The other day I was in a pipe smoking mood. I have not had some nice pipe tobacco in a while. Over the weekend I had another one of my 'cigarettes! Blah!' moments where I am filled with a sense of self-loathing for cigarettes. This happens to me every six months or so. Then I will go off cigarettes from anywhere from six weeks to a year. Then out of the blue I'll have another one, enjoy it, have another, enjoy it, and then six months later its three in the morning and I am picking through an overflowing ashtray trying to find a butt that still has a lingering trace of tobacco sticking to it.
It's a vicious cycle, but I have come to terms with it.
So I popped into the Tinderbox in the mall. Actually, it was called something else, but I call all mall tobacco shops 'The Tinderbox'. I stuck my nose in a few of the pipe tobacco jars to find one I liked. I usually like the darker tobaccos. I like the rich heady smoke that comes out of it. However, they tend to be a bit wet and a pain in the ass to keep lit. I sniffed their cherry tobacco, but the cherry scent was way too strong. It also smelled too artificial to my taste. Sort of like a breakfast cereal. While I was sniffing the tobaccos a gaggle of teenage stoners came in to gawk at the pipes. The store owner gave them a sour look.
I ended up on settling on some almond and butter rum tobacco. It had a nice light scent and it did not seem overly moist. I took it home and stuck a thumb full in my long stemmed tavern pipe. It was perhaps the best pipe tobacco I have tried. Not only was the smoke smooth, did not burn my tongue, it was also really easy to keep lit. A few starter puffs and it stayed lit almost the entire bowl. I was pleased with my smoke. I puffed away while I watched 'Dead like me'.
Today at lunchtime I was having an antsy 'cooped inside with the fluorescent lights' moment and decided I wanted to get outside for lunch. I peeked at google maps and I realized 'Big tree park' was a ten minute drive from my work. So I putted on over there. Big Tree Park is a tiny park that houses a mammoth bald cypress tree that is around three thousand years old. Back in the day this tree used to be the largest thing in Seminole country, sprawling 165 feet into the air. You could see the top of the tree from lake Monroe and miles around. But in 1925 a hurricane blew through and snapped it almost in half, leaving it a mere hundred or so feet tall.
Anyways, there is a little park there. It has a little playground and a few gazebos and some stone picnic benches. I was going to walk down and see the big tree, but that's when I saw 'the dude'. He was a white guy, probably in his early twenties, slim muscular build and wearing a baseball cap and a white wife beater. He had one of those obnoxious mini-beards that only trace the jaw line.
He came walking out of the path where the tree was. He slowed down when he saw me. I stopped and read the little information board before the walk. The dude paused a moment and then turned around and walked back towards the tree. A little bell in my mind went 'ding' and I was pretty sure I had encountered a forest fag. Deathly afraid that if I followed him down that path he would take it as an invitation to yank his wang out at me, I instead when back to my car and got my folding chair out of my trunk and settled into the shade with my book.
After a while he came out of the pathway again. He stood there a moment and looked around. Then he wandered into the (wait for it) public restroom. After a moment a truck near me that I had registered with my brain but not thought about suddenly opened the door. A guy got out and went into the bathroom. After ten or fifteen minutes (that's a long ass shit there, pal) he came out, went straight for his truck and drove away. Wife-beater shirt wandered out a few minutes later, tucking his wife beater in his shirt and then gave a yawning stretch. He then pulled out his cell phone and yakked into it a moment.
Then another car pulled up, and a guy got out and went into the bathroom. Wife beater quickly followed him in. There was another ten minutes passage of time before they guy came out and went right for his car and drove away. After a bit wife beater came out and sat in his car. Seemed to me he was having a busy day. I could not tell if he was a homo or a drug dealer. I vowed that if I ever returned to that park I would be seated in the shade well away form the public restroom.
As I was loading up my car I found one of those little one-hitter boxes potheads use. I peeked in it but there was nothing inside. Tsk.
2026 Update
Twenty years back, Ed is sniffing tobacco jars and then treating a public park like his own private stakeout.
Ah, 2006: a fossilized ecosystem where a mall had a tobacco shop you could sniff like a produce stand, and a grown man's lunch plan involved Google Maps on a desktop monitor before heading out to a park. Ed's whole afternoon is a time capsule—smoking indoors, cell phones you pulled out only to 'yak,' and a suspiciously detailed restroom stakeout conducted from a folding chair. Nowadays, the Tinderbox has been vaped out of existence; cigarettes are a nuisance you must walk a block to commit; and if anyone wants a private bathroom encounter, they have an app for that, not a wifebeater and a public toilet. The language has shifted too: that 'forest fag' reflex now reads less like a threat and more like a man narrating his own anxieties into a blog for strangers. And the 'one-hitter box'—charming little artifact, like finding a rotary phone in the woods. I miss Dead Like Me, but not the fluorescent-light dread it soundtracked.
“2006 Ed, why were you timing every stranger's trip to the public restroom instead of walking those thirty feet to see the three-thousand-year-old tree? Did the almond-butter-rum smoke really convince you that you were a connoisseur and not just a folding-chair surveillance operative?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2006 Ed: Well, Beelzebubba, you got me there. I had every intention of walking down to see that tree, I really did. But then my brain saw the dude, and the little bell went ding, and suddenly I was not a man on a peaceful lunch break anymore, I was a detective in a folding chair, apparently. Thirty feet from a three-thousand-year-old cypress and I chose to watch a public restroom like it was my job. That’s droll, even for me. And yeah, the almond butter rum had me feeling pretty sophisticated, puffing my tavern pipe like a gentleman. But a gentleman probably would have gone and looked at the tree instead of timing bathroom visits. I’ll tell myself it was just curiosity, but I know better. Next time I’m parking closer to the tree and keeping my nose in my book. Or maybe I’ll just bring the pipe and stay home.
