Smokem if You Gottem

Rich's is my favorite smoke shop, especially the one on Park and Alder in downtown Portland. They have a ton of magazines and, lotsa cool pipes, some great cigars (I haven't smoked all that many cigars, lately), and some of my favorite tobacco. I started smoking cigarettes more as prayers, and lately, more as habit with prayers thrown in as much as possible. I decided to smoke reasonably, if there is such a thing. I talked to a man at Rich's with a lot of tobacco knowledge and told him I wanted to smoke an organic blend. He informed me that the tobaccos used at Rich's are indeed organic and chemical free. Rich's also has their own master blender (that may be who I talked to), so all the pipe tobacco's are created right there by someone you can talk to if you can find out his schedule and name (I haven't asked, yet). I mulled over a few blends. The blend that caught my eye was "Girls Blend." I thought the name rather sexist, but I identify more with women than men and for the most part, get along better with women than men, although I do have many close male friends now. The man told me it is a "girly cut" (what that means I'm not sure) flavored with a bit of vanilla. It smelled real nice, so I chose that blend.

I already had some papers in mind from a friend of mine that I would occasionally smoke cigarettes with from time to time who used a Virginian organic blend rolled in "Pure Hemp" papers. I like these papers especially for the fact that they do not have the chemical in the paper that cigarettes do. If you look at a cigarette, you will notice that it has little rings around it. Those rings are a chemical that keeps your cigarette burning, thus using more tobacco when not inhaling, thus making you need to buy more cigarettes, thus making more money for the ultra-elite. [Quick point: Notice how when there are discussions of fires caused by cigarettes and the desire to make a cigarette that doesn't stay lit, there is never any mention of the chemical in the papers that keep the cigarette burning. NEVER!] Pure Hemp and a few other papers do not have that chemical. Recently, when out of my papers, I tried a paper from an over the counter brand that I bought for prayers. It tasted so horrible I couldn't smoke. I had to wait.

My personal habit is done mostly at work. I can get a good interesting, not overwhelming nor heavily intoxicating buzz from smoking. It helps relax me and I sincerely try to pray everytime that I smoke, but don't always. I occasionally smoke at home or in my car as well, but not often enough. I have no problem going days without smoking, either.

Now, here is my quandary:



Rich's has a cigar store Indian...and a cigar store clown. Yes, this is INDEED institutionally racist. Indians, as demonstrated in previous posts, are supposed to look like their Hollywood version of plains Indians counter-part (whether or not we're from the coasts, woods, rivers, desserts, etc.). If we don't look like this, we are not considered Indians by our imperialist/colonialist dominators who have given themselves the privilege of defining what is and isn't Indian. This is, ideed, dehumanizing, and encourages the colonialist ideals that "there are no real Indians left, because otherwise, there'd be guys like this walking down the streets," Signed, the Beloved Indian Definers Who Are Not Indian.

We also have the cigar store clown. I used to live with a clown, and he doesn't look anything like this. Not only that, being a clown is a "profession," not a race. Some one who makes people laugh, and often times by looking or being rediculous. It doesn't take a heavily fortified steel bridge to make the connection that clowns and Indians are rediculous. You see, there are no cigar store white guys, like say: a member of the KKK with a white hood and burning cross; no cigar store Italians; no cigar store Puerto Ricans; no cigar store French folks; no cigar store Brits; no cigar store lawyers; no cigar store Spaniards; no cigar store Jews; no cigar store Palestinians; no cigar store librarians; no cigar store truck drivers; etc. But there are cigar store Indians and cigar store clowns.

I still go to Rich's despite this form of institutional racism. I don't discuss it with them because I figure I'll get the usual arguments from the institutionally racist of, "I'm not racist" and "that's not racist" and "it's a tradition in tobacco shops," etc. It would take too much effort and too much energy and I've already been on the verge of burnout for a while.

Here are a couple of fantasies I've had should I had ever come into a large amount of money:

1) I would buy a huge house in the country with lots of acerage. I would then buy every cigar store Indian I could get my hands on, and set them out to watch over my property until the weather rotted them down after the decades of exposure.

2) I would have hired a carver to make cigar store white guys, Italians, Brits, Chinese, Portugese, lawyers, truck drivers, etc., and display them in a tobacco shop of my own.

Just fantasies, though, and not worth the effort at public education that I hope it would be considering Americans are so purposefully stupid.