolgathering silent moments when doing repetitive tasks, about how I packed and lit the heap. You notice which bowls shine and which do not, and start to draw comparisons between the two. The one that you loaded carefully by jostling the little bits of leaf until they were all touching on all points — they call it “packing” like “packing luggage” although that usage seems lost to time — seemed to smoke better than the three-pinch cram. You start thinking about the smoke stream and how to keep it steady and minimal, since that way you do not have to stop to pack a pipe every hour; instead, your bowls last closer to two hours. A thin stream of smoke makes more sense now because you want slow and steady to avoid sudden burns and the loss of flavor that accompanies them. Higher nicotine tobaccos no longer make you sick because you are not getting sudden jolts of nicotine, like with a cigarette, but a constant background hum of warm nicotine goodness that sharpens the mind and distracts from the negative. Technique becomes more important than gear, although you still adore the pipes you have acquired that “smoke well,” which usually means good insulation in the bowl and good flow without turbulence down the stem. You are now a different type of smoker.

You may still smoke aromatics, although if you are like me, you will dilute them with some strong Burley since you do not need the baseball bat of flavor from a heavy aromatic anymore. You want a hint of chocolate, fruit, wine, and flower with your Burley, which is how you can enjoy Prince Albert or Armonia. These are solidly excellent aromatics, so among those who smoke aromatics, you raise them up in your praise. For people who like that sort of thing, these are godsends, and for people like me, it makes no sense to disregard them simply because some think themselves above aromatics. Smoke what you like, like what you smoke. I avoid some aromatics like I avoid some people because they are too crass, too saccharine-sycophant, and possibly too low quality at their core to spend time with. But that is after years of experience, so your mileage may vary and there is nothing wrong with learning to walk before you can run. In my view, most lifetime smokers tend to have some blends from any type that they like better than others and will smoke when available. You never know where you are going to be or what options are available, so you try new things or stick the ones you know are workable, as part of the serendipity of life. Knowledge and wisdom come from that too (we might define “wisdom” as having enough knowledge to understand where it all fits and the degree to which it applies).

In the end calculus, I enjoy some aromatics, like I enjoy some blends of just about any type. Not all blends are equal, even within type. To say that there cannot be a good aromatic is bigotry, just saying that all natural tobaccos are good. Blends have different quality and this is unevenly perceived, but also addresses different needs. In the same way, people are of different quality, and workers are of different quality. You keep the good and eject the bad, like natural selection, but your capacity for doing this varies with your innate ability, experience, and that rare thing called “gumption” or “sticktoitness” which measures your dogged determination to see a task through to the end. Most people do the minimum, some do what everyone else is doing, but only a few are that guy who is going to tear a machine apart, inspect every part, and figure out that the veeblefritzer is creating vibrations that joggle the connections in the wurlitzer and that is what is causing the drill head to skip, even if it looks like a bad drill head and that is why it has been replaced thirty-eight times but the problem remains. Knowledge comes from experience, and experience consists of conclusions after analysis, with a bunch of sweat, pain, and cursing in the middle. Those who have wisdom can use that knowledge, but even more, adopt a philosophy of life that involves “sticktoitness” since this is the only way to find the cause of an effect hiding many layers removed.

If, like me, you take the pipe journey as far as you can do, which is an ongoing process without end but with multiple plateaus, you end up somewhere in the world of flakes. When a blender uses a steam press to crush tobacco into little bricks, then slices them into strips, you get flakes, and these are prized because you get a lot of tobacco flavor in a small, durable package. You can keep flakes in your pocket and dig out a couple to tuck into a pipe, then tamp and light and go on about your day, which is useful if you are a working smoker, even if that “work” is nothing more than ripping out the weeds which like a fifth column just invaded the far patch beyond the garden. You are heading out into the world for the day, so you grab a half-dozen Dark Flake or Erinmore flakes and drop them in your shirt pocket. When you get onsite, you load your pipe, then light it and spend a few hours in contented distraction, allowing you to think with your forebrain about Big Issues while using your animal brain to do the fairly repetitive task; smoking allows this process, like music or dance, since it like a mantra or rhythmic breathing induces order and stability so that you can do the obvious while thinking about the non-obvious. I think this is why we are here on Earth, really, to figure ourselves out, and in the process, to come to understand this world that is a duality of beautiful and terrifying.

For those who attempt flakes, I can offer some good basic advice: pack light and pack low. You do not want to cram tobacco unless it is really dry stuff like caporal or its middle class equivalent, Semois. You want your flakes to slide into the pipe, barely touching the sides, and for them to be packed low, meaning an eighth of an inch below the top of the pipe. Flakes are compressed tobacco and this expands when lit, so they will rapidly fill the pipe even if dropped loosely in the bowl. The same applies to a lesser degree to ropes. If you cram too much in there, you get the dreaded wet bowl that requires thousands of re-lights. If the heap touches the top of the bowl, it is going to rise and little bits of burning flake will ignite anything around you, especially on the belly of your shirt and the groin area of your pants for added humiliation. There are good semi-aromatic or aromatic flakes and plugs, like Erinmore and University Flake, and these are worth enjoying too, even if the people on Reddit and Facebook think you are a poseur for doing it. Smoke what you — well, you get the point.

As Samuel Clements reminds us:

As concerns tobacco, there are many superstitions. And the chiefest is this — that there is a STANDARD governing the matter, whereas there is nothing of the kind. Each man's own preference is the only standard for him, the only one which he can accept, the only one which can command him. A congress of all the tobacco-lovers in the world could not elect a standard which would be binding upon you or me, or would even much influence us.

Is this democracy, every man for himself, or something darker, like nihilism?

Nihilism is the belief that all values are baseless and that nothing can be known or communicated.

Somewhere in between the human categories we can find a truth: people are not the same, nor do they have the same wisdom or needs, therefore there cannot be one standard of tobacco, truth, values, or communications. All we can do is pass on what we know, unlocking our word hoard to communicate as well as we can, hoping that our suffering leads to conclusions which can save others the same suffering so that they can move on to new suffering, therefore increasing the sum total of human knowledge. Someone has to try the red mushrooms. They may be tasty, cause hallucinations, or kill him outright, but after that, everyone else can know their nature. Some will not know the language, others will refuse to hear, and some others will take Twain too far and decide that the rules of reality do not apply to them, so the lessons will be re-learned by observers, but at least the knowledge potential is there. The same is true of tobacco: what you like to smoke today may not be what you like tomorrow; you may be happily puffing on Eileen's Dream on Thursday, but by Tuesday be breath-smoking Dark Flake (mix it with 507-c for a sublime experience, IMHO — that means “in my humble opinion” to the visitors here who are new to the internet).

Our minds settle on the tangible whenever they can. We like broad categories, square grids, equal divisions, and integers. Nature works in clines, curves, individuals, and ratios; these do not break down into “easy” for humans most of the time. The metric system is great in theory but inches, feet, and tablespoons work better on the human scale, which is why we measure drugs (pure commerce) in grams and guns (pure science) in milimeters but when you are making that pecan (pee can, not pee con) pie for the family reunion you use cups, tablespoons, scoshes, and dashes. You might want to think that all aromatics are bad, like all members of an ethnic group are bad, but life is not that simple. It is also not so simple as the converse, namely that all aromatics are good or that diversity is good. One of the hard truths about human society is that the only “science” is history and commonsense conjoined, and that tells you that some things lead to bad places, like having too many conflicting groups in the same place, distributing income because infinite need consumes all resources, or allowing pointy-headed managers to run your society. These are grim, hard truths but if you have compassion, you want the best results possible, so you pay attention especially to the hard truths hiding behind the elephant in the room. This will not win you friends among the entry-level folks, since they lack the experience to know that you are actually doing them and everyone else a favor, but among those with experience, you will get the nod: some things work better than others. You should smoke what you like and like what you smoke, especially since you will anyway, but in my experience, packing light and packing low despite being counter-intuitive provides the best flake experience short of visiting California.

As far as aromatics go, I freely admit to being gay for Armonia and some of the other products of the Mac Baren and Kohlhase & Kopp dynasties. Armonia has fruit, chocolate, and flower flavors on good-quality Burley with a minority amount of unflavored Cavendish. It is naturally sweet, but not too sweet, although grumpy curmudgeons (“mudges,” as we are known) like myself tend to cut it with Burley because after years of tasting tobacco, a little goes far enough as far as flavorings go. I tend to mix it also with Black Twist Sliced since that kicks up the nicotine and slows the burning, adding a rich coffee-like or barbecue-like flavor to the mixture. If you smoke Prince Albert, try cutting it with a little chopped Cotton Boll Twist, since this gives it power and some oily goodness that spreads out the chocolate-vanilla side of the flavoring and thins out the wine and whisky flavors a bit. Just about any aromatic improves by adding Five Brothers, since that gives it body and strength with natural flavor, adulterating the top note a little bit since you do not need a wallop of it to enjoy it. If someone from the internet shows up to tell you that all aromatics are equal and therefore all bad or all good, nod politely and tell that person, “Smoke what you like, and like what you smoke.”