Howdy fellas. TB here, coming at you live from way up north. This is one of the coolest summers in recent memory - it's 10:33 in the AM and it's only 54 degrees. Rained hard and steady all night. Slept with the window wide open - it was grand. Currently rocking a righteous bowl of well aged Sextant in a 1/4 bent, rusticated and paneled Winslow cherrywood/poker. The funny thing is that I don't like pokers. Especially if they are clunky. And so I don't like cherrywood shapes either. And I generally don't like paneled pipes - at all. But I LOVE this pipe. It literally called my name. A close pipe friend (I only have one...) here in Anchorage who has a huge affinity for any and all poker shaped pipes - when he saw this pipe, he said one word, and one word only to describe his thoughts on his initial encounter. Every time I pick up this wonderful pipe to smoke, I am reminded of his one word descriptor for this particularly briar - "Savage." Cuppa mud - neat, with a little Chuck Mangione on the tube amp. Very nice.
Passing thought: Mr. Mangione got me thinking - we each and all literally have given it all we've got, and yet we continue to do so anyways. As if "all you've got" to give in this life was somehow... endless, or perhaps without measure... or perhaps, "savage" even, as if the efforts to maintain this state of action and positivity and choice were somehow beyond computation - like in some unknowably knowable way finitely infinite, and thusly, we land smack dab on "savage." Just like this pipe. Ha! And so it goes - catch you boys on down the trail. Peace in.