“All important decisions should be made within the space of seven breaths” – Hagakure; The Book of Samurai.

 Clearly, I’m not a Samurai (for that matter, I can’t even navigate a sushi menu), for I have been tossing around the idea of having a blog on this site for about a year. The reason for the hesitation should be pretty obvious to those who know me personally; I am a talker, not a writer.

Despite the above, I have wanted to create a forum with a different attitude, flavor, and edge than you are likely to find hosted on other retail sites. To digress,  there’s a long standing, unwritten ‘code’ about communication within pipe internet retail offices, and that code dictatesthe amount of candor/writer’s opinion that gets passed along. There is one for what is displayed on the front page (or will be permanently available in archives). This is the ‘happy place’, where content could not possibly offend any reader, be they Mother Theresa or Andrew ‘Dice’ Clay. Next, there is content that will be up for only a week, pretty similar to the first, but some sandpaper can appear because… well, it’s only up for a week. Third, there’s what might be passed on to a brand new customer and fourth covers what’s said to long standing (hopefully good humored) customers. The fifth is what we say amongst ourselves… and (ok) what we’d say after a few beer’s with pals at a pipe show. Yes, as you have no doubt already guessed, this blog will often run pretty close to that fifth level.

I have lined up quite a few guest bloggers, men whom I like and respect, and (most importantly) guys who call it as they see it. The topics will range as far as their opinions, and the tone will be similar to our conversations over the telephone or when we’re at a show. There will be a little humor, a bit of colorful language and some subjects that might get me in trouble but it will hopefully get you guys talking. I’d like for all future blogs to be informative sure, but not how to clean your pipe or smoke this tobacco from this shape kinda bullshit. You guys are grown men, you have access to Google. In short, if you haven’t figured that stuff out yet, then this might not be the spot for you.

I’ll try not to hold back and tell the people writing for the site not to hold back, bottom line is there will be no skirting around a subject. That’s basically it, we’ll see where this road leads us, aside from me writing my first blog… .

Nick