Ides of March.

Days Remaining to Next Beer: 365

I love beer.

I mean, I love beer.

If the concept of beer were of made corporeal and had a green card, I’d have married it by now.

I love beer the way Cookie Monster relishes his namesake, framing all of his perspectives through either the enjoyment of what he loves, or the pursuit of what he adores, or the anguish of finding himself denied access to that which drives him bonkers.

Beer. Monosyllabic obsession that has jet-fueled so many a misadventure.

And yet, as with many a thing I love, when it’s always there, hang around, looking for attention, just a pound note away or cowering in the back of the fridge, I find it’s easy to take for granted.

Add to that the simple fact that like men and CD players, not all beers are created equal once they’re put to the ultimate test of taste. And when I discover myself taking a prize beer made by vow-of-silence Belgian monks for granted like so much hipster Pabst Blue Ribbon tall boy pilsner, something radical must be done.

And as I also recently wondered how I might encourage myself to write more, another thing I’ve been taking for granted, as though those books were just going to write themselves in magical novella land, I arrived full stop with brakes squealing upon the steam swamped landing platform at the proverbial Eureka Station.

Ides has long been a favorite holiday of mine. From Shakespeare readings in junior high to those Iron Maiden’s amp standing crotch thrusting sausage smuggling anthems discovered the same year; the holiday has a reputation, one measured with words like hark, foreboding, prophecy, and consequence. All fun things, for sure.

So, here goes a project about restoring a healthy respect for my favorite liquid refreshment, and an earnest effort to get slap some word together and make some prose.

365 days of pure beer blog bludgeoning bliss. Replete with pictures and intermittent anecdotes about some of my favorite beers, beer moments, beer fueled incidents, and how beer has often been embroiled with the strange course corrections of my otherwise wholly human life.

I’m still working out the details, this is a first for me after all. Be gentle.

One idea is to use letters of the alphabet, as opposed to those of mail, to theme the posts. For example, many fine words begin with F. First, flimsy, fickle, and also failure.
• Monday could be a post about Firsts, like first beer, first beer out of a bottle, first beer shared with a friend, first beer shared with a stranger, first kegger leading to making out with a girl a year ahead in architecture school who wouldn’t return my calls ever after.
• Tuesday could be Futures day, with posts about favorite stock investment tips, or at least, things to take stock of, particularly in grocery stores.
• Wednesday could be Fantasy day, where we could explore fantasies around beer, such as a swimming in a beer filled Olympic sized swimming pool in Valhalla with Falstaff from Henry the 5th, or sharing Das Boot with Einstein and Oppenheimer before enacting a massive conspiracy to help end WW2 before anyone has the chance to load up Fat Man and Little Boy and go dropping them on Japanese suburbs and city centers thereby unfortunately causing Akira to never be made.
• Thursday could be about Fiction. Maybe books I liked to read while sipping a tasty long neck, or book about beer like Tim Power’s satirical masterpiece Drawing of the Dark. Or perhaps the sorts of fictions that people often invent or embellish or simply bring up to debate across patio tables in the shade of massive brewery logo emblazoned umbrellas on hot summer afternoons.
• Friday could be about Feasts. Or Finalists. Or Fungi. Or Fung Shui.
• Saturday might be Fatalism or Frugality or Futility or Fatality because of any day has a potential for walks of shame or trips to the pharmacy for headache remedies or trips to an all day dinner for a heap of greasy meats and flap jacks, it is Saturday.
• Sunday would have to be about funnies. The funny papers. Or formerly funny, if you recall how much better they seemed to be when I was a kid with a plastic Easter Egg’s fist full of Silly Putty at the ready.

Any rate, just an idea. Important thing is to write, and through writing better learn about myself, my culture, and my heritage, and my waistline as pertains to the magical elixir that best never be taken for granted that is beer.

See you tomorrow for another pint of prose.

e