“Spare me the unsolicited lecture about addiction, I don’t believe a man’s contentment comes from purity—it comes from innocent vices and the reasonable cognitive dissonance about them.”

I’m sharing that line because I spewed it in some haste to someone commenting about my pipe smoking. The summer around my neck of the sagebrush has been hot, and literally, on fire. The wildfire smoke from local and regional catastrophes has been awful. As an outdoor smoker, this left me with fleeting moments to do what I do, and that includes writing about pipe tobacco. It’s also made it rather difficult to deal with people who, on top of everything else going on, have been edgy and much more bold in their opinions of what everyone else is doing. When I explained to this particular complainant I’m merely doing my job smoking this evil, briar crucible of terror, I gained a bit of much-needed pleasure by telling them to mind their own damned business in a decent, honest manner.

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