nicotiana

Many of us during the holidays find that we are spending time driving long distances to be with family. Sometimes, we even end up alone for a variety of possible reasons, which means that we can smoke on the car. This reminded me of one of my favorite tobaccos.

Although I hate H.E.B. and refuse to shop there because almost all of their customers, rich or poor, are total self-obsessed sociopathic parasites, H.E.B. carries one item of great importance: Peter Stokkebye Amsterdam Shag for about $7.00 an ounce.

Back when they still made the Prince Albert packets, my favorite ritual was to drive to the outskirts of town where oilfield meets ranchland and pick up a pouch of Prince Albert for the road. Then I would set my pipe cleaners, fast food drive-thru napkins, pipe nail, and lighter on an old shop towel on the seat next to me. You can tell I have spent many hours on the road alone with the back window cracked and a pipe going since I can clean the pipe in the dark. I bring an old coffee can for ash and pipe cleaners. The lid is really useful, since I can seal the can and choke off the oxygen flow in case one of the pipe cleaners starts smoking.

Now, I take a small detour and stop at the downtown H.E.B., pick up a pouch of Amsterdam Shag, and then begin my drive. Since I breath-smoke everything, that represents about twenty bowls of over an hour each, so it is rare to run out on the road. If I do, I have to stop wherever I am and explore the local options, which sometimes leads to great discoveries in out-of-the-way places. Since I do not believe in an “objective” value to human spaces, these are some of my favorite places, since they are less terrifying and chaotic than the cities.

Amsteram Shag continues the tradition of the old Peter Stokkebye Amsterdam, a mixture of dark-fired Kentucky Burley and red Virginia with a slight perfumey topping that gives it a cherry or wine flavor as the bowl matures. You load it by taking a big wad of the shag cut tobacco from the pouch and pushing it into the bowl of your pipe; I take a couple pipes with me and alternate between them, cleaning them thoroughly and leaving them exposed but out of the sun on the dash so they dry out completely. With one hand on the wheel and eyes on the road, I can dip a pipe into the pouch, cram it full and tear off the excess, then transfer it to my mouth and light it.

At first light, you taste the dark fired leaf, but then the Virginia comes into play and by the time the heat has caramelized the sugars, the Virginia dominates and the smoked leaf melds into the hint given by the topping and takes on a fruity, spicy, and piquant quality. Amsterdam Shag lights on the first touch and does not expand much, so you need only a single light, no tamp, and then can focus on other things for the duration of the bowl. Sometimes I get closer to two hours out of one, but this leaf requires packing more tightly than regular ribbon cut. If you pack it too lightly, you might have a half hour bowl as the stuff goes up like an over-insured building.

For me, driving takes a fair amount of attention since it can bring imminent death to myself and others, so I tend to just breath-smoke the pipe at the slowest pace possible, the smoke barely visible in the cabin. If you watch the remake of All Creatures Great and Small, Siegfried Farnon smokes a pipe the right way when he drives. You see only a thin tendril of smoke, and he keeps the pipe in his mouth. You never see him draw on it, only let it burn naturally so that the smoke flows into his mouth in a thin stream. This is the ideal way to smoke, especially when driving.

This tobacco blend may not impress people for its fancy attributes. In fact it is a simple blend based on a recipe from centuries ago, but this type of tobacco endures because it delivers a somewhat powerful but profoundly sweet smoke, perfect for distracted enjoyment while you look out the bright vistas and sprawling prairies. As far as a tobacco that you can take off the shelf, smoke without complications, and enjoy as deeply as any other blend you can find, Amsterdam Shag ranks up there with the best of them. Happy travels; smoke what you like, and like what you smoke.

With a recent order, one of these little cuties showed up. It's kind of funny how we joke about TAD/PAD and yet half of us are just trying to stock up before the taxes or other insanity kick in. Every day, government and industry want more from us, and they spend it on... well, one wonders.

Today's smoke is a parfait of Gawith Hoggarth Brown Flake with Brown Twist Sliced and Sliced Black Twist. The Brown Flake comes in long thin flakes, so you pull one of those out of the jar, tuck a couple coins of brown twist and one of black twist in the middle, then fold it on itself and slide it into the pipe. The sweeter and milder brown flake burns easily and ignites the other two, uniting the deep sweetness of the brown twist and the barbecue flavors of the black twist, making for a honey barbecue sauce flavored smoke.

When I was a kid, everyone wanted to eat at McDonald's because it was a new happening thing in pop culture, which is sort of what is left over when real culture dies and mass trends take over.

My father took me to McDonald's one day and said, “The key to any business is knowing their business model, or how they make profit. How do you think this place makes any money?”

I blinked and looked around. There were eight people working in a modern restaurant with a lot of gear. They did not appear to be paid much, but operating this facility had to be expensive.

“Everything but the food ingredients has to be expensive,” I finally said.

“They also spend a lot on advertising,” he said. “Now look at that Coke in your hand. What is it, really?”

It will not surprise any of you to hear that the ingredients revealed water, sugar, flavorings, colorings, and a preservative. Again, cheap ingredients plus a lot of advertising makes for high profit.

I don't know how fast food does it now, but the usual answer in restaurants is to use cheap seed oils, lots of carbs, salt, sugar, and low quality meat tricked out in some kind of sweet-sour sauce.

Now we should look at the tobacco industry during the same period of the 1950s-1970s. What were they doing?

They were busy developing “aromatics” which took cheap Burley, inexpensive Cavendish, and sugar water with flavorings and tossed them together, then pitched it out the door with the idea that it was a new trend: smoke tobacco that other people will not object to because it smells good, like a Yankee Candle or Febreze.

How have things changed since then? McDonald's is now pitching fresh salads which seem to have very little chicken in them, and the tobacco industry is showcasing “mostly natural” blends which seem to have a lot of bright Virginia and white Burley with a gentle top flavoring, pressed into cakes so that no one notices they are getting a brick of bulk tobacco.

I will always be in favor of economics in the Henry Hazlitt sense, capitalism, or “free markets” as people call it now. Basically, though, it is just economics without some middle-man handing out free money and taking a lot in taxes to support it.

However, we have to know the limits of things. I like horses and dogs but I would not let them run my society either. The dogs would eat all the steak and the horses would tear up the gardens. Every thing on Earth acts in its own self-interest only, including free markets.

You have to keep them in check with something else. For me, this is a cynicism toward a tobacco industry that will always attempt to crank that cheap Burley-Cavendish mix out the door and mark up the price using advertising, novelty, and trends. How much of your average English blend now is cheap Burley-Cavendish? Ever wonder why Frog Morton and other flavored Englishes, usually using Cavendish, got such trendy status?

I am not trying to defame the tobacco industry here, but rather point out that they are not different in this regard. They are like everyone else: they want as much money as they can get for as little labor as possible. As a sometimes honest man, I admit this about myself. I like wealth and laziness. But it is true for everyone, including the shareholders who actually control all public corporations.

It is true of politicians, too, which is why your taxes always go up right after they show you pictures of someone, somewhere suffering something awful. They want you to get emotional, start an emotional buzz with others, and for all of you to beat your wings together, demanding that “something be done.” They will create a new agency, hire their friends, get kickbacks from their friends, and raise your taxes to pay for it.

They built a new public school in our town a couple years back. I drive by it regularly. It looks like a fast food restaurant, very modern but simple design, as if optimized for building instead of human occupation. The administrative wing is as big as the classroom area, but they have added gyms, psychological counseling, even security guards to roam the halls. The place has an annual budget in the tens of millions.

My old man was not cynical when he took me to McDonald's. He was simply talking about cause and effect. If someplace is making money, there is a reason. If it's making lots of money, the reason is that they have found a way to buy something cheaply and sell it at a high price.

It's good to be cynical about tobacco blends.

Every now and then it works out, like the case of Prince Albert. At the time it came around, Perique was trendy, just like the sweet-sour song of Oriental blends (which were popular in cigarettes at that time, now living on as Camel Wides). The John Middleton people figured out that if you take a pile of Burley, shred it, soak it in port wine and whisky extract, then add chocolate, vanilla, and sugar, it tastes about like a Burley blend with some Orientals and Perique added.

Pile Burley goes for about $2 an ounce retail, while Prince Albert sells for about $2.50 an ounce. That little markup means an extra $5 of profit per tub, which is enough if you get the right advertising, astroturfing, or organic popularity going to make a tidy sum. What else could they do? Convenience, mostly: since postmodern smokers cannot smoke at work or around their families, they smoke less, so Prince Albert now comes in a seven-ounce tub for $2.75 an ounce.

The psychologist — a man in late middle age with round glasses, a thin beard, and a rangy frame under a thick sweater — stroked his chin and turned back a page in his notebook, continuing to write at the same languid but incessant pace.

“Tell me when this fixation with White Burley began,” he said gently.

“Doc, I don't really know,” I waffled. “It was probably about at the time I really nailed pipe technique.”

“Tell me about that,” he said. More writing, this time with some kind of diagram. I suspect he is actually making grocery lists.

“Well, when you start out, people keep talking about the perfect pipe and all these blends that you just have to try,” I said. “So they bullshitted me for a few years. Let me back up: I started out smoking the stuff you get at your local Walgreen's. It's not bad, but it's like an MRE, more designed to survive shipment, storage, and abuse after sale by neophytes than it is to be, you know, good... and stuff. It's wet as hell, loaded with flavoring, and half-Burley half lawn clipping underneath. I loved it and smoked it in my Grabows, which I also got at the Walgreens I could walk to from our house at the time, but it required frequent relights and never really burned down well. One day Walgreen's stopped carrying it and I found myself in a state of panic. I really enjoyed smoking! Not just the nicotine, but the process. Holding the wood of the pipe, feeling its texture, swabbing it with pipe cleaners, packing — back then I thought of it as 'packing' and not 'filling' — a bowl, and then holding it in my mouth so it became a background, like a piano playing Chopin in the next room or a mural above a busy street, that I enjoyed while I did stuff. Life is about doing stuff, and through that, we learn to understand life. We figure out how it works, but it's more fun with a pipe in your mouth,” I said.

“I see,” noted the psychologist.

“I was inspired by this passage from Florence Nightingale, you know, the famous nurse who figured out that using statistics she could radically cut mortality. She's a hero of mine, since she tried to figure stuff out instead of just going with the flow or doing something arbitrary so she could be on the cover of Time magazine with 'visionary' written under her name. She said:

Perhaps it is not true to speak of God as a judge at all, or of his judgements. There does not seem to be really any evidence that His worlds are places of trial but rather schools, place of training, or that He is a judge but rather a Teacher, a Trainer, not in the imperfect sense in which men are teachers, but in the sense of His contriving and adapting His whole universe for one purpose of training every intelligent being to be perfect...Our business is, I think, to understand, not to judge. What He does, as far as we know, to rule by law down to the most infinitesimally small portion of His universe, not to judge.

You know, a guy I knew who went to law school laid that one down for me. He said basically that the law was the opposite of understanding; it was about categories. You set up a series of categories, like one of those old banks you would drop coins into and they'd roll down an incline with first small slots, then big ones, so the coins got sorted. Then you stick the defendant into one of those, and if you are on defense, you find a way to argue that he is a different kind of coin. It was in his words like distancing from what reality was, which requires we understand things — patterns, cause and effect, means and ends, cycles and epicycles, ultimate reality, that kind of thing — instead of slamming them into some category so that we can avoid understanding them. But I digress.”

“It's okay, you pay by the hour,” said the doctor. This must be psychologist humor.

“Well, anyway, it struck me that these must-have blends and exotic pipes were just categories, but that I didn't understand pipe smoking, least of all why I liked it. I had low self-esteem at the time, remember this was when you counseled me after I accidentally dropped my first wife in the turkey deep fryer at Christmas, and so I thought I was just an addict, grubbing out my miserable existence with the help of some drug that was legal only through wrinkles in the law. No, it was when the pipe went away that I missed holding it, missed having something to fiddle with, and wanted to be able to walk the grounds of our low-grade entry-level middle class housing with it in my mouth, smelling the tobacco on the breeze, tasting the leaf and its curing, and having some excuse to have something to do that did not involve buying crap to show off to the neighbors or eating something, since those were the main activities around there. Or sports, since watching sports has always made me feel like a loser for not simply going out there and living the dream by, you know, actually playing sports or just hiking in the wilds. So I wanted to understand the pipe.”

“Go on.”

“I mail-ordered. There's just more variety and better prices. There were all of these options, but also blending leaf, which means the basic varietals (Virginia, Burley, Cigar) and preparations (Latakia, Dark Fired, Perique) as well as cuts (Cube, Flake, Ribbon, Shag, Plug). It was a whole new world! I started trying new blends and found that I really just like the taste of tobacco, in just about any competent form, and I like having a pipe. But with some of these new blends, I was encountering the limits of my technique, of my understanding. Then I began to study the pipe and the leaf, to explore pipe tobacco smoking as a discipline instead of a hobby or consumer activity. It opened up a new world, and just as that was happening, I started to separate out the different flavors and became obsessed with White Burley.”

“Why is that?” asked the owl-faced man, his pen resting on his lip as he looked at me contemplatively.

“A little bit of it is in about everything, but no one talks about it much,” I confessed. “It's like the mysteries of the universe: hidden in plain sight, buried under the distractions of daily life, but there waiting to explore if you want to be the 1.4% of the human species that decides to step off the beaten path and do something unpopular but meaningful.”

He made more notes. “Unfortunately, our hour is almost up. Where did this lead, briefly?”

I chuckled. “Doc, I ain't never been brief in my whole damn life. White Burley is a chameleon, somewhere between Virginia, Cigar Leaf, and regular dark Burley. It tastes like one of those Connecticut leaf cigars to me, but then you get that nice strong flavor like cracked roast nuts from the Burley. It's kind of funny, sometimes it tastes like barley, just one vowel removed from its actual name. You know, toast some barley bread and smear honey on it, and there you are with White Burley. Or you could just ferment the stuff and have tasty beer. But anyway, I started thinking, what if you made a vaper — that's a Virginia and Perique mixture — with White Burley? Since White Burley tastes sort of like Burley and Virginia together, maybe that would turn out well. So I threw one together with blending Perique, a whole lot of White Burley, a small amount of dark Burley and a tiny amount of dark fired Kentucky Burley. It was a reckless experiment, Doc, and I don't know if the ancient tobacco gods will forgive me.”

He handed me a bill and checked his watch. “We'll start here again next time. I'll notify your parole officer that you attended.”

“That's great, Doc. Thanks a lot, really.”

On the bus ride home, my ankle bracelet irritating my skin, I thought over how strange my life had been. People just keep dying around me. Some were accidents, some disappearances, and some mysterious. A few died by trying some of my experimental vapers. I really have no explanation for it, but I enjoy this White Burley vaper analogue, what I call a “bur/per” for Burley-Perique. It might make you burp because it is not short on nicotine. White Burley does not seem to have a heck of a lot of nicotine itself, but it seems to be absorbed easily, so when you throw in a little dark Burley and some Perique, you get a sledgehammer blend with a very light, sweet flavor that has faint overtones of vanilla and buttermilk. It burns more easily than Virginias, and there is less of the faint tongue tingle of acidity. If I made it again, I might throw in some red and orange Virginia, maybe a fifth of the blend, and crank up the dark Burley percentage to round it out. However, there is room in this category of vapers that are mostly Burley. It's important to add in just a touch of dark fired Kentucky Burley to give it that molasses edge, just a touch of smoky and rich flavor to add texture to the taste.

When I got home, there were flashing red and blue lights flickering as reflections in the windows of all the homes nearby. It seems that a business associate of mine had come by to discuss some money he believed that I owed him, but he didn't know that when my terrarium broke, I had to store all of my coral snakes in the money lockbox temporarily. They were using a tire iron to separate his grip from the chair arms. After my interview, I loaded up a new bowl of my burper. It's good without the Virginias even, and if I added any, it might even be less than a fifth, since a good Burley blend needs just a little spin from things like Perique, Virginia, and dark fired to adjust its flavor rather than clobbering it. It's subtle like an English. I think I'll call it “Case Dismissed.”

Today's smoke is Star of the East, one of those Cornell & Diehl blends that will be eternal for its ratio of ingredients despite having some bright Virginia bite at the fringes, mixed with a moderate amount of Black Twist Sliced.

Some years ago I observed that traditional pipe smokers in America tended to shore up their everyday blends with Five Brothers, a strong Burley that both warms up any flavor and gives the mixture some strength. Why not, I wondered, would UK smokers not do the same thing?

That would explain the rather wide slices of the brown and black twists being popular. You could just toss a couple coins in a large bowl of your regular English blend and walk out the door.

Perhaps this sounds a bit alien to modern people, but back in the day, life moved slower, and men used to smoke throughout the day as they worked. In my life, I know that I always have a little prep time before any task or round of tasks because you have to orient your mind toward what you want to accomplish before diving in to rote procedure, or you end up mechanically going through the motions. That means you do not notice quality of output, or at least overlook anything you are not programmed to notice, and this tends to result in typical human stupidity where you repeat the same acts compulsively and achieve mediocre or ludicrous results.

When your average UK smoker was getting ready to unload a boat, write a will, build a wall, plough a field, or transcribe a symphony, he took a few minutes to carefully pack his pipe and think through the upcoming job. During this time, he cleaned his pipe, blew it out, scraped off any residue, and packed in his favorite blend, maybe tucking little bits of twist that he shaved off a roll in his pocket with a knife. He probably spent more time fiddling over the putting the bits into place, being more familiar with agricultural product and less so with fungible modern mixtures, then lit the mess up and wandered off to do what he needed to accomplish that day.

As it turns out, the brown twists work as excellent additions to just about any Virginia blend, and the black twists both sweeten and enhance any English or Balkan mixture. If you ever smoke Three Nuns (or analogues) consider tucking in a couple of the little roundrels of brown twist when you next pack a bowl. For me, Star of the East comes alive not just with the six months of age on this jar, but with the added strength and depth of the black twist. Perhaps the only disadvantage is that I will be enjoying this one alone, because the “room note” of this mixture resembles what happens when a napalm strike hits a tire dump frequently defecated on by flocks of passing pelicans.

Pipes and Cigars has started offering a sampler for new smokers and in my view, they did it all wrong:

2 oz. – Sutliff Rum & Maple

2 oz. – Lane 1-Q

2 oz. – Lane BCA

2 oz. – Lane RLP-6

2 oz. – Hearth &Home Signature Anniversary Kake

2 oz. – Hearth &Home Signature Old Tartan

I know they are just doing it to sell pipes, because Pipes and Cigars makes its monthly rent by selling newbies landfill and passing off a couple tins of Escudo to hipsters in exchange for high daily prices and twelve bucks of shipping. They know that their audience is “unequally situated” and they take advantage of this, like every business, government, charity, and social group does. You don't get rich in this world by selling thin-margin high quality products, you get rich by ripping off the clueless and then having them post photos of it on Instagram.

Your typical Pipes and Cigars “deal” involves a $20 pipe and two $15 tins for $49. You save a dollar. They get to move on more of their stuff at the new price of $5 more per tin. The clueless army of buyers toddles in, buys their samplers, and takes them home. Then they find that they really don't like pipe smoking after all, because the tobacco doesn't light and when it does it doesn't stay lit and the pipe gurgles and they have to dump the frustrating mess if not just throw it out the window. Most of the people who buy these samplers end up getting driven to cigars, which is just fine with industry, since those cigars bring in even more profit than pipe tobacco.

Pipes and Cigars does not care, like the other major retailers, because their MBA-informed “intelligent” strategy is simple: filter out everyone but the fanatics, and then soak those fanatics. This is a variant of the “true fans” strategy developed back in the 1990s for niche marketing. If you don't think the niche will expand, you need to find the people who are hardcore (originally: rock fill added to cement) and extract from them as much as possible. If you ever maintained a “hobby” car, like a classic American muscle car or old BMW, you know this pain. Or if you have become a fan of an older band. They know that their audience is 680,000 people worldwide with an average age of 56, so they assume that there are fewer each year. The tobacco industry does the same.

I think they are all wrong.

If anything, people are fleeing away from the clever modern solutions like vaping and pharmaceutical anti-depressants and more likely to try to enjoy what their grandfathers did. There is an expanding audience for pipe smoking out there as people flee from vaping and cigarettes, but more importantly, from Prozak and Zoloft and drinking box wine until they vomit every night so that they can go back to their corporate jobs and look excited about filing those TPS reports. People need relaxation, and cigars or pipes provide the safest and most enjoyable form of it.

A new smoker does not need a bunch of aromatics, which are hard to light, hard to keep lit, never deliver the scent that comes out of the tin, gurgle like mad because they give off tons of water, and rarely smoke well because they burn artificially hot and therefore constantly go out. The good tobaccos found the “sweet spot” between soaked aromatic and dry tobacco, and from that you got wizardry like Carter Hall,Sir Walter Raleigh, and Prince Albert that you can smoke all day and not pass out from lack of nicotine but also, which burns like natural tobacco for the most part and therefore, teaches the art of smoking so that later you can come back and grab that tin of Escudo.

No one wants to hear this, but your first year with a pipe will be spent developing breathing technique alone, as well as mastering the basics of filling, tamping, ember-chasing, lighting, and pipe care. Your best start sampler is a tub of Carter Hall and a cob because until you get your technique mastered, better tobacco will do nothing for you except bleed your wallet. The mercantile minds of the MBA clan like that idea because their agenda is to maximize short-term profit, so they want to sell you an entry-level pipe and garbage tobacco so that you, a true fan, keep buying fancier pipes and more expensive tobacco in search of that elusive “transcendental smoke.” Once you have spent your one or five thousand dollars, they drop you and move on to the next sucker, because they have found that retaining customers over age fifty is kind of hard, and that group gets smaller each year.

You can only escape this loop when you stop looking at pipe smoking as a hobby and start looking at it as a tool and an enjoyment. Most of us smoke pipes to keep us from saying something we shouldn't, or possibly strangling people when witnesses are present, because so many of the people in this world are batshit insane but at just below the level where they go to the padded cell. We also simply enjoy smoking, not just the delicious nicotine but the process of having something to fiddle with, poke, prod, adjust, and light while we think. We like having a treat that is not food or consumer junk which goes straight to the landfill, namely the different blends that show generations of human ingenuity at its best. We also like an excuse to be alone, or outside, or simply silent while everyone else is chattering away with their latest desires, rationalizations, and projections. We smoke because it is part of who we are, and we are not the ideal consumer for Pipes and Cigars, which would rather sell to someone who will spend five years in the community and lots of money on rare pipes and tobaccos than sell to someone who will spend a few decades enjoying the experience of being a pipe smoker.

Why sell to the clueless, you ask? The same reason that spammers make spelling errors in their emails: it filters out those who ask the difficult questions. You want the credulous, someone motivated by inexperience and a “need” to be seen as a pipe smoker, who will come in and buy two tins and pay the exhorbitant shipping, which also provides income to the seller. You want someone who believes that if he just buys the “right” pipe and most exotic tobacco, he will have that mystical experience that he saw on YouTube or read about in Lord of the Rings. Guitar stores have made this their bread and butter for years. You want some guy who will not get anywhere in his “career” but will buy a dozen of those fancy expensive guitars in the process. Even better, he will probably manage to destroy them by neglect when he quits, so you will not have competition from the used market. Pure, gleaming profit.

When your grandfather got his pipe, he didn't buy a sampler pack. He trucked on down to the local store and bought whatever everyone else was smoking, although those tended to be more like Carter Hall and less like pumpkin spice translucent aromatics dripping with odd chemicals. He bought a Dr Grabow pipe, or a Peterson if overseas, smoked the heck out of it, trimmed cake with his pocketknife, and replaced it when he lost it or it died on him. He may have smoked a cob, since those were acknowledged as thrifty back in the day, and if you accidentally lost a pipe when reeling in that largemouth bass, it was a minor loss and not a catastrophic failure. He probably smoked the same blend or blends most of his life, every now and then springing for something on holidays or sales to keep the interest. At this job, he likely smoked all day, and when he came home, the pipe went in his mouth after dinner as he took care of the homestead. There was no setting up a perfect Instagram moment with a backstory, custom-made pipe, exotic blend, and artisanal whisky; he had better things to do.

In my view, new smokers need to get an introduction to the technique to maximize their chance of finding their relationship to the pipe. Some will smoke daily, some weekly, some only on special days. Like cigars, pipes have a technique to them, and if these smokers learn that early on, they will get the feedback they have been craving, which are those mind-blowing smokes that you wish would never end. That means that they will be able to come back for more, even if they do not do what industry wants and rush out to buy a few thousand dollars of stuff they'll check in a landfill just a few years later.

A long time ago, someone wrote a biography of William Faulkner that described him smoking his pipe down to “fine white ash.” Everyone at some point finds themselves seduced by this image, and many of us find it interesting that most pipe bowls involve dappled grey ash, with the black bits being the tobacco that does not quite fully burn. Consequently, most go home disappointed, figuring that they will not be experienced pipe smokers until they have had the fine white ash experience.

I have had this experience, but it is rare. Since I am a lifestyle smoker, meaning that I smoke a pipe while doing other stuff for my daily life instead of being a “hobby smoker” who sits down after work to have his one bowl of some rare blend in a limited edition Dunhill rare shape pipe with a military mount and tassel that once belonged to Bela Lugosi, most of the time I have had a fine white ash experience, my response has been, “Huh, that's cool,” before I dump the ash and renew my efforts to get done whatever I am getting paid to do or must do so my family does not kill me with an axe and bury me under the roses.

Ah, who am I kidding? They'd never do that; corpses are bad for roses. I'd go under the rhododendrons, because they are very tolerant of the methane and other corpse gasses and thrive on the breakdown products of adipocere and fermenting tissue. And knowing them, they'd probably bury me under the flower bed next door, leaving a surprise for whoever decides they need a swimming pool a few decades from now. A buddy of mine is a contractor and he says that they often find bones, but the only call they make is how far away they are going to re-bury them. Not my circus, not going to be my manqué, as they say.

Early fine white ash bowls I had always came from Dunhill blends. These are cut fine with few stems, and if you gravity pack them, they burn down to nothing because they have a perfect moisture level and not much of the fancy stuff that other people dump in. Dunhill started out as a tobacconist who kept a book of favorite mixtures for their clients, and these were formulas instead of fancy procedures of pressing, steaming, roasting, and adding toppings. Sure, they added toppings, but with a gentler hand than the European mainland blends, and they cut their leaf thin so that it took to the flame easily.

To gravity pack a bowl, you lightly take pinches and fill it up. No squeezing. Then put your thumb over the top of the bowl and shake your arm up and down vigorously a few times. This settles the leaf so that each shred is touching others enough for flame to travel, but without compacting it much at all. Then you pile up a little cone of tobacco on top of the full bowl, letting gravity take away anything that won't stay, and then press that down once lightly with your thumb until the bowl is level just below the rim. One circle of flame to light the top, then gravity tamp, letting the tamper fall rather than pressing, and light again with three circles of the fire. After that, breath-smoke and an hour or two later you will have fine white ash.

The breath-smoking is key because it does not drag the flame with your drawing of air. Instead, it lets the fire sit at each level until it is ready to go below. This thoroughly burns the tobacco and, by heating the stuff below it, produces the best flavor as that layer caramelizes, giving off its flavors, and then burns, releasing flavorful smoke. It takes longer to smoke a pipe this way so hobby pipers hate it, but it's the best way to taste everything, get the most nicotine, and keep your hands and mind free to do other stuff, which if you are a working pipe smoker or an active person who likes to do other things while you smoke is essential.

Another way to get the fine white ash is to smoke a plug, flake, or cube cut. This gets a bit dicier because compressed tobacco expands as you smoke. You have to pack loosely, and by this I mean not compress at all, and have the load in the pipe such that if you inverted the pipe, it would drop straight out. The tobacco needs room to grow just like a new suburb outside the city. You build a bunch of houses out beyond the crime and pollution belt, and soon all of these little businesses and apartments crop up, and pretty soon you have more of the same stuff you left the city to avoid. Flakes are better behaved, but they need room to grow, too, which means you need to fill the pipe loosely. At this point, I tend to tear a flake in half lengthwise, then invert one strip, fold them, twist them, and then slide them into the pipe. The wad should fit like ham in a sandwich not a cork in champagne, if that helps.

Today I am smoking eight-year-old Peterson Peterson's Perfect Plug (or 3P) which is a Burley/Virginia mixture that gets pressed, cooked, pressed, and aged before it goes out to you. This little cube glistens like mica on the side of an escarpment, and the plug is so dense that I can cut it in little shavings. This is how all these old UK plugs and ropes were designed to be cut, into little shreds, and they burn really well if you do this but are infuriating if you do not. The pre-cut Gawith Hoggarth ropes like Brown Twist Sliced and Sliced Black Twist are designed, in my view, either to be cut up further into something like a thin cube cut, or added to existing blends. Try the black twist in your Englishes, and the brown twist in your vapers. But if you smoke the ropes straight, cut them like butter for toast, as thin as possible, and fill in multiple layers just laying against each other.

The thing about the Peterson plug is, you sort of have to be a lifestyle smoker working on your boat, lawn, business, sermon, correspondence, or garage because you are going to be attached to the pipe for awhile. You'd be a fool to take it out of your mouth because with the breath-smoking technique, a small amount of rich smoke keeps rolling over your tongue for hours and you will be sad when it goes away (doubly sad if that was the last of your plug; the final layer will be too thin to shave off bits reliably, so I cube cut those and load in tobacco dust as kindling). These bowls take quite a while to burn down but lend themselves naturally to breath-smoking, so you will find no need to puff, suck, draw, huff, wheeze, and so on. Just take it slow and enjoy every second.

The point is, in part, to avoid interrupting the fire so that when it descends into that final fifth of the bowl that is always hard to keep lit, the tobacco is hot enough that the flame moves outward. You want to make sure you are only breath-smoking at this point because anything else focuses the oxygen current straight toward the draw hole, at which point the tobacco burns in a path right to the hole and the rest stays wet and unmolested. A slow smoke dries the tobacco as it goes, including the moisture naturally produced by smoking which is concentrated at the bottom of the bowl by gravity. When you steam the last fifth, then let the flame naturally expand without directing it by sucking on the stem, you burn everything and end up with that bowl full of white ash.

Oftentimes with this plug I end up not stirring or tamping at all, since if the circle of flame gets the edges, you have a nice flat fire that burns the tobacco in sequential levels from top to bottom. If this happens to you, your ash will take the form of the shavings you put in the bowl with their structure intact. Generally this involves keeping the pipe in your mouth, since breath-smoking works by something like capillary pressure, and so the oxygen flow never varies and the burn is smooth, cool, and consistent. If you suck on the stem, you get an inconsistent fire, and it burns what is easy to consume then jumps on to the next layer, giving you that dappled grey-black ash. Again, you have to be ensconced in some activity that allows you to keep a pipe in your face for a couple hours, especially with this plug.

On this last bowl, I only knew it was over when the smoke ended, and I waited a few minutes out of respect for the bowl that had just passed on to the tobacco hereafter (presumably, it gets reincarnated as a straight Virginia). Then I took out the pipe and examined it, seeing only the ghost-shapes of the shavings that had gone in there just as the light of dawn was peeking over the horizon. When I turned the pipe over, the ash slid out in a rain and dissipated on the passing breeze. It had been pure white like the hair of an old man or a young child, and vanished as thoroughly as the smoke, leaving behind only fine memories and a satisfied smoker.

From a story I was reading:

After having attended so many funerals, it was easy for me to imagine that the competing smell of all the different flowers which I was sure made it smell like, well, a funeral home.

Lakeland Essence, to me, smells like rose, geranium, and clove. There is probably something plum-like in there, and maybe a little citrus. But it is the clash of the different floral scents that gives it its distinctive (some would say horrifying) character.

The latest from the smoking desk: enjoying the classic Scottish Balkan flavor of Rattray's Red Rapparee:

Summary: a Scottish mixture closer to Balkan levels of Orientals, this blend provides a depth of flavor.

A solid Scottish blend — an English with Cavendish added — presents a spicy gingerbread flavor, like “My Mixture 965,” but by upping the Orientals and Latakia, “Red Rapparee” delivers a stronger and darker take on the English more like “Nightcap.” As with most of these, the Latakia flares first at the touch of the flame, but then the strong Virginia flavor comes out, but the Orientals balance it and the unflavored Cavendish flattens it out, making a blend that has no single identifiable dominating flavor. Instead, like a Hieronymous Bosch triptych, this blend delivers a solid note of Virginia-Latakia with details constant emerging and interacting. The Orientals give it a spicy undertone and the Cavendish imparts an almost floral quality. Like most of the Kohlhase & Kopp production, it has added sugars and is cut to a fine ribbon following the Dunhill model, which makes for a nice easy burn. It came slightly wet out of the tin, but lights perfectly at that moisture level and provides a great deal of flavor without letting the Latakia clobber everything else.

I can see why cigar smokers might like this blend: the rich texture of Latakia balanced with Virginias, Orientals, and Cavendish makes for a full flavor that has depth like a cigar, with little variations constantly bubbling to the top, but a steady background note that stimulates the senses fully.

Although it compares in ingredients to Dunhill My Mixture 965, the end result is closer to Dunhill Nightcap with the richness and intensity it presents, although one might also compare it to Peter Stokkebye English Oriental Supreme No. 306 and Cornell & Diehl Star of the East because of its Balkan leanings, which occur when a blend uses slightly more Orientals to the point that they balance the Latakia and make a new, spicy sweet-sour flavor emerge from the interaction. The red Virginia serves as a backbone, but the Cavendish balances that as well, making a texture which is finely detailed and therefore very consistent despite effervescent internal variations revealing its constituent parts through the course of the bowl.

The tin I have came from a local store six years ago, but looked as if it had been on the shelf for some time, so what greeted me upon popping it was a heap of black leaf. While some fret about moisture, I always smoke at the moisture level in the tin, knowing that breath-smoking makes this less of an issue and usually, the blender has a reason for shipping the blend at a certain level of moisture. The first few bowls will be slightly too moist, since the blend is designed to lose a little moisture over the week or so that the tin will be open, just like the last few bowls will be a little too dry. The only tip I have with moist blends is to gravity fill them, which means dropping the tobacco into the pipe until it is full, then holding your thumb over the top of the bowl and giving it a few vigorous shakes, at which point you can heap tobacco on the top and push down to flatten the little cone of leaf. That provides approximately the correct density for a blend like this, which owing to its complexity, settles significantly over the course of a bowl.

In contrast to your standard English — Virginias, Latakia, then Orientals in descending order by weight — Red Rapparee comes on strong with thick flavor like a cigar, but as the Virginias caramelize, mellows just a bit. At first light, it might seem too intense, but the taste buds become accustomed to it and soon this blend feels like an old friend. I can easily see tromping around the hills of Scotland, buffeted by the frigid wind, with a tin or can of Red Rapparee, enjoying an all-day smoke and sharing with friends in the light of a hearth-fire in a bothy or croft. The flavor is intense enough yet varied enough to enjoy as if one had a satchel full of tins, sweet enough to be a treat, but spicy and complex enough to avoid sliding into being only sweet, and I doubt this one will ever grow tiresome.

I have started posting my ruminations on pipe smoking here instead of social media for several reasons. First, the interesting people are all bailing on social media because of the nanny-esque environment:

Back in 2012, 94% of teens had a Facebook account, a Pew Research survey of 12- to 17-year-olds found. Almost 10 years later, only 27% of adolescents say they're on the platform, according to a 2021 survey of 10,000 teenagers conducted by Piper Sandler.

Megan Baron, a 19-year-old from Ohio who uses Reddit, Snapchat, Twitter, and YouTube, cited privacy concerns as one of the reasons she does not use Facebook, adding that the platform “seems so toxic.”

That last line might be my concern: these platforms are toxic like a bad relationship, specifically a variety of Stockholm Syndrome caused by the constant censorship, drama, and deletions. It does not make sense to enter high-value content into social media, since if someone complains your account may be arbitrarily deleted. This is why they want to stay away from the Boomers, who are either absurdly politically correct on the Left or nagging moral nannies on the Right. Kids want to socialize, and that includes sex, drink, drugs, and making fun of losers, and the “adults in the room” demand that they be able to censor that and manipulate these kids toward buying stuff from the corporate sponsors.

I started out in 1980s BBSes, moved to USENET, and then early web forums. I never had any problem getting along with people until 2007 hit and the cell phone people got on the net, at which point everything became manipulative and circumpect in respect to “the optics.” You cannot have an honest conversation under those conditions. I was kicked off Pipes Magazine Pipe Smokers Forums for making fun of JimInks and a particularly dumb thread titled something like “What do you like to do while smoking your pipe?” It was an obvious plant: started by the webmaster, populated quickly by the forum toadies with prop answers, and designed to bring in a lot of activity that looked from a distance like compelling content. In my experience, when you do that to a forum, you may get more users but they do not stick around, and you dumb down the content. Dumbing down the content makes the interesting users leave, and soon you have an echo chamber of people with nothing better to do and nothing much to say, so the site slowly fades into irrelevance like MySpace.

I went over to Pipe Smokers Forums where I was banned by some neurotic moderator for my perceived political views, even though they had not been expressed on that forum. Someone complained, as usual. I didn't consider it a loss, since the conversation there had that sickly feeling of conversations in Communist or Fascist countries about how great Dear Leader is. I was banned from Smokers Forums for making fun of JimInks, again, showing how the crony system which takes money from Big Tobacco to promote the latest junk boutique blends is important to this little ecosystem. I liked The Briar Patch but left after I saw them censor another user, and left the Christian Pipe Smokers forum because, as someone who has failed at every religion, I felt like a fraud. The people there were quite nice however, being like most who have their minds on “big things” every day, namely not distracted too much by the petty squabbles, disadvantages, glitches, and pains of normal life.

On Facebook, I was banned after tackling SJWs in the heavy metal scene. I wrote the truth, using screen captures of these same people talking, and they mass-complained. Facebook then demanded that I take a picture of myself, holding my driver's license, to verify my identity. This obviously made no sense, so I never went back there. I was banned from Twitter in the run-up to the 2016 election, but I don't know for what in particular; my political views span the gamut from anarchist hippie through Nietzschean realist, but if any of what you post hits their media-coordinated filter, they remove the account. Reddit banned me as part of one of the political purges. These bans are never content-related, but happen when the site decides to expand its vague rules in order to filter out people whose political outlook does not favor that of the user base that Reddit wants to cultivate. I went back to Reddit only to interact with the pipe tobacco community there, but I fear that this has come to an end, too.

I tend to be pretty old school on most things in that practical way that normal people worldwide are. We like codes of behavior in which people can get along, especially when they violently disagree (the “violence” here refers to degree of disagreement, not bashing in heads, although the former often leads to the latter). That means that if you are in the right place to be talking about something — usually something spicy like religious, cultural, social, economic, political, or genetic critique — and you say it politely without spammy repetition or dogmatic indifference to context, we want you to be able to say it, to say “I agree” or “I disagree” or some variation on the two, and then move on. We like having ideas out in public, and we dislike viewpoint discrimination:

Viewpoint discrimination is a form of content discrimination particularly disfavored by the courts. When the government engages in content discrimination, it is restricting speech on a given subject matter. When it engages in viewpoint discrimination, it is singling out a particular opinion or perspective on that subject matter for treatment unlike that given to other viewpoints.

For example, if an ordinance banned all speech on the Iraq War, it would be a content-based regulation. But if the ordinance banned only speech that criticized the war, it would be a viewpoint-based regulation.

Social media could have gone with content-based regulation and banned all talk of religion, politics, sex, and other hot topics. Then again, that sounds about as much fun as counting yeast, so the smart move would have been for them to say, “Welcome to the Octagon. Here people are going to say all sorts of stuff, and you're going to hate some of it, but as long as they stay polite and on-topic, we don't have a problem with it; just use that mute/block button!” Since this is human history we are talking about, obviously they did not do that. Instead they waded in by removing anything that offended their audience. Keep in mind that there are several layers of interpretation here: low-paid employees at social media, basing their knowledge of the people they want to use their sites on what they read in the media, are removing the content that they can identify as offensive to these people. It is a comedy of errors, and ends up with anything controversial being erased and replaced by the insipid, sort of like Kevin Godbee's grand plan to turn Pipes Magazine Forums into a place for happy Teletubby style conversation about pipes and tobacco.

The sad thing in all of this is that online is not reality. The online audience is 8% of 31% of the population, and this tends to be the people who have nothing else to do, as Facebook found out. The internet favors the retired, people on disability or mental health disability, individuals stuck in permanent entry-level jobs where you have to wake up for fifteen minutes a day but otherwise just look busy, and students who are not socially successful, therefore spend most of their free time on their phones instead of going to parties, having boyfriends or girlfriends who actually like them, smoking weed, and listening to music that scares their parents. The old internet required that people have a modicum of ability to read instructions, configure a computer, and learn some basic software. The new internet pops up an application in with the video games and text messages that is designed for people who know nothing and want to know nothing.

Luckily, the social media boom is winding down. Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and Google are going the way of the dinosaurs. It is clear now that they have been faking their statistics since day one, and that users are defecting en masse for pastures that are not such a snarky combination of Nanny State and Corporate Advertising. We are seeing coordinated activity between these firms to blacklist users, ban topics, and promote a small group of stooge influencers who astroturf corporate products, pimping those products for pay while pretending to be a normal citizen journalist who just happened upon these fascinating new purchase options. This means that the world of social media is as fake as the world of three big television channels (ABC, NBC, CBS) and a few crappy UHF ones (usually PBS). As it turns out, in any market, once you start the process of regulating it, the costs go up and so all the entrants die out and you get a big monopoly, sort of like with the FARTNAGS (Facebook, Apple, Reddit, Twitter, Neftlix, Amazon, Google, Spotify) who are now de facto monopolies that, not surprisingly, have used that market position to eke out more cash from their audience while growing to bloated size and becoming less able to produce a quality product. Corporate America is not a thing so much as it is a syndrome by which companies, in order to deal with increased costs, massively centralize and genericize, while focusing on risk and efficiency, missing out entirely on the idea of a good, basic product. I find this fascinating, especially the way it repeats.

Continuing our narrative, I have been banned from other places as well. The guys on Speak Easy, a Reddit offshoot, think they're clever. They asked me political questions, then banned me for answering. This came after a wave of censorship that removed everyone but the little clique who are most active on the site, which is about typical of what happens on small forums. The only thing good about the place was a lack of influencers hyping up the latest Sutliff boutique blend made from $2/ounce tobacco pressed and splashed with rum to sell for $8/ounce (a nearly perfect product, similar to the profit margins from Coca-Cola, Friends, or your average healthcare visit; the MBAs must be pleased!). I have been banned from other forums, too, like Stormfront, where they did the same thing the Speak Easy guys did: they asked if I thought Jews were responsible for the downfall of the West, and being an honest man with some experience in the world, I said that I thought that was a paranoid fantasy, and the causes of our decline starting shortly before The Enlightenment™ were obvious. I was banned from a Rage Against the Machine forum in the past because I posted the biographies of band members, including their families who were wealthy and powerful in Hollywood, and suggested that the band was a fraud. I was banned from a Mumia Abu-Jamal forum for pointing out that Mumia did, in fact, shoot Officer Daniel Faulkner. I've been banned from a number of other forums for various blasphemies and heresies, many related to heavy metal music, genetic literacy and human biodiversity, environmental activism, and skepticism of religion and the Moral Majority.

What did I learn from this? First, that people who crave power come to the internet and get established as “jannies” or moderators in forums. Some good people do, too, and if you find one of those, hang on to them. For the most part, the only people who have time for forums and social media are obsessives whose “real lives” are unsatisfying. That is sad but true, and I didn't realize how true it was until a recent injury sidelined me for a long time, and I found myself turning to the internet for distraction from the pain. I do not like pain meds, since having a fogged-up head is about like not being alive, although please do not read this as a jeremiad against, uh, recreational use. I did not widely experiment with drugs, but I was fond of smoking weed, and only quit because I followed the wisdom of Alan Watts:

If you get the message, hang up the phone. For psychedelic drugs are simply instruments, like microscopes, telescopes, and telephones. The biologist does not sit with eye permanently glued to the microscope, he goes away and works on what he has seen.

For me the message was to look at cause-effect relationships to understand the structure of reality. That led me to extremes on both sides of the political divide, and sent me away from certain lifestyle choices. In my view, sometime in the 1950s the modern world brainwashed itself into a kind of “I got mine” me-first mentality which resulted in the rise of consumerism, and then consumerism consumed media, government, non-profits, and eventually culture itself, making us into a culture of bratty entitled people who want to be insulated from all the things they fear while being feted as important for trivial achievements. It is exactly as Aldous Huxley wrote in Brave New World, William S. Burroughs warned of in Naked Lunch, Scott Fitzgerald hinted in The Great Gatsby, and Plato ominously predicted in The Republic.

Let me share a brief passage from Fitzgerald that tells us what is going on, in my view:

“You’re a rotten driver,” I protested. “Either you ought to be more careful, or you oughtn’t to drive at all.”

“I am careful.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Well, other people are,” she said lightly.

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“They’ll keep out of my way,” she insisted. “It takes two to make an accident.”

“Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself.”

“I hope I never will,” she answered. “I hate careless people. That’s why I like you.”

We have all become the careless driver, narcissists who think that our own mental state is the world around us, instead of merely part of it, who wants someone else to solve our problems. Most of all, we want someone else to make us happy, whether that is a FWB, wife, husband, lover, subordinate, or merely a mention on television. Humans learned how to make fire and erroneously assumed that we could handle every problem the same way, by forcing nature and manipulating others to go along with it, and only now are we seeing how evil and destructive the modern world has been all along. I have failed at every religion known to humankind, but I find most inspiration in the Christian and Buddhist authors who point out that our megalomania and reliance on external sources to provide “happiness” has made us delusional, and the groupthink of modernity re-enforces this in a kind of echo chamber, which means that what Immanuel Kant called “radical evil” — destructive acts accepted because they are commonplace — has won out over what I think Jesus Christ and Buddha both desired, which was a human species that desired to affirmatively do good instead of avoiding evils, risks, fears, and inefficiencies and then concluding that because the result did not immediate self-destruct, it was a moral pathway forward. “Progress,” before it meant science or politics, designated the process by which cities replaced farms, jobs replaced callings, and relationships of convenience replaced community bonds. It seems that going forward is going backwards, even if it takes centuries to see that, although I am not sure that going backwards is the new going forward either.

Enough of that. I had to get it out of the way so that if you are wondering why you did not see this content on the usual social media sites, and feel like you were abandoned. There are many great people out there on social media, but fewer every day. They are running back to the decentralized internet, where you visit little sites and no one is keeping track of your data. They want pages without Google advertising, Bing rewards, or any of the other manipulative little programs that these bloated self-congratulatory “virtuous” corporate citizens promote. That was the promise of the internet: basically not just citizen journalism, but citizen self-expression about real-world topics and not navel-gazing, so that we could escape the dual threats of ideology and consumerism, both of which “gate-keep” in order to exclude necessary controversy. Maybe once upon a time social media served that goal, but it quit doing it, so I quit social media.