You'll undoubtedly love your pipe Shain,
he makes a damn fine smoking instrument.
AND NOW
...Bigpond's comment about the skateboard, heh heh, sadly forlorn and reduced to photo props nowadays, it's been so long since I've actually skated. The one with blue wheels any real skater could look at it and tell it's been barely used, it's my "old man cruiser" board but I haven't been cruising much and they could call me a poser and it wouldn't bother me a bit, unlike when I was younger and such would be an insult to immediately disprove with utmost vigor.
The other board that's slightly roughed up is my actual riding board, to do tricks 'n stuff, and sometimes it's the most simple things that provide the most fun, like backside slappies on a yellow curb, or high speed slides while zooming down a big hill...when I was young I was a sponsored amateur, but it was much different than it is today, more underground, then suddenly grunge went mainstream and punk had got broke and cultural demarcations largely disappeared and you couldn't tell a redneck from a deathrocker anymore, which all eventually led to the whole hipster thing where someone might look cool and then you talk to them and discover that they are clueless fashion mannequins...
...etc, I'm offtopic and on a ramble.
I was sponsored by Triple X, who was originally Brand X but another company named Toxic sued them in court over the use of the letter X and won, thus Brand X changed to XXX to sort of give the finger or whatever, they were a great company:
http://skately.com/library/brands/brand-x-skateboards
Note at that site was listed Ed Gein as one of their riders :P
They released a pro model from Eddy Gein, which was hilarious when you think of some little kid riding around on their Eddy Gein skateboard, with no idea who Ed Gein was... 8O
(skateboard graphics ever since the Dogtown days had had skulls 'n gore galore, so it wasn't anything out of the ordinary)
here's the ad for it:
http://skately.com/library/ads/brand-x-skateboards-xxx-decks-1989
I still sometimes look at the old skate stuff, I wish a pipester would start a blog similar to this:
http://skateandannoy.com/features/ebaywatch/
It's interesting.
(you think pipes are expensive? browse those archives and feel vindicated!)
Anyway,
getting back to the pipe, I should have linked to Ryan's site:
http://www.aldenpipes.com/
He saved me from buying a Russian pipe because the prior several days I was absorbed by looking at a few makers and came close to pulling the trigger on one and if such did happen then I'd have to live with a pipe by a maker whose name I couldn't even barely pronounce!
And it all went down while reading Cigrmaster's thread when I checked Ryan's site and saw this pipe...
http://pipesmagazine.com/forums/topic/my-first-ryan-alden-pipe
A pipe in some ways is similar to a skateboard in my eyes, an instrument which provides a metaphysical aspect way beyond their material sum, and can help make magic happen, and can greatly enhance the living of a life.
I still ain't made the commentary as per Ryan's evolutionary jumps, but I got sidetracked and it'll still be downstream a bit...
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