"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats

Just shy of his 50th birthday, Jarvis Bagley’s life has become an awful cliché.  Long divorced, long single, estranged from his children, working an unfulfilling job, Jarvis has long since dropped courtesy and decorum for acrimony and rancor. 

So lost is he in his contempt for others, that he finds his most meaningful relationships interacting with his favorite craft beers and the anthropomorphized caricatures he turns them into.

His lone solace is competing Tuesday night trivia at Grendel’s Tap & Pub.  His greatest dream is winning the coveted Saxon Keg—the Pub’s prize awarded to the best trivia team of the year.

But if he wants to win the Keg, and maybe put his life in some kind of order, he’s going to have to put together a winning team.  Worse yet, he’s going to have to get along with the real people who will form it.

Chapter Six: Jarvis and Catherine Discuss Bad Parenting

Saxon Keg Point Standings—Early July:

1. Jarvis Bagley and “Friends”: 850

2. Isaac Newton’s Missing Apple: 800

3. The Ken Dolls: 710

4. Make Trivia Great Again: 480

5. Saxophones and Saliva: 320

6. Zen and the Art of Beer: 250

7. The C-Chord Walk Downs: 140

8. The Off-Road Commuters: 30

9. Others: 20

In one of the most serendipitous moments in the modern craft beer movement, the founders of Indiana City Brewing happened upon an apt and historic location to house their business. 

More than a century earlier, Home Brewing Company—founded by the likes of John Hook’s father and Kurt Vonnegut’s grandfather—became a Midwestern juggernaut, cranking out as many as 35,000 barrels a year.  But because Indiana holds a deep-seated “Utah-fetish,” those wise souls sent to Indianapolis—sent by the even wiser souls who repeatedly shelved their rifles and rolled up their Confederate flags so that they could go the polls and elect them—decided that Prohibition needed to get started a full two years before the rest of the country joined in.  By 1922, Home Brewing was kaput.

For her expansive knowledge of beer and brewing, Catherine Addleson-Smith had no idea that Indiana City brewed and served in Home Brewing’s old bottling building smack-dab in the middle of downtown Indy.  I took pleasure in knowing something she didn’t.  I was cool about it.  Casual, even.  But I savored it, nonetheless.  Since she joined the team, I could count the number of trivia answers I knew exclusively on one hand…maybe two.

When I knocked on Catherine’s garage door, a four-pack of Shadowboxer Oatmeal Stout dangled from the curve of my index finger.  After she had forced the door open from inside, I held the cans aloft and half-grinned.  She returned my expression with a blank stare.  If she were a comic strip character, I suppose the thought balloon suspended over her head would have made some reference to the three chests of beer sitting behind her.  I knew that would be her reaction, of course.  But somehow, I felt compelled to bring something.  If I was going to spend the day on her porch downing all her beer, I had to find some way to mitigate the “mooch-effect” which I knew would haunt me.

Nodding—and sighing simultaneously—she took the cans and placed them in the chest behind her. 

“I know it’s a bit too warm this time of year for a stout,” I said, “but Shadowboxer is worth the violation of beer decorum.”  On those words, she reached back into the chest where she had just placed the cans, withdrew them—still conjoined by the plastic carrying cap snapped over their tops—and slowly pivoted them in her hands.  What I didn’t tell her was that I had meant to bring a four-pack of Tribute Pale Ale instead and tuck away the Stouts for a chilly, rainy day at home.  But after last night’s trivia fiasco, I promptly went home, sat in front of Netflix, and knocked every one of them out.  When I make plans with other people in mind, I don’t follow through very well.

“Heavy,” she said still looking at them.

“Yeah,” I answered.  “But good.  Smooth.” 

In the intervening years between the death of Home Brewing and the birth of Indiana City, the old bottling facility had served a number or roles: plumbing and lumber for a while, and later a boxing gym.  Etched into the blackness of the can, a cinnamon colored diamond wrapped around the now sweating curves.  Filling out the bottom have of that reddish blot stood the boxer himself, his arms extended as if resting along the ropes.  The silver shading across the tops of his muscular shoulders bespoke his raw power, and the downward tilt of his head—his eyes presumably staring hard into the canvas—bore witness to his grace.

Sensing my gaze upon him, the Boxer turned his head my way, then torqued the rest of his body around.  In the blackness of that face, I could feel his expression of solidarity.  Without a word, he held his right arm up, forming a 90-degree angle at the elbow.  Quickly he forced two short fist pumps, then pointed at me with the left glove, and just a suddenly turned himself around and resumed his trademark pose on the can.

“Okay,” Catherine Addleson-Smith said as she gently retuned the cans to the chest fridge. “Thanks,” in a voice best described at flat, if not one punctuated by descending inflection.

I took pleasure in knowing something she didn’t. I was cool about it. Casual, even. But I savored it, nonetheless. Since she joined the team, I could count the number of trivia answers I knew exclusively on one hand…maybe two.

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On her porch I took healthy draws from Catherine’s own single-hopped pale ale.  After last night’s mini-bender I was still “Jonesing” for more.  Alas, a two-hour trip to Indy and back seemed too impractical for a handful of beers.  But when I described Tribute to her—a perfectly balanced pale that bit a little on the front end and closed with a delicious, sweet finish—Catherine Addleson-Smith nodded twice, moved her eyeballs into the beer catalogue stuffed under her forehead, and disappeared into her garage.

“Here,” she said six minutes later.  Before me hovered a pint of beer best described as artistic.  The color reflected hues of brown, gold, and amber while a perfect head of foam filled out the glass’ top centimeter.  After my first draw, I was hooked.  I still preferred Tribute, but I nodded in satisfaction after my first gulp of Catherine’s brew.  On its own merit, the sharp second-bite on the finish gave it a distinct and savory taste.

“That’s good,” I said earnestly.  I took another drink, and as I sighed in satisfaction, I turned my face back to her.  “You have a name for this?”

Catherine shrugged.

“If one comes to mind,” she said, “you can have the honors.”

Halfway through my second pint of “Hrothgar’s Throne” the conversation gravitated to last night’s game.

Paul’s trivia contests followed a standard pattern.  The games were comprised of six rounds, of three questions each.  In each round, teams could place five, ten, or fifteen-point values on answers of their choosing.  One value per question, per round.  No repeats.  A “Halftime” question followed Round Three, and a “Final Question” followed the sixth round.  In both cases, teams could wager up to as many points on their scoreboard as they wanted.  Get it right, double the bet.  Wrong?  That was moving backwards.

Last night’s game, however, came with added fireworks.

“You get hot under the collar at the shake of a stick,” she observed.  As usual, she delivered her comment with a matter-of-fact tone to her voice.  As she spoke, she pulled her evergreen infused lager to her lips in a manner more befitting a description of the weather.

I sighed.  It’s what I always do when someone calls me out after one of my episodes.

“Yeah,” I said.  “I don’t know why, but once I’m worked up I can’t stop it,” I said.  Honestly.

During the second round of questions, I noticed that Jared had been dropping answers to the team in the adjacent booth.  He was our brilliantly smart server with a razor-sharp sense of irony. A displaced metrosexual, given Ephraim’s population and demographics.  And on any other night of the year, he was, hands-down, my favorite human being in the entire town.  But at that moment, however, he was nothing of the sort. 

The dudes sitting behind us—the ones benefitting from Jared’s sudden impulse to share—were camo-wearing, tree-stand-hugging, Toby-Keith-loving, Dodge-Ram-driving Republicans.  They weren’t dumb, regardless of assumptions all the Ephraim professors on my Facebook feed said.  They knew, for example, the approximate speed needed to reach escape velocity (25,000 mph), and they had no problem with John Wayne’s real name (Marion Michael Morrison).

But when Paul asked us which article of the Constitution forbade religious tests for government positions, I could hear the air whooshing out of their Fox News silos.  One turned to the other, then the next, then a third with nonverbal exchanges that proclaimed: “I don’t know… Do you know…?”  As I’ve said all too many times, it turned out that their actual knowledge of their beloved Constitution started and stopped with the 2nd Amendment.  And somewhere in the midst of that they assumed it also commanded every American to bow in their living rooms before their framed paintings of that two-thousand-year-old brown-haired pasty-white guy hovering above the rocks in that ill-fitting bathrobe.

For reasons I still can’t fathom, Jared leaned toward them as he sped his way past the booths and loudly whispered the answer.

“Article Six!” he all but hissed.

“Thanks, brother!” One of them shouted back after the momentary look of “why is he helping us?” had passed.

In round three, Jared let them know that the U.S. Embassy in Israel was in Tel Aviv, and during the “Halftime” question he nudged them again, cluing them in that “gamophobia” is a fear of being married or committed to a relationship.

When he leaned their way during the second question in the fourth round…  That’s when I hit the wall.

I don’t remember what I said.  When the really ugly scenes unfold, I file them away in vault somewhere in the basement of my head, so that I don’t have to suffer the embarrassment of memory.  Still, some details managed to escape the file cabinet.  I know I was loud.  I know I stood up and stopped Jared in his tracks.  I know he returned my red face and torrent of spittle with wide eyes and a stunned expression of abject horror.  I don’t know how the four Republicans took it in. I tend to subconsciously steer my line of sight away from people who intimidate me, and those four bastards scared the complete shit out of me.  If Maxwell’s punch to the face last winter hurt for a month, then those fuckers would probably make me whimper with each step I took for the next year.

But with Jared I was explosive.  I was profane.  Emily walked me outside, while several teams shuffled and changed tables.  In the evening humidity, I whipped out my first Marlboro in seven months.  It was that big of a deal.  Several people opted to step outside while I smoked and ask me, “Are you okay?” or “What can I do for you?”  It’s all code language you use when doing a quick round of “social reconnaissance.”  Two cigarettes and a half-dozen “I’m fine’s” and “I’m sorry’s” later, Emily walked me back inside.  The team had moved to the southeast corner, by the “garage door” windows.  Normally, on a night as warm as this one, they’d be flung wide open.  They had indeed been open, in fact…about twenty minutes earlier.

Any other pub… Any other time in my life…  My ass would have been tossed out.  Maybe for good.  Emily was professional…and more than that.  Jared even walked to me, touched me on the shoulder and apologized to me.

God… I am such a dick.

In the intervening years between the death of Home Brewing and the birth of Indiana City, the old bottling facility had served a number or roles: plumbing and lumber for a while, and later a boxing gym.

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“It’s just a game, after all,” said Catherine Addleson-Smith uttering THE four words that absolutely make me clench my teeth and pinch the inside of my thigh to keep from screaming.  She had just returned from the garage with a fresh pint, this time an imperial IPA with a mixture of Chinook and Amarillo hops wrapped up with a soft, grapefruit aftertaste.

“I mean…Jared could have told those fools the answer to every question, but they still would have lost on the Final one.”

The final one.

“Put the following rivers in order by length,” Paul announced.

The rivers in question were the Mississippi, the Yellow, the Nile, and the Amazon.  The correct order was:

1. The Nile

2. The Amazon

3. The Mississippi

4. The Yellow

While ruining the evening with my colossally stupid unforced error proved the worst part of the night, ending that night on a “length of rivers” question pushed my spirits still closer to the neck of my dark, funnel of moodiness.  I didn’t know the answers.  Catherine did, however, and she listed them before I could lift and then lower my beer.

I was surprised that the Mississippi made the list, though.  I figured something like the Danube or the Volga would run farther.  It had been almost a decade since I last crossed it, back when I made frequent trips to St. Louis.  Back then I was dating a secretary for a real estate firm.  I had met her on Match.com, and even though the three-hour drive was a long distance to cover for a few laughs and a good lay I took it.  Especially since my next-best option was “Elaine,” a gorgeous brunette “from Cheviot, Ohio” who had been “abandoned in Africa” by her “ex-husband” and begged me for my credit card number so she could “pay for her way back home.”

Every time I crossed the Mississippi, I would peek out over the concrete abutment along the edge of Interstate 70, and stare out into that swirling mixture of blue, green, and brown.  Watching the water cut such an enormous swath out of the landscape, I would hold my gaze on it as the same, profound thought caromed through my mind: “That would be a horrible place to die.”

Only a few years earlier, the I-35 overpass collapsed in Minneapolis, and for whatever reason both Dateline NBC and 20/20 spent all of the 1990’s obsessing over the millions of loose nuts and tons chipping concrete on America’s bridges.  As I crossed, I tensed up, bracing myself for the rumble I was sure would happen.  Preparing myself for the sudden, violent drop I knew I would feel.  More importantly, I made peace with the fact that, if anyone ever found my body, they’d find me strapped into my shitty 2006 Chevy Cobalt—a five-year-old sedan that rolled across Illinois with all the smoothness and silence of a ’74 Gremlin.

I didn’t look at the Republicans when Paul announced our victory, but Max and Sarah did. Their faces told me that a quick exit was a good idea.

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Thank to Catherine… Thanks to a lot of people, actually, we left Grendel’s with the win.  I didn’t look at the Republicans when Paul announced our victory, but Max and Sarah did.  Their faces told me that a quick exit was a good idea.  On the way out, I passed Jared.  He nodded awkwardly, a gesture which belied the combination of hate and hurt that escaped his eyes.  Once outside I looked through the windows as Jared bussed tables.  He was more than that aforementioned favorite person.  He was also one of the most genuine people I’d known in this town.  When he talked to me, he wasn’t pretending to be interested in my life for the sake of a tip.  He wanted to know when I’d last seen my kids.  He wanted to me to introduce them to him.

For a moment I tried to catalogue all the relationships with real people.  For a second moment I replayed the myriad ways I had managed to send every single one of them up in flames as if they were a pile of dried leaves.

“I treated him the same way I did my own kids,” I said resting my near empty pint glass in my left palm while running my right index finger around the lip.

Catherine started, lifting her eyes toward me when I spoke.  It was funny, really.  I arrived there fully determined to figure out a way to get her to talk about her son.  Instead, after opening the door herself, I stood at the threshold without another word to say.

“Jared’s a good kid,” she said.  “I’m sure he’s already forgiven you.”

I helped myself to another beer, sat back down, and stared into the trees.  She knew I wanted to ask about her son.  I tried to mask my curiosity with the pensive expression I had naturally worn when I talked about Jared.  But was gone.  She knew that, and she knew what I was up to.

“I was a selfish father,” I finally said.  The silence between us had become uncomfortable, and I said it as much to break that as anything.  More silence followed it, however.  After roughly another eight fluid ounces of quiet, I turned her way again.

“I suppose you’re going to tell me that I should try to patch things up with my kids,” I said.  “You know…?  While there’s still time?”

“Still time for what?” Catherine replied, her eyebrows up.  “I’m not going to tell you shit.”

If she wanted me to go home, she didn’t say it.  She also didn’t say another word until I nodded and saw myself out some 30 minutes later.

Image Credits: 

"View of Mississippi River, Natchez, Mississippi" by Ken Lund is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

"View of Mississippi River, Natchez, Mississippi" by Ken Lund is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

"Bulldog Lowertown St Paul Beer Flights" by edkohler is licensed under CC BY 2.0

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats

Just shy of his 50th birthday, Jarvis Bagley’s life has become an awful cliché.  Long divorced, long single, estranged from his children, working an unfulfilling job, Jarvis has long since dropped courtesy and decorum for acrimony and rancor. 

So lost is he in his contempt for others, that he finds his most meaningful relationships interacting with his favorite craft beers and the anthropomorphized caricatures he turns them into.

His lone solace is competing Tuesday night trivia at Grendel’s Tap & Pub.  His greatest dream is winning the coveted Saxon Keg—the Pub’s prize awarded to the best trivia team of the year.

But if he wants to win the Keg, and maybe put his life in some kind of order, he’s going to have to put together a winning team.  Worse yet, he’s going to have to get along with the real people who will form it.

Chapter Four: Jarvis and the Master Home Brewer

Saxon Keg Point Standings—Early May:

1. The Ken Dolls: 660

2. Jarvis Bagley and “Friends”: 540

3. Isaac Newton’s Missing Apple: 500

4. Make Trivia Great Again: 390

5. Saxophones and Saliva: 130

6. Zen and the Art of Beer: 100

7. The C-Chord Walk Downs: 30

8. Off-Road Commuters: 30

9. Others: 20

C

atherine Addleson-Smith lived on the north side of town, adjacent to the city park.  To say her house was overgrown would be an understatement.  But to be fair, hers wasn’t any more overgrown than mine.  Since I lived out of town, however, on an isolated bit of property tucked alongside a large, old-growth grove, no one particularly cared that I’d let things go.  My hedges, which long ago were neatly flat-topped and even with the top step of my front stoop, now snaked over the gutter, along some of the roof, and shot another foot or two toward the heavens.  And was just the front yard.

I suppose, among the few folks who bothered to walk along County Road 275 North, there may have been one or two who flashed a quick double-take and noticed that someone’s house actually sat behind those unchained evergreens.  Most folks, however, zipped by in their cars anywhere from 15 to 30 miles over the speed limit, never taking notice of the wall of nature shielding my one-level from the hostilities of the world.

Catharine Addleson-Smith’s house, on the other hand, was much harder to ignore.  Okay…that’s a bit misleading.  At first, it was easy to miss.  Ephraim was an old town.  Most of the lots had swapped out privacy fences for more natural walls.  Maybe a lifetime ago, back when everyone watched Leave it to Beaver on tiny bulbous Westinghouse sets. Maybe then when the property lines within each block met neatly in right angles next to pruned apple trees with cute birdhouses.  Now, however, every back yard was cut off from the next by narrow walls of poplar, maple, and oak.

So, the first time you plodded along Buchanan Street, Catharine Addleson-Smith’s lot may have looked like one of the dozens of wooded spots which had filled in all the dead space in Ephraim.  But eventually on that jog, when you stopped to tie your shoe or tuck your headphone a little more deeply in your ear canal, you’d look a tad more closely into the trees.  Then you’d realize that this tiny copse of saplings and mid-range hardwoods which had leafed over your head every evening was in fact Catharine Addleson-Smith’s front yard.

Then you’d notice the trail which bore the resemblance of a sidewalk leading to the shadowy outline of an otherwise average bungalow.  There, some six or seven tree trunks deep, sat her home.

The couch, which she had asked me to help her move into her house, sat in the back yard.  Or, should I say, it sat in the back grove.  Half standing on its end, half leaning against the trunk of a shade-weary persimmon tree.  As soon as I had placed my palms on its maroon upholstery, I knew it was a goner.  The wetness bled out of the woven overlays and soaked my hands.  The smell that wafted from the fissure I’d just formed nauseated me.

Catherine Addleson-Smith wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill homebrewer. Catherine Addleson-Smith was a small-batch beer artisan.

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“You can’t take this inside,” I said.  I’m sure I spoke matter-of-factly, but it’s possible there was some pleading and supplication in my voice as well.

She knew I was right before I’d finished the sentence.

“Yeah…” she answered.  Her voice trailed off and she stared into the trees in front of her.  “Well,” she resumed.  “We might as well toss it then.  Don’t want it to make this place look unsightly.”

Twenty minutes later I stood in her living room as she rummaged through a mountain of envelopes and loose-leaf papers stacked a yard-high on her kitchen table.  Most of the room was furnished with mismatched bits of chairs, ottomans, and loveseats akin to the thing we’d hauled out of her back yard and then set by the garbage bins in her alley.  A threadbare yellow rug covered the hardwood in the middle of the room, a wooden rolltop desk filled in one corner, and bookshelves of various heights and designs covered all the remaining wall space. 

I stood next to a waist-high set of shelves in what seemed to be the front of the room.  They were deeper than the others, sticking some two feet out from the wall, and they obviously served as Catherine’s “entertainment center” of sorts.  An old television—and I mean “old,” a Zenith with a picture tube screen—stat on top.  Scattered on either side of it were an assortment of vases—most of them sporting garish, fake floral arrangements—and a handful of 5x7 photo frames propped up on their cardboard easels.

I reached for the nearest picture.  A young man.  Somewhere in his early 20’s.  Blonde…or more like “blonde-ish.”  He bore Catherine Addleson-Smith’s aquamarine eyes, and he shared her nose and jawline.  Somehow those features made the man in the photo look handsome.  Dashing.  But Catherine’s features made her look angry.  Intimidating.

“Who’s this fella?” I asked, holding the frame limply.  Catherine Addleson-Smith pulled her eyes out of the glasses at the tip of her nose and craned her head my way.  She looked at the picture from her spot by the kitchen table, and her gaze disappeared, out of the room, out of the moment.

“He was my son,” she said.  As she spoke, she dropped her vision back into her glasses and resumed her rummage work amid the papers.  Carefully, I placed the frame back on the top shelf.  I eased my fingers off of the frame and pored my eyes into the boy in the portrait. 

“Ah,” she finally announced holding what looked like the tattered remnants of a checkbook before her, “here we go…”

“You don’t need to pay me for helping you with that couch,” I said with a bit of polite condescension in my tone.

“I’m not going to pay you,” she replied, her own condescension lacking any hint of politeness to it at all.

“So…” I asked my eyes on the band of checks in her hand, “then what’s the purpose with that?”

“Come on this way,” she answered.  She waved her arm, swinging it at the shoulder over her head as she nodded toward the back door in the kitchen.  “I’ll show you.”

Written on the back side of some half-dozen bank checks were a series of beer recipes.  They were neatly penned with gel ink.  She organized everything, the list of materials and ingredients as well as the steps, with a series of crisp, logical dashes.  Short dashes preceded her heading points:

-What I Need…

-Making the Wort…

-Fermentation Specs…

Longer dashes followed, laying out her answers to her topical questions:

-What I Need…
 --11 lbs—Two Row Malt
--1 lb—Caramel Malt, 20 Lovibonds…

“What’s a Lovibond,” I asked, fumbling the pronunciation.

“Color,” Catherine said over her shoulder.  She had to lean into the back door and wedge it open.  As she talked about the ranges of color among the standard malts that most homebrewers use, she also shuffled her way along the short sidewalk between her house and detached garage.

“Most people keep things pretty simple,” she said.  She huffed a little, a bit out of breath.  The side door to the garage proved just as stubborn as the back door to the house.  In a move that seemed routine, she shouldered the door, leaned into it with a slightly pained grimace and pushed.  The screeching sound of wood versus concrete gave to a shudder then silence.  Silently we walked inside.

As the fluorescent lighting flickered to life, I took in the arrangement before me.  Catherine Addleson-Smith wasn’t just a run-of-the-mill homebrewer.  Catherine Addleson-Smith was a small-batch beer artisan. 

Hunkered in the back corner sat a gleaming, 80-gallon mash tun. Factoring in the four-legged frame it sat upon, the tank—roughly three feet in diameter—stopped about 18 inches shy of the garages roof trusses.  To its left stood an equally imposing stainless-steel boil kettle.  In between, resting on a crude, two-by-four scaffold, sat a state-of-the-art heat-exchanger.  Further to the left, mounted on gleaming, chrome stilts, ran a row of small fermenters.  All of them were apparently hard at work.  Tags dangled from them.  One read “Brown,” and another announced it was whipping up a batch of “Red Irish.” And in the shadows, just around the corner, another reflective, steel cylinder, similar in size to the mash tun, which bookended the setup.

“My God…” I said.  “You’ve even got a brite tank.”

In front of us ranged rows of chest refrigerators.  I wrapped my hand around the edges of the nearest fridge lid and tugged it open.  When the wisps of frost swirled and dissipated, I stared at a half-dozen pony-kegs, neatly settled and wrapped in bags of ice for good measure.

“There’s no way you drink this much beer,” I said.

“No,” Catharine replied.  “I hang onto what I can.  I dump a lot out.”

“This can’t be legal,” I added.

“The first hundred gallons of beer are,” she said.  “The equipment…?  Probably not at this scale.  And it’s definitely illegal when I sell it to people.”

“What?” My eyes were wide when looked up from the kegs to meet her face.

Catharine Addleson-Smith shrugged. 

“I’m not worried,” she finally declared.  “Besides…it’s not like anyone can find this place.”  We both chuckled at that.  Gently I closed the fridge and looked at her with an expression that belied my obvious question.

In short order we sat on her back deck overlooking the scattered saplings which had filled in her back yard.  Walden Without the Pond, I called it.

We sat in silence.  Catharine Addleson-Smith worked on a pint of her Nut Brown Ale infused with cinnamon.  I could literally smell the spices wafting between us as she raised and lowered her glass.  In my hand was what she called a “Hard Pineapple IPA.”  It earned the name for two reasons: first, that it clocked in at a full 9.5% ABV.  Second, where her source recipe called for half a pineapple, she went ahead and added the whole damn thing.

As we sat, I flipped through a stack of her recipes.  To her credit, she had written authorship at the bottom of each one.

“Nice of you to give credit where it’s due,” I said.

“Yeah…” she mused.  “I guess you could say it’s a product of my training.”

“Got it,” I responded.  “So, did you retire from Ephraim? Or do you still work there?”

“Neither,” she said.  She raised her glass, took a very long sip, lowered it deftly, and kept her eyes over Walden Without the Pond for the duration.  For a few moments I steadied my gaze on her, but gradually I turned my attention back to the recipes.

“What’s with the asterisks and footnotes?” I asked.

“My own additions and adaptations,” she said.  “Credit where credit’s due.  Right?”

In my hand was what she called a “Hard Pineapple IPA.” It earned the name for two reasons: first, that it clocked in at a full 9.5% ABV. Second, where her source recipe called for half a pineapple, she went ahead and added the whole damn thing.

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When I nestled my newly acquired keg of Red IPA into my own refrigerator, I stared at the steel container, still thinking about what I had seen in Catherine’s garage.  It took me a good twenty minutes to get the CO2 assembly set up—of course she had a spare CO2 get up on hand—and after I had drawn my first, beautiful pint from the spigot I sat in front of my tiny flat screen and ignored the Sherlock rerun I had pulled up on Netflix.

On the bookshelf adjacent to my own television were a pair of framed portraits, much like the one I had fiddled with at Catherine’s.  Bart was 28 now…maybe 27.  I had to literally count the years with my fingers to figure it out.  Renee was 31…maybe 33.  Same problem.  Occasionally, I would text them.  Most of the time I was drunk, and all of the time they knew it.

The text messages were, well… tolerable.  Both kids exercised a modicum of civility that rivaled a gifted, international diplomat.  There was a frigidness to the formality of the words on my phone, but I’d take them.  Compared to the last time we’d spoken in the flesh, the texts were all too kind.

Image Credits: "Beer Kettles, Prague, Czech Repiblic" by Grufnik is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats

Just shy of his 50th birthday, Jarvis Bagley’s life has become an awful cliché.  Long divorced, long single, estranged from his children, working an unfulfilling job, Jarvis has long since dropped courtesy and decorum for acrimony and rancor. 

So lost is he in his contempt for others, that he finds his most meaningful relationships interacting with his favorite craft beers and the anthropomorphized caricatures he turns them into.

His lone solace is competing Tuesday night trivia at Grendel’s Tap & Pub.  His greatest dream is winning the coveted Saxon Keg—the Pub’s prize awarded to the best trivia team of the year.

But if he wants to win the Keg, and maybe put his life in some kind of order, he’s going to have to put together a winning team.  Worse yet, he’s going to have to get along with the real people who will form it.

Chapter Three: Jarvis Sees Dorian Stout’s Portrait

Saxon Keg Point Standings—Early April:

1. The Ken Dolls: 490

2. Jarvis Bagley and “Friends”: 370

3. Isaac Newton’s Missing Apple: 360

4. Make Trivia Great Again: 330

5. Saxophones and Saliva: 90

6. Zen and the Art of Beer: 80

7. The C-Chord Walk Downs: 30

8. Off-Road Commuters: 30

9. Others: 20

“

Okay folks,” Paul announced.  “Your final question tonight is this:  Put these Major League Baseball players in order according to total career base-hits, from the most to the least.”

I loved listening to Paul work the mic on trivia night.  He was a vocal master when he read his questions.  He uttered the first name of each ball player with a hard, rising inflection.  When he segued to the surname his voice reached a crescendo on the first half of the syllable and promptly fell.  He was brilliant, showcasing the instinctive nuances of a three-ring master.

“First,” Paul continued, “we have Derek Jeter.  Again, we have Derek Jeter…”

Jeter’s career began a couple year after a players’ strike had nixed the ’94 World Series.  I missed most of Number 2’s work at second base because, for the next 20 years, I was all but done watching professional baseball.  Some drama brought me back, however.  The home-run chase in ’98 put in me in front of the tube every night.  But the real drama went down five years later in both the National and American League title series.

Two nights after Steve Bartman’s colossal goof had made it somewhat clear that the baseball gods hated their underdogs, I watched Jeter and his Yankees remove all doubt in 11 innings against the hapless Red Sox.

I’ve never been a Yankees fan, and I have always been suspicious about anyone who claims to be one.  I understand why they appeal to people.  Since the 50’s in particular—and you could take that back almost a hundred years if you wanted to—the Yanks were the New England Patriots of baseball.

How Derek Jeter walked out of that massive, Performance Enhancing Drugs debacle with his boy scout reputation unvarnished is mystifying.

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But honestly, something about the post-strike years has always smelled to me.  How Derek Jeter walked out of that massive, Performance Enhancing Drugs debacle with his boy scout reputation unvarnished is mystifying.  When I got sucked into the spectacle of Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa’s single-season home-run chase in ’98 I allowed myself to be mesmerized by it. 

I should have noticed that McGuire had bulked up like a badly drawn Marvel superhero since the night my Reds clobbered him in game four of 1990 World Series.  I also should have scratched my head at the fact that not one, but two muscle-bound caricatures were spraying dingers all over the far-end bleachers as if they were swatting flies at the Sunday picnic table.  I didn’t notice, however. For starters both McGuire and the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa won me over with their own versions of “Aw, shucks!”  But I also wasn’t quite as cynical back then.  As a matter of fact, many of us weren’t cynical at all.

A decade later, all those clowns found themselves sitting in front of Congress squirming in their chairs as they awkwardly let the world know that they’d pumped themselves full of enough hormones and steroids to pick up a Dodge Ram and throw it across the Wabash River.  Out of that walks Jeter, who racks up over 3,000 hits, a legion of fans, and a first-ballot trip to Cooperstown.

I sighed.  A long one, the kind that come when you realize how far down the rabbit hole your thoughts have taken you.  I cupped my hand around my pint of Dorian Stout.  Scarlet Lane Brewing puts out several varieties of this signature beer, but my favorite has always been the cocoanut-tinged mixture sitting at the tips of my fingers.  I nursed a sip from my glass as Paul continued. 

“Next we have Paul Molitor.  Again, that’s Paul…Molitor.”

In the summer of ’87 Molitor was threatening Dimaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.  Those were the early days of ESPN’s SportsCenter, and every episode led with Molitor.  The day the streak died, at 39 games, I was moving into my dorm—a terrified would-be college freshman about to spend his first legitimate night away from home.  I sat in a crowded dorm room, huddled with a dozen other fellows I’d met for the first time at watched all them moan as both Molitor’s run at history ended on the same day that the American basketball team lost badly in the Pan Am Games…in Indy, no less.

Molitor had a drug problem early in his career.  Well… by “drug problem” I mean he was hooked on cocaine.  It’s kind of like saying that O.J. Simpson had “a problem” with kitchen cutlery or that Bill Cosby was too insecure to stick with Tinder.  But Molitor admitted his fuck ups, took responsibility for them, and as far as anyone can tell, he went on with his life playing solid baseball.

“Then we have Pete Rose.  We can’t ask a question about ‘baseball’ and ‘hits’ without mentioning Charlie Hustle, right…?”

I was 16 years old when Pete Rose knocked his 4,192nd hit to shallow left field.  Eric Show, the San Diego starting pitcher who surrendered Rose’s single, dejectedly sat on the mound resting his forearms on his kneecaps while Riverfront Stadium lost its mind for the next 15 minutes.  And why wouldn’t he?  From that moment on, every corner bar conversation about baseball for the rest of history would include Rose’s record.  And the next question they would ask is who gave up the hit.

I would like to think that Show breathed a sigh of relief a year later when Bill Buckner let that ground ball roll between his legs a year later in the World Series—something else for all the barstool experts to prattle about.  Or maybe he really exhaled something special when Bart Giamatti canned Rose for the rest of his playing career?  Who knows?  We can’t ask him.  Nine years after sitting on that mound, Show was found dead in his room at a drug and alcohol rehab center.

A lot of folks say over and over that Pete should be allowed into the Hall of Fame.  I get it.  I mean, I grew up a Reds fan, for starters.  I can barely remember my first game (sometime in the late ‘70’s…don’t remember who they played…do remember that they lost).  My grandma took me to that game. A devoted Johnny Bench groupie, she introduced me to the Reds and spent every single summer afternoon parked by her AM radio listening to each pitch. When she told me that the team had traded away Tony Perez, she uttered with deep sorrow.  It was the first divorce in my family.  By the time Rose bolted for the Phillies all the fun in the world had been sucked off into space.

I thought it was great when Pete came back to Cincinnati.  Hell, even Perez returned eventually.  Then they snagged Dave Parker, and Eric Davis, and Paul O’Neil, and an on-fire reliever named John Franco.  The team that would sweep the A’s in ’90 was coming together, and Rose’s big hit late in ’85 had set the whole thing up.  Almost as if it was a screenplay for Anspaugh and Pizzo.

Then all the gambling shit happened.  I still don’t know what irritates me the most about all of it.  Hell… all of it irritates me.  Bart Giamatti’s mobster persona filling up the screen during his press conferences.  Watching Rose’s face contort like a guy getting kabob stick shoved up his ass when he denied betting on Reds games.  All those clowns on ESPN throwing Rose onto the subway tracks with the smug conviction they were doing the honest work of a Woodward and Bernstein.  It was horrible.

So there sits Rose at the top Major League Baseball’s all-time hits list, his name shaded in white on Wikipedia… An asterisk somewhere else…  They all say the same thing: “Yeah, he holds the record, and yeah he actually did hit all those balls into play, but…”

“And finally, we have Ty Cobb.  Once more, our final name is Ty…Cobb.  Put those four in order, from the most hits to the least.”  With that, Paul flipped a switch on his control board, and (fittingly) Don McClean’s “American Pie” flooded the pub.

Ken Burns all but painted Ty Cobb as a racist asshole, and a violent one at that.  Since then other writers, often at the behest of the Cobb Estate, have argued otherwise.  Go figure.  All the rumors that he sharpened his spikes are probably bullshit, but he was still a savage fighter who would barrel into the bleachers and clobber hecklers in a blind rage.  Maybe Cobb had a genial side.  Maybe he was a charitable soul when removed the stirrups and pinstripes.  But I doubt it.  You don’t grow up the son of a mother who killed his father and not find yourself moderately fucked up in the process.  The irascible, combative asshole on the diamond was no doubt equally a dick in sum and total in his saddle-shoes and double-breasted blazer.

When Team Zen pulled off a string of three consecutive wins in the summer of ’14, two of them came on impossibly hard nights.  Name the four longest rivers in the world…? Match each famous psychologist with his particular school of thought…? Who was the woman who formed an organization opposed to Dungeons and Dragons…?  Shit like that.

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Before me, Dorian Stout leaned against the pint glass bearing her name.  She looked slender and polished.  Her trousers tapering the length of her legs, wrapping snuggly around her two-toned, button-down Madisons were accentuated by her perfectly fitted topcoat.  The lapels crossed her breasts with the slightest curve as they angled their way from her collarbones to the bottleneck at her waistline.  Her black locks stopped at her shoulders, curving in waves that revealed splashes of soft gray and even white.  She had tipped her top-hat a smidge toward her forehead.  With one hand—from the same arm leaning against the pint glass at the elbow—she casually fiddled with the hat, moving it slightly back and forth.  The other hand was wrapped around her stylish cane.

She said nothing as she eyed me.  While her pale nose, her reddened cheeks, and her obsidian eyes entranced me, I ignored her likeness etched on the glass.  That Dorian sat in the pint glasses’ portrait window looking haggard and wrinkled.  The black hair flooded with wisps of white and seas of gray.  While the eyes standing beside the glass seduced me, those on the glass harbored cruelty and bore upon me with the piercing sort of hatred you get from a scorned lover—a gaze I knew all too well.

Slowly I moved my line of sight from the lithe figure on my booth table and turned it to the names on the paper before me:

1. Pete Rose

2. Ty Cobb

3. Paul Molitor …?

4. Derek Jeter …?

I let out a breath and shoved the list to Max and Sarah for their approval.

A month has passed since Maxwell Beauregard Anderson hurled his fist into my nose.  It still hurt, at least it did when I sneezed, or when I would push firmly against my nose.  I’m not really sure why I did that so often, but every ten or fifteen minutes, suffocating anxiety would flood me, and I’d need to push against it…I guess to make sure it was still there.

When Grendel’s first launched trivia, they determined who won The Saxon Keg by adding up each week’s point totals.  That turned out to be a disaster.  When Team Zen pulled off a string of three consecutive wins in the summer of ’14, two of them came on impossibly hard nights.  Name the four longest rivers in the world…? Match each famous psychologist with his particular school of thought…? Who was the woman who formed an organization opposed to Dungeons and Dragons…?  Shit like that.

We all crawled out of those bloodbaths with measly totals.  Team Zen won one contest with fewer than 60 points.  So, when our team—my old team, that is—won the next two weeks scoring almost 200 points on a slew of “Disney-Level” questions, Team Zen weren’t feeling much like turning the other cheek about it.

Out of that drama—which included a smidge of shouting and maybe one pale ale down the back of Aldrich Evenson’s corduroy sportscoat—a point system was born.  First place bagged you 50 points for the season, regardless of the game total.  Second earned 40, third 30, fourth 20, and fifth got you 10.  It was fair.  If you showed up and got your wins…? Great.  If you missed a week or two…?  That was on you.

Such was the case for a number of teams throughout the school year.  Thanks in part to middle school basketball games, sick grandparents, and bouts of the flu, the leaderboard shuffled considerably in the four weeks since Max tagged me in the face.  But as the late winter grey skies succumbed to bits and pieces of sunshine so too fell the frequent absences.  Too bad for The C-Chord Walk Downs.  After a pair of good weeks finishing “in the money” against a reduced field, Team Zen had reemerged from hibernation and the Make Trivia Great Again crew was back to full force.  Well… as “full” as they would ever be without me.

I still don’t know why Max and Sarah sidled into the same booth with me the week after the punch-out.  But they did.  That said, life also didn’t go on as if nothing had happened.  Max deftly kept all of the conversation on the game, and Sarah—who clearly didn’t want to be near me—said a whole lot of nothing…verbally, that is.  She said plenty with her eyes.  None of it good.  Amid the tension, to put it bluntly, we killed the field. 

Well, most of it.  The “Ken Dolls” spent March methodically tearing apart every question Paul threw at us.  But try as might, I never caught them Googling a single answer.  Not a goddamn one.  Their brilliance utterly befuddled me.  It’s not like Ephraim College thrived on a 7% acceptance rate.  Hell no.  They took in almost 70% of the kiddos who applied, and probably a third of those were legacy types, minted for four years thanks to pops and granddad.

For his part, Max still played the game with the same, enviably childish vigor that he’d played before the fight. When Paul threw a Spaghetti Western question to the field, he nailed Sergio Leone as the genre’s most celebrated director.

“Ha!” he cheered when Paul announced the answer.  “I knew it!”  I tapped on the table with my index finger and looked at Sarah, who gave me about two seconds of eye-to-eye contempt before averting her gaze.

Halfway through the game, Paul routinely hits everyone with a “Gambler’s Question.”  The point values are doubled, but unlike normal rounds, this question comes with risk.  Get it wrong, you lose the points.  Easily the most conservative member of the team, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve had to talk teammates out of betting away all our points on stupid answers.

“Do you know this for sure?” I would ask.  “A hundred percent?  Ninety-five?”

“What Egyptian god of mummification and the afterlife was also the patron god of lost souls and the helpless?” Paul asked.

“Anubis!” Max snapped excitedly.  “It’s Anubis!”

“You’re sure…?” I asked.  Automatically.

He was.  We bet the full amount—sixteen points.  It was Anubis.

“Ha!” Max exclaimed.  He was about to roll his fist in the air a let out a “whoop,” but Sarah reached for his forearm and further restrained him with her expression.  I flashed her a grateful nod.  I think I even smiled.  Once more she looked at me just long enough to let me know how much she hated me, then she moved her eyes to the Butler-Xavier game on the TV screen mounted over my shoulder.

An hour later, Max pushed my list of baseball players back across the surface of the table.  He nodded and shrugged ambivalently.

Why it was that Catharine Addleson-Smith abruptly sat down beside me remains a bit of mystery.  I say “a bit” because plenty of circumstantial reasons exist.  For one—and this can’t be discounted—Grendel’s was a packed house that evening.  Seating spaces were at a premium on Tuesday nights, especially during the school year.  Catherine Addleson-Smith was a woman who looked fit enough to stay on her feet for a long time.  Most of the day, most likely.  But her face bore all the signs that she had crossed her threshold.

For another reason, Catharine Addleson-Smith and I had been “digital friends” since at least Obama’s reelection, and casual acquaintances before then.  A science professor (of some sort) at Ephraim, her online history is chock full of all that esoteric gobbledygook that college types like to share with the rest of us: Condescending editorials from The Guardian, five paragraph analyses of Claude Lorrain and J.M.W. Turner paintings, and excoriating teardowns of all my favorite Netflix shows.  After she essentially told my I was stupid because I thought Star Wars was symbolically relevant, I moved her to “Unfollow” status.

She was probably two or three years older than me.  Like my own hair, hers bore the earmarks of aging, appearing stiffer and scratchier that it probably looked when she wore it in that long, blonde braid I once saw in one of her rare, sentimental posts.  She deftly placed her index finger on the list of ball players before us and drew it toward her.  She tilted her chin up and peered at the names through the bottom third of her eyeglasses.

“That’s not right,” she said.  Max and Sarah sat transfixed.  Moderately befuddled.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You’ve got Jeter and Molitor reversed,” she answered.

“No way,” I said.  “Molitor got a base-hit in 39 straight games.  There’s no way a guy that productive gets outhit by Jeter.”

“So what?” Catherine Addleson-Smith muttered, waving me off with a dismissive flip of her wrist.  “Babe Ruth isn’t even in the top 40.”

“Yeah…” I said defensively, “I know that.”  I had no idea, of course.  I assumed Ruth was at least a top-20 producer, if not in the top ten.  Turns out he’s currently 45th.

And on the pint glass beside her, that older and life-worn version of Dorian Stout had morphed into something uncomfortably familiar.

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Moments later, as Paul read the correct answer to the crowd, Catherine Addleson-Smith sat calmly, her arms folded, a subtle grin pursing her chapped lips.  Max whooped and cheered as he tallied the points.  Sarah, meanwhile, shot passing glances toward Catherine, rolled her gaze over the top of my head and planted her vision on the television, desperately trying to engross herself in two schools she cared nothing about playing a game she loathed.

On the table before me, Dorian Stout twirled her cane and shot me her own grin, one far more soothing than anything coming from the likes of my teammates.  And on the pint glass beside her, that older and life-worn version of Dorian Stout had morphed into something uncomfortably familiar.  Carefully I threw quick glances from Catherine Addleson-Smith to the woman appearing on my pint glass.  Slowly, I took a few deep breaths and ignored the growing similarity between the two.

Image Credits:  Dorian Stout image via Scarlet Lane Brewing

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats

Just shy of his 50th birthday, Jarvis Bagley’s life has become an awful cliché.  Long divorced, long single, estranged from his children, working an unfulfilling job, Jarvis has long since dropped courtesy and decorum for acrimony and rancor. 

So lost is he in his contempt for others, that he finds his most meaningful relationships interacting with his favorite craft beers and the anthropomorphized caricatures he turns them into.

His lone solace is competing Tuesday night trivia at Grendel’s Tap & Pub.  His greatest dream is winning the coveted Saxon Keg—the Pub’s prize awarded to the best trivia team of the year.

But if he wants to win the Keg, and maybe put his life in some kind of order, he’s going to have to put together a winning team.  Worse yet, he’s going to have to get along with the real people who will form it.

Chapter Two: Jarvis Gets Close with Dirty Helen

Saxon Keg Point Standings—Early March:

1. The Ken Dolls: 320

2. Isaac Newton’s Missing Apple: 280

3. Make Trivia Great Again: 250

4. Jarvis Bagley and “Friends”: 200

5. Zen and the Art of Beer: 90

6. Saxophones and Saliva: 30

7. Off-Road Commuters: 30

Dirty Helen Brown Ale was named after a Prohibition era bar matron who would cuss out customers who ordered liquor she didn’t have in stock.  She looks a little different on the bottle label than she probably looked in real life.  The woman I saw wrapped around my amber bottle was a softer, more seductive figure.

She was a woman I’d loved for a long time.  That illustrated Helen, her bare shoulder askew floods the right half of every six-pack.  Her eyes seductively peer at us from under her wide-brimmed, Prohibition-era Cloche hat.  Her bobbed haircut exposes more of her shoulders than any self-respecting woman in pre-Prohibition America would stand for, covered only by small spaghetti straps leading to a swimsuit? A bra? A summer dress?  Whatever Helen’s wearing, the church deacons will be sure to talk about it before Sunday.

Like the woman she was named after, the booze in her bottle was every bit as unique.  When most folks think of “brown ale” they think, Newcastle.  You know…? That English stuff mostly made in New York?  Newcastle was cool when I was a novice drinker, back when I was making that flip from Miller to something meatier.  Now I know better.  Newcastle is little more than Kool-Aid.  Brown water with sugar and the slightest tinge of octane.

Dirty Helen, on the other hand, was like nothing I had tasted before.  The soft nutty taste on the front end blended beautifully with the slightest hop-bite and thick texture.  But on the back end the rest of the “farm” cascaded over the tongue.  No other beer compares.  Dirty Helen took me back to my great grandma’s kitchen—where I could see myself inhaling half a box of her oatmeal cookies.  It also took back to my grandpa’s garage—where I almost taste the alcohol swimming in the air between us.

Dirty Helen, on the other hand, was like nothing I had tasted before. The soft nutty taste on the front end blended beautifully with the slightest hop-bite and thick texture.

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“Hey Jarvis, are you ready?”

Max’s question pulled my eyes off my bottle.  He sat wide eyed.  Of course, he did.  Every time Maximillian Beauregard Anderson answered a question—and he answered them all—he raced to those answers.  I don’t know if he did it because he just had to be the guy at the booth to spout the answer or because he was madly in love with the process of knowing shit.  Whatever… Every time Max answered a question, he did it with all the overacted theatrical punch of Grace Kelly in a fucking Alfred Hitchcock film.

I looked at him.  I’m sure I looked annoyed.  As long he assumed it was because I am always annoyed…not because he interrupted the best spine-tingling bit of metaphorical phone sex I’d had in months, even if it was with a beautifully drawn woman on a beer bottle.

“Okay, folks,” Paul was also chipper.  I’m not sure why, but Paul’s upbeat demeanor didn’t irritate me the way Max’s did.  It’s probably because Paul exuded a sort of natural coolness which I knew I’d never achieve.  Don’t get me wrong, I wanted “Paul-level” coolness.  I craved it actually.  I’d been craving it all my life.  Who doesn’t want to be that guy who seems a hundred-percent happy to be in the room, breathing the air, peeking at the sun over the ledge of the building across the street?  Who doesn’t want to be the guy who can pass that happy-bug shit onto other people like an Ebola virus? 

But Max’s “happiness” is that sort of enthusiasm that makes me want to stick my head in a fully primed crock-pot, tamp the glass over down over my neck, so that I could wait six hours for my brain to bake itself into a pork loin

“What is the real name of the Irish rock-and-roll singer and anti-AIDS humanitarian who became good friends with President George W. Bush?” Paul announced.

“Bono!”

The shout came from a crowd of college types.  Not the Ken Dolls, mind you.  No, those pristinely molded specimens of carbon and silicone were, as usual, tearing through the night.  They nailed everything from the “spelling difference between the founder of Toyota and the cars named after him,” (the original name was Toyoda) to “the only apple native to North America” (the crabapple).  Nope, those boys would never deign to shout out an answer…not when they can write it down, Tweet about it, shoot a picture of their answer, and upload it to Instagram.  They never needed to broadcast their success.  They were all too happy keeping their evening to themselves, downing every beer like it was their last orgasm as they methodically scored on every single question.

Every. Single. Question.

Nope. The dude who spouted off the answer, and thus ruined my own answer, hovered around a throng of sorority coeds. His white, zip-up sweatshirt hung open over his rounded, flabby upper body.  His shorts stopped above the knees, and his pasty-white, wiry legs ran to a crappy pair of Chuck Taylors wrapped around a bunched-up pair of tube socks. Capping it off was his flat-brimmed baseball hat, worn backwards, the Adidas leaf bobbing to the rhythm of his own jive.  Whereas the Ken Dolls looked the image of comic book, superhero perfection, this kiddo looked the part of a life-size pushpin.

Pushpin stood there, proud of himself.  He knew something!  He was sure that he was cool when he said it, and he beamed at the coeds—who returned their own gazes with oozing degrees of contempt.

There are two kinds of dudes in the “desperate to get laid” category.  There are those like me.  The kind who won’t give anyone the satisfaction of knowing just how desperate we are.  We compensate with suffocating degrees of self-destructive, acerbic behavior.  We mouth off, we insult, we play the distanced, pretentious, intellectual snob.  We don’t particularly do it that well, but we convince ourselves that we do.  That’s usually good enough.  We go home feeling smug, and in the comfort of our living room we pop open our laptops and masturbate to airbrushed supermodels, firmly convinced that they really get us.

Then there are clods like Pushpin.  Good God…  When one is forced into a life of involuntary celibacy, the least he can do is strap on some dignity… not stand there like a wide-eyed Labrador by the front door happily waiting for someone to turn the knob.

“Ah…” Paul announced.  “Okay folks scratch that question.  We’ll try this one again.”  He was surprisingly matter of fact about it.

“What did the 70’s rock band, Blondie name themselves after?”  I had no idea (The answer, it turns out, was Hitler’s dog). Just like that, six points evaporated into the fermented ether of the pub.

“Goddammnit, Pushpin,” I shouted.

Pushpin turned my way, his eyes scanning for the source of the insult.  Moderate fear clouded his eyes.  He wanted to know who said it, sort of.  After four seconds of terrified, yet aggressive scanning, he shrugged his shoulders, grinned, and returned his face to the coeds.

Despite my best intentions, I turned my head to my former teammates.  They’d heard me, too.  Hell, the entire pub heard me.  Phil, Jan, and Grace flashed that quick bit of judgment that all people give when they forget they’re awful people in their own right.  Then they turned to one another, rolled their eyes, and reacclimated themselves on their barstools, their backs squarely my way.

“Live to Tell” was the sort of god-awful song totally designed to repeatedly plug an equally god-awful movie.

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Lisa held her gaze a little longer, obviously wondering what it was about me that convinced her I was worth getting naked for.  I’m not going to lie. I was embarrassed.  Sorry, even.  But like hell I would let her see that.  I stared back.  Even.  Expressionless.  My fingers massaged my bottle of Dirty Helen.  Gently, I ran the tips of my fingers along the curves of that bare shoulder.  The matron on the label nodded her head and winked at me in support.

“That question hurt,” Max said snapping me out of my fog.  “We needed those points.”

“No shit,” I replied.  It wasn’t the first time I snapped at Max, nor at his girlfriend, Sarah.  The first time I flippantly tossed a jab Max’s way he blinked hard and stared at me dumbfounded.  Sarah did likewise.  Gradually, Max’s demeanor calcified.  At this moment held his gaze on me with gently pursed lips.  Shock and a sense of betrayal had given way to resigned tolerance.

“There’s no need to be rude…”  Sarah’s courage has been percolating for the last 75 minutes, and when she spoke, she tensed.  I gave her a glance.  It was quick.  Then I looked away.

“Your final question is this:” Paul announced.  “Put the following four Madonna songs in chronological order, with the oldest song first.”

“Holiday” was Madonna’s first hit, from her self-titled album released in 1983.  I was somewhere between middle and high school when the first song aired, when all of us heard her for the first time.  The song itself is brilliant.  It’s not “Eleanor Rigby” brilliant…God, no.  But from that miasma that was the early ‘80’s it counts as a masterpiece, at the very least in terms of the way that good rhythm and musical balance can somehow make otherwise insipid lyricism sound like William Butler Yeats.  That or, more likely, every time I hear the song a part of me turns age 13 again.  Maybe that’s it.  Sometimes you can’t take the horny boy out the crappy music video.

By the time my old man fired up that monstrosity of a satellite dish he sunk into our back yard, MTV had worked up a full chamber of steam.  With one flick of a switch… 

Okay… scratch that thought.

This was one of those C-Band dishes, the kind that looked like giant, upside-down umbrellas mounted on three-inch steel pipes.  You didn’t “flip a switch” to watch something.  You punched in the name and number of the particular satellite you wanted—there were something like 12 or 15 of them—and then you waited for two to seven minutes watching whatever faded in and out on channel 11 as the dish rotated outside.

The awkwardly smiling, middle-aged woman with gilded earrings selling paste jewelry on the Shop at Home Channel faded into electric salt-and-pepper rectangles of static.  Moments later the screen was filled with a gangly dude with a hideously protruding Adams-apple and accompanying thick moustache enjoying an aggressive blow job from a curly-haired, pale brunette wearing thick, scarlet lipstick.

Back then, I would hit the “Stop” button on the remote.  I was usually “all-clear” and ready to resume scanning about one or two minutes later (today I typically need 45 minutes and absolutely NO distractions), and then the blowjob—like the cheap jewels—slipped away into an electric haze.

Classic cinema cartoons from the ‘30’s were replaced by an Australian-Rules Football match, which was replaced by Roger Clemmons on the mound for the Red Sox, which transitioned into a much younger Pat Robertson praying that Jesus would destroy Tip O’Neill.  Satcom 4 gave way to Telestars 301 and then 302, which surrendered to Anik D, then Satcom 1 then Morelos 1 then Satcom 5, Spacenet 1, Westars 4 and 5, then Telestar 303, and finally (finally), the receiver box clicked hard at Satcom 3.  The humming of the dish’s motor just outside the window went silent, and there, on my screen, was my favorite channel 11: MTV.  There, on that channel, in those humid 80’s summers, I fell hard for Madonna.

I didn’t realize how transformational and transitional “Material Girl” was when I watched it over and over and over in the summer of ‘86.  I didn’t even know it was a classy knockoff of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.”  I just knew that it was the specific moment Madonna won my heart. Of all the music videos I watched through my old man’s satellite dish, I will take the image of Madonna doing her best Marylin Monroe to my grave.

Every time I sat in front of the screen, I nearly tumbled into it in a manner of speaking.  Madonna wasn’t singing to the camera, she was singing to me.  And no, I didn’t see myself as one of those tuxedoed schmucks cavorting her around that grand staircase, but yes I did see myself happily offering the combined total my first six years of adult wages in crystalline form…all for her to look down her nose at me, smile, and blow me gently puckered air-kiss.

But then she turned around and married Sean Penn, and she got herself all sorts of that miserable, hollow, overblown, turgid sort of seriousness that is Sean Penn.

“Live to Tell” was the sort of god-awful song totally designed to repeatedly plug an equally god-awful movie.  All I know about the film is what I saw in the music video.  They were a couple, they did something bad, they got tied up.  It looked like they were going to die—hopefully Sean Penn’s character did—but everything, mostly, worked out.

I still watched the video, almost as over and over and over as I did “Material Girl.”  But my hot blonde girlfriend who would wink at me and pull me into the backseat of a ’78 Oldsmobile had turned into the mature woman who would keep me at arm’s length and point to the filled trash can.  I mean, I get it…  We all have to grow up, but the wafting smell of artistic condescension in that Madonna was simply too much.

Then she made “Like a Prayer.”  To this day I still don’t know what I loved more about that song—that it marked the moment when “mature” Madonna grew a backbone and did some full-on, legit, hardcore adulting, or that it was one of those songs that pissed off all those hyper-conservative, late 80’s Jesus-freaks.  Everything about that song, from the slow intro to the explosive beat that followed to the beautifully offensive imagery in the video… all of it won me back.

As Paul rattled off the answer, I gently tapped on the tabletop, and compared his answers with mine:

“Holiday” 1983 “Material Girl” 1985 “Live to Tell” 1986 “Like a Prayer” 1989

Despite the Bono-fiasco, we had racked up enough points for the win.  A golden evening for Team Jarvis.

“I’m glad we didn’t go with my suggestion,” Max said, breaking me out of the slow dance I was having in my head with the matron of rock and roll.  Max had insisted that “Live to Tell” preceded “Material Girl.”   The very idea.  I laid out Madonna’s complete metamorphosis, explaining in the most polite terms possible that there was “no fucking way” that she could have “grown” into “Live to Tell,” regressed to “Material Girl,” only to pivot over “Tell” and into “Prayer.”  I’m pretty sure that I…

1. Ignored the fact that Max single-handledly answered seven questions for which I had no idea what answer to write, and…

2. He was just being earnest. That he was legitimately happy that we pulled out a win on a tough night.

Either way, I proceeded to…

1. Openly roll my eyes at him, wave him off, and “pffffttt” him.

“You know,” Sarah said icily, “you should be a little more grateful given that he carried you most of the night.”

“I tell you what,” I snapped.  “If he’s so good at carrying people, have him carry you to the sack. Then you can whip out your electron microscope and hunt for his dick.”

I heard that speed kills. I don’t know how true that is, but I know for sure that it hurts like a motherfucker.

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I had never been punched in the face before.  I still don’t exactly know how someone as small and lithe as Maximillian Beauregard Anderson sucker-punched me, but as soon as my insult left my lips he was out of his seat, over the booth table, and landing his haymaker on the left half of my nose, where its base meets the check.

I heard that speed kills.  I don’t know how true that is, but I know for sure that it hurts like a motherfucker.

I would love to say that Max’s punch sent me sprawling.  I would give anything to be able to tell people that I flayed backwards in full James Bond fashion, that I shoulder-rolled over the bar, wiped out three rows of premium liquor, and sent the Saxon Keg bounding across the floor of the pub.  It would be cool if the end result sent dozens of people out the door screaming in fear as the two of us traded blows, threw chairs, and did our very best Indiana Jones impersonations.

But yeah… That didn’t happen.  Instead I whimpered (loudly apparently) and collapsed on the floor, assuming the fetal position under the booth.

When you watch guys like Harrison Ford take fists to the chin and cheek under that fedora of his, you almost allow yourself to think that a good fistfight is something akin to an aerobic workout, maybe with a little step-action at times.

Actually, a fistfight is more like laying down on the floor, holding up a cinderblock over your face, and letting go.  Everything turned purple when Max leveled me.  It came as a flash, then blue, then purple.  My ears wouldn’t stop ringing.  My adrenaline carried me as I gradually scrapped together my senses and hoisted myself off the floor. By the time I had worked halfway through another Dirty Helen, the pain flooded me.

“Holy cow,” Paul consoled me.  “Your year is off to a shitty start, my friend.”

I nodded and turned what vision I had to Helen.  The real-life, barroom Helen probably would have mocked me.  Told me get off my ass and throw some punches back.  But this was my Madonna Helen.  All she did was smile softly and blow me a kiss.

Image Credits: Feature Image: "Brown Ale" by zolakoma is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Madonna: Madonna, Rotterdam, August 26, 1987 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats

Note No. 1:  Chapter One originally appeared at Indianaontap.com.

Note No. 2:  This novella contains a high degree of "salty" language.  Anyone likely to be offended by such language should be advised.

Just shy of his 50th birthday, Jarvis Bagley’s life has become an awful cliché.  Long divorced, long single, estranged from his children, working an unfulfilling job, Jarvis has long since dropped courtesy and decorum for acrimony and rancor. 

So lost is he in his contempt for others, that he finds his most meaningful relationships interacting with his favorite craft beers and the anthropomorphized caricatures he turns them into.

His lone solace is competing Tuesday night trivia at Grendel’s Tap & Pub.  His greatest dream is winning the coveted Saxon Keg—the Pub’s prize awarded to the best trivia team of the year.

But if he wants to win the Keg, and maybe put his life in some kind of order, he’s going to have to put together a winning team.  Worse yet, he’s going to have to get along with the real people who will form it.

Chapter One: Jarvis Commiserates with Bad Elmer

Everybody thinks that Sean Connery is the definitive James Bond.  Everybody, of course, would be totally full of shit.  Darting around the globe in his pencil-thin neckties, wrinkling his face with that smartass grin, and knocking out one-liners in the Gaelic twang he picked up from Edinburgh, Connery became everybody’s favorite Bond because he was their first Bond.  That, and it didn’t hurt that he played the spy at the height of the Cold War.  It may not have been the best time to wake up every morning and wonder when the mushroom clouds were going to turn the bean crop in the south-forty into a glowing heap of tofu, but it was most certainly the best time to pretend to be a spy.  Connery allowed men from no fewer than three different generations to imagine themselves gunning down hapless henchmen on a Tuesday evening and mourning the dead, golden body of a blonde with all the cavalier empathy of a Vegas pit-boss the next day.

Some dislike him because he heaped on the misogyny.  And it’s true: Connery’s Bond was a sexist asshole (most versions of the character were, for that matter).  But people call me one of those, every so often…meaning they call me one all the time.  Denial is a crucial survival skill, even when you’re envisioning yourself earning your pension in British espionage.  Other critics disliked Connery because of the sadistic masochism inherent in his violence…which is an argument that is somehow even more colossally stupid than the sexism shtick.

Like everyone else, I laughed when Bond cranked up the heat on Count Lippe and wedged the broomstick between the door handles of that little Whirlpool sit-n-soak aluminum sauna.  Lippe was the worst kind of villain—the incompetent, arrogant type you can’t respect.  Watching tools like him suffer offered the sort of vicarious thrill you take to the office and use as a coping mechanism making it possible to suffer the day taking orders from the nitwit who ass-kissed himself into your corner office.

For a guy who would later win an Oscar for his work in The Untouchables, Connery played Bond as if he were Keanu Reeves.

None of that stuff bothered me about Connery.  My problem is that he was so blasted one-dimensional.  For a guy who would later win an Oscar for his work in The Untouchables, Connery played Bond as if he were Keanu Reeves.  Sure, sometimes he would flash a moment of concern, he might even look like he was in love, but Connery’s Bond looked the same whether he was stuffing that magic cassette tape next to Jill St. John’s butt-cheek or plugging that balding dude in the chest with a harpoon gun.

“Forty-five seconds!”

At the sound of Paul’s voice, I turned my thoughts to the table in front of me.  My pint of Bad Elmer’s Porter waited patiently while I read the chronological list of James Bonds scribbled on the paper under my palms.  Under the fluorescent glare of Grendel’s Tap & Pub, my beer’s pristine surface cast an obsidian purity.  It was a bizarre marriage, Elmer’s utter darkness and Tap & Pub’s brilliant light. An apt metaphor for the relationship between the eyes and the taste buds.  At any number of glances, one’s sight reveals almost nothing about the chemical mysticism bouncing around the inside of my pint glass.  The tongue, however—and those reliable Rosetta Stones spread across its top—broke the code and opened me to the wonders that Upland Brewing Company had tucked into the still blackness in front of me.

Bad Elmer’s Porter bites a bit on the front end.  Not a lot—it’s a porter, after all—but it doesn’t lead off with that syrupy feel common to other heavy winter beers.  It reminds you that you’re drinking a beer, not a Zima or a two-liter of Purple Passion.  The sweetness does come on the back end, however, metabolizing when the last drops cross the palate.  Elmer was my first craft beer.  Upland, my first craft brewery experience.  Like everyone else over thirty, I was indoctrinated on one of the three big light beers.  As an homage to dead grandfather, I gravitated to Miller, and as a tribute to my own narcissism, I convinced myself it was different from Budweiser and Coors.  Elmer’s changed that, a point I reminded myself when I wasted eleven of my final forty-five seconds letting a healthy swig wash to the back of my throat.

Setting Elmer back on the table, I glanced over my list.  The question: “Name all the men who played James Bond in the order they played them.”  I knew I had written the right answers.  It was the easiest question of the year—hands down.  But the hyper-technicality of it gnawed at me:

Sean Connery George Lazenby Sean Connery Roger Moore Timothy Dalton Peirce Brosnan Daniel Craig

I was ready to walk it over to Paul’s table, but I couldn’t pull my eyes from the two “Sean Connerys” on the page.  Literally speaking, I was right.  Connery quit, because he couldn’t get along with Albert Broccoli.  Then Lazenby replaced him, and sucked so miserably that somebody cut a deal to bring Connery back.  And so it was that Sean Connery—thanks to a good, old-fashioned pissing contest with his producer—threw away the chance to play an emotionally devastated James Bond as he looks upon the face of his dead wife.  That scene might have changed everything I think about Connery’s Bond.  But we didn’t get Connery.  We got George Youvegottobefuckingkiddingme Lazenby.

The Bond question was the final trivia question of the evening.  I held my own against the two teams I chased all night, and I had scrambled my way to 68 points going into the last round.  Working much like Final Jeopardy, I could bet all or none.  Bet them all, get it right, and I had a shot at the win.  Or I could draw my “goose-egg,” walk my sheet to Paul and hope the other two squads screwed it up.

That, however, wasn’t going to happen.  For one, it’s the “name all the James Bonds” question.  The ubiquity of this knowledge is not exclusive to Brits.  The credo of modern, popular culture demands that you know who played all the James Bonds.  If you don’t know them in order…okay…  But if you don’t know them at all…?  You should lose your voting rights immediately for one thing…and maybe your driver’s license to boot.

After handing my sheet to Paul, I sat down in front of Elmer.  I had no team to chat with, no one to launch into a micro-analysis of whether I should have added the second Connery or not.  I was alone.  This time a year ago, I’d had a team.  We were on our way to winning the Saxon Keg, too!  It was a little wooden barrel, about nine inches high. The top was cracked, and one of the brass bands was missing from, but walking out the Tap & Pub just before Christmas with that misbegotten lump of wood tucked under your armpit meant you were the intellectual bad-ass for the next year.  No matter how many times you blew a fucking Beyoncé question, you could point to the keg with the index finger of your left hand, flash people the middle finger of your right hand, and silently mouth the word, “cham-pee-yun!”

I wasn’t going to be the champion tonight.  The remnants of my team sat wrapped around the corner of the bar.  Some four months earlier, at 7:00 in the evening, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, we met, as we had all year, at our favorite booth, ordered beers, and enjoyed our pre-game laugh-up.  By 9:30 that night, Lisa had called me a dick.  Phil told me there was “no reason to be an asshole,” and Jan and Grace walked away without uttering a word.  Now they sat a dozen feet from me, holding down second place.

First place belonged to a quartet of college fraternity brothers.  Four life-sized Ken dolls, their plastic hair swooping into perfectly brush-stroked curls.  They sat there staring at each other with their doe eyes, their slacked jaws, and their wrinkle-free skin.  They called each other “dude,” all night and perpetually muttered vapid nonsense, nonsense they would stop saying mid-sentence for the sake of a Snap-Chat selfie.  They also crushed every question Phil threw at them.  Crushed. Every. Single. Question.

Paul: “Who was the famous pitch man for Oxy Clean until his death in 2009?”

The Ken dolls: “Billy Mays!”

Paul: “That’s right!”

Me (to myself): “Pphhfffff!  Easy…”

Paul: “What are the two most common fox breeds in Indiana?”

The Ken dolls: “Red and Grey!”

Paul: “That’s right!”

Me (to myself): “Harrummmph!  Logical…but lucky…guess.

Paul: “Who was the jackal-headed, ancient Egyptian god of embalming and the dead?”

The Ken dolls: “Anubis!”

Paul: “That’s right!”

Me (to myself): “How the fuck did they know that?”

I tried to sneak glances their way during the “answer phase.”  They had to be using their phones, at least one of them did.  Their booth was tucked in the corner of the Tap & Pub.  It sat across from the servers’ station, so if they were sneaking peeks at Google, someone would have to have seen them.  Every chance I could, I craned my neck.  I took extra trips to the john for the express purpose of walking past them, hoping to snag some sort of confirmation out my peripheral vision.  By the end of the night the only proof I had was circumstantial: those slacked jaws, that pristine skin, those empty eyes, that insipid banter, and those stunningly spot-on answers.

Paul: “What was the name of Franz Kafka’s sales clerk who wakes up one morning to discover that he’s been transformed into a bug?”

The Ken dolls: “Gregor Samsa!”

Paul: “That’s right!”

Me (to myself): “Fucking cheaters.”

Bad Elmer’s Porter bites a bit on the front end.  Not a lot—it’s a porter, after all—but it doesn’t lead off with that syrupy feel common to other heavy winter beers.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve turned to Bad Elmer when I’ve been feeling down.  Not the beer, per se, but rather that confident hillbilly on the bottle’s label wearing that bowler hat, squarely set on the back of his head.  The Bad Elmer I see most frequently is a new one, a cartoonish caricature which Upland had apparently spent gads of money on for the purposes of branding or uniform imaging or something like that.  Whatever.  Maybe I’m a traditionalist.  Maybe I’m just getting old.  But I always preferred the previous Elmer who graced my bottles, a man who, according to local gossip, lived near the brewery. 

On a sweltering July afternoon, I would grab a seat on my deck, absorb the sun, down a swig of the porter, and make eye contact with that fellow wrapped around the outside of the glass.  There was something about that stare he threw back at me.  The combination of the cap on his head, the scraggly lengths of hair running down the side of his face, the shotgun casually resting along the crook in his elbow.  But the most oddly reassuring spot in the picture were those eyes.  No matter whether I popped one open to celebrate an especially efficient trip around the yard on the Dixie-Chopper or pulled up that chair to commiserate a particularly ugly battle with the Chevy during an oil change, Elmer was there, reminding me, in the only way he could, that most of the things I worried about really didn’t matter. 

“What the fuck do you want?” Elmer asked me from the bottle.  I sighed in deep relief.  He was the epitome of every male figure I knew growing up in the boonies in rural Indiana.

“Okay, everybody,” Paul announced, his inflection rising.  “I have the results.”

While Paul’s answers effectively doubled my point total, I decided that he must have exercised “trivia host’s privilege” and given me a pass on the second Sean Connery because I only heard him mention his name at the outset.

“The second man to play 007…” Paul said.  He always revved his second and third syllables with a sort of announcer’s booth diphthong, every time sounding like an excited Slick Leonard calling out the starting lineup for the Pacers.

“That would be my favorite James Bond…Raaaaaaajjjjjjer Moooooorrrrrrrrrre!”

Boos caromed off the Tap & Pub walls.  All the naysayers were wrong of course.  Roger Moore was the best 007, hands down.  That we even have to waste time exercising the debate is patently absurd, like debating the legitimacy of Lincoln’s presidency because he once picked Ambrose Burnside as his general.

Nevermind that Moore’s range of facial expressions compared to Connery amounted to the difference between a professional mime and a cinderblock, what really set Moore above all the others was his gift for gravitas.  To loosely paraphrase the late Roger Ebert: Connery would walk around with that dab of blood on his coat collar looking for the next guy to shoot.  Moore would take fifteen minutes to blot the stain, rub in a dollop dish soap, and then go look for the next guy to shoot.  In short: Connery’s Bond enjoyed killing people.  Moore’s Bond enjoyed killing people and looking good in the process.  Add that he pulled all of that off in the 1970’s—when “looking good” was by all definitions impossible—and you have your game, set, and match.

“After Moore,” Paul graveled, “came Timothy Dalton…”

Timothy Dalton…  Please… Moving on…

“And resuscitating the role after a six-year hiatus was Pierce Brosnan…”

No story strikes Bond fans with more sorrow than Brosnan’s.  When he almost secured the role in the mid-80’s, we were exultant.  He was perfect, and he would have been the fitting transitional actor coming out of the two-decade long duo who preceded him.  Then NBC nixed the deal because he was contractually obligated to play, of all parts, Remington Steele.  God, the phlegm builds up in my mouth just thinking about it.  Sometime after that his wife—herself a Bond girl in For Your Eyes Only—died of cancer.  And when he finally landed the role he was born to play, what does he get?  One great movie, three god-awful scripts after that, and 9-11.

“And the most recent Bond,” Paul wrapped up, “is Daniel Craig.”

No matter what anyone tells you, Daniel Craig doesn’t portray James Bond.  Daniel Craig portrays a spy who’s stopped attending his anger-management sessions and for the life of him can’t find his Zoloft prescription in his glove-box.  But, according to the experts, he was the “appropriate response” for the new world after the acts of terror in 2001.  According to them, a quirky, sophisticated spy with a dapper sense of humor, a great right hook, killer looks, and good aim had no place in the post-9-11 world.  So we got Craig.  But Craig’s Bond was a travesty: blonde, overtly muscular, morose, and—worst of all—monogamous.

“Tough night, Jarvis,” Paul nodded to me.  He had just handed my former teammates (who still kept our old team name: Make Trivia Great Again) their second-place gift card.  He also chatted a storm with the Ken dolls, who ran away with the evening.

“Yep,” I replied.  I ran my fingertip around the lip of my Bad Elmer’s, gazing through the Tap & Pub’s windows, lost in the glare of the lights dangling across Indiana Street.

“You need to kiss a make-up,” Paul said.  “You all would have killed those boys.”

“Sure,” I replied.

Nursing what was left of my porter, I thought about James Bond.  If we’re going to be unofficially official about it, he was one of those figures on whom I had modeled my life.  Granted, none of us who grew up in the ‘70s and ‘80s watching those occasional Sunday night 007 reruns on ABC, exactly thought of ourselves as gun-toting GQ models with a hankering for martinis.  But we did grow up thinking that real men were cool under pressure, tastefully sexist, callously in the moment.  He was the cliché I grew up wishing I would be.  I didn’t become that cliché, but I still managed to become one nonetheless.

One by one, the members of Make Trivia Great Again walked past me en route to the exit.  One by one, they looked the other way as they passed me.  Sighing, I downed the rest of Bad Elmer.  I closed my eyes, and saw Elmer behind my eyelids.  He had withdrawn his forearm, and his shotgun had fallen out the frame.  He leaned in, those aquamarine irises unwaveringly zeroing in on me.

“Be a man,” Elmer told me, “and get yourself a team that’s gonna kick some ass.”

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By Donovan Wheeler

Photos Courtesy of the Apple House

I can’t remember if I was in second or third grade, but I can distinctly remember losing my mind one Christmas break in the late 1970’s.  It had to be either ’77 or ’78 (I’m thinking the latter for some reason), but I recall that, out of all the holiday breaks I enjoyed as a little kid, that was the one that crawled along most slowly.  On the days that Mom had off from her job as a bank teller, I would lay under the tree, tucking my head between a couple of wrapped boxes with my name on them, and stare at the lights which coned their way up into the spiderweb of branches that hid the star somewhere up there on the top.  Losing myself in the splendor of the color, trying not to think about the fact that I had something like six more days until I could open up whatever rested under all that wrapping paper.

The cheap lights we can get today for a few bucks per box weren’t common back then, and while Mom adeptly covered the living room with garland, advent calendars, and angel chimes, it was always the lights that mesmerized me.

A dozen years later, when I first walked into Terre Haute’s Apple House, my college apartment didn’t quite evoke the Christmas color I’d grown up with.  My tree was about two feet tall, my light collection was sparse, and the fake, dark, needles smothered them and reduced them to pinpoint flickers.  I was a broke college junior in 1990, so for added decoration I stacked a pyramid of empty Coke cans—sporting various Santa poses on them—in my bedroom window.  If I happened upon a couple feet of silver garland, I taped above the threshold to the living room.  If someone gifted a Hallmark ornament, I made sure it took center stage amidst the blackness of my tree.

A lot of stores had Christmas displays. But after the Apple House, there was nowhere else to go.

A lot of stores had Christmas displays, as did the mall south of the interstate.  And before the Apple House, I had always found myself making an extra trip or two if for no other reason than to soak in the color and enjoy the canned peace that comes from elevator Christmas carols.

But after the Apple House, there was nowhere else to go.

“My dad is the one who started it,” says Tom Cummins, the Apple House’s CEO.  “We had an older building which my dad had bought back in the ‘60’s, and he cobbled onto it about three different times.  He was doing the Christmas thing when I came back here to work with him in 1981, but it was really cheezy,” Cummins adds laughing.  “The ornaments were just piled into boxes…banana boxes and any kind of boxes we had.  And we didn’t have any kind of decorated Christmas trees.”

Shortly after Cummins’ arrival, he and his father started to take the Christmas idea more seriously, and while the spot they had for it needed a lot of work, it was the perfect spot nonetheless.

“We had a greenhouse frame that came off the building to the north,” Cummins explains.  “It was just a frame.  We finally got it covered, and then we bought sliding glass door inserts and put those up as the windows on the street side.”

In an instant, that row of trees caught Terre Haute’s attention.  Drivers slowed to a crawl along Third Street, also known as U.S. 41, a buzzing north-south thoroughfare whose “Speed Limit” signs passed for little more than decorations themselves.  The advertising helped, but the word-of-mouth proved powerful.

“That [display] transformed the business overnight,” Cummins explains.

By the time I had caught a bit of that word-of-mouth I walked into a facility approaching its heyday.  Before me lay nearly 35,000 square-feet of holiday spectacle.  Think of the storefront window scene at the beginning of Bob Clark’s 1983 classic, A Christmas Story, and magnify the color, the nostalgia, and the sense of wonder by a factor of five.  Then you’ll be about halfway there.

In an instant, that row of trees caught Terre Haute’s attention. Drivers slowed to a crawl along Third Street, also known as U.S. 41.

From my first step in a meandering path adorned with trees wound its way to the back corners of the showroom, so far that, in that back corner, you feel the trains rumble as they cut through the south end of town.  There was something for everyone.  It was there that my dad saw his first set of bubble lights since his childhood in the ‘50’s.  It was there that my mom decided to dedicate the rest of her Christmases to Victorian themed trees.  A few years later it would be there where my little kids would marvel at the pines showing off primary colors and their favorite cartoon characters. 

“I had a crew of five people who would go with me to these shows,” Cummins says.  “They were my designers, and each one of them was in charge of four or five trees.  We would see a theme, and we would [latch on to that idea].  We might buy from six or seven other vendors [in order to fill up] that tree.”  They traveled everywhere to get ideas: Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas.  As my wife pointed out to me, they did all of this before the internet, before Pinterest.  Every year they scraped together some 25 original ideas, and every year they found a way to make those ideas stand out from the year before.  All of it at a time when coming up with ideas meant getting off your butt and putting in the work.

But on that first visit of mine, it was there where I experienced that sort of youthful optimism that only happens when you’re in your early 20’s.  I was almost done with school, and I had big plans for my adulthood.  It was a heady time.  Every road in front of me went up, and I was buoyed with that confidence that knows nothing about the troubles of normal adulthood.

Under, around, and beside each tree rested tight enclaves of ornaments, tinsel, and garland.  Cotton sheeting passed for snow, and it led us from one “yellow-brick-road” of trees to the next.  Beyond the grove lay even more color.  More ornaments, holiday tins, Christmas signage, stuffed animals, battery-powered elves on ladders, wreaths of both the traditional and experimental variety filled every inch of usable space.

They did all of this before the internet, before Pinterest. Every year they scraped together some 25 original ideas, and every year they found a way to make those ideas stand out from the year before.

And the one display that particularly sent me back year after year, were the miniature villages. 

“The [Department 56] salesman came by in October,” Cummins says, referencing the company that once marketed the popular ceramic buildings which made both nostalgic post-war towns and Dickensian street-corners. 

“We were pretty much set up, and he said, ‘Man, you need to handle this.  I don’t have anybody in Terre Haute selling this.’”

“I said, ‘People aren’t going to pay $50 for a little house.’”

“He said, ‘I guarantee you they will,’” Cummins remarks laughing again.  “’Let me put $5,000 worth in here, and whatever you don’t sell, I’ll take it back.’  We blew out every piece in two weeks.”

The funny thing about being 21—hell…the funny thing about being any age, for that matter—is that when we come across something that reminds us of childhood, we let ourselves get completely lost in it.  Maybe it was all the years my brother and I spent building our own “towns” with our Hot Wheels cars.  Or maybe it was the rest of the time we spent building “galaxies” with our Star Wars action figures.  Whatever it was, the intricacies of each small house and each corner shop took me back to that childhood.  It was hard not to stare at the postman walking in front of the barber shop and imagine the conversation he’d have when he handed over the mail.  It was equally hard not to take in the cluster of carolers in their top-hats singing over the noise of the horse-drawn coach.

“We were a destination for people,” Cummins admits. “We had people come from 50, 70, 80 miles away.”

When I graduated from college, my own trips grew from five miles to almost 200.  But I kept coming back.  Every single year.  I don’t remember what year it was when I arrived and found the Christmas display condensed to a shadow of its former self.  But for Cummins, keeping the tradition going came down to simple math, math that wasn’t working any longer.

“We were a destination for people. We had people come from 50, 70, 80 miles away.”

Tom Cummins

“Basically, what happened was just kind of a perfect storm of bad timing,” Cumming says.

“The chain-stores had ramped up their footprint,” he explains. “You know, it used to be they just dabbled in the Christmas stuff.  But once they ramped everything up, they just destroyed specific categories with cheap prices.  Then Hobby Lobby moved into Terre Haute, and Jeffery Allan’s moved in as well.”

“We always had a half-price sale after Christmas, and for most of those years, we didn’t have much left,” Cummins adds.  “All of a sudden that [sale] became a focal point for people, and they’d kind of just wait you out.”

“When I pulled the plug on it, I had basically taken a bath for two years in a row.  You have to pay all your invoices on December the 10th.   You've got $400,000 worth of invoices and when the bill is due you've got to come up with the 400,000, and then you look around and it's all just sitting in the store.”

“I was running Disney World, but I wasn’t getting any admission,” he finishes matter-of-factly.

This is not to say that Cummins doesn’t appreciate his contribution to life in the Wabash Valley and beyond.  But when your job is to make a profit, the only thing you can do is see his point and nod your head.

Coincidentally, in the years after the Apple House reduced its footprint to the garden center that it is now, my own relationship with the holidays changed.  I got caught up in all the things that make life in one’s 30’s and 40’s very different from one’s 20’s.

“I was running Disney World, but I wasn’t getting any admission."

Tom Cummins

But the early 50’s version of me has started to notice the lights again.  Maybe I’m just proof of what all the research says—that when you hit this age, you just stop caring about a whole lot of stuff that once seemed important.  But maybe it’s because I’ve watched the world practically fall apart and lose itself in anger and fear.  Whatever the reason, those Christmas strolls through the Apple House have returned to the front of my brain.  I’m not exactly sure what I would give for a chance to go back and take just one lap past all those trees and all of that color.  But I imagine I would be willing to give quite a bit for the opportunity.

Since I can’t, maybe I’ll do something I haven’t done since third grade.  Maybe I’ll just lay down under the tree and stare up into the lights, watching them snake their way to that place way up to the top that I can’t quite see.

Nearly all my childhood memories have slipped into a fog of snippets, as I am sure is the case for most of us when we “reach a certain age.”  Consequently, my memories of my first trip to Riverfront Stadium are more photographic than concrete, more emotional than analog.  

I went as an eight-year-old in the late summer of 1979—a nighttime bill against the Pirates.  Even to this day, the few—very few—mental snapshots I still have remain vivid.  I remember a foul ball caroming over the backstop and reaching its apex above Riverfront’s upper deck.  I remember a fan snagging that foul with a black sweatshirt (a Pirates fan no doubt).  I can remember our seats, the red ones, situated high over the third base foul line.  I remember all those better seats, the blue ones, tucked into the lip of the dugout roof.  I remember asking my mom, and my dad, and my grandparents over and over, “What’s going on?”  I remember clutching my newly bought Johnny Bench poster for most of the game, coveting and caressing, visualizing its place on my bedroom wall.  But probably more than anything else, I remember the resignation in Grandma’s voice when she told me the Reds had lost.

When I got home, I scaled that bedroom wall, propped my rubber-soled feet on my headboard, and affixed Johnny Bench just under the ceiling. For the next five or six years Bench hovered over my head—his gaze staring toward the outfield, his fingers slowly unclutching his bat, his lead step toed in the direction of first base.  The Reds would be pretty good that year.  But Tony Perez had already left for Montreal, and Pete Rose was bound for Philly.  They were effectively the first two divorces in the family, Grandpa's decision to leave her became the third.

For the next four decades, my relationship with baseball would run hot and cold.  Failing to move up from pee-wee sent me away, as did learning to play golf, as did the 1994 strike.  But every time my baseball switch flipped back “ON” I gravitated to Grandma.

For more than thirty years she worked the desk at our family’s tiny, nine-hole golf course in west-central Indiana.  For all three of those decades she dialed her popping and crackling and humming, AM radio to the Reds Radio Network, silently reacting to Marty Brenneman’s play-by-play.  She was, in every sense of the word, a composed woman.  When the Reds pulled out a comeback, walk-off victory, she would smile and maybe offer a mellow “hooray.”  When they blew a save, she would wave her hands toward the radio, tossing out a low-keyed “bah!”  No matter what happened on the carpet in Cincinnati, however, Grandma always flipped off the set back in Indiana and returned to her day.

No matter what happened on the carpet in Cincinnati, however, Grandma always flipped off the set back in Indiana and returned to her day.

Throughout all of it, the radio always played.  The Reds always took the field.  Not long after Pete Rose blooped Eric Show’s fateful pitch into the outfield, Grandma suggested that we all go see a game together—our first trip back to Reds country since that night in ’79.  For the rest of that decade we annually traveled to Riverfront, and for the rest of that decade I spent my Hoosier summers leaning over the glass counter in the golf course’s pro shop with Grandma.  Behind me Brenneman called the game.  To my side Grandma sat, nursing her dinner, nodding and shaking when the game’s fortune demanded it.

Our last trip to Cincinnati was in 1990.  Paul O’Neil sealed a Reds’ win against the Padres with a sailing homer that fell so close our seats, that even when we stood up, all we could do was watch the ball disappear behind the railing in front of us and wait for the rest of the crowd to let us know it was over the fence. 

Despite the joy of the World Series win, life did what it does.  I got married.  I moved away from home.  I had kids of my own.  When Grandma died in the winter of 1999, baseball had more fully than ever evaporated from my conscious thoughts.  Sure, the home run battle the year before had given us one last chance to talk about the game, but too much day-to-day life, too many miles, and too much bitterness over the strike had worked itself between me and the game.

If I harbored any thoughts about returning to baseball, the other sports gave me more than enough reason to temper that passion.  The Malice in the Palace dampened my relationship with the Pacers. And one good friend’s awful experience working for Larry Bird soured it further.  And when Peyton Manning tearfully bid adieu to the Colts, I started to earnestly believe that being a “fan” was for suckers.

But last February, when PBS rebroadcast Ken Burns’ Baseball in conjunction with the return of spring training early this year, my thoughts returned to Grandma.  In the years since the ‘94 strike I had grown older. In fact, I’m a few years older than Grandma was when she took me to that first game against Pittsburgh.  I had gotten divorced and remarried.  My kids had grown up and moved away (both to become Brewers fans, no less), and as each minute of Burns’ film flickered past my eyes, an intoxicating nostalgia consumed me.

So, I went to Amazon Prime, and I signed on.

I’ve caught more than my share of grief from friends.  “Oh…” they say, “so now you decide to become a Reds fan, again…”  It’s a fair jab.  In my defense, though, the team didn’t play well in spring training, they had traded away not one but two key pitchers, and they opened the season with an ugly 11-6 loss to the Cardinals.  When I clicked that button on Amazon, I was hoping for 80 wins.

But then something magical happened.  I got to know the team.  I watched the post-homer exchanges.  I reveled at Votto’s Jamie Tartt thumb-jabs.  I can still hear Jesse Winker say “They’re just men!” after rocking a lead-off dinger at Dodger Stadium.  Jonanthan India’s aggressive base-running reminded me that men still playing to win requires risk.  Kyle Farmer’s ascendance to a top-of-the order infielder let me know that quiet determination counts for something, even in this caustic culture of hedonism and self-indulgence.  And all those “scooter revs” from second and first base reminded me that baseball is fun.  And that playing the game among good friends is better than special.

All of this couldn’t have come at a better time for me, either.  The news is overwhelming.  It suffocates hope and thrives on our collective fear.  Somewhere out there is something that will get us—the flood, the wildfire, the Taliban, the virus, the politics.  In a moment when I wanted more than anything to find a way back to the world I grew up in, baseball proved to be that conduit to a better place.

And every time I flip on a ball game and let myself get away from the ugliness of the current world, I find myself at that glass counter, watching the game with Grandma.  I have thought about her more in the last five months than I did in the previous twenty years.  She wouldn’t have loved the long, baggy pants nor the slower pace of play, but she would have loved Great American Ball Park.  She would beam at the sight of the riverboat cannons going off after a dinger, and she would have very much loved this team.  Despite seeing three World Series champions play in the flesh… Despite watching a rookie Johnny Bench perform at Crosley Field… I would venture to suggest that this team would have stood out as one of her absolute favorites.

I understand the frustrations of Reds fans who’ve not taken breaks from the game.  This is a tantalizing and agonizing season for sure.  And heck yes, I want to see the Reds eek their way into the playoffs.  But even if they don’t, I honestly owe them from a very personal level.  Playoffs or not, they’ve given me a connection to a more innocent version of me I had forgotten and brought back to life a woman who did everything in her power to teach me to be the best person I could possibly be.

If I could say anything to the men on this team, I probably wouldn’t even mention the playoffs.  I’d simply let them know that they’re playing for Grandma.  They’re playing for that legion of life-long fans who hovered over their GE’s and Zeniths and Philcos, people who—in the middle of their own very difficult lives—counted on those Redleg boys of summer to bring them a few hours of respite and joy.

Photo Credits:

Featured Image: "Crosley Field, Cincinnati 1969" by Blake Bolinger is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Reds Baseballs by Greg Reese via Pixababy

"Cincinnati reds scoreboard" by ChipMahaney is licensed under CC BY 2.0

"Big Red Machine, Great American Ballpark" by SeeMidTN.com (aka Brent) is licensed under CC BY 2.0

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

John Keats

Just shy of his 50th birthday, Jarvis Bagley’s life has become an awful cliché.  Long divorced, long single, estranged from his children, working an unfulfilling job, Jarvis has long since dropped courtesy and decorum for acrimony and rancor. 

So lost is he in his contempt for others, that he finds his most meaningful relationships interacting with his favorite craft beers and the anthropomorphized caricatures he turns them into.

His lone solace is competing Tuesday night trivia at Grendel’s Tap & Pub.  His greatest dream is winning the coveted Saxon Keg—the Pub’s prize awarded to the best trivia team of the year.

But if he wants to win the Keg, and maybe put his life in some kind of order, he’s going to have to put together a winning team.  Worse yet, he’s going to have to get along with the real people who will form it.

Chapter Five: Jarvis and Leo Lift Off Talk Courage and Fear

Saxon Keg Point Standings—Early June:

1. The Ken Dolls: 710

2. Jarvis Bagley and “Friends”: 710

3. Isaac Newton’s Missing Apple: 650

4. Make Trivia Great Again: 460

5. Saxophones and Saliva: 240

6. Zen and the Art of Beer: 140

7. The C-Chord Walk Downs: 40

8. The Off-Road Commuters: 30

9. Others: 20

By the end of May the Ken Dolls evaporated.  Not the team’s lead, mind you.  I mean the team itself.  None of that was particularly surprising.  Ephraim moved from the average grind of the spring semester into the pressing grind of finals week, and that was it.

I suppose we all knew the Ken Dolls would call trivia quits for the summer.  Sarah wondered if maybe their lead might convince some of them to commute or grab summer jobs around town.  But nope.  They didn’t care.  For half the year they had waltzed into Grendels’ with their lighthearted humor and their dazzling smiles and their polite handshakes and their sincere banter.  Then they sat in their booth and laughed and joked and drank happily.  And they didn’t just take the lead in the standings, they ran away with it.

But once school ended, they up and left.  Just walked away from the whole thing.

It was as if it was a game or something to them.

“Hey guys, can I hang out with you all tonight?”  The question came from the only member of the Dolls still in the pub.  When he introduced himself I tensed my face and braced for the off-chance his name was indeed “Ken”… or Alan… or Bobby, Steven, Devon, or any of the other official Barbie names I happened to know thanks to one too many boredom-infused, stream-of-consciousness deep-dives into depths of Wikipedia.

“I’m Jordan,” he said answering Max’s introduction.

Of course.  Jordan.  How fucking millennial.

Jordan Parmeter was an economics major from a rich family living north of Chicago.  So far, this kid was ringing the bell and scoring 100’s in every single category of Let’s Be a Cliché!

Even though it’s every bit as hoppy as any good, self-respecting IPA should be, Lift Off figures out how to be strong enough to win over guys who want some bite in their beers while dialing it down enough to lure in the girlfriend next to him who is nervously fingering her White Claw.

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“Which mammal has the longest gestation period?” Paul asked.

“Yeah,” Jordan muttered to us.  “That’d be the elephant.”  I flashed a glance to Max, who stared at Jordan with gushing aplomb.  Meanwhile Sarah dismissively raised her eyebrows and shrugged her shoulders, the closest thing to a begrudging olive branch I suppose I would ever get from her.  And to my left, Catharine Addleson-Smith sat unfazed, gently rubbing her chin with the pad of her index finger, her mind far off one of her internal, tangential parallel universes.

“That’s right…” I finally said, my voice trailing.  I’m pretty sure Jordan didn’t pick up on the politely suspicious tone in my voice.  No sooner had he uttered the answer than he picked up his phone, resuming the four or five-person group chat which had been underway since before he walked through Grendel’s front door.  Never taking his eyes off the screen his expressions ranged from grins to outright chuckles, and from furrowed concentration to bland serenity.

“Okay,” Paul continued, “your sports question for tonight is this one:  Where did the New York Knicks get their nickname?”

“Oh yeah…” Jordan said offhandedly.  As Paul asked the question, he instinctively rolled his phone, planting it face-down on the table.  Nodding, to himself more than the rest of us, he delivered again.

“That’d be Washington Irving,” he said.

Thus, it went all evening.  This is not to say that Jordan Parmeter went full one-man team that night.  Max threw out a half-dozen of his own answers just as quickly as the young college kid.  Often, they spouted them synchronously.  Well, as synchronously as the two of them would ever get.  Max’s tendency to snap his fingers, break out into a euphoric smile, and get straight to the answer typically put him about four syllables ahead of Jordan’s “Yeah…that’d be…” preamble.  The effect was something tantamount to a strangely engaging, if not unharmonious, echo.

But he never once turned to his phone for an answer, which is a weird observation to describe given that he was never off his phone for any span of time longer than fifteen or twenty seconds.  If he flat-out didn’t know an answer, he would shrug, pick up his gadget, and get back to his long-distance hang-out session with his buddies.  God knows what they were talking about.  What could be so goddamn important that it had to be said then?  And over the phone?  And by typing it out no less?

Running the last three months through my head, I thought about all those college kids, as well as older people with phone fetishes—lonely divorcees, social divas, and widowed old men trying to score 30-year-old waitresses on Tinder. 

For the first time I considered the fact that maybe they weren’t looking up answers at all.  In a world where those tiny supercomputers in their purses and pockets had effectively deprived them of the ability to sit (or stand) for minutes at a time doing nothing but staring at a wall or watching Emily serve beers from behind the bar, their phones were less a means to circumvent the rules of trivia and more a line of cocaine designed to feed the instinctive need for a fix.

“Your movies question tonight is this,” Paul announced.  “What brand of golf ball did James Bond and Auric Goldfinger play in the 007 film, Goldfinger?”

“Slazenger,” I said.

“Are you sure?” Catharine Addleson-Smith questioned. Sighing discretely, I turned a bit of side-eye her way, concentrating most of my vision on a random row of pint glasses behind the bar, over Emily’s head.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “Very.”

“I don’t know,” Catharine Addleson-Smith said.  That seems a little too esoteric for a film designed to be consumed by the masses.”

Carefully and deliberately I proceeded to lay out the details from Goldfinger’s famous (or so I thought) golf scene.  From Odd Job slipping a ball down the leg of his pants to Bond letting Goldfinger play out the 18th hole with the wrong ball before calling him on it after the final putt.

“He holed out a with a Slazenger 7,” I explained…obviously too emphatically.  “But he had announced he was playing a Slazenger 1!”

“So,” Jordan asked…phone in hand.

“So?!” I replied.  “So…?!  Every time you change a ball, you’re supposed to announce it.  If you change without doing that you, risk forfeiture.”

“I don’t know…” Max said his voice trailing.  “Wasn’t Club Special a popular ball in the ‘60’s?” Max was clearly supplicating.  He saw a chance to score some “cool points” with his new pal, Jordan, and the little shit seized on it. At this everyone else in the group nodded emphatically.  That is, everyone except Jordan, who flippantly waved his hand in agreement as he texted his posse of friends.

I countered, laying out that while Club Specials were popular in the 60’s they were primarily American balls.  The odds that Bond and Goldfinger would be knocking around US ball in Stoke Park, Buckinghamshire, England, UK were infinitesimal.

Be it because I was emphatic in my confidence… Be that Catherine Addleson-Smith was testing me in some way…  Whatever the reasons, the group acquiesced.  Max wrote “Slazenger” on our slip of paper and briskly snaked his way through the tables that filled the Grendels’ floor before handing it to Paul.  By the time Mellencamp’s “Small Town” repeated its chorus for the third time, Paul softly pulled on the volume slide on his amplifier, and Mellencamp’s rasp faded.  On cue, two dozen conversations among as many tables grew silent with the music.

“What brand of golf ball did James Bond and Auric Goldfinger play in the 007 film, Goldfinger?” Paul repeated, as he often did in order to build up the aesthetic effect of delivering the answer.

“That’d be a Slazzzzzz-enger!” He growled.

Silently I gave everyone a hard look.  Several seconds at a time with each person.

Grumbling to myself I turned my attention to the fresh pint of beer in front of me.  Some people dislike Daredevil Brewing’s Lift Off IPA because of the heavy “nutty” taste that hits them on the finish.  And yeah, it’s true that the malt flavors are strong on the back end of a good swig of this beer.  But Lift Off is more than its finish.  The beer leads with a solid wave of citrus and pine, both of them balanced, and both of them not overbearing.

And even though it’s every bit as hoppy as any good, self-respecting IPA should be, Lift Off figures out how to be strong enough to win over guys who want some bite in their beers while dialing it down enough to lure in the girlfriend next to him who is nervously fingering her White Claw.

Etched onto the can sitting next to my glass, Lift Off’s iconic Flying Man wrapped himself around the curvature of the aluminum.  I rotated him in my hand.  Leo, as I called him, flew from the can’s surface and hovered in the air, suspended by the propeller-driving flying machine that held him aloft.  Grizzled and old, his beard splaying out from his face as the remaining spots of graying hair danced on his bald head, Leo flung himself across the heavens in spread-eagled fashion.

“Wha-hooo!” he shouted as he swirled off the can and around my head.

“Whaaaaaa-hooooo!”

Sometimes, when the belt snaking its way through the pulleys attached to his torso slipped …  When the subsequent stall in the propeller rotation caused a five- or six-inch drop in altitude…  Those were the moments when Leo’s expression shifted from exuberance to wide-eyed panic.  Those outspread arms, which had moments before hung in air with the steadiness of a trained yoga instructor suddenly flailed, as did the legs behind him.

“Uhhhhnnnnnggggg…” Leo said as he dropped.

It happened maybe three or four times.  Every time that I expected to see him turn into a splat of animated goo on the tabletop, the belt abruptly squeezed into the pulley’s channel.  Once again, the props started whirring more rapidly.  And like that Leo shot back into the air, returning to about eye-level as he zipped around the booth table.

“You’re not living…” Leo shouted.  He left the sentence unfinished as he looped away from my face, out over Jordan, Max, and Sarah’s heads before circling his way back to me.

“…unless you’re living…”  Again, he swooped away, circling the span of the booth table.

“…on the edge!”  As he flew away for another loop, he let out another “Whaaa-hooo!”  And again, his belt slipped.  And again, he dropped a half-foot in a steep dive for the table, again flailing his limbs like a small dog picked up by a child.

“Alright folks,” Paul’s voice carried from the speakers snapping me back into the moment.  “Put these historical events in chronological order, with the most recent event listed last.”

“Our first event,” he continued, “is the Tank Man standoff at Tiananmen Square…”

I was a college sophomore when Tiananmen Square happened.  I had planned to drop out after my freshman year, but I changed my mind in late July.  While I had been able to enroll without much problem, finding an open spot in one of the dorms was a “no-go,” from the first phone call.  Stuck by myself in a two-room efficiency apartment south of campus, I had no other recourse to salve my boredom except watching the news.

With a month left in school, I followed every ebb, and the hung on every flow of Dan Rather’s gyrated tonal inflections.  Rather had walked the jungles of Vietnam in the 60’s carrying his microphone as if it were an M-16.  He even crawled into the tunnels when he spotted the chance.  If ever a reporter lived like Hemmingway, Rather was the guy.  So, when the last stable, lynchpin of the Communist Empire showed signs of cracking… When arguably the most boring decade in modern history looked to be ending on a very exciting note…?  Rather flew to Beijing the way Hemmingway darted back to Europe in the 40’s. 

“Thank God,” he must have thought, “another war!”

I found out pretty quickly that I was the only one on campus watching the news.  The rest of my classmates sat limp-faced in class, downed their Meister Brau in their dorm rooms, and assumed that Deng Xiaoping was city in Japan…or something like that.

Tiananmen ended badly.  I sat there every night watching Rather squat on his haunches as he excitedly listened to a striking mill worker talk about his dreams for his children.

“That poor motherfucker is going to die,” I thought.  Most likely he did.  The rich college kids with important fathers and grandfathers got out of it okay, but the poor, ordinary schmucks holding broomsticks and shovels were slaughtered.

So much for Communism. 

In retrospect—especially after things like Oklahoma City, 9-11, the financial meltdown in ’08, and the whole “invading the wrong country after a terrorist attack” matter—a toddler stuck in an eight-inch well seemed a weird "big news" story at best and an inconsequential one by any other standard.

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“Next we have Baby Jessica stuck in a Texas well…”

I remember sitting in the bleachers of my high school gym when Mr. Archer, my chemistry teacher who side-gigged as the public-address announcer at basketball games, extended a time-out to let us all know that Baby Jessica had been rescued from that well in Texas.  Everyone broke into emotional applause.  All of us in the cheap seats, the players, the coaches, the cheerleaders, the pep band, the referees… Everyone.

In retrospect—especially after things like Oklahoma City, 9-11, the financial meltdown in ’08, and the whole “invading the wrong country after a terrorist attack” matter—a toddler stuck in an eight-inch well seemed weird at best and inconsequential by any other standard.

But like I said, this was the 80’s.  And also, like I said, the 80’s were boring.  Epic Billy Joel songs aside.  Okay, the Challenger explosion was definitely a big deal. 

And Regan’s shooting, also a big deal.  Mostly because the assassination attempt generated a wellspring of sympathy for the President, and every member of Congress who thought Supply-Side Economics was the dumbest fucking idea since the Ford Edsel enthusiastically voted in favor of it.

People were outraged when John Hinkley, Jr. landed a sweet “not guilty by reason of insanity” verdict.  And yeah, attempted murder is bad… But indirectly causing four decades of corporate feudalism ought to be worth at least a life sentence spent bagging produce, beer, and personal lubrication products at Walmart for a buck or two more than minimum wage.

Quickly I tried to place myself when Mr. Archer made the Baby Jessica announcement.  I couldn’t recall if I was still in high school or I had returned to the gym as a college freshman.  Most likely it was the latter.  Having struck out at every attempt to get laid on campus I threw on my senior letter-jacket one more time, crossed my fingers, went to that ball game.  That didn’t work out, either.

“Then we have the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas…”

Of all the things about the Waco-Whacko incident that still befuddles me, it’s hands-down the “whacko” part.  As soon as Paul finished speaking, I placed the moment in history.  April of 1993.  April the 19th, to be specific.  That’s an easy one to recall.  First because the bombing of the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City happened on the second anniversary of Waco, for obvious, and symbolic reasons.  And second, because I was sitting in the maternity ward at Ephraim General waiting for Bart to be born.  While my ex-wife groaned, occasionally screamed, and sunk her fingernails into the flesh of my hand, I watched the Branch Davidian Compound burn with rapt attention.

When James Jones lined everyone up in ’78 for that big Kool-Aid party, we later learned that hundreds of the would-be disciples actually wanted no part of a mass suicide.  Alas, held in line at gunpoint, they downed their “Black Cherry” and “Tropical Punch” Dixie Cups and wondered how in the hell they had gotten themselves in French Fucking Guyana with a couple ounces of dissolved cyanide at their lips.

By the same respect, I watched that hideous barn in Texas shoot torrents of fire out of the windows wondering how many of those poor bastards regretted the moment they threw themselves at David Koresh’s feet.

Coincidentally or not, one of the TV’s suspended over Grendel’s bar had shifted from Duke’s freshly completed thrashing of Wake Forrest and had switched to the news.  There, a replay from last year’s rally filled the screen.  And there, I watched again as the Republican nominee for President of the United States cocked his arm at and odd angle, let his wrist fall limp, and mocked the disabled Washington Post reporter who had called him out on his bullshit.

Behind him, hundreds of his followers gawked in admiration.  A pair of white-haired grandpas in thirty-year-old Arrow shirts under beige Carhart jackets grinned while dozens of middle-aged women sat next to their fat, bald husbands wildly shaking their “Make America Great Again” signs.  Rounding out the spectacle were the handful of Paul Ryan wannabes—draped in dark blazers which accentuated their groomed crew cuts—forcing smiles and masking their horror all those modern Alex Keatons must have clung to the dearest hope that…

1. This guy would lose, and…

2. If he won, he would grow up.

Yeah, I thought to myself.  Fat chance of that.  Those dumb bastards are going to be dropping their cyanide in Coors Light, decaf coffee, and sweet tea.

“And finally, we have the fall of the Soviet Union…”

In retrospect, those of us alive in the early ‘90’s all saw the U.S.S.R.’s implosion happening on a weird sort of slow-motion, instant-replay reel.  Sitting at my girlfriend’s house watching the cast of some long-forgotten ABC sitcom spinning an episode in the Soviet Union at the height of Glasnost, I laughed at the dumb, 80’s jokes, prompted by the cheap, canned laugh track.

But the fact that I was even watching this was profound.  Growing up the U.S.S.R. had been a kind of haunted house, a place you watched guardedly from the fence by the sidewalk and hurried past as quickly as possible.  Now we were seeing it.  The veils were lifted.  Sure, the placed looked alien in some respects—the dilapidated infrastructure and outdated cars standing as “Exhibit A” in that regard.  But the people walking those far away streets seemed all too normal. Many bore expressions of irritation, their eyes screaming, “Get your damn camera out of my face.”  Others turned profile to the cameras, let the film roll, sucked on their unfiltered smokes, and said, “Welcome to our shitty lives” with an ambivalent shrug.

I watched the news unfold from a TV mounted to the wall of my first classroom, during the first year of my grown-up life.  It was a day or two before school, and the old guard’s coup had failed.  In his victory, Gorbachev had all but declared that the “Evil Empire” was finished.

I suppose that was probably the catalyst that started all which followed.  I looked across the table at Jordan.  His face still lost in the glowing sheen of his pixelated lobotomy, he sat there unaware how different his world was from mine.  Here sat the sum and total of falling skyscrapers, desert wars, crashing stock markets, and oafish despots running for office.  I wondered what the kid would have been like had we sat at the same table thirty years earlier.  He’d probably still be the same swirling mixture of genius and stupidity that sat in front of me now.  Only, I’d be able to make more direct eye-contact with him.

We didn’t discuss the answer very long.  As I rattled off the dates, everyone nodded, and we penciled in the list:

• Baby Jessica, ‘87

• Tiananmen Square, ‘89

• USSR Falls, ‘91

• Waco Compound, 93

As Paul read off the answers, while Max enthusiastically tried to get Sarah to take joy in something…anything…  While Catherine Addleson-Smith stared off into nowhere…  While Jordan Parmeter thumbed his phone like a safe cracker… I replayed the list I’d handed to Paul in my head.

“Oh shit…” I said in a low voice.  Everyone froze, turned their glances to me, and hesitated.

“What?” Max asked.

Painfully I told them.  The list we’d agreed on, wasn’t the list I’d handed in.  I had gotten excited.  I wrote the correct years next to each entry, but in a sudden flurry of energy I had written them down like this:

• Baby Jessica, ‘87

• Tiananmen Square, ‘89

• Waco Compound, 93

• USSR Falls, ‘91

And we had bet everything on it.

***

Outside in the adjacent parking lot, Catherine Addleson-Smith shouted at me from two cars over.

“Goddammit,” she said.

“Look,” I replied.  “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care if you’re sorry,” she answered, her voice still raised.  “You got sloppy, and now we’re not getting paid!”

Getting paid?  For a half-second I imagined the $50 gift card that would have sat in front of us had I not fucked up the answer.

“Two hours’ worth of work pissed away!” she screamed.  As she shouted, she turned away and began her sauntered march to Buchanan Street.  Alone, I turned my eyes to the paned window fronting Grendel’s.  Through the glass I spotted Leo, still flying in circles over our vacant booth table.  Every ten seconds or so he dipped below the windowsill, his arms and legs thrashing violently as he fell.  Every time he popped back up, resuming his loop with exuberant confidence. 

“One of these days,” I muttered as I unlocked my car, “that motherfucker’s gonna make it all the way to the table.  I can’t be the only asshole in this world to hit the bottom.”

Image Credits: 

"Tiananmen Square Protest (tian_med)" by mandiberg is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

"Reagan & Gorbachev Arrive" by The Official CTBTO Photostream is licensed under CC BY 2.0

ures could maintain themselves for thousands of years without the aid of a smartphone, why is it that within just a few hundred, we’ve managed to drive ourselves into the ground?

Editorial Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this web site are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of National Road Magazine, the NRM staff, nor any members of the team at Distinct.

This first chapter is more of an introduction. Maybe a statement of purpose. A mission statement? That would be counterintuitive to its purpose. This is about escapism, not conformity. Fair warning, this will offer thoughts far more stream-of-consciousness than well organized topics. I intend to focus on different things in each “chapter” but cannot promise what that will hold. I don’t know of any other way to do it. Adding too much structure seems to reduce the meaning of my intent, which is ultimately to journal this experience uninhibited. My apprehension around opening myself up this much publicly should also be pointed out. I do enjoy sharing moments of my personal life if it provides some sort of meaning. I can’t promise this will have meaning to you, the reader. Only that this will offer insight into one man’s experience. It is sure to change with each installment. It will undoubtedly contain words and phrases that, by tomorrow, could be considered culturally inappropriate. Not intentionally, of course. But it seems to me this is the way the world is evolving and to try and guard myself from some future ridicule is futile. I can only hope, at the very least, this first paragraph can be entered into evidence at that trial as a disclaimer.

How is it possible, in this tech-driven age, to disconnect? That is ultimately my goal. To break away, even temporarily, from the digital connections I maintain each day. It is next to impossible to navigate the modern world without a smart-phone. Businesses choose to post their information on social networks, rather than pay for a dedicated website. Advertisements infiltrate everything; from pop-ups on web pages to robo-calls and junk email. Navigating a strange city without a global positioning system in your phone or car is unheard of. We are as dependent on technology as we have ever been, and it shows. At least, in the United States. I accidentally left my wallet at home while traveling for work once. I survived three days without it, using only my smartphone. While on some level, it was cool to realize if I get stranded again I’ll be okay, it was also a bit scary.

Each day I become more aware of my own relationship with electronics. I sit in front of a computer when I’m in my office, and in front of my laptop when I am not. At home, if I am not outside doing chores, I’m indoors with the television on in the background for white noise. Or, I’m sitting directly in front of it. And then, it is difficult for me not to pick up my phone to thumb through social media posts, even though I am absorbing media from the television. In an attempt to reduce my usage, I’ve deleted most of the profiles I had on major social media. To further reduce my time spent scrolling, I began the practice of removing connections with people. At first it started with individuals I interacted with in person on a regular basis. I felt if I saw someone weekly, I didn’t need to see what they were doing in between face to face interaction. What then would we have to talk about? The purge grew to those I had not been in touch with, in person, for years. Because, why? If I haven’t seen someone in years, what purpose does it serve me, or them, to stay up to date on their evening meals? It all felt so fake.

Removing my own ability to interact with other people via online connection reduced the amount of time I spent on social media, mindlessly scrolling through posts. The unintended consequence was that I missed some things, like the invitation to my twenty year high school reunion. The event never even crossed my mind until someone I’d not heard from in over a decade sent me a message through a professional network asking if I would attend. After confirming I would not be able to make the event, the conversation ended. Even though I politely asked what that person had been up to in recent years, I received no response. So, despite making the effort to find a way to contact me, that person didn’t seem to care about anything else to do with my life. I won’t lie, I was a little disappointed. But it proved a point I’d been making for a while. Those “friends” I’d accumulated through social platforms were nowhere near the definition of the word, even if we’d had a real life relationship in the past. So then, what was the point of keeping those digital connections?

Ever since my self-eviction from social media, engaging with people in person has been much more meaningful. It is entirely possible that is an oversimplification, but this is just my personal experience. I don’t miss political debates fostered by links to biased news articles. My life is much less stressful. When I have a conversation with a distant friend  it’s because I’m genuinely interested. It’s far more satisfying and if we must tie it back to the need for connection, it solves that problem too. Strange to think that humans ever interacted without digital means, let alone for thousands of years. How ever did we make it?

It’s no coincidence studies are showing the effects of this constant use of devices with screens are not positive. Increased rates of depression, dissociative disorders and suicide are directly tied to the amount of time we are in front of screens. A Nielsen report in 2014 stated that an average adult spends eleven hours a day in front of a screen. Eleven hours! I can only imagine it’s increased, six years later. As if those indicators weren’t enough, more disturbed sleep, eye strain, weight gain, and lower self-esteem are directly correlated to the amount of time we spend interacting with electronics. The biggest shift is in the addiction to screens. Social media created a new way for individuals to receive hits of dopamine.

Suffice it to say, this is the new normal. I worry about what comes next. My son struggles with screen addiction. If he is not watching cartoons, he has his phone or tablet out. And if he’s not interacting with either of those, he wants to play video games. We restrict his time, of course, but his demeanor is markedly different after spending too much time with any of them. Even physically, I can tell when he has reached a limit. His eyes get dark circles underneath, his attention span is limited, and his temper is short. Very, very short. Despite our best efforts to encourage him to find activities that are not electronic, at some point the argument becomes exhausting for all of us. It’s difficult to mitigate. The problem isn’t just his, or kids in general, it’s everyone. I’m ashamed to say when there is a lull in a conversation, even in a group of friends, we all tend to find ourselves with our phones in our hands. It’s ingrained in our culture now. And I don’t think it will ever leave. Not without some sort of mass awakening.

No one has been able to convince me that as a collective species we are responsible enough to wield the power of the digital age. But my distaste for digital social platforms does not mean I’m unable to acknowledge their potential benefits. We now have the ability to select all of our groceries and have them delivered to our homes without ever getting dressed. For many, this is a wonderful tool. It’s crazy to think about, but I know several retired individuals who have become personal grocery shoppers to make a little extra money on the side. They only work when they want, as much as they want. There are jobs available now that no one could even imagine a decade ago. At the same time, the reduction in human interaction is a cost. I’ve stood in line at coffee shops and watched people walk in to collect their beverage from the counter, then walk out without saying a word to anyone. They order their drinks ahead of time and pick them up. Digital makes things faster, of course, but is that better?

Those “friends” I’d accumulated through social platforms were nowhere near the definition of the word, even if we’d had a real life relationship in the past.

Tweet

Our social structure has completely changed in the last twenty years. News clips are now derived from social media posts, because people stop to record everything. We see everything through a digital filter. Our ability to harness technology for the improvement of life is very high. But not high enough to overcome our want to be distracted. In a digital world we can be what we want others to think we are, and never have to face our reality. It’s far easier to present the false image than to do the work to be a better version of ourselves. I think that’s so sad. The most powerful resource in the world, the internet, full of limitless knowledge, is at our fingertips. At any given time one can access any subject they wish to learn about: find a program to learn a new language; watch instructional videos on how to build furniture; read books in online libraries. What do we do with it? Fill it with pornography and cat videos. The decline in quality of spelling, grammar, and particularly the ability to have a normal conversation is depressing. If online interaction isn’t the cause of those things, it’s doing a great job highlighting them as existing problems.

Each time civilization reaches a peak - that is to say, when efficiency creates spare time, we seek out means to fill the void. For the easiest example, consider the Roman Empire. Arguably, their technology for the time was highly advanced. Running water, sewer systems, indoor plumbing, trade, farming, construction and more, created a scenario in which the day-to-day needs of people were taken care of. So without the urgency to meet basic needs each day, society found itself with “free time.” New forms of entertainment evolved, most notably the gladiator games. All to essentially provide people with something to do in order to distract and prevent civil unrest. Lay modern American culture on top of the Roman example and it’s not too different. The means of distraction aren’t quite the same, but the principles are there. Even the need to constantly be at war with an enemy has managed to remain a part of our social construct. If not as a distraction, as a weak means of creating a false sense of unification. “Us versus them.”

Sometimes I wonder just how blurred the line is between reality and a false existence. Distractions like the ones we have today seem to encourage complacency. Perhaps the better term to use, rather than false existence. Complacency more accurately describes the apathetic attitude most seem to have toward any threatening issue. Because we see things through digital filters, it adds a layer of dissociation from a real issue. Our most recent past president of the United States seems to struggle with this very concept. His level of dissociation from reality is so high, he lacks any form of empathy. I think this is true of a lot of people. As a whole, society views poverty as bad. We share posts on social media about how we should give money or resources to combat poverty. But when we’re asked to pass out supplies at a food bank, or ladle soup at a shelter, we shy away from it. Such response requires tangible interaction bringing us face to face with the problem we vehemently insist should be resolved.

Can you tell I’ve been thinking a lot? It’s like this all the time in my head. Encouraging my son to spend more time outside is easier said than done. I think back to my time at his age, and if it was nice outside you couldn’t keep me indoors. My dad probably had the same sentiment, only his time at that age was spent doing chores. And a lot of those chores, I bet, would be considered cruel for kids today. The further back in history we go, the more responsible children are forced to be. In Alda, Nebraska, there is a monument to two boys, ages 12 and 15, who were attacked by a party of Souix and Cheyenne. This was 1864, mind you. The boys were attempting to flee, and were shot with arrows, one of which pinned them together. They eventually made it to a doctor who treated them. One of the boys lived to be middle-aged and the other died an old man.  Compare the experience of those boys to yourself, or your own children. My son will be thirteen soon. I would never dream of expecting him, even in the care of an older sibling, to travel for miles to pick up a load of hay. Let alone be attacked and make it home to survive. Getting my boy to brush his teeth is a monumental feat. Perhaps this is a commentary on my own parenting, but I don’t accept all of the blame. Thanks to technological advancements, the option of sending my son to pick up hay doesn’t exist. While I’m grateful for that, it does seem a bit like we’ve lost something.

All of these things: the constant barrage of information, the near requirement of participating in an online world, the unseen waste generation and effects on mental and physical health give me incredible anxiety. Looking at the world from a holistic perspective is far more disappointing than it is encouraging. Honestly, how could it be? I don’t care how many cat posters your office has that say “hang in there,” or how many blog posts there are telling you how you can be successful in five easy steps, our problems as a species are overwhelming.

People really are remarkable. Some are blessed with the ability to appear calm in the most stressful situations. Most of that is probably derived from heavy training, but others come by it naturally. Others can’t handle the slightest bit of stress and express it often. The amazing thing is, those calm individuals are feeling the same way as those who are panicking. They choose to react differently to the same instance. Even those with years of training which allows them to have a calm reaction, still make a choice. That is one of the most amazing things about humanity. We’ve evolved to a point where we know, deep down, we possess the ability to choose how we behave. Yet, here we are, literally choosing our own poison.

Easier does not necessarily mean simpler. I once heard a story about how the popular store, Target, was so accurate (no pun intended) in predicting their patrons’ shopping habits, they sent a teenage girl coupons for infant supplies, before she realized she was pregnant. That might be an urban myth, but to be honest I’m not so sure. Data, in this world, is gold. If corporations can learn enough about us, they can *ahem* target us with specific marketing to increase sales. From items we wear on our person, to the way we surf the internet, down to the way we peruse a grocery store, our habits are tracked and recorded. Our habits, then, are sold to marketing organizations for one purpose, to make more money from our behavior. What’s more shocking, is those actions taken regularly, without much thought, are incredibly complex. The data shows us just how many steps we go through to arrive at one choice. We perceive it as a simple task when it is anything but.

From a certain point of view I find that kind of data fascinating. Like most things, there are gross amounts of potentially positive actions taken based on our collective behavioral information. But as I’ve already pointed out, that’s not how humans work. If there is opportunity to exploit that information to raise one’s status over another, we’ll take it. The millennial generation is the first in human history to be almost completely documented from their first day on this earth. They are plugged in from birth. Consequently, as educated as they may be, or “woke” as they think they are, they’ve been operating inside a system designed entirely to take advantage of them. In some respects, it’s like a living version of The Matrix. And at this very moment I just realized how close we might be getting to that reality.

Rising from the imaginations of those we consider forward thinkers, augmented or virtual reality is pulling us further out of a physical reality. I suspect I will get into the irony of that, for me, later on. I think augmented reality is awesome. It can assist people with disabilities by providing additional tools for them to interact with their environment. What a marvelous invention! The rest of us rely on it for entertainment. The same technology that allows an individual who is deaf, to participate in a conversation with someone who doesn’t know sign language, can also turn a sidewalk into a personal Super Mario obstacle course. A “live” game. Now those dopamine producing awards embedded in games on a phone apply to how many virtual blocks you can break while walking to the bathroom. It also means increasing the amount of screen time a person uses. I don’t know much about the psychological effects that can have on one’s brain, but it seems to me that training it to accept digital input as reality versus, well, reality, is a bad thing. Science fiction has explored this concept numerous times. One of the better examples, I think, other than The Matrix is a movie called Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis. In this movie, humans plug into beds and operate robotic surrogates of themselves in the “real” world. The premise stems from a fear of being injured or dying due to the random mishaps of everyday life. Of course, the lesson is, it is far more damaging to humanity to live as surrogates than living out life naturally. It is also a shining example of our collective propensity to abuse technology that should otherwise be helpful.

Oftentimes I think I’m being too cynical; that I’m not giving us enough credit as a species. Part of the issue might be that I’m examining it from a very cush worldview. I’ve had my share of woes, but never been more than a phone call away from assistance if I needed it. I’ve been hungry, but not long enough to starve. I’ve been destitute, but had the education, strength and support system to lift myself out. I’ve also known abandonment. All the social media in the world couldn’t cure my loneliness at the time. Then again, I don’t believe overcoming those struggles had anything to do with the technology available to me. It had to do with my family, friends and willpower. Was I able to conquer those obstacles because I lived in a country that had resources available to me? I argue it had far more to do with more basic connections than modern resources. If anything, I believe it made me more self-reliant. Less prone to fall under the spell of keeping up with the Jones. The truth is I don’t need a lot to survive, and am in fact happier when I have less.

Much of my life has been figuring out how to operate within a system that I never fit into. So much competition, proving one’s worth, dominating others through intimidation. Capitalism, this economy of consumption, makes no sense to me. I find the model of patriarchal structure exhausting. Add to it my religious upbringing, this looming possibility of eternal punishment, and I couldn’t help but feel anything except boxed in. The absurdity of arguing over words someone said 2,000 years ago is never lost on me. Neither is the obvious measuring-up that takes place between people in social scenarios. Could be complete strangers or best of friends, it still happens. In each case, I find myself asking, who cares? The whole dance is draining.

My son struggles with screen addiction. If he is not watching cartoons, he has his phone or tablet out. And if he’s not interacting with either of those, he wants to play video games.

Tweet

This takes us back to the beginning. Escapism. There is a movement of people choosing “simpler” lifestyles over modern benefits. Tiny houses, raising chickens, vegetable gardens, composting, recycling - sustainable choices made with the intent of lowering one’s impact on their local environment. I am always surprised how much judgment follows these individuals. The way an older generation looks at them like “dirty hippies.” Or, in the case of my father, who grew up on a farm, can’t imagine why anyone would want to go back to it after living an “easier” modern life. My childhood was filled with memorable one-liners from dad about only having one pair of shoes, sewing holes in socks and using an outhouse. But here we are, sixty years away from his youth experience, discussing the effects of climate change due to modern benefits.

Have we reached a tipping point? Are we past the point of no return? Does it really matter if a small segment of the population in the United States adopts more sustainable practices? Sometimes it feels like we’ve sold out the future of our species, and maybe every other, for just a few more hits of dopamine. If people realized those same effects can be felt without artificial support, would we see a mass exodus from electronic media?

It seems more and more people are figuring that out, I just don’t think it’s enough. Comparatively, the population of the United States is small in the world. It is the third largest country behind India and China. Still, with 370 million people in the U.S., there is an incredible amount of land space. 3.8 million square miles, to be exact. That means there is 64 acres per person in the U.S. Obviously you’d have to subtract what is considered habitable land to come up with a more real number of acres people could reasonably survive on, but even if that number is divided in half, it’s a lot of space.

So, if there is all this space, how is it possible we could ever feel constricted, cramped? It is a mental state, not a physical one. We’re designed to live in communities. Just not towering, mashed together centers, linked by systems of roadways, digital and electronic grids. Because of the way we live, it should be impossible to feel alone. Yet millions suffer from depression citing their loneliness. I just don’t think our species is mature enough on an evolutionary scale to keep up with the pace of technological innovation. We have the mental capacity, not the emotional amplitude to handle it. Which is why, when someone stands up and shouts that the earth is dying and we’re responsible, the majority of us shrug and dance our way to doomsday. This is why we fall victim to distraction. It’s simply too much to process. There’s no other way to cope.

Like so many others I’m trying desperately to find a balance. To live in a society that insists we participate on terms determined by a few, while maintaining some kind of autonomy. Finding joy in the easy things while keeping myself honest about how much I procrastinate the real priorities. It’s hard. In our society it might be the toughest time in the history of our species. We here at the self-declared top of the chain, look down on cultures that embrace sustainable lifestyles that have existed for centuries. We see them as backward, stuck in the past and primitive. They don’t know what it’s like to put their feet up at the end of the day and turn on the news, therefore they are less than. Yet here, at the top of the chain, we fight addictions, mental strife, health complications and poverty, every single day.

If revered ancient cultures could maintain themselves for thousands of years without the aid of a smartphone, why is it that within just a few hundred, we’ve managed to drive ourselves into the ground? Irreversible effects of climate change, constant competition, gross consumption, pressure to succeed, false sense of entitlement - god dammit it’s overwhelming. If you don’t pursue those things, well then you’re lazy, less fortunate or it’s implied you’re ignorant. There is a mountain of inherent knowledge lost on entire generations because of perceived advancements in technology.

For me, it’s too much. I owe technology, and by that word I mean computers and access to the internet, much of my knowledge. I could have gathered it through libraries and books, but I didn’t. (It may be argued that books and libraries themselves are technology.) I watch YouTube videos on how to install ceiling fans, repair my car, tips for gardening and more. I like to think I use the digital resources available to make myself more self-sufficient, and thereby, live a more fulfilling life. 

Enter this self-inflicted challenge. Which, I promise, does have a point, if you really want there to be one. The goal for me remains the same, escape. So this is the beginning of a journal documenting my attempt. I have a brain full of conflict and lots of desire to sort it out. The only way I know how is to do what I always do, dive into a project.

Image Credits: 

"Handcuff and Locked With Smart Phone" by Jangra Works is licensed under CC BY 2.0

"Xbox One Controller" by mastermaq is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

"cell phone" by samantha celera is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

by Donovan Wheeler

photos by Bryan Reed

Every seat along the bar at Plainfield’s Bru Burger was filled.  For a Tuesday night, the place was packed.  But why wouldn’t it be?  On that January night… Right there… In the infancy of the calendar year 2020, I sat there with Jon Strahl oblivious to all that we had gained.  After a decade of growth in the region’s bar culture, a “Friday night crowd” on a Tuesday had become as ho-hum as morning coffee.

We were all about to lose that, of course.  We were about to lose pretty much all of it.  But as Strahl and I sat across from the two TV sets, taking in college basketball scores and NFL playoff commentary, our conversation was in a far more important galaxy. 

“It's obvious that J.J. Abrams is playing to his crowd, you know?” Strahl asks, upending his first beer. “Rather than just saying, ‘Hey, what's an interesting story with this?’”

He’s talking about the ninth episode of Star Wars, of course.  Back then those of us who nerded out hardcore on that Galaxy Far, Far Away really cared about our anger.  For starters, most of us still nursed twenty-year-old grudges over Lucas’s decision to give us Jar-Jar and Hayden Christensen.  Then we had to watch Episode VII rehash the 1977 plot because…?  Sighing, we walked into Episode VIII, that thing Rian Johnson made…and walked out even more pissed off.  So, by the time Abrams “fixed” the story arc with Star Wars: Now, Nobody Gives a Fuck About Skywalker, we were all pretty much done.

“And there's a reason I care,” Strahl continues.  “The reason that I end up caring is because I've seen Star Wars stuff done really well in such a rich world with all kinds of complexities and conflicting moralities.”

“Man…” he adds, his eyes still on the episode of SportsCenter blowing up the flat screen in front of us, “it's such an opportunity for someone like Abrams, who's obviously so talented, to really get down and do something interesting…and he just doesn’t.  But I do think that great things are going to happen.  They're going to come. They are. Mandalorian, even the Clone Wars and all the cartoon stuff that they've done. That dude, David Feloni…”

“And Jon Favreau,” I add.

“And Jon Favreau,” Strahl repeats. “Those guys are doing something. Like, they get it. They're like, ‘Man, this is a blank slate. This is just a world we step into and there's all these really cool things that happen. And we can tell any fucking story we want in any style.’”

https://youtu.be/Uqrf3xDpo24

The Jon Strahl Band

• Jon Strahl - Vocals, Guitar

• Bill Mallers - Keyboard

• Nick Mallers - Drums

• Mitch Millhoff - Bass

We would talk about Star Wars for another 10 or 15 minutes, if not for the next 30.  When I sat at that bar with Strahl, five years had passed since we last spoke.  In 2015, he was a married father of two balancing a 9-to-5 with his musical ambitions.  When we met again in 2020, was a divorced father of two, settling into his new 9-to-5 just happy to still be making music.  After taking months off to record his second full length album, Heartache and Toil, he and the new incarnation of his band—one he was especially excited about—were planning for a hell of summer.

Rather than releasing all of the LP’s track in one dump, Strahl opted to release one song at time, building a gig around each track, celebrating the best tunes in the isolation of the moment.  Other artists were doing it, and streaming platforms catered well to it. It was—on its face—a smart idea.  By the late summer, with the best songs already out, the rest of the album could follow.  Lots of gigs.  Lots of music.  Good money.  After a rough few years, the good times were coming again.

Then came March, and the World Health Organization had its say.

First my dad passed away. Then the company I was working for went out of business. Then, while I was going through my divorce, I changed jobs a few times, moved houses a couple times, and right when things were stabilizing, the dog my girls and I adopted came down with a severe illness and died. It's damn near surprising I didn't make a country album.

Jon Strahl Tweet

January 2020 – Bru Burger Bar – Plainfield, Indiana

Donovan Wheeler:  When we were talking about Star Wars, you were talking about how good artists give things a chance to breathe. Listening to your new record, and listening to your old record, [2015’s The Ladder], I do feel like the new one breathes a lot more. Is that a misinterpretation?

Jon Strahl: I think you're probably right. I don't know that I necessarily set out to do it. I certainly feel more comfortable in what I'm doing now. I feel more comfortable as a songwriter and musician.  It’s like the stuff we were discussing about Star Wars—what happens when you're trying to do something to please people.

Wheeler: Are you talking about your divorce, here?

Strahl: No. I’m talking about something bigger than that.  I think, when we spoke in 2015, I was still trying to be someone I wasn’t, a kind of fake version of myself. I was not happy on a lot of levels for a long time.

Strahl moves off the record, here.  When it comes to the divorce, he’s not that interested in blame or finger-pointing.  Instead he directs me back to his journey, his pursuit of a musical ideal that seemed noble at the time.  Proper, even.  Giving the people what they want.  But as his own life unraveled under his feet, he found that the best moorings he could find wasn’t the sort of traditional blues music he once believed he had to sing.  Instead, calling for him in the seas of his despair, were the lights of a new musical buoy.  The lights of his own story and his own music.  The stuff he really wanted to make.

Strahl: The blues is a great genre, don’t get me wrong.  You talk about a world or a base for creativity, right? Same type of thing. It's definitely a world that has a lot of things that go into it. And it's got possibilities to take music in all these different places. I pride myself on being very fluent in many styles of the genre, but I think most people end up doing one thing and that's it. I've always taken a lot of pride in not being so one note or one trick ponyish with it.

Strahl: I don't think I could ever not have blues in the music that I write or perform. But I also studied classical music, and I have all these other influences. And there's so much of that R&B and jazz and blues just kind of in my soul, you know? So, completely divorcing myself from that I don't think is realistic.

Wheeler:  Yeah, I know that feeling.  It happened after my own divorce.  That idea that it’s time to go a new way.

Strahl: I took the opportunity to rewrite myself, to take charge of my own kind of fate.

Wheeler:  And that gets me back to your record.  I'm thinking a little bit about what I heard in that record. To what degree am I hearing something traditionally blues? And to what degree am I hearing somebody say, "You know what? This is where I am. This is the journey I've been on. This is the story I'm going to tell.  I'm just going to do it and lyrically and musically. I'm just going to let it happen based on how that feels?”

Strahl:  Totally. Probably my least favorite tunes on the album are the blues, the more traditional kind of riff blues, bluesy tunes.

Wheeler:  Explain that.

Strahl:  I was not in a place where I could tolerate restriction. I had dealt with it for years, trying to fit into this set of musical expectations, expectations I put on myself because I thought that’s who I was supposed to be. Instead I ended up being this person that I wasn't comfortable being. And while I want to make kind of a more traditional kind of blues album to pay homage to the different styles and the more traditional elements, I don't know that my voice lies in that traditional universe. For me it's just more of like a jumping off point.

Wheeler:  Traditional blues do follow a lot of set norms.

Strahl:  Well, lyrically the blues is great because you have this wealth of styles and these tropes. And they're great to rely on at certain times. But then people always ask me, "How do you write these songs? Why are you so sad? Did really such terrible things happen to you?"  I would think, no, that's the genre, you know? That's the style. That's the thing. But I wasn't relying on that. I had plenty else to write about from just real-life shit that I needed to get through and process.

Wheeler: I can't help but kind of marvel at the irony of that. A genre that's steeped in despair and misery and the best way to express your own particular stretch of despair and misery is to kind of break away from that genre.

Strahl:  It is really ironic, but it's also very true.

Our conversation shifted from the process of making the new record to Strahl’s plans for releasing it.  In his words, the album would begin dropping “sometime in the spring.”

“One of the things I’ve decided,” he added, “is that I’m not in a rush.”

Some six weeks after our conversation, the world shut down.  Strahl would get a lot more time than he needed.

A year would pass, and that January conversation would sit on my phone.  Strahl would cope with the gap his way. Spending time away from his guitar.  Spending time investing in his new life.  I spent mine a bit less constructively: drinking way too much beer, writing half of a novella, and arguing with my 23-year-old stepdaughter about politics.  Strahl did release his first single.  Then his second.  And then, very quietly, the rest of the album just appeared online.

https://youtu.be/3UHugyulGK0

February 2021 – Zoom – Westfield and Greencastle, Indiana

Wheeler:  So, I assume you sort of gave up on the singles release plan after the pandemic hit.

Strahl:  That’s how it started.  But you remember the early days of the pandemic, when people were flooding the internet with online performances.  We had considered that, but the more we looked into that, the less enthusiastic we felt about it.  So, we just put the whole thing out in one drop.  Putting out an album then…?  It just felt stupid.  I’m like, “Oh, great… Who cares about this?” Seriously on the grand scheme of things people are worried about going to the grocery store… People are losing their jobs left and right… And I’m supposed to be over here saying, “Here! Buy my CD, man!”

Strahl laughs as he speaks, but in eyes the passion is evident.

Strahl:  And everywhere we play… We're friends with all those folks, from bartenders and servers to the owners.  You feel bad for them.  It’s just like, “Shit, here I was talking [last year] about my experiences as if I were dropping off of a cliff, and in one second all those folks are gone.”  I really feel for those people.

With that discrete album drop, Strahl and his band “took a bath” Financially.  He believes that, given vaccination and a gradual return to normal the group can gradually recoup their investment.  But, it’s not about turning a profit.  For all local musicians it’s never about that.  But the chance to work their way back to the “breaking even” stage means the chance to say that the work, the love making the music, was at least validated by a little bit of returned love as well.

And for Strahl, that sort of validation is important, not just because this record is declarative personal and artistic time stamp of sorts, but because it’s the most collaborative project he’s done, with a version of his band which he considers one of the best he’s put together.

January 2020 – Bru Burger Bar – Plainfield, Indiana

Strahl: [The band is] a completely new group of guys I'm with right now, and to a man it’s a group I’m super happy with. One I want to work with again. If that happens, it’ll be the first time that I've been able to keep the same exact group of guys together for two albums in a row. So, I’m crossing my fingers.

February 2021 – Zoom – Westfield and Greencastle, Indiana

Wheeler:  When we spoke last year, you were pretty stoked about the band you had put together.  How has that held up?  Is the group still a thing?

Strahl:  It’s good, still. After some fits and starts, we finally got to go to pretty regularly last fall, and then things kind of slowed down over the holidays.  But since the turn of the new year we've been getting together pretty regularly, at least once a week, working on new music. But even then, we've had a couple times where we’ve had to cancel because [someone] might've been exposed.

One of those mates is his keyboardist, Bill Mallers.  An older gentleman, and the father of his drummer, Strahl discovered the value bringing a seasoned artist onto the team.

January 2020 – Bru Burger Bar – Plainfield, Indiana

Strahl:  He's been in the music business for his entire life, and he owns a studio called Ripple Effects.  He also used to make his living doing jingle work and stuff like that. Working with him has been awesome.

Strahl:  We were working on one of my favorite tunes on the album which was also the last one we wrote. At one point Bill said, "Try using this chord here.”  After I played it, I was like, "Oh, shit. That's so cool."

Wheeler:  What chord was that?

Strahl:  It's an E minor seven. Normally you just do a minor or a dominant seven or a major seven or anything, and the minor seven kind of has this ambiguity between the seven chord and the five chord, it kind of combines the different harmonic things.

Wheeler:  So, he really solved a logistical, creative problem at that point?

Strahl:  Yes.  Exactly.  I was having serious trouble with the song.  I knew where I wanted to take it, but I couldn’t figure it out when I played it.  Once he unlocked the riddle, I thought, “I never would have thought to put that chord right there.”

Strahl: But just that type of collaboration was so enjoyable on this album. Bill wrote 80% of the horn parts. And working with him on this process was incredible.  I’ve always been someone to say, “Nick (Mallers) you know drums better than I ever will, or Mitch (Millhoff) you’re a better bass player than I will ever be you know bass, so do your thing, and let’s all make this cooler. Make this song as good as it can be.”  They all really allowed this to feel more collaborative, and the album is so much better for it.  And especially Bill because he let me feel good about relinquishing control of things from a writing and arranging standpoint.

In the grand scheme of things people are worried about going to the grocery store… People are losing their jobs left and right… And I’m supposed to be over here saying, “Here! Buy my CD, man!”

Jon Strahl Tweet

As was the case on multiple occasions during that pre-Covid conversation, “relinquishing control” proved a prophetic bit of word selection.  It also proved symbolic in a much larger sense as well.  As he talked settling into his new life, he described that early upheaval as “being thrown back to the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy” and of his mental state locked into a “survival mode” akin to “becoming feral.”

When we spoke recently, as the talk of vaccinations and the pandemic’s end began to gather around us, Strahl once again reflected on the impact of upheaval.  Like his divorce years before, the pandemic’s disruption unnerved him, untethered his moorings.  But unlike that first emotional cataclysm, this one happened on a much safer harbor.  His home life is good. His girls are happy. He’s newly engaged. His band is solid.  There’s music in the can, and more music ready to be made.  When Jon Strahl finally picks up his guitar on the regular, he will still be the same technically masterful musician he was when we first featured him six years ago.  But when this Jon Strahl resumes work on the stage, he’s going to be the most authentic form of himself that he has maybe ever been.  This version of Strahl will carry more some exposed warts and maybe a few raw nerves.  But it’s all good.  Because that’s a story he can tell honestly in his music, with a band that’s going to make sure he tells it all was beautifully as possible, too.

On two separate days, I shadowed two college presidents at Indiana State University. One impressed me tremendously, mostly by not caring one bit what I thought about him. The other one ended up not impressing me at all, for all the worst reasons.

Editorial Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this web site are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of National Road Magazine, the NRM staff, nor any members of the team at Distinct.

Prologue:  The words below were originally written in early March of 2020.  Back then, my alma-mater, Indiana State University, had just released their hideous new athletic logo with great fanfare.  For me, it seemed yet another example of a university administration that had turned a deaf ear to average alumni and supporters.  My other example of this problem was a lot more personal, however.

Three years earlier, I worked an assignment for STATE Magazine covering the newly hired president, Deborah Curtis.  The short version of that story is this: I wrote an honest depiction of her going about one of her first days on the job.  She didn't like it, and she buried it.  Whatever.  Fine.  That happens.  If she would have reached out to me, walked me through her grievances, and told me why she couldn't endorse my profile, things would have been different.  I would still be salty, sure.  But there's something about a candid face-to-face moment that leads to legitimate closure, respect even.  Instead, she passed the matter off to a handler, who passed that to another handler, who passed that off to my editor.  Okay.  Chain of command.  I get it.  But it's Terre Haute, not Washington, D.C.

When I found out, first hand, the lengths she would go to control the narrative, I became conditioned to look at every campus controversy though the lens of the President's office.  What was her role in this?  I would ask myself.  The answer is always ambiguous.   Curtis is a master at taking center stage when the news is good and being nowhere in sight when it's not. 

On the day I was ready to publish this, the pandemic finally arrived.  My work had just shut down and many of my friends in the service sector were being laid off.  In that light, ranting about a logo  seemed woefully tone deaf.  So I shelved it.  When another day arrived, as I knew it would, I'd raise my points then.

Now, about 368 days later, that day is here. Watching the Greg Lansing drama unfold, my thoughts are returning to the school's president.  To her management style.  To her narcissism and her insecurity.  I've never met Lansing, so I don't know if he's a swell guy or an asshole.  I've heard both, but so what?  I've heard both about me, too [insert shoulder shrug].  I don't need to write a defense of Lansing, given that both Gregg Doyel and Todd Golden have done that quite well.

But any university's public display of dysfunction is ultimately a reflection of its leader.  Here is my experience with her.  Maybe I'm an anomaly.  Maybe (to paraphrase her words about me) I totally got her wrong, and the problem in my story is me.  That wouldn't be a first.  But something tells me, I'm not the lone member of the "Not Impressed Club" when it comes to the Sycamore president's leadership style.

Thus, in my opinion, ISU's current "time for a change" drama is a half-correct story.  It's definitely time for a change in Terre Haute, but it's not the basketball coach who needs to go.

March 6, 2020:

Loyal Indiana State University alums are Sisyphean figures.  Tragic protagonists stuck in a redundant saga, painfully rolling our boulders up the slope.  Occasionally, the ’79 boulder gets near the top, or ’86 stone rolls into the College World Series.  Most of the time, however, that great rock rolls back on top of us, down to the bottom.  We sigh.  We stare at the sky for a moment, maybe shake our fist a bit.  Then we plod down to the base of the slope, put our hands on the boulder, and we shoulder it back up the hillside.

In early March, with… let’s say… “moderate” celebration, my alma-mater publicly revealed its new athletic logo.  If you haven’t had the chance to see Indiana State University’s new design, I’ll spare you the hassle of looking it up and tell you right now that it’s bad.  In fact, it’s that special kind of bad that only seems to happen to us Sycamores. 

Social media blew up over it. Rather quickly, in fact, and rightfully so.  My favorite post was the mock-up meme showing Sycamore Sam (our school’s own fuzzy blue varmint that’s part squirrel, part ferret, part racoon, part lemur), wearing the logo as a pair of boots.  Hats also go off to whomever shared the meme presenting a bunch of preschoolers at the Crayon table as “The Graphics Design Team.”

Ignoring for a half-second that this is Indiana State University we’re talking about, all I can do is scratch my head when I try to figure out exactly what all those thousands of dollars (but probably more) bought.  Who signs off on this?  How does this happen?  A lot of folks blamed Under Armor (which is probably warranted).  Still more turned their ire to Athletic Director Sherard Clinkscales (which is also fair).  I, however, turned my attention to the white-haired woman on the stage.

I shadowed President Deborah Curtis early in her tenure, on something like her first… or third… or fifth day on the job.  I spent most of the day with her, sitting in her office as she acclimated herself to her digs.  I followed her across campus as she met with students in the commons.  I squatted on my haunches in a sound booth as she gave an interview to the school’s public radio affiliate.  And I had lunch with her as she spent 74 minutes talking about her biography, her philosophy, and her world view.

She wasn’t the only ISU president I spent a day with.  Seven months earlier, I sat the same office watching Daniel Bradley go through his routine on a bright June day in 2017.  Actually, the sun was more than “bright” that day, it was brilliant, euphoric even.  I remember staring out the windows often noticing the fluorescent green corona marking the edges of the leaves on the other side of the glass.  When I occasionally stepped outside, I turned my face upward and let the air envelope me.  It was a perfect symbiosis of man and environment.

The following January while Curtis spent her first (…or third …or fifth) day holding court over her advisory council, sub-freezing winds buffeted those now leafless branches, and spittles of snow rocketed sideways past the panes.  On the two occasions when we walked outdoors, I wrapped my coat collar around my jaw, sunk my head beneath the buttons, and wished myself anywhere…anywhere other than there.

Two different presidents. Two different days.  Even [three] years later, the Dickensian symbolism still resonates with me.

Where Bradley went about his day to the quiet ticking of the clock in the office, Curtis spoke as if every syllable was choreographed to a booming John Williams soundtrack in the background.

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A freelance writer for ISU’s STATE Magazine at the time, I had been tasked with an unconventional assignment.  Follow each leader by their coattails, observe all that goes on, and tell the story of the day.  Describe them as they were.

There were caveats, of course.  STATE was a university publication, and some degree of ass-kissing was woven into the job.  I was fine with it, however…and my editors were as well.  For the chance to publish something other than another lame, glowing “look how awesome we all are” piece…? For the opportunity to write something that didn’t read like a “safe” article in the local newspaper…?  We were all up for that.

Seeking inspiration and guidance I turned to the work of one of my friends.  For more than 20 years Esquire Magazine’s Tom Chiarella has galivanted around the country (sometimes the globe) chasing down big names for his own profiles.  Even though his Tom Brady experience was flat-out horrible1, the feature he wrote was brilliant, and it’s still my favorite Chiarella interview.  So, before I headed to Terre Haute, I read several of Tom’s pieces.  Then again, before my second trip back to the “high ground,” I read yet more of them. 

                        1—To this day, Chiarella has little good to say of Brady.

I thought of Tom and his work all the time when I wrote about that day with Bradley2.  Yes, mine is still a university piece, but I stand by its merit as an honest description of the day.  In fact, the only “dicey” part I had to remove was a quote describing him as a “micromanager.”  It’s true, by the way. He very much was a micromanager.  It’s also true that his tendency to obsess over small details annoyed and angered a lot of department chairs and professors …along with the occasional vice-president or two.  Whatever.  The man got results.  When, by all accounts, ISU’s enrollment should have slipped into the abyss, he shot it up to record highs.

2—I would provide a link to that piece, but ISU has apparently shut down that arm of its website.

The thing I remember most about my day with Bradley is that he worked like a “nuts and bolts” guy.  He answered emails, he went through the necessary rigamarole with visiting dignitaries, and he kept every meeting as short as possible.  He could make small talk. He just didn’t particularly want to.  He wasn’t gruff or rude about it.  He humored you when you brought up one of your favorite professors or what you were doing in the winter of ’793.  But Bradley also became gregarious if you asked him about his children and grandchildren.  Whether he gave you a polite, but mildly dismissive, nod or a vigorous handshake and a warm smile, none of it struck me as inauthentic.  Like I said, not everyone liked him.  That comes with the job. But everyone got the real him.

3—Mention “79” around any of us with an ISU pedigree, and we sprout a boner—even those of us who think Larry Bird is an asshole.

Deborah Curtis, on the other hand, was everything Dan Bradley was not.  To be fair, I didn’t dislike Curtis when I spent the day with her.  She was different than Bradley, but so what?  I pretty much expected that. Consequently, I thought her assertive sort of laughter was sincere.  I assumed her effusive voice, her flagrant hand-gesturing, and her booming volume were all a genuine reflection of someone who really loved the personal interaction that comes with the job.  I would love to tell you that something didn’t seem right about her.  That I somehow knew she wasn’t all that she made herself out to be, that she would sell ISU over the edge of the cliff if it meant making her look amazing the process.

I didn’t see any of that, of course.  Save for one rather odd moment4 during my lunchtime interview with her, nothing “pinged” on my sonar.

4—It’s probably best that I not go into detail about the comment she made during that lunchtime conversation.  

It's definitely time for a change in Terre Haute, but it's not the basketball coach who needs to go.

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Of all the moments I replay in my head when I think of those two days, one image I remember most happened when Bradley encountered some students on the way to an important meeting to talk about tuition rates.  He looked at the pair of passing young people and said “hello,” with all the enthusiasm of a retiree walking his dog.  It wasn’t dismissive.  It was just him.  I can’t help but compare that with Curtis who shook everyone’s hand as if she were Jack Nicholson portraying the Joker5.

5—“Whooo-hooo… It’s going to be hot time in old town tonight…”

Where Bradley was hyper-detail oriented, Curtis spoke in broad strokes.  Where Bradley went about his day to the quiet ticking of the clock in the office, Curtis spoke as if every syllable was choreographed to a booming John Williams soundtrack in the background.  Where Bradley was perfectly fine pissing you off, Curtis wanted you to worship her.  Where Bradley only cared about results, Curtis obsessed over perception.

I couldn’t tell you whether Bradley liked my piece on him or not.  I’m fine with that.  If he hated it, I imagine he read it, shrugged his shoulders, went on with day.  If he loved it, I’m betting he read it, shrugged his shoulders, and went on with his day.

I do know for a fact that Curtis hated my piece on her6.  I would share it with you, if I could.  That one, however, never made it to STATE’s web site.  And since it’s now the property of the university by contract, I can’t share my copy of it, either. 

6—I opened the piece with a melodramatic depiction of Daniel Bradley’s shadow looming in the room during her first (…or third …or fifth) day.  So yeah… dumb move on my part.

I still don’t know the exact reason why Curtis scrapped the whole day.  I do know that STATE eventually published a very safe, very vanilla interview, one written by her “Chief of Staff.”7  President Bradley got a mention in the piece.  She thanked him for “for everything [he] did to strengthen this institution and this community.”  Then she declared it was up to her to “pump up the volume…”  Whatever the hell that means.

7—I didn’t realize ISU needed a Chief of Staff, but…okay.

And now we have a new logo.  To the casual schmoe, all this anger over an ugly splotch of blue, white, and gray is kind of silly.  But it’s not the logo that has me upset.  The logo is just the hideous goiter on the skin, a festering wound desperately needing a Band-Aid.  What really sets me off of is tumor growing underneath.  A Keystone-Cops-shaped mass of incompetence and insecurity.

Despite the outcry, it looks like that hideous logo is here to stay.  The leaders have exerted their will, and they are writing the narrative that they want the rest of us to adhere to.  There’s nothing else for this Sycamore to do, except that thing all good Sycamores do.  Thus, do I put my hands on the boulder before me and begin rolling it up the slope.

Epilogue: When I wrote this last year, I discussed my draft with my former editor--who left ISU, citing Curtis' leadership style as reason number one.  Recently ISU's provost, Mike Licari, left Terre Haute for the top job at Austin Peay.  That was inevitable, regardless who the Sycamore trustees had chosen over him. 

But right now, amidst declining enrollments, increased turnover, and a global pandemic ISU should be circling some wagons.  Instead the school has let go of a coach who consistently made a school with a mostly woeful history competitive.  Terre Haute is a hard place to recruit.  ISU is a hard place to win.  And that's during the good times, when the people running the university know what they are doing and go about their day comfortable in their own skin.

One of those memes which seems to make a slam-dunk point is actually a grotesque false dichotomy and a symbol of how we distort logic in order to perpetuate suffering.

Editorial Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this web site are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of National Road Magazine, the NRM staff, nor any members of the team at Distinct.

According the Economic Policy Institute, if today's minimum wage had kept pace with inflation--specifically from 1968 forward--then the nation's lowest-paid workers would be pulling in $11.62 per hour (Michaels).  Salvatore Babones, writing for Inequality.org, takes umbrage with this number, however.  As he argues, "Using 1968 as our benchmark for the minimum wage implies that low-wage Americans today should be making just as much as low-wage Americans were making 44 years ago.  That benchmark is — frankly — ridiculous" (Babones).  Instead, Babones suggests that we should model the minimum wage according the actual amount of real money flowing in the current economy, or--as he calls it-- the "overall income growth in the American economy."  The net result of that calculation is staggeringly different: a hourly wage sitting just over $21 per hour.  I thought of this often-overlooked part of our national minimum wage debate as I viewed the meme below.  On its face, the meme--like all memes--appears to be a slam-dunk.  But also like all memes, it's a deceptive bit of shell-gaming and propaganda that distorts one message and leaves out an argument that is much more important.

A Long-Raging Debate

Like a host of similar memes, this image draws its relevance from the country's long-running debate over whether every American worker who puts in 40 honest hours on the clock has earned the right to a basic standard of living.  The argument, as supporters of the wage increase claim, is that everyone who shows up on time, does their work, and contributes to society is entitled to at least a safe home, three meals a day, and a basic opportunity to get further in life.  They support this argument by citing that many people living on the current minimum wage must file for government support and face terrible burdens in the event of illness in many cases along with expensive mechanical breakdowns.

Opponents counter with two points.  One, they argue, is that many minimum wage jobs are, by design, not meant to employ primary income earners.  The wage is meant for teenagers and secondary earners who are trying to gain supplemental dollars, valuable work and life experience, or both.  Further, they point out that most wage providers are small businesses, operations which cannot afford to absorb the impact of raising the minimum wage over 100% of its current value.  Such an increase, they argue, will be passed on to their customers, either in the form of increased prices or curtailed services.  Either way, the debate itself continues to work itself closer to the front of the national stage.  And given that the last federal increase dates back to 2009, the odds that the discussion will escalate seem almost certain.

Like a host of similar memes, this image draws its relevance from the country's long-running debate over whether every American worker who puts in 40 honest hours on the clock has earned the right to a basic standard of living.

Donovan Wheeler Tweet

Fallacies Everywhere

On its face, the meme is suggesting that hourly workers at places such as McDonalds should just keep quiet and be thankful for what they have.  By comparing their outrage--as captured in the meme's image of angry fast food worker holding protest signs--to the noble sacrifice of the solitary EMT worker--depicted inside an ambulance holding his head in despair--the meme is saying that: "If the EMT is willing do something more noble than 'burger-flipping' and go about his work with quiet dignity, then why can't fast-food workers do the same?"

It's a terribly flawed argument for more than one reason.

Firstly, the ad-hominem attack against hourly food-service workers as "burger-flippers" carries a range of biased assumptions: that they are lowly, unskilled workers not worthy of the basic right to demand a bigger piece of McDonalds' pie.  The insult ignores the fact that most of these employees routinely went to work during the darkest days of the pandemic, and that they exposed themselves for poverty wages, while Americans making comfortable salaries safely waited for their food in the security of the drive-thru line.

Secondly, the meme creates a false dichotomy.  By comparing the EMT worker to food-service workers, the meme is suggesting that the issue on the table is not the depressed wages across the board, rather it's saying that the issue is the food-workers' collective ingratitude.  That the middle class is disappearing is not an issue.  The sense of entitlement and the very arrogance of hourly workers, however...?  That's the issue the meme turns us to.

What About the EMT?

Perhaps the best way to underscore the problem with the false dichotomy in the above meme is to replace that dichotomy with a different one.  Namely this:  What if the meme compared the forlorn EMT to a cardiac surgeon, or a neurologist, or an accident attorney?  If we change the framing of the message, then the very message itself changes as a result.  Instead of poo-pooing a horde of food-service workers for their indulgent sense of entitlement, we are now asking a much more fundamental question:  Why in the world are we paying EMT's--people who literally hold others' lives in their hands--such paltry wages? 

As a high school teacher, I consider my work important.  I won't lie and say that I don't swell with pride when a student goes off to college, and then reaches out to me to tell me that they felt ready for the writing they faced at the university level.  But on my best day, when I am doing my most important work, my value pales compared to the EMT.  If the day comes (and let's all pray it never does) when we need that Emergency Medical Technician, that individual will be the most important person in our lives.  I am perfectly comfortable embracing a massive wage increase for the nation's EMT workers.  They should be making at least twice what I am making, if not thrice.

Clearly, the meme's decision to side-step that issue underscores the real message in the image.  By dividing one underpaid group of a American workers against another, the collective attention is therefore diverted from arguably the rightful target of that rage: the powers that be who suppress wages across the board.  The meme's real message is, therefore, a pro-corporate, pro-big business message.  McDonald's wins.  Their employees do not, the legion of EMT workers do not, and the crash victim on the side of the highway lies in greater risk than she would in a different world.

By dividing one underpaid group of a American workers against another, the collective attention is therefore diverted from arguably the rightful target of that rage

Donovan Wheeler Tweet

The Real Argument in the Meme

In his popular podcast series, American History Tellers, host Lindsey Graham (not that Lindsey Graham) said, upon the conclusion of his series covering the Gilded Age, that the strife between labor and management has been the central narrative of our history for the last two centuries.  Even as far back as the 1880's, when robber barons held levels of wealth comparable to those held by the current top 1%, the mass of human labor who actually built this country felt angry.  And like many angry laborers today, they split into two factions: one turning their rage to the wealthy elite, the other turning that ire to fellow laborers whom they deemed "beneath" them.  This inability to get everyone on the same page, turning their outrage to the same target, has been the secret to this nation's perpetuation of the feudal oligarchy who wants to keep running it.  Rather than bond together and use their collective power to make the world better, the American middle class is turning on each other.  If the meme above did one thing well, it was in capturing that toxic sentiment.

Image Credit: "Fast food strike and protest for a $15/hour minimum wage at a McDonalds restaurant" by Fibonacci Blue is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Featured Image Credit: "Dollar" by Images_of_Money is licensed under CC BY 2.0

Before I went to Sweden I considered myself an American from Indiana. Since returning home, I realize that instead I'm a Hoosier first.

By will of birth I entered this world a Hoosier.  By will of death I will probably leave as one, too.  For most of my life I never thought that much about being a Hoosier.  Actually, for most of my life, I never thought about it at all.

On second thought, that’s not exactly true.

In the college sense, I thought about it all the time.  Growing up in the ‘70s and ‘80’s, that was all any of us could do.  I was born in Lafayette, and both of my parents were Boilermakers at the time.  Those are a different sort of Hoosiers.  They spend a lot of time dwelling on science and math.  They also used to send brave souls to the Moon and great quarterbacks to the NFL.  If you ask them, they’ll tell you they’re witty people, too, and a few of them are.  A few of them.

Fans who grew up singing along with Martha the Mop Lady went to their graves firmly believing that Bob Knight was a stern but loving mentor who taught his players how to be responsible men in later life.

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State Identity on the Hardwood

Regardless, thanks to my parents, I grew up in this little fortress of black and gold surrounded by entire neighborhoods proudly sporting cream and crimson.  A few folks, like my parents, picked a side because once you’ve trodden upon your school’s cobblestones for a semester or two, you’re tethered to the place for the rest of your waking life. 

It’s a strong loyalty, stronger than marriage for most of us.  When the Purdue board of trustees handed over control of Mom and Dad’s beloved school to the whims of a mean little man, they remained true to Old Purdue.  Even in my own case, when my own alma mater, Indiana State, handed over control to a mean little woman, I too remained loyal to my Sycamores.  That’s just how it works.

Students and alumni, however, were the smallest pack in that college, statewide fight.  The rest of the devotees—a teeming horde of millions—adopted the teams their parents rooted for.  They did it without conscious thought.  Somewhere in the fog of infancy the little red-and-white rattle became a child’s hoodie.  Then it transformed into the dangling pennant in the bedroom beside the Heather Thomas poster.  By middle age, it had become a row of matching barstools next to the basement kegerator. 

Entire world views were shaped in those cribs as well.  Fans who grew up singing along with Martha the Mop Lady went to their graves firmly believing that Bob Knight was a stern but loving mentor who taught his players how to be responsible men in later life.  Their rivals, who spent their own youths humming along with Tuba Man in his dusty attic, grew up convinced that Knight deserved nothing better than a jail sentence for his behavior.

...most of the people with whom I share this land, are not people who share my values. As an American I can ignore them. As a Hoosier, I can’t do that.

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A Hoosier in the Broadest Sense

During all of that time, time spent up to my eyeballs in college rivalry melodrama, I didn’t think that much about what it meant to be a real Hoosier.

And after all the college drama fizzled.  After Knight got fired…  After Gene Keady “retired”…  After the NBA style offense ruined whatever was fun about college basketball to begin with… After all of that, I still thought of myself less as a Hoosier and more as an American, who happens to have lived all of his life in Indiana.

This is a significant distinction, I think.  And it was a distinction that never occurred to me until I finally hopped on a plane and flew somewhere else. 

I only spent six days in Sweden, and last year I wrote quite a lot about that week on the other side of the water.  And as smitten as I was with the convenience of their trains and the fluid beauty of their language, I think the thing I most envied was their innate comfort with their sense of identity. 

My American conditioning, I realized had also skewed the way I looked at Europe.  I had always thought about them both in a continental sense.  Just as I saw myself at home, I arrived in Växjö feeling as if I were around a city full of Europeans who happened to live in Sweden.  But I figured out very quickly that the good people going about their day under those perpetually gray skies, and walking to and from work in that permanent winter humidity which surrounded them… I realized that those were folks who were proud of their birthright.  They were Swedes, who happened to live in Europe.

I saw that pride in every golden, Nordic cross hanging inside of the hundreds of flags adorning every street corner.  I saw it in every mid-morning fika session, in one coffee shop after another.  And I saw it in the energy swirling around our hotel on the night the national soccer team squared off against Spain.  It was an international energy every bit as comparable as the interstate energy in, say, an early ‘90’s showdown between IU and Kentucky—when rabid fans assigned the balance of their emotional capital on the fate of Damon Bailey’s three-point shot and Jamal Mashburn’s moves under the basket.

Since my return to Indiana, I see my state differently.  It’s a difference that comes with its own set of complications.  Over the span of three decades we have all traded our heated arguments over a Bob Knight for an even more hostile fight over a new tribal leader.  The old Sunday feuds after an Oaken Bucket game ended by dinner, with a grunt or a shrug, and the certainty that next year awaited.  But now, instead of belonging to the Boilers or IU, we now belong to the Elephants or the Donkeys.

The difference in that identity shift is stark: Now we really hate each other.  We very much distrust each other. We are all Hoosiers in the broadest sense, but we value our tribes much more than the state lines which ought to unite us.  We are one.  We are “us” and “them.”  It’s a frustrating paradox.

I certainly wasn’t in Sweden long enough to know how passionate citizens sort out their paradoxes as they metaphorically swaddle themselves in the blue and gold of their flag.  As someone who almost always votes for the side that loses in this new rivalry, I have found that metaphorically wrapping myself in the blue and gold of my homeland’s flag comes with the complicated acceptance that most of the people with whom I share this land, are not people who share my values.  As an American I can ignore them.  As a Hoosier, I can’t do that.

If you’re a real Hoosier, you don’t gripe about the winter. You buy good boots, a warm coat, and you enjoy the muffled wall of silence conjured up the flakes which are blessing your homeland.

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Right now, however, I can take a break from the hostility.  Right now, the weather unites us.  Standing in my driveway, shovel in hand, I took my mind back across the Atlantic.  Sixteen months after traipsing across southern Sweden—almost a foot of snow is falling on the Hoosier earth in my yard.  I suppose that’s one thing we have in common with the Swedes: if you’re going to live somewhere where the winter always comes, you either embrace that winter and savor the quiet that comes with a thick snowfall, or else you curse the cosmic dice that birthed you here, instead of Florida or California.

Well, let it snow.  Every few winters or so it happens around here, and if you’re a real Hoosier, you don’t gripe about it.  You buy good boots, a warm coat, and you enjoy the muffled wall of silence conjured up in the flakes which are blessing your homeland.

Tim McLaughlin, of Hapless Guitar Photography, launches his video series chronicling what's going on among the artists, creators, and musicians in the Greater Indy scene.  In episode #1, McLaughlin sits down with filmmaker, editor, director, and guitarist Bubba Fontaine.

https://youtu.be/zzVmjH144A8

Ross Hollow's Fine is a clever collection of tunes crisscrossing multiple styles and genres.

Ross Hollow’s Fine tackles the biggest elephant in everyone’s room. Released last October, the band’s second full-length album calls out our collective tendency to tell the biggest lie on social media: that we’re all just “fine.”  Even before the pandemic, our Facebook and Instagram accounts became the places where most of us spent the last decade sorting out who we were going to “be” online.  Some folks opted to share every minute of their divorce depositions.  Most, however, took the opposite tack: sharing curated snapshots of bright yellow finches or "happy" Zoom get-togethers while quietly enduring depression, battling anxiety, going through chemotherapy, or lamenting the loss of a loved one.

https://youtu.be/UTUsGuZUjAg

The timing of this record couldn’t be more fitting.  In the wake of the intermittent shutdowns and closures, COVID has forced too many of us to reckon with the dark underbelly of our social lives.  Going out every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoon sure seemed like the epitome of folks who making the most of their limited times in their mortal coils.  But all that time away from the brewpubs and amphitheaters also forced us to realize that we were using too many nights out, and too much booze, to deal with the reality that we weren’t 100% comfortable inside our own heads. 

Fine lives up to Ross Hollow’s self-billing as a “multi-genre” band.  Stylistically, the songs range from rock anthems to 60’s surfing tunes to the blues to swinging country tracks.  The production quality is pristine.  Each track is sharp, and the range of instrumentation layers well with snappy melodies and the thoughtful lyricism.

When the curtains of quarantine are finally lifted, spending one of those Friday or Saturday’s checking out the band is completely worth the time.  In the meantime, please consider supporting the band with something more than a few Spotify spins.  Consider buying Fine or their freshman album, Horizon.  You can also “tip” the band via Venmo or PayPal.

Venmo: @rosshollow

https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/rosshollow

Fine forces the attentive listener to accept the reality that life is messy, and that we all struggle.  Sometimes the most basic shit is the most impossible shit.  Sometimes it’s all we can do to open up that doctor’s bill, get online, and pay the damn thing.  Admitting that, Ross Hollow shows us, is perfectly okay.  In fact, it’s completely and utterly fine.

Keep a lookout for our in-depth profile on Ross Hollow, coming this spring.

Featured Image Credit:  Photo by Greg Kicinski of Greg Kicinski Photography

Editorial Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this web site are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of National Road Magazine, the NRM staff, nor any members of the team at Distinct.

by Donovan Wheeler
photos by Rich Voorhees
and Tim McLaughlin

I have only been to The Jazz Kitchen twice. Admitting this is embarrassing. After all, Tad Robinson is a friend of mine, and I live five minutes from his house. I’ve seen him perform here in Greencastle some two or three dozen times in the last decade, but I’ve never followed him to Indy for a Kitchen gig.

In my defense, my interest in both jazz and the blues have been casual. In the case of the latter, I listen to the blues because Tad got me interested in it, as did other friends such as Jon Strahl, Paul Holdman, and Rebekah Meldrum. As for jazz, I developed my taste for that thanks to the recent work of guitarists like Indy’s Charlie Ballantine. Before the pandemic ended my school year, I graded more than one batch of essays listening to the likes of Bill Frisell and my new favorite: Julian Lage. As I said, it’s a casual interest. But had I never gone to the Jazz Kitchen, I doubt I would even have that.

My first visit to that SoBro joint finally happened in the summer of ’18. Inspired by Ballantine’s work on Life is Brief—his Bob Dylan tribute collection—my wife, our close friends, and I snagged four tickets for the band’s early set. Everything about the place impressed me back then. The close-quartered feel of the dining room, the enveloping darkness, the rug under our feet, the narrow doors—leading you to yet more narrow doors—in order to find the restroom… all of that exuded a kind of “back in the day” charm which has been getting more difficult to find.

And when Ballantine plucked his strings—and when his wife, saxophonist Amanda Gardier, belted out her leads and soft harmonies—the sound cascaded off the walls with a velvety clarity you just can’t hear in the Hi-Fi or in Bloomington’s Bluebird. The Jazz Kitchen, I realized, was like those low-ceilinged casinos on Vegas’ Freemont Street: a place where serious people go to savor serious work. It’s a place to get away from the loudmouths and buffoons.

The experience was so powerful, that it even rewired my thinking about Bob Dylan. To be fair, I was also never an avid Dylan fan. But in the two years since that evening, whenever I hear any other cover of “Don’t Think Twice,” I unconsciously assume it’s a knock off of the rendition Brandon Whyde sang on that Kitchen stage next to Ballantine, Gardier, and company.

Maybe it was because, like us, he was enjoying a live gig for the first time in an epoch. Or maybe it was because the teacher in Buselli is wired so deeply into his DNA, that he exudes that role in front of the microphone. Whatever the reason, I felt it, and I connected with it. -Photo by Rich Voorhees of Voorhees Studio, Inc.

Emotional Object Permanence

Tucked in my rolodex of happy memories, that night is certainly a good one.  And while good memories matter to us because of their emotional currency, the best memories matter even more because of their vector.

We’re always thinking about our lives according to trajectory—the heights we’re climbing or the valleys into which we plummet.  As a barometer of sorts, our ups and downs are nice because they can give us perspective.  When life goes to shit, we can remember the good times.  When life feels pristine, we think of the shit, and appreciate the good days all the more…or at least we say that to others.  The problem with this thinking is that it almost always replaces the more important part of our lives—the stuff that’s always right there.

We can grasp the object permanence of a rocking chair on the front porch, but we can’t seem to apply the same conceptual understanding to our own lives.  A strong gust of wind catches the top of the chair and scoots the tips of the runners into the cleft of mortar between the house’s bricks.  That’s fine.  We notice it.  We put the chair back in its proper spot, and life goes on.  Despite the wind, the chair never changed its hue, nor its balance, nor its ability to support our weight and lull us into a soft afternoon coma while the sun saturates our cheeks.

Like a lot of folks, my pandemic experience has been one largely of emotional inconvenience.  Meanwhile, my life’s object-permanence held steady: My income remained steady and I didn’t get sick. And in one case life even improved: I married my fiancée of five years. By all rational accounts, I should have risen every morning, checked the “chair on my porch," put it back in place when it moved a smidge one way or the other, and counted my blessings that it never blew over collapsed into kindling.

That’s not what I did, however.  Of course, it wasn’t. 

The Jazz Kitchen [is] a place where serious people go to savor serious work. It’s a place to get away from the loudmouths and buffoons.

The Worst Kind of Funk

Instead, I let myself slip into a funk.  I feel embarrassed to even admit it.  I mean, I’ve been in real funks before.  I’ve faced divorce, bankruptcy, foreclosure, a dying parent, and a cancer diagnosis…all in a five-year span.  But when you’re facing a crisis that is physically existential, and one that’s going down in a very busy, very fast-moving world, the speed of the rapids washes over you.  So, you deal with it. You face each oncology visit, each lawyer meeting, each “celebration of life” with the same seat-of-the-pants orthodoxy that got you through grad school.

In a fast-moving world, a funk is an abrasion.  It hurts like a motherfucker…no doubt about that.  But it eventually scabs over, itches for a while, scars a bit, and gets better.  In a stalled world, however, a funk is an infection.  Painful in the center, gangrenous around the edges, and causing fever everywhere else.

I returned to the Jazz Kitchen shaking off the lingering vestiges of an infectious funk.  It snuck upon me in those first warm days of the pandemic.  I had just celebrated running National Road Magazine for five years, patting myself on the back for every interview, each editorial, and all those little Vignettes. I had even wrapped up our first series of local music awards.  The feedback had been positive, and the support was strong.  By late January, local artists like Chad Mills and Keller&Cole dropped their newest batch of singles and albums, and my whiteboard filled up with interview targets and future story ideas. As the cliché goes, big things were ahead. 

But when March turned into a warm April followed by a hot May and sweltering June, the once Friday evening IPA became a mid-afternoon Old Fashioned.  I pushed the keyboard farther away. I tried to get into the Facebook livestreams and the virtual house concerts.  I just couldn’t.

So, I fidgeted about the house, stripping and staining the deck, cleaning the pool three times a week, mowing the yard until the drought had turned the grass to cinder.  The only successful thing I could do was the one thing I absolutely did NOT want to do: get hopelessly lost inside my head.  Once there, I turned over the cognitive tumblers packed with memories of old resentments, embarrassing gaffes—all of it wrapped up in insecurity and bow-tied with obsessive narcissism.  Slowly and steadily, I made myself irritable and lazy and apathetic.

As it happens—as it always happens, I think—on the morning before my return to the Jazz Kitchen, all of my angst spilled out during a spontaneous conversation with a wise colleague at work.  In fifteen minutes, she listened to me and effortlessly showed me how to flip off the recurring movie in my head which had plagued me.  And ten hours later, feeling better than I had in months, I walked back into the Kitchen.

We can grasp the object permanence of a rocking chair on the front porch, but we can’t seem to apply the same conceptual understanding to our own lives.

Back to The Jazz Kitchen

When I passed the ticket attendant and rounded the bar—a once tucked-away feature that now stood as featured bookend to the stage—I was moved less by the remodeled improvements than I was by the immediate feeling that I was returning to a world that harbored me.  One that protected me. 

And yes, the improvements are grand.  The new Jazz Kitchen showcases a perfect blending of the modern open-concept while retaining much of the closed-in vibe that gives the place its “charm.”  It’s further impressive given all the ways that a remodel could have gone wrong.  I could have walked into the gleaming, fluorescent hell of a sanitized “Aldi’s for music lovers.” Likewise, I could have sat myself down in a bastardized “rustic-prefab” sporting “wood that looks like plastic.”  Instead, I saw an interior which showcased what had always been hiding in front of us.  The Jazz Kitchen grew into an even better version of its old, glorious self.

Framing my return to the Kitchen was Amanda Gardier, sharing center stage with trumpeter Mark Buselli.  Fronting an ensemble comprised of Ball State music faculty, Buselli impressed me with his authentic balance of humility and professionalism.  He wasn’t up there to “own” anything, and while he more than once deftly removed himself from the spotlight for his bandmates’ solos, the vibe he seemed to cast our way felt welcoming—a tone of accommodation.  Maybe it was because, like us, he was enjoying a live gig for the first time in an epoch.  Or maybe it was because the teacher in Buselli is wired so deeply into his DNA, that he exudes that role in front of the microphone.  Whatever the reason, I felt it, and I connected with it.

To Buselli’s right, Gardier spent the night delivering another impeccable performance.  To say that Gardier is captivating is an understatement.  Her technical precision combined with her easy-going aesthetic makes it hard not to zero-in on her.  Of all the musicians in the Indy scene—across any genre—who people look to as model for the future of local music, she’s the lead ambassador.

Her technical precision combined with her easy-going aesthetic makes it hard not to zero-in on her. Of all the musicians in the Indy scene—across any genre—who people look to as model for the future of local music, she’s the lead ambassador.  Photo by Tim McLaughlin of Hapless Guitar Photography

Joining the group were brothers Joel and Nick Tucker working strings and Cassius Goens III at the drums.  Joel, seated under his guitar, played with an air of technical deliberateness.  It was a style that juxtaposed nicely with his brother’s fluid, loose-shouldered movements beside the upright bass.

But of all the folks on that stage, I found myself most interested in Freddie Mendoza’s work on the trombone.  The native Texan spoke briefly when he introduced his own tune—one of my favorites of the night dubbed “El Jefe”—but most of what I got from him was the nonverbal exchange that always happens in a gig.  Every bit as professional, and every bit as sharp, as his bandmates, Mendoza carried himself in a way that spoke to me as if he were someone going through his own journey and making his own peace with the isolating nature life’s turns. 

Maybe I totally misread him up there.  Maybe it was just me projecting my own emotional place on him, but for whatever reason, everything about Mendoza’s work on that Kitchen stage felt like an extension of that conversation I’d had that morning.  My colleague helped me verbalize and articulate all the things that were toxifying me, and Mendoza let me take some long, slow breaths, allowing the poison to seep out of my system.

I don’t know why serendipity works out like it does, and I further don’t know what is about music—more so than a night at a Pacers’ game or in the multi-plex—that helps us come a moment of closure.  But at a very specific moment in my life, when I needed to zip up a long-neglected wound, Mark Buselli’s ensemble helped me do just that.  I still don’t have a word to describe what the hell was wrong with me.  But do think I can say that jazz is word that describes one way to cure it.

Featured Image Credit:  Rich Voorhees of Voorhees Studio, Inc.

Voorhees Studio, Inc.

In the waning minutes of Greencastle’s final First Friday, I was all but done with them.  Now, I’d drop everything to attend one again.

Editorial Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this web site are solely those of the original authors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of National Road Magazine, the NRM staff, nor any members of the team at Distinct.

Last year, on what would have been every single First Friday, the weather was spectacular.  I know this for a fact, because, on each one of those days, I took very specific note of the skies above me. 

My observation comes with a modicum of irony, too.  In the waning hours of the final First Friday event I attended—probably back in September of 2019—I had decided I was done with them.

I loved those Fridays in the early years.  Back then, when they were confined to the courthouse block of Franklin Street, they carried an “adultness” to them.  Yes, we talked through the music—treating it too often like ambient sound.  And yes, we all drank too much.  But when we celebrated the last call in The Swizzle Stick and cheered for War Radio’s final tune of the night, we left happy.

Somewhere along the way, however, First Friday changed.  By that last edition it had become “The County Fair with Beer.”  Instead of celebrating the end of each long month in the intimacy of The Swizzle sharing laughs with some of our best friends, we sauntered to our vehicles at 11:15 watching the town square fizzle into a ghost town.  Most of it ruined by a handful of loud-mouths who got themselves white-girl-wasted on Michelob Ultra an hour before midnight and then convinced themselves they could slur their way through a fistfight.

Then the virus showed up.

It’s true that we only seem to appreciate what we’ve had after we’ve lost it.  When I grabbed our family’s take-out on what would have been last April’s big event, I was saddened.  But that sadness was still tempered by a now-silly dose of optimism.  The one thing that got all of us through that bleak April was that we all knew—just knew—that we’d be reveling again by July.  But when that July Friday finally arrived…?  Well, that was when we knew—just knew—that there would be no First Friday’s for the rest of the year.

Somewhere along the way, however, First Friday changed.  By that last edition it had become “The County Fair with Beer.”

Nowhere did that hit me more fully than a couple weeks ago, sitting at my favorite corner spot in Greencastle’s Tap House.  Working my way through my pint of Indiana City’s Tribute, I listened as Ben, my bartender, waxed poetic about the death of the town’s once blossoming bar culture.  Ben’s been around for a long time.  For years he worked at Greencastle’s primary college bar, The Fluttering Duck.  And while the good times there were good times indeed, he talked more about the days before then, when he clocked in shifts at The Rock House.

When you’re trying to straddle life in a town populated by two extremes—folks who haven’t stepped out of their houses since last March and people who mockingly stare you down with their unmasked grins—a bar with lots of space becomes a godsend.

Long time locals know the city’s iconic basement hangout by a slew of other names.  It was Hathaway’s when I arrived here in the late ’90’s.  In the years that followed it took on a half-dozen monikers, and my own happiest bar memories happened when a band of former students owned it and dubbed it Hoods and Capers.  Ben’s heyday went down a few years before that, when hundreds of townies flocked there to escape the woes of the emerging Great Recession.  The tips were in cash, and they were generous.

As we chatted, I looked around me.  My group (part of my “COVID Crew” of close friends) had hunkered around that aforementioned corner of the bar.  At the far end, with a dozen empty seats between us, a couple of regulars nursed light beers and watched NBA highlights—dazzling displays of athletic prowess performed in front of empty seats and cardboard depictions of Macaulay Culkin.

Don’t get me wrong on this.  We were actually grateful that the place was sparse.  When you’re trying to straddle life in a town populated by two extremes—folks who haven’t stepped out of their houses since last March and people who mockingly stare you down with their unmasked grins—a bar with lots of space becomes a godsend. Even a week later, when the joint was filled up, we still found a place to distance ourselves, thankfully grabbing the leather seats arranged on the other side of the “legal-age” divider.

I turned my eyes to the spot in the corner, where three years ago Will Scott brought his own set-list of original tunes to a couple of packed houses on a pair of Tuesday nights.  Yes, once upon a time that was a thing.

As we sat there, I closed my eyes for a second and listened for those echoes of the past.  Of course, I could hear all the recent First Fridays. I could hear the cover band just outside the then open windows warbling and wailing “Purple Rain” and “Livin’ on Prayer.”  But when I let my mind sink further into the past, I could hear better rhythms in the echoes.  That’s when I turned my eyes to the spot in the corner, where three years ago Will Scott brought his own set-list of original tunes to a couple of packed houses on a pair of Tuesday nights.  Yes, once upon a time that was a thing.

But even back then, in the midst of that last good heyday of the Greencastle scene, many of us worried that it could easily collapse.  We all knew there were one (or maybe two) too many restaurants for a town Greencastle’s size.  There was a lot of talk about supporting them with out-of-town patrons.  And in fairness to that argument, travelling customers did seem to be the new thing.  Most of us have multiple anecdotal examples—one of mine being the random family from Brownsburg who handed over their bar seats in a crowded Wasser as they prepared to drive home.

“This place is neat,” the elderly Brownsburgian who’d come with his adult kids, announced to me.  “We’re definitely coming back!”

One or two weeks later: “Enter Coronavirus.”

So, when this great global nightmare is over… or different… or evolved… whatever… When we’re on the other side of this thing, I don’t know which doors will still be open and which ones will be shuttered.  It’s both an element of human nature and an unofficial requirement for Greencastle citizenship to sit around and speculate about the town and each other.  So yes, we’ve talked among ourselves.  I won’t tell you what we’ve guessed.  I will tell you that we don’t want anyone to go down.  We don’t want anyone to lose.

When we’re on the other side of this thing, I don’t know which doors will still be open and which ones will be shuttered.

But right now, holding on to the idea that COVID will fade out of the headlines seems a naïve fantasy.  It remains equally naïve to think that the DePauw community will return, that the live bands will come back this way from Indy, and that the beers and good cheer and laughter will return.

But hope does indeed spring eternal.  And if the next First Friday comes back, even in a dialed-back form, a smaller version resembling its roots…?  That won’t be a bad thing.  And if it resumes as it was…?  That’s fine, too.  All I know is that I can’t wait to get back to noisy crowds.  To flowing suds.  To laughs and jokes.  To good times with missing friends.  Hell, at this point I’ll even tap my foot to crappy cover tune, so long as it’s not anything by Bon Jovi.  I’ll need two more pandemics in order to look forward to that.

Photo Credit: "Pint of 90 Shilling Amber Ale" by mfajardo is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Notes from The Edge:

The Chronicles of my Social Distancing amid the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic

Thursday, March 19th

[dropcap]S[/dropcap]leeping in has become part of the new routine, though there are varying definitions of what that means in our house. I’m up today around 9:30, which seems to be the running average for me, but my two older sons are easily stretching it out to late morning, even early afternoon, and today is no different. Perhaps sleeping in is a defense mechanism, or a natural process, getting us to revert to our ancient circadian rhythms that we’ve been destroying since the harnessing of fire.

I can barely get any work done. ISU’s system gets slower and slower by the day as it gets overwhelmed by traffic. Simply submitting a grade takes up to five minutes, not nanoseconds. Maybe it’s because of my proximity to campus. I don’t know enough about the internet to make an educated guess, or really care at this point.

As has been usual of late, I’m doing a horrible job of avoiding the news. None of it’s good. I spend most of the day working, then read Donovan Wheeler’s excellent piece on locally supporting those who are feeling the economic breakdown.

Mid-afternoon my seventh grader heads over to my sister-in-law’s house to erect her ping pong table outside, under an old pool shelter in her back yard. We’re taking the sport outdoors, a combination of exercise and fresh air. There’s talk of a tournament between the seven of us. I find myself consciously going out to the porch and just breathing, taking solace that I’m not confined by real walls for a moment, though imaginary ones are already being erected at the edges of my lot.

Over Christmas, I bought one of my friends a tactical throwing tomahawk, because he’s hard to buy for (the most content people usually are), and I consider buying one for myself, for when it all goes full Thunder Dome. I don’t think it will come to that, but I mentally earmark some funds for the axe anyway. At the very least it could be fun to throw it into a tree stump or something. It seems very American at the moment.

Keto is quickly falling by the wayside as we search for all the creature comforts we can find, which I hope lasts. Tonight it’s good old frozen pizza, a luxury if you’ve ever known the carb and sugar embargo you must enforce during Keto. I’ll get back on that horse sooner than later, I tell myself, knowing full well it’s probably not true.

Again, the television is our family hearth in the evening. I teach a research and writing course at ISU that focuses on American Popular Culture and I can’t shake my teacher-role, even at home with the kids. We’ve burned through the filmography of Wes Anderson in less than a week, so it’s on to the films of John Hughes, starting tonight with Sixteen Candles.  As we watch, I’m reminded of two things.

First, though I didn’t think it at the time, the 80's were damn good to me. The sprawling suburbia of the Hughes Universe reminds me of my own experiences in the suburbs of Dayton, Ohio, riding bikes in a gang of middle-schoolers during summers where the days just bled together.

The second thing that strikes me is that this movie would never be made today. Long Duck Dong, anyone? Sometimes we get so caught up in political correctness and self-victimization that we suck all the fun out of life. We’re horribly judgmental creatures. We even have to laugh at John Hughes behind closed doors, for fear of reprisal. Oh well. Maybe tomorrow night we’ll spend a Saturday in detention at Shermer High School. Go Bulldogs!

Friday, March 20th

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]ne week down, and according to the President one week to go, though anyone who believes that shit is delusional, or just a plain old denier. The same people who deny climate change and the fact that flying a confederate flag is racist. I’ve decided to become a sort of denier myself. I’m going to deny the fact that Trump is in charge. I’m making Dr. Anthony Fauci my de facto President, since he seems to be the only voice of reason within the actual President’s orbit. And why not deny? If it’s good for the goose, fight fire with fire, etc. Sometimes denying others seems the only kind of discourse people are willing to engage in. It’s hard to fathom how childish people on both ends of the political spectrum are about everything. They’re sitting in opposite corners, holding their breath until they get what they want, which neither will. I may have to follow our fearless editor’s lead and just give up on the two major parties.

I can’t really get into working. It has nothing to do with technology or being at home. It has everything to do with the fact that I feel paralyzed. Paralyzed by the videos of people packing beaches, parks, and hiking trails. Paralyzed by news of brawls at distant Costco stores. And, by mid-morning, the news comes down that the first case of Covid-19 has been identified in Putnam County. But, we all knew it was coming, me and the deniers. And we know there are probably hundreds of cases out there, on our doorsteps. But many still go about their business, and their pleasure, like it’s all a hoax. That’s probably easier than admitting narcissism or the possibility you might value money more than someone else’s life. And my own circle is not immune to the oblivious approach. I get word that some of my extended family in Illinois, all forever-Trumpers, are planning to throw a cocktail party for their friends. It seems the cure, for many, is a blind eye. I’ll be praying for this lot.

But what the hell? As of 5:00 p.m. today, I’ll officially be on Spring Break. I won’t be in Canada, as planned, though Canada is looking saner by comparison by the minute. But, I am planning to take the time to take a real break. I’ve often lamented my schedule out loud and in the digital pages of this very publication. The endless practices, games, school concerts, math bowl competitions, ballet recitals, pickups, drop offs, rushed dinners, dinners in the car, late nights grading, the commute to Terre Haute, the commute home, and the list could go on ad infinitum. I always wished that I could just be home, with nowhere to go. Now, in a biological twist of fate, I have just that. And there’s no telling for how long. Spring Break. Spring Break forever, y’all.

[author title="About Patrick Barcus" image="https://gyrewide.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/barcus.jpg?w=162&h=227"]Patrick Barcus holds an MFA from Butler University and teaches writing at Indiana State University. He’s the front-man for the local band, Saturday Shoes, and also happens to be one hell of a poet. [/author]

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Notes from The Edge:

The Chronicles of my Social Distancing amid the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic

Monday, March 16th

awaken to my friend’s irate text and roughly 100 emails from students. I’d asked them to respond to an email from last week, acknowledging that they understand how their courses will proceed in on-line-only format and, surprisingly, almost everyone has complied before the end-of-the-week deadline.

I call my friend, who seems as fine as anyone right now, and he assures me it was just a primal scream of sorts, a venting. Before we hang up, we’re both convinced of the other’s sanity after shared remarks about squirrel potentially becoming our food source. We both claim to be deadeyes on our pellet guns, but I know he has more experience slaying tree rats. Fortunately for me, I live in town and the squirrels are fat and slow. Job for today: Google squirrel recipes.

The first day’s e-learning assignments for the kids come over the internet and the grumblings about their workload predictably begin. My own heap of work groans from my swollen messenger bag. At 9:00, I set about the task of setting up the first on-line modules for four courses. By noon, I have three of them done.

I have washed my hands so many times over the last few days I do not realize I’m doing it anymore. It’s become part of some autonomic system inside me.

Again, far too early into this whole ordeal in my estimation, the grumbling from the children continues. They’ve mostly finished their e-learning, and they’re itching to get away from the house. My faith in their ability to get through this waxes closer to disbelief. I concede, if only to end the constant barrage of requests and get back to my own work. My high school sophomore goes out and runs to the DePauw Nature Park in solitude, covers several of the trails, and then runs home, logging roughly 8 miles. My wife drops the two younger boys at the golf course. Save a handful of other brave duffers, who they avoid, they are the only players on the course on a brisk, windy afternoon. When I venture out two hours later to pick them up, they are blue with cold and scurry to the warmth of the car.

Upon returning home, CNN reports Canada is closing its borders to foreign travelers, with some exceptions for US citizens. I hope I’m not an exception. I want more leverage for a renegotiation of terms with Expedia and Air Canada over my cancelled flight. My wife licks her chops. It’s these administrative sort of dealings that are going to keep her going longer than the rest of us, the fuel of some sort of routine. Again, she is my superior. Who figured up this patriarchy thing? Ludicrous.

We try out my wife’s new video conferencing software with my parents as the guinea pigs. They look good and Mom’s surgery went off without a hitch, if that’s possible. They only let her in the hospital. Dad wasn’t even allowed out of the car. Still, I can’t shirk the iota of worry that still clings to me afterwards.

After we learn San Francisco, the second coolest major city in America behind Portland, Oregon, is on lockdown, I make a pledge to myself to give up on the news for a while, at least for the rest of the evening. We have burgers again (we’re probably going to have a lot of burgers when it’s all said and done). Fine by me. The few moments of solitude in the back yard don’t freak me out like they did three days ago. I envision myself plumping up on burgers before the weather breaks, an American version of Pat Roach’s character, Randy, on the Canadian gem Trailer Park Boys.  Hopefully, it won’t come to that. I’ve put a lot of work into Keto.

I end the evening watching the premiere of Westworld, which is awesome. It’s strange how I’m reveling in a show about a dystopian future conflict between man and android, but then again, I was brought up on those. And I think it gives me comfort to watch a futuristic show, because it suggests a future at all. If all we have now is the unknown, soon, whichever way it goes, that future will be the now.  And then we will know, because we’ll be there. And I look forward to shaking some hands.

Tuesday, March 17th

[dropcap]I[/dropcap]t’s Saint Patrick’s Day, folks! No better excuse to day drink on a weekday was ever invented. I’ve been reveling in the holiday since I ran a bar in the south Chicago Loop for two years in the mid-90s. I can’t even begin to fathom the millions, maybe billions, of dollars restaurants, bars, and service workers will miss today with all of the mandated closings across the country.

The news spits a rumor that the United States and Canada may put more stringent border regulations in place, so the wife and I agree to hold off for the day on calling hotels and airlines back. Maybe we can get even more leverage if the border closes altogether for travelers.

But, where was I? Oh yeah, Saint Patrick’s Day! Keto be damned. Today is no day for Daytime. It’s for Guinness Stout. But, I have none.

My kids again want to hit the links by mid-afternoon, so we let them. I notice a lot more activity at the course. No lie, I get a bit queasy. My seventh grader’s friend and another kid roll up to the course at the same time we do. I remind my kids: play by themselves, don’t get near any old people. I also have reservations about the fact I left the house at all.

“Oh well, too late now,” is what I tell myself, so I head to Kroger for Guinness. There are a couple other items still needed at home, too. What sort of cosmic law always requires I never make it home from the store with everything? This trip’s pressing need is ketchup. You might be surprised how many things ketchup goes in, as well as on.

I head into the Kroger lot and it’s not exactly jumping. In the store, it seems to be much more subdued than it was last weekend, almost normal. Almost. There are still vast swaths of clear cut shelf space where toilet paper, sanitizer, bread, and other sundries once congregated. But there are also several workers stocking up on most other staples and it looks like Trump’s promise that the food supply chain will remain intact is holding up, for now. There are two six packs of Guinness Stout left. I take only one. Remember: leave some for others. I grab the ketchup, a couple other small things, and head to the self-check-out. Despite the experience being far less eerie than expected, I can’t wait to get out of there.

After picking up the boys around 2:30, it’s time to throw Saint Patrick’s Day into as high a gear I can when stuck at home with four minors and the wife. I crack a Guinness, don my official Irish National Rugby team jersey and put the corned beef on to simmer. To say I love corned beef is to say a kleptomaniac loves to steal. It transcends love into a more subconscious needing. If cooked properly, and I do, hot corned beef can slide down the throat with minimal chewing, an orgy of protein, fat, and salt. I towel myself off, consciously wash my hands.

Though the symbolism is thick today, I do a good job of not letting the potential (inevitable?) cancellation of my trip to Ireland get me down. As my first antidote, I take a picture of my freshly poured Guinness, its thick head plugging the glass, and send it to the other guys set to go on the trip. Only one responds, but at least it’s a positive pingback.

My sister-in-law comes over and brings a platter of what I call the oyster of the Midwest: deviled eggs. I consume many. We spend the evening in what is becoming typical fashion: some board games, avoiding the news, and we cap it off watching the latest episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

As the evening closes, I consider it a win. There have been minimal depressive situations, probably from avoiding the news, and though cracks may be beginning to show, the kids are holding up pretty well. I’m getting great at faking it, too.

There have been minimal depressive situations, probably from avoiding the news, and though cracks may be beginning to show, the kids are holding up pretty well. I’m getting great at faking it, too.

Wednesday, March 18th

wake up feeling better than I probably deserve after my St. Patrick’s Day reveling. No headache, no lower GI distress, the usual markers of pretending to be cartoonishly Irish for 24 hours. A cold, hard rain is falling, and it will do so for most of the day.

The news comes down early today. Canada and the US have agreed to further restrict the border. No non-commercial crossings, no recreational travel. That’s us! My wife heads to her home office downstairs and sets about starting to renegotiate with the hotels and airlines. I can hear her on the phone below me, playing pathos, ethos, and logos like perfect scales on a fretboard. Boy, can she persuade. She ought to be teaching my course. By the end of the day she will have recovered the vast majority of what we stood to lose from our trip. Expedia (dicks) are the lone holdouts, but she’ll slay that beast, too, I imagine. If we learned anything beyond the biological and epidemiological recently, it’s don’t ever book through a third party travel site. Always call, or connect online with the hotel or airline directly. Trust me on this one. The false value of your rewards program be damned. You’ll thank me later.

It continues to rain, I continue to work and take hand-washing breaks. Last night, again while I slept, word came down from the golf course that it will close until April first. I would bet the ranch that that date gets extended. I wonder if they should have opened in the first place, but I was at least thankful for the physical outlet it gave the kids for a few days. We will certainly miss it. The club has been central to my adult life. I think my seventh grader knows his middle school golf season hangs in the balance of what happens over the next few weeks, and I’d bet that season never happens, along with every other sport scheduled this spring. In a few weeks, I’ll be watching a replay of last year’s Masters. Last year. We thought it was a son-of-a-bitch? How wrong were we?

If you can consider Greencastle City Hall high places, then I guess I have friends in high places. The local rumor mill, now fully digital, is suggesting there will be an upcoming announcement and the city will ask us all to officially shelter in place and not go out for anything other than emergencies, necessary work, and food. I fully support this idea. But, I have almost zero faith that all the locals will take it to heart. Let’s face it. It’s probably going to take ramped up police effort, maybe even the National Guard to enforce a true containment policy. For every level-headed citizen out there, there is a conspiracy theory-loving moron who won’t comply, negating the hard work and sacrifices of the rest of us. Such cases already dot the news from other places where these policies have gone into effect. I’ve even come up with a plan to help out the authorities: release all the non-violent marijuana “offenders” from jails and prisons, if they aren’t COVID-19 positive, and make room for locking up the idiots who insist on prolonging this nightmare.

I get quite a bit of work done today. Not enough to get my head above water, but close enough to see the surface. I close up my virtual shop and pick up The Overstory. Later this evening, I hit a major milestone, the halfway point in this huge, 500 plus page novel. When you’re an English instructor, you rarely have time to read anything other than student work, which can be depressing, but this week I’ve read more than I have since killing a whole issue of McSweeney’s in Santa Barbara over the holiday break.  God, I wish I was back in that California sun now, in both time and space. I try to shuffle off that thought, but it sticks hard. I know this situation we’re all in is shitty. It’s nobody’s fault, despite what the President might suggest. Like the wildly fluctuating markets, Nature is making a correction.

Patrick Barcus holds an MFA from Butler University and teaches writing at Indiana State University. He’s the front-man for the local band, Saturday Shoes, and also happens to be one hell of a poet. 

Featured Image Credit: Italiano: Guinness da Bar by Morabito92 (Own work), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons