Fine white ash

So another blogger thanked me very prettily for posting four links to his blog, then asked why I had chosen those particular four. I disabused him of the notion that it was because they are excellent pieces.

He's a decent if prolix writer, but those links had nothing to do with literary merit.
They were all tight little blinkered holes into the dark pit of his soul.
A smelly, reeky, smokey swamp of existential angst.
Black, boring, tobacco posts.

[Gratuitous Link Cluster: THIS, THAT, THE OTHER THING, and SMTHG ELSE.]

I was amazed at the passion he has for that strange subject. See, he writes about all kinds of things, but when he writes about smoking, it's almost like he's describing his favorite sexual position. Without any sense of shame or reserve.
It's not about his wooden object, there is no queer symbolism. It's the pipe tobacco.

For years he's had an unrequited love affair with a product named "Balkan Sobranie", the mistress-slut-virgin-whore and girl-next-door of pipe tobaccos, yay, even the Mary Magdalene of Oriental Blends.
Balkan Sobranie Original Mixture has had many casual lovers, but Atboth is probably the first bonafide stalker for a smoking tobacco ever. He longs, passionately, to dip his sweaty Charatan or Sasieni Four Dot deep into her soft and spongy silken shreds again, stroke her firmly into submission, then light her up. Puff.
Oooooooooh!!! And 'Mmmmmmmm!'

Disgusting!

It's quite the nastiest thing to which I've ever been exposed. I live in San Francisco, so I know from depravity too.
Grant Patel likes panties. Snooky lusts after a motorbike. Dovbear teases Hareidi Jews. Midinaite Manna loves her husband and her baby. Steg is studying to become a rabbit.
[Lily Haskell picks on Jews, Jameel settles the West Bank, Harry provides answers to questions I had not yet thought of asking, Dick Becker waves his tiny shrimp-like dongus, and Treppenwitz writes wittily about living in the best of all possible lands. These are a few of my favorite things. No, I shall NOT mention "I can has cheez burger", it's just too flippin' precious! Icky!]


Mister Atboth rhapsodizes about smelly dead leaves. Balkan Sobranie.


He wrote "you should've see the fine white ash I used to tap".
I thought he was making an obscene and boastful reference to a long-past sexual exploit, or a portion of his own anatomy (as boys are wont to do), till the next line made clear that it was what he knocked out of his pipe after smoking.
Fine white ash, "velvety", and of "an even and uniform small grit".

Pipe smokers are neurotic.
Which is a nice polite way of saying nuts.


周小燕