Belly Up, Pint Down

"Warm beer and cold women, I just don't fit in
every joint I stumbled into tonight
that's just how it's been"
--Tom Waits, "Warm Beer and Cold Women" from Nighthawks at the Diner

drinking at the bar: an activity involving pints of beer and conversation.

There's a great bar in downtown Greensboro called McCoul's Irish Pub. It's on the opposite side of Elm Street from Natty Greene's, the brewery that anchors nightlife in Greensboro's fabled Hamburger Square. The mood at McCoul's is just right for a pub (or for what passes as one here in good old North Carolina). It's dark and cool. The décor consists of lots of lacquered wood and green, and there's lots of good beer on tap. What I especially like is that they serve beer in real pint glasses—not those American pint glasses that hold 16 oz. (or less) of beer, but the English 20 oz. pint. They also serve more than one beer on nitrous. Guinness. Boddingtons. Mmm…

Do not mistake me. This blog is not about chicks. It's not about live music, or watching the game, whatever game that might be. This isn't about high drama low tolerance booty clubbing. And this certainly is not about getting drunk on cheap beer.

This is about the magically mundane experience of sitting at a bar, drinking pints of beer, and shooting the shit.

Good beer. Good conversation.

Beer is good.

Interestingly enough, my journey to beer lover and beer maker started badly.

My first beer ever was can of Busch Lite. This first tasting was followed later by a can of Bud Dry, prompting a remark, "This isn't as bad!" O my misspent youth!

I did not drink alcohol prior to college, and I didn’t really develop a knack for drinking until I was out of college. Sure I did the rounds, and bespattered many a porcelain throne, but there was no love there. That came later. Early on, though, I realized that a) beer is an acquired taste and b) I needed to acquire taste.

This last point is one that, interestingly enough, my wife and I were discussing the other night. Taste. Taste is not something that can be manufactured for you. You cannot simply buy "Taste for Idiots" and hope for immediate connoisseurship. There is no Costco Crash Course for taste.

Taste is something that has to grow with experience and exposure. Had I taken a slug of Guinness instead of Bush Lite that first time, I would likely have had the same reaction: Ugh. It wasn't until I had made an effort to taste lots of different beers that I began to like them. And, even after I became a beer lover, I still didn't truly appreciate its complexity until I started brewing it. Standing over a pot of wort, smelling the grains, the malt, and the hops, I understood where all those flavors in good beer come from.

Back to the beginning: I knew I didn't like it, so I thought, "If I'm going to have to acquire a taste for beer, then I might as well try everything I can get my hands on!" This led to my roommate buying me a different brand six pack each beer run. Blackened Voodoo was my first dark beer. I distinctly remember pouring it into a glass, holding it up to the light, and marveling at the fact that I couldn't see through it. That's the kind of beer I need to drink, I thought. From that point on, I only drank dark beer. Heineken Dark. Beck's Dark. Negra Modelo. I was still too scared of Guinness…

It should come as no surprise, then, that I still lean toward the dark end of the beer spectrum (Sierra Nevada Porter is one of my all time favorites. As is Anchor Steam Porter. My all-time favorite homebrew: Snow Day Porter. Someday soon, I hope to repeat it…).

All of this early tasting didn't lead to love, though. I developed my drinking chops, but I would have still preferred a can of Coca-Cola to a bottle of beer.

And then it happened. I graduated from college, moved up to Connecticut, and became a bartender. I worked for a couple of years in a fine dining restaurant and began to live the life of a barfly. I worked nights and slept until noon. What else was there to do but go to the bar after work? And that's where I fell in love.

I don’t remember the specific night that it happened, but I do remember taking a sip of ice cold Bass in a frosty pint glass and melting right there on the spot. All the tension and exhaustion from work oozed out of me (Eric Clapton blaring from the juke).

I asked that pint of beer to marry me.

Seriously, though, it was there in Connecticut that I became a professional beer drinker. Yeah, later, in graduate school, I developed a taste for scotch (and discovered that brown liquor makes me mean), and spent more time bar hopping than reading Dickens and Thackary. But there was a mania in my grad school drinking that didn't mirror my Connecticut beer enthusiasm.

Now, as a responsible adult (I've only been one of those for a few years…), I enjoy beer. I don't drink it because it's cheap, or because I'm a "dude." Yeah, I get sloppy now and then, but I always start with the thought, "I love beer." There is something deeply satisfying about a good, cold beer. And, though I consider myself to be an intermediate oenophile, I always default to beer. I can sip scotch, appreciate it, even enjoy it, but beer is my passion.

And brewing really has amplified my taste. The last batch of beer I brewed (named Gaius Pale Ale after Gaius Baltar from Battlestar Galactica— I wanted to make a beer that was pretty but evil, light and very, very bitter), I invited a friend (Gerald from Virtual Bourgeois) to join me in the brewing process. I love to brew and, extrapolating on the fine art of home brewing (propane turkey cooker boiling five gallons of wort on a tilting cement patio) while consuming the last of my previous batch, I hoped that Gerald would see why I loved it. He did. I also hoped he might enjoy brewing, too. He didn't.

I believe his words were, "I now have a deeper appreciation for beer."

When asked if he would start brewing, too: "Nope."

It's a labor of love.

And I guess that's part of my overall love for beer: My acquiring of the taste was like a hero's journey. I set out on my quest in search of drunkenness but found so much more. I'd also say that my beer journey is symbolic of my coming of age. It is an integral part of my adult life (both the creation of it and the consuming of it).

My wife reminded me of the sagely words of Ben Franklin:

"Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Bar is good.

Okay, so I briefly mentioned my grad school binging. My dear friend and grad school compatriot, Jon, refers to the summer between our first and second years as "The Summer That Time Forgot." When we weren't in class, or performing meager research assistantship tasks, we were drinking. Darts, pinball, and booze held court with Flannery O'Connor and Robert Frost. We drank through every cent of our research assistantship money. Hell, we probably drank more than that. This summer long tribute to Bukowski had its moments, but it was, more or less, an exercise in self destruction. It wasn't about the beer. It was about the drunk.

I mention this because my love of the bar springs, too, from the time I spent in Connecticut drinking after work. The goal there was to wind down, have a good time with my colleagues, shoot a little pool, and kill time until our next shift.

This is the love of the bar.

It's hard to explain that love, especially to someone who hasn't really saddled up to one and committed to the experience. I go back to my opening comments: Going to the bar isn't like going to the club. It isn't a pretense. It isn't about socializing with strangers, or the anxiety of hooking up (for me, hooking up was always precluded by anxiety).

Don't get me wrong, I spent many a night wishing I had the chops to chat up the chicks, but I didn't do that—and what resulted instead was an ongoing conversation about humanity. In the end (and happily married to a woman I did not meet at a bar), I am thankful for my lack of hook ups because it allowed me to spend time, with my beverage of choice, doing something I love: shooting the shit.

Shooting the shit. Let's unpack that phrase. In my career (responsible man), I've often thought of writing a piece for my students entitled, "The Fine Art of Bullshitting." For college freshmen learning to write decent essays that's what everything I assign them boils down to: B.S. That's what they think development is. To them, it's enough to say "I don't like it," "I don't know," and "I don't care." Beyond these simple "don’ts" is a space reserved for bullshit. Explanation, details, developed and well-thought out opinions? Naw, bullshit.

But in the heart of that shit is communication. It's like the swimmer practicing his strokes. It may seem tedious and like a waste of time to outside observers, but with each lap, something happens, however miniscule, to improve the stroke. Conversation breeds deeper conversation.

And so, for me, conversation is the cornerstone of life.

Shooting the shit brings me closer to god.

Sure, some might argue that it's better to live life than talk about it, but to me this is counter-intuitive. One can shoot forward into experience without contemplation, haphazardly dashing into life like a witless Labrador retriever. And yes, biting down on that soggy stick, like tasting the fruit of eternity, and swimming back to the shore with it might seem life's sweet reward.

But I've never liked labs…

William Wordsworth wrote, “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” This phrase is often misread—primarily because we want to believe that our instincts, ungirded by reason and reflection, are true and right.

Thoughts spontaneously flowing onto the page are always the best!

But that colon changes everything: poetry "takes its origin" from recollection "in tranquility." Spontaneity, then, cannot exist without "emotion recollected in tranquility."

I am, of course, making the observation that, yes, life is poetry, and we have to reflect upon it in order to open ourselves up to the power of experience. Otherwise experience has no meaning. It simply satiates the pleasure principle.

What does any of this have to do with drinking at the bar?

Let me give some simple equations:

Going to the Booty Club = Exercising the pleasure principle

Drinking at the Bar = Emotion recollected in tranquility

Okay, so I'm full of shit. We know that. But my point is that conversation guides experience, and without it, we might as well be animals. And, frankly, many of us are. But we must not mistake the experience of drinking beer from a pint glass at a bar for something detrimental to human progress. It is, rather, a meditative experience.

That's what the bar does for me: It allows me to connect to the bigger picture. It allows me to reflect, collectively with my partners in pints, upon the spaces between action and inaction. The bar is a pause. It's a slowing down of time (with the help of alcohol, of course). Here, in these moments, I can misstep, mistake, misbehave (in an intellectual sense), and come to a better understanding of the universe and my place in it.

Did I mention that I love beer?

Not Just A Drunk

That last bit reminds me of what many of us know: Most "great" writers were/are/will be drunks. Is there a connection here? Certainly. It harkens back to Wordsworth's comments.

Only, we must replace "reflected in tranquility" with "getting drunk."

I used to think that my inspiration for writing came from a combination of magical elements: cigar, black coffee, jazz, the hours between two and four a.m. What I later discovered (I can be a bit slow) was that none of these "magical" factors were really necessary in and of themselves. Rather, it was the quiet of those hours—the uninterrupted time (no phone, nothing good on TV, etc.).

This was my time of tranquility.

How do we get from tranquility to being drunk? Let's call it a loosening of the belt. And there's truth in this. The restrictions of civil society impinge upon creativity, upon the creative act (I started this blog more than a month ago…). This is why we move from teaching children to enjoy the creative act to scolding them for coloring outside the lines. And, as a people, we have developed a complicated system of checks and balances to keep us from careening off course (stay on target…).

As we grow up, those checks and balances become so automatic that we turn to social lubricants to help us slip out of our boot cut jeans.

Writers (artists) rely on the energies outside the lines (call it channeling radio signals from outer space; we sneak out at night to catch the faeries, then pin them to the page), and must suffer the consequences of too many out-of-body experiences. I might argue that writing is too reliant on a pre/post-linguistic state—ever seeking to capture thoughts that strive to break through the limitations of language, only to be lost again. Writers go mad in the blurring of lines.

Said more plainly: Drinking loosens us up enough to make connections otherwise imperceptible. Addiction (and destruction) is simply a matter of too much course. If you spend too much time searching for tranquility at the bottom of a pint glass, you move from a freer state of mind to an unraveling of the mind.

I liken it to any thing or act that is positive in moderation but destructive in superfluity. As Milton said, "knowledge is as food and needs no less her temperance over appetite." The search for tranquility ends, when sought too often, in perturbation.

But as long as one moderates the pints, the words flow.

The bullshit, too.