The Future of IPSD

February 20, 2019 by Chuck Stanion in Pipe Line

Today, February 20th, is the best day of the year: International Pipe Smoking Day (IPSD). Pipe smokers around the world will pause to raise a bowl in honor of our community of enthusiasts. Our activity is most often a solitary pursuit, but on this day we acknowledge the history and tradition of pipes, knowing that others are toasting the same event and sending into the cosmos our self-acknowledgement as a community.

I predict that IPSD will evolve over time, and I imagine a future where the world at large celebrates pipe smoking and those who smoke pipes. The population will continue its understanding that slowing down and thinking out a problem while communing with natural elements is far superior to knee-jerk modernized reactions, and pipe smokers will be recognized as primary practitioners of this outlook.

Instead of meeting with other pipe smokers on IPSD, we will all be in high demand for parades, interviews, autograph signings and general admiration. Your day will start with a mob outside your door waiting to carry you to the Pipe Smokers Parade, where you and any fellow pipe enthusiasts will be stationed in comfortable leather chairs on floats to smoke and demonstrate your technique for the admiring crowds. Afterward, you will give seminars on pipe smoking for the throngs of people anxious to master the art.

World-wide banquets and parties will rival New Year's Eve. Actors, politicians, authors, and the famous of all stripes will be photographed clumsily trying to pass themselves off as pipe smokers. Soon, though, with our help, the world will catch up to us and we will all be pipe smokers. For the first time, peace will envelope the human race.

Of course, heroic efforts will be initiated to grow and harvest the finest tobaccos ever seen, grown specifically for the pipe. There will be a rise in tobacco companies with new products rivaling anything we can think of from history. Pipemakers will be the most revered of personages, and every major corporation will invite a pipemaker to join its board as an overseer of morality and ethical practices. It will be a golden age of prosperity and pipe smoking.

While we wait for the world to reach this stage, IPSD is important and enjoyable, expanding our individual perceptions to include all of those we know and don't know who share our understanding of the benefits of pipe smoking. Until the world catches on, we're fine with celebrating in our own way.