When Nick Miller and I first started talking about the direction we wanted Pipe School to go at its new home on Quality Briar, one of the things we discussed was occasionally having pieces not related to pipes. While we all do love pipes and tobacco and everything remotely related, we also have other interests and those interests should not be neglected.

One passion of mine is exercise. I’m big on eating healthily and staying in shape as much as I can. I know that a lot of people out there in the pipe world are equally interested in maintaining a healthy lifestyle but often consider themselves too busy to do so, and it is for this reason that I share my story.

When I was thirteen, I started working out with a personal trainer so that I could learn how to safely and efficiently exercise. When the later half of high-school and the first part of college rolled around, however, I found myself unable to keep that up. I stopped working out almost entirely. While this did not have a huge negative effect on me in any visible way, I felt it: I missed working out and the energy and sense of well-being that it brought.

Then, in the Summer of 2011, I wrote my old personal trainer to ask him to help me put together a workout program for myself. In response, he suggested that I check out something called P90X. He expected that I had probably seen infomercials about it — I had not — but suggested that I check it out and give it some serious thought.

Within a week, I purchased the program and started testing it out. Read more

Oh, yes! One month left. That’s right. You do know what I’m talking about, right?

The Chicago Pipe Show, of course!

For those of you who have never been to a Chicago Pipe Show — oh, wait, that’s me! — the show is put on by the Chicagoland Pipe Collectors Club. According to its website, the club “started in 1993 with a small group of pipe smokers meeting at local lounges and restaurants for companionship and trading information and ideas about the hobby of pipe collecting. Over time we established meeting venues where we could display our pipes and other smoking items and buy, sell and swap from each other. Oh, and smoke together for an evening. Our first ‘Chicago Show’ was held in 1996 and has steadily grown to one of the largest hobby shows of it’s type in the world.”

In the sixteen years since the start of the Chicago Pipe Show, it has made an incredible name for itself, featuring over 300 different exhibitor tables, lots of different events and speakers, and one of the most incredible assembly of pipes in one place in the entire world. If you can dream it, it is either there or has not been invented yet. (If it is the latter, I would just contact Stephen Downie and he can make it happen!) Read more

It was a slow evening at the pub. Through the blue and grey smoke diffusing through the room, I smelled something familiar. It smelled like my music teacher’s leather jacket; it smelled like his trumpet and my piano and avoiding my lessons.

Four, college age men sat at a table and one of them was holding a long, clay pipe. Like some sort of mystic ceremony, they passed it around the table, taking a puff, savoring the flavor, and passing it to the next.

Within a week, I found myself at a small, old tobacconist with a statue of an Indian chief standing on a block with the word “TOBAK” written on it. I remember circling the tourist area a number of times before I even worked up the courage to park. It took me even more time to walk inside.

I was completely out of my element. Large glass jars were filled with different types of tobacco, all of which looked so similar, aside from the one in a porcelain jar with a portrait of a Middle Eastern man painted on it; I later discovered that this was the one English tobacco that the establishment offered.

I am sure that I lingered too long in my attempt to blend into the woodwork, but I eventually asked to purchase the same pipe that the guys at the pub had been smoking. I work at a Renaissance Faire during the summers – yes, I’m lame like that – and I justified the purchase to myself by thinking that, if I didn’t take to the pipe, I could at least use the clay one as a prop.

I remember taking the long box that contained the pipe and my two plastic bags full of bulk tobacco back to my dorm room and hiding them in the bottom drawer of my desk. I wasn’t hiding it from my roommate, since I didn’t have a roommate. Perhaps I was hiding it from the memories of my parents telling me how evil tobacco is. What I could not hide, however, was my excitement: a slight feeling of butterflies in my stomach, smiling like an idiot, and anticipating my first experience.

To say it was not the best of experiences might be an understatement, and, much like most bad first-pipe-experiences, it was entirely my fault. I was trying to use flimsy matches to light a pipe that was poorly packed and around a foot-and-a-half long on a cold, windy night, while perched on a ledge of a dormitory building. I think it might have been easier if I had been trying to juggle eight rabid pit bulls while trying to light my pipe. Read more