Joy of a New Pipe

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PreppyHippy

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I've been smoking several new pipes lately, and with one of them clenched in my teeth I started putting down the following notes of the thoughts that smoking a new pipe gave me. I wondered if this would belong in the PAD and TAD forum, but since it's about the pipe experience in general rather than the specifics of a new pipe I'm pumped about and want to show you, I thought I would take the risk of posting it here. If it doesn't belong I sincerely apologize and beg a moderator to move it where the readership will find it more appropriate.

But I put the notes down because smoking a new pipe is not at all like smoking one you're accustomed to, and because it's new, it sure gives a whole boatload of different thoughts. These are roughly what came out of my notebook.


-The new way it hangs off you with its own sculpture. In your hand its own new weight, different from your other pipes. The new way it distributes its weight.

-The new way it smokes and your new concentration on its flavor and how it delivers blends you know.

-Your new or renewed consciousness, pulled from before, that you used in your other pipes when it was their turn to be new to you once. All your previous pipes are somehow recalled to you, for they were the new pipe once before as well, and felt as ideal, as much a perfect door into smoking delight.

-The new way the shape expands the shapes you know and like, and how now your aesthetic is reevaluated in smaller or greater part--discovering the comfort of an oval shank on a straight pipe, for example, or getting a full bent when your tastes until now had been for your two dozen straights or eighth bents. You scoffed at chimneys before, say, or never thought you’d want to have any shape but a prince in your hand; but now, however, you step into a new aesthetic again.

-How the stem holds your mouth wider with a new thickness, say, or the reverse and a new saddle stem is shockingly comfortable. How the new pipe shows you things you’re not accustomed to, and might dislike in theory, aren’t so bad after all, and even might be awfully good instead.

-Its special warmth in your fingers, as you use the tips to rotate it around gently when you hold it out from your face at the point where your eyes focus on it without effort. The point where you look at your pipe in a way and mentally think something like “behold!”

-How you tell yourself the joys you’ll have in the coming smokes of it to build its cake and you imagine these delightful first supremely involved smokes will be the rule for all the coming smokes of this pipe.

-The mysteries of this pipe--a London shop’s marked pipe, cut by whichever company decades ago and the similarities of its canting bowl to those of the great names in manufacture of the era. Which great maker might have turned this beauty for the shop’s shop pipe? You convince yourself it was one of the holy grail marques.

-Its texture is smooth in this example, with the well buffed way that isn’t gummed yet by your hands however you’ve cleaned them before smoking your other, older pipes. This new wonder in your hand has “new pipe feel” or the buyer’s delight of new pipe touch. You resolve a new devotion not to soil the new pipe so that it everlastingly gives you all the rich experience of the new.

-How you wish you could be certain of the origin locale of the briar and wonder of its journeys undiscovered in blocks yet cut or dried--what other “shaped” pipe it might have become if a carver who looked at the block a generation or two before you had seen it chose to make a different shape emerge from its block. How an infinite imagining of pipes is present in every block of briar cut, but one one comes from it. This one, the one in your hand, was the lucky one, and now you’re the lucky one.

-To experiment with the puffing, alternating with the decision to just sip from it, with it beautifully internally warmed against the night air by your careful lighting and bowl contents maintenance.

-How you curse yourself again for making the purchase since you’ve already got all the pipes you need yet know the value to you of this additional wonderful purchase which brings all the delights of the new pipe back to you again. You curse yourself for being hardwired by the capitalist mentality that what you already have isn’t good enough, that for folly and debt, we all think the next shirt, the next watch, the next thing will make us who we really see ourselves to be. Why can’t I just be forced to live in my own iron curtain and be stuck with the pipes that will already make me happy? Curse the angst of the West and its hopeless gathering craving!

-How you tell yourself that this will be the last pipe for a long time--this pipe is so good it is sure to be the be-all and end-all of your pipe hunting--that with its joys you won’t need another pipe.

-Until another will strike you and you’ll get to have all these feelings again and remember that you’d forgotten about all the ways of discovery with a new pipe.

-How you merely observe how the pipe performs. Like a new car or motorcycle or sunglasses or stockpot, you observe how it does all the regular things from point A to point B, same as all the others like it, but does them in its own way.

-You have grand and small whimsical thoughts too, like how a sandblasted or rusticated pipe would become interesting to a blind person smoking it, how its tactile nature could be so much more known and intimate with the smoking experience for someone so much more attuned to the tactile. How you wish to love and know this pipe’s tactile nature as much as that blind person in your mind’s eye would so easily.

-How the pipe’s first bowls are all too quick.
 
What a beautifully written and well articulated piece. And I agree with everything you say!! Wonderful.

 
Thanks Henwrench! There's not much better on a rainy Monday like today than good words like yours.

It's funny about pipe smoking. There are two parts to it: the pipe and the tobacco. Sometimes the pipe itself seems to give me the majority of the pleasure, sometimes it's the tobacco. The other thing about smoking a new pipe was I had the strong wish that getting a new tobacco could always be as mentally engaging as a new pipe. TAD is so much less expensive than PAD after all, and would that an experience of the new could cost the pocket change a bowl of tobacco costs instead of the wallet damage a new pipe does.

Another thing about getting a new pipe is that it's so fun I always end up telling myself I'll have to get another every three months just for those first three or four new pipe bowls. I wish I weren't so foolish.
 
Interesting. Kind of like peering into the bedroom of another while they're having passionate moments.

Though, personally, I never guilt myself for my gathering and perpetuate "not good enough" feelings with my belongings. They're all carefully-chosen tools in which I build a world within the world around me. Justification? Of course. Pipes are never "not good enough," they're simply borrowed and passed on to the next guy, sooner or later--after a lifetime. Beginning acceptance on what owns us, or what we own: both are silly. One can eat and get fat, or eat and survive. We still have to eat. Even the fat guy, as despicable as it is to watch. Enjoyment is very personal, and really easy to categorize.

8)
 
Kyle Weiss":pgg8ljs9 said:
Interesting. Kind of like peering into the bedroom of another while they're having passionate moments.

Though, personally, I never guilt myself for my gathering and perpetuate "not good enough" feelings with my belongings. They're all carefully-chosen tools in which I build a world within the world around me. Justification? Of course. Pipes are never "not good enough," they're simply borrowed and passed on to the next guy, sooner or later--after a lifetime. Beginning acceptance on what owns us, or what we own: both are silly. One can eat and get fat, or eat and survive. We still have to eat. Even the fat guy, as despicable as it is to watch. Enjoyment is very personal, and really easy to categorize.

8)
Thanks I think.
 
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