Euclidean Olfactory

Walking down Euclid, just past the park that leads to the Inman Park MARTA station, a strange, pungent odor caught my nose. Someone had been smoking something near the treeline. Intrigued, I lingered a bit and whiffed awhile. Finally the nature of it’s strangeness came to me: it wasn’t weed. It was pipe tobacco. Someone had been smoking a pipe in Little Five Points.

Hmm. The hippies, rastas and bike lane advocates smoke weed, the homeless guys smoke the cheapest Dutch Masters cigars you can get at the BP, the Ron Paul ’08 guys smoke their own weed and never share and the Paideia high school girls all smoke American Spirits. Who smokes a pipe?

Eventually I guessed it must have been one of those Church of the Subgenius members paying some kind of homage to J.R. “Bob” Dobbs. I’ve never quite gotten into Bobism—that whole postmodern thing of mocking religion by creating a religion. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but why not just mock religion. But that pipe tobacco did smell sweet.

I’ve always had a dream that one day I’d become a pipe smoker, but … ah, who’m I kidding. That’s never gonna happen.