Carcinogens of love burn in my bowl of joy. From a hobby to a reminder of a dead family patriarch, pipe smoking is many things to many people. Cigarettes are despised, yet aromatic pipe blends never fail to charm. Many times, bystanders just toss a glance of mockery or assume the pipe merely serves as an attention getter.
For smokers who know, it's not about winning the approval of non-smokers and certainly not a fashion statement. It's really about the love for the leaf, and a cigar just won't do. Cigarettes assailed my lungs, and then pipes won my heart.
Switching from cigarettes to pipes is nothing new. After buying my first pipe in 2001, I was told my father did the same in the '70s. Him and probably most fail at this; I did a few times until my recent success. Pipes are never to be inhaled; also most blends are too strong for the human lung. As smoking goes, cigarettes are pretty lame, but superior at nicotine delivery, filling the lungs with satisfaction.
Pipe tobacco offers nicotine of course, but only that which is absorbed through the mouth lining. The pipes' true advantage is the smoking experience, not mere addiction.
Common smokers apologize for smoking, smoke “light” cigarettes, and see little else in their habit but feeding a drug addiction. Mostly outdoors, I'm sure. This is one reason why living alone is a must. If you lower yourself to “ultra lights,” you may as well quit and suck on toothpicks. They probably started as part of adolescent rebellion or some such asininity. If this is their idea of smoking, they should just give up. Common smokers have already - at least politically and socially. I have no regrets or apologies. I love the leaf dearly and avidly.
Pipe tobacco is now my poison of joy and for the most popular reason. I live at the poverty line, and giving up cigarettes was my only way out of the hole. Pipe smoking, my favorite smoke, costs me less than 75 cents a day compared to roughly $6.70 on cigarettes. The latter figure is also my hourly wage. I might as well have been swilling Vicodin.
Article comments
1 - Jack
I think I'm going to faint. The keyword coded Amazon link pointed to "316L Surgical Steel Curved Barbell with Ball Spacial for Prince Albert Piercing, 0G, 5/8 - Sold as a Pair"
2 - Piping Hot
Pipe tobacco can be rolled into a cigarette - most pipe tobacco is quite good, especially if it isn't topped too much with aromatics and flavor additive casings.
Tobacco, after all, is tobacco.
Manufactured cigarettes, on the other hand, are a whole other animal...mostly not tobacco.
3 - Joe Harris
Yes, Carter Hall makes an especially good makeshift cigarette. Hopefully, we can keep this on the down low to save pipe smokers from a swift tax-raping.
As more cigarette smokers attempt to convert, pipe smoking will be assailed with yet more bullshit. Relatively little research has been done on pipe smoking. While some of the research has been on the favorable side, we don't need any goddamn studies giving ammo to the rabid, worthless, intolerant anti-smoking cartel. Yeah, we know smoking is unhealthy. Fuck off and die, crusader slime.
Meanwhile, the free world assumes that anything negative said about smoking must be true and that smokers have no right to mind their own damn business. Potheads are given more consideration these days.
4 - Dr Dreadful
Cough hack spew... My grandfather smoked 60 a day... hack hack choke cough... and lived till he was 95... hurl hack gasp convulse... of course he couldn't open his mouth without Jackson Pollocking the opposite wall with phlegm... cough cough hack gasp splutter flail thud
5 - Ruvy
I don't know, DD. I was hocking up something terrible a day or two ago and you would have thought that I'd inherited my father's three pack a day unfiltered Camel's habit. The last time I smoked was when I was 8 years old - my dad told me to inhale deeply on the lit cigarette (his unfiltered Camel) and I damn near puked from the coughing fit I got.
I never toughed a cigarette again. If I were to smoke at all, it would be a pipe, but with the problems I have with my lungs, I stay away from the stuff.... With my luck, I'd lip have cancer in a week. Nah - time for me to indulge in my drug of choice - coffee....
My wife, reading over my shoulder, mentioned that her drug of choice is chocolate....