My favorite time on a job is when the client or customer gets hung up, and I'm left with nothing to do but sink back in a chair, close my eyes, and try to catch a nap. Or catch up on emails. Or....
Have a pipe.
As a photojournalist, I have a neatly arranged cyberbag, a type of backpack with padded compartments for lenses, camera bodies, strobes, batteries, etc., and pipe bag.
At at Starbucks in Irving, seeing which outside table to sit at, I was dismayed to see each had a No-Smoking label on it. I asked the gentleman who was hosting my visit if there were others farther off where I could have a smoke. He asked did I smoke, and I told him, yes, a pipe.
Immediately he said, "Oh fire it up. Won't bother me. I love pipe smoke." A young blonde woman with intriguing accent, who was sitting just off to the side, urged me to smoke, promising me nothing would happen. Please, smoke my pipe. Really? "Yes, yes. Please."
Um. Okay.
Wished I had my Lane CA with me, but this was my safest "public friendly" tobacco: Captain Black regular. I don't really feel that I've had a smoke after a bowl of Captain Black, only that I went through the motions. There's no nicotine hit, and I have to really work at tasting it. And the taste is okay. It's ... safe. No bite. Milky. Salty-milky. And it smokes so much. It just looks like my pipe is a nuclear power plant's stack, white curls steadily rising out of it, feeding the breeze.
Here's the "Pipesmagazine-professional" filling. Here's the tamp and the check-draw. Now the char and light tamp. A second char and light tamp. True light, puff, position, and ... relax with a nice freehand projecting from corner of my mouth.
Gentleman across from me took a deep breath and smiled and exclaimed how good that smelled. The blonde woman for some reason let her guard down and was talking to us as if we were all old friends. She was from Bulgaria. Been here 11 years. Is an internal accountant for a small company here. Learned English in Kansas and apologized for her slang.
It felt as though I'd become the friendship fire. I was in the center of the group. Listening, relaxed, all the while my pipe smoking, wafting, uniting the group.
Oh, I know it wasn't that. Course it wasn't that. But it felt like that. It felt as if everything was right, and I didn't want to be anywhere else but right there, right then, in the sun, amid these temporary bosom buddies who would never see each other again after this lunch break. I was hoping the client wouldn't come for a long time, hoping the management didn't rush out and pluck the pipe from my mouth and fling it out into traffic, hoping that customers in/out of Starbucks weren't being offended that I was breaking the no-smoking rule. But everyone not only was okay with it, everyone seemed to approve and encourage it.
The pipe as social catalyst. Pipe-bonding.
This is something that must be studied further.
Volunteers?
Have a pipe.
As a photojournalist, I have a neatly arranged cyberbag, a type of backpack with padded compartments for lenses, camera bodies, strobes, batteries, etc., and pipe bag.
At at Starbucks in Irving, seeing which outside table to sit at, I was dismayed to see each had a No-Smoking label on it. I asked the gentleman who was hosting my visit if there were others farther off where I could have a smoke. He asked did I smoke, and I told him, yes, a pipe.
Immediately he said, "Oh fire it up. Won't bother me. I love pipe smoke." A young blonde woman with intriguing accent, who was sitting just off to the side, urged me to smoke, promising me nothing would happen. Please, smoke my pipe. Really? "Yes, yes. Please."
Um. Okay.
Wished I had my Lane CA with me, but this was my safest "public friendly" tobacco: Captain Black regular. I don't really feel that I've had a smoke after a bowl of Captain Black, only that I went through the motions. There's no nicotine hit, and I have to really work at tasting it. And the taste is okay. It's ... safe. No bite. Milky. Salty-milky. And it smokes so much. It just looks like my pipe is a nuclear power plant's stack, white curls steadily rising out of it, feeding the breeze.
Here's the "Pipesmagazine-professional" filling. Here's the tamp and the check-draw. Now the char and light tamp. A second char and light tamp. True light, puff, position, and ... relax with a nice freehand projecting from corner of my mouth.
Gentleman across from me took a deep breath and smiled and exclaimed how good that smelled. The blonde woman for some reason let her guard down and was talking to us as if we were all old friends. She was from Bulgaria. Been here 11 years. Is an internal accountant for a small company here. Learned English in Kansas and apologized for her slang.
It felt as though I'd become the friendship fire. I was in the center of the group. Listening, relaxed, all the while my pipe smoking, wafting, uniting the group.
Oh, I know it wasn't that. Course it wasn't that. But it felt like that. It felt as if everything was right, and I didn't want to be anywhere else but right there, right then, in the sun, amid these temporary bosom buddies who would never see each other again after this lunch break. I was hoping the client wouldn't come for a long time, hoping the management didn't rush out and pluck the pipe from my mouth and fling it out into traffic, hoping that customers in/out of Starbucks weren't being offended that I was breaking the no-smoking rule. But everyone not only was okay with it, everyone seemed to approve and encourage it.
The pipe as social catalyst. Pipe-bonding.
This is something that must be studied further.
Volunteers?
