Chronic Town

This is the lost post from a few days ago. I'm presenting it to you unedited, so try to put yourself back into whatever mindset you may have been experiencing, say... this past Sunday.

So I'm lost in Virginia, but that's not important. What is important is a smoke shop in State College called Chronic Town. Other things are also maybe important, but they're probably not as interesting. Or else they are, but I don't know about them. I do know (a very little) about Chronic Town. Subtly located (not to say hidden) between a Qdoba and a Starbucks (how do you think I found it?) on East (or possibly West) College Rd., (not that it matters) it announces itself... actually, it doesn't announce itself at all. All it offers is a lonely, generic glass door, through which you see only a short hallway apparently going nowhere, and an ugly white sign above it. But, once you get inside and make your way down the steps you just discovered at the end of the aforementioned hallway, you discover before you a veritable den of wonders (a den of no small proportions at that). Check it out: They have a generous (in a manner of speaking) supply of hideous, shellacked wooden furniture - the kind that's meant to look like you just pulled it out of the forest and threw it in your living room (think Adirondack lodge) - booths and chairs and side tables and the like; you know, lounge furniture, but uncomfortable looking. The furniture is spread throughout the space, with some in front of a small stage (bands I guess?), more next to a fistful of old-school stand-up video games; they have a coffee bar (you know, an actual bar, that you can sit at), a small retail counter with pipes and tobacco and shit, and another counter covered with about a million hookahs, all shiny as shit (well, shinier than shit, actually), made of brightly colored glass and looking generally awesome. So I'm told that you're meant to go in and choose your tobacco and order your drinks, and they set you up at a table with one of these hookahs, fixed with the appropriate number of tubes (or whatever they're called) and you sit there reveling in your brief but meaningful visit to a place that actually celebrates the joys of culturally sanctioned suicide. I'm telling you, it positively warms your heart; makes you feel glad to be alive. It also doesn't hurt that they sell pouches of American Spirit for six measly dollars. I bought two.

Chronic Town, friends. Unexpected joy in a den of football-obsessed Pennsylvanians. Who knew?

So, yeah. That was the Chronic Town post that I thought I'd lost forever. I suppose it would have been just as well, but I did spend something like ten minutes writing it, and I was never going to get that time back, you know? At least now I have something to show for it. Time is money, people.

(Get it? Loser humor.)