START THE HARDEST PART FIRST: BEER CULTURE

Doing the hardest part of anything is not the opposite of doing the easy part.

The easy part serves as a warm-up? Sometimes.

But, do that and you might be too tired for the next part, which is also not the hardest.

Like what?

Take drinking beer for example.

I live in a beer town, Portland, Oregon.

 

If I understand the meaning of culture:

 

Culture is what I know that you know that I know.
Culture clashes is when I assume to know that you know what I know.

 

If I understand correctly, I live in a beer culture, which I’ve responded to with over four hundred and sixty posts on a beer search.

And I still haven’t found what I’m looking for? Take it easy, Bono, I’ve found it, and more.

Beer culture says it’s always time for a beer, maybe two.

It might be going out for a beer, it might be staying in, unless you forgot you have no beer.

So you go out and come back, but since you’re out, why not stop at Tapphoria just down the road instead of the gas station?

Or both? It’s not easy.

Beer culture says mind your priorities.

If you plan to drink a beer later, ask yourself why not sooner instead. Or sooner and later?

Why not turn your phone off and binge a few hours away running up a $50 tab ($7 X 7 beers = $49 without tip) and doing your best impression of a bar-rag?

Maybe play some gambling games since you’re feeling something?

Or consider the time you’d spend there doing what you’ve already planned, so stop in the gas station for a couple of 22’s, and get on back home.

 

Better Beer Culture

The hardest part of anything is staying on track, and no one knows it better than middle-aged former high school basketball star.

If only they’d shot 1000 jumpers a day, a thousand free throws a day, and worked out with weights, they could have made the league.

Instead, there was a party, a road trip, an injury, and now you spend your time looking at the river flow like the dreams you once had, drink a beer, and shake out another smoke.

That could have been you out there on the Willamette with your yacht in the marina to take you across the river to your houseboat.

In the City of Bridges, you don’t need no bridge.

You could have played ten years in the NBA, made prudent investments, and lived like a Portland prince the rest of your life, a man of the people.

You explain it to anyone who stops long enough to listen.

After you hurt your knee, it was your ankle, then your calf, and finally your achilles tendon and you were done.

A ‘friend’ introduced you to weed with, “You don’t want none of this, it’s not for you,” then introduced you to Big Red’s dealer.

He was a small man with a skin condition that prevented him from wearing pants. He navigated his house behind a walker.

 

“Be careful where you sit once we’re inside. If there’s a towel in the seat, don’t sit there.”

 

The hardest part for him was going outside, so he didn’t.

With a million hard-luck stories in the big city, it’s a long line of sorry tales.

People come and go. They show up for the good times, only to find those ended last year and all that’s left is to clean up the mess.

If it’s not the sort of mess they’re used to, they go back home and get to work.

I touched down at the Trailways bus station when it was in Old Town.

I had strong support from the beginning, the kind of feeling I didn’t have where I’d come from three days earlier, Brooklyn, NY.

After growing up small town in a small town on the Oregon coast called North Bend, Portland was my new small town.

It was a fraction of the size of a NYC borough.

As kids, my parents drove past Portland on the way to Grandma’s house and the city looked enormous.

When I stepped off that Trailways, it was a different story, a different vibe.

The beer culture back then included the Blitz Brewery.

 

Very few cities had their own hometown breweries in 1980, and fewer still as old as Weinhard. Portlanders understood local beer at a level most Americans couldn’t. More importantly, in the 1970s, Blitz-Weinhard introduced the Weinhard line of premium beers starting with Private Reserve.

 

I stepped off in 1980 to learn the good times were already over.

According to the locals, I missed it by ‘that much.’

 

Watching From 1970

Like every small town boy in every small town I heard about the evils of alcohol.

And like every small town boy in every small town, the hardest part was figuring out a way to sneak booze past my parents.

In the summer between eighth and ninth grade I was walking around my neighborhood and journeyed up the hill on dirt roads with dirt side streets.

Edgewood Terrace was a real frontier back then.

I saw my older brother’s buddy pulled over on a side street unloading a box of Blitz beer in the bushes.

After he left I relocated the box to the other side of the street and called a couple of friends on their way to delinquency to come help drink it up.

These were guys who had already cracked the code on sneaking booze past their parents. They had older brothers’ help.

Did Jerry Muscus ever wonder what happened to his half-rack? I’ve remembered it all these years.

I rememberF four beers was way too much for the first night out while leaning on Geno’s parking lot pole.

It may have put me off alcohol forever if I’d had an unfortunate event, like knocking over a tray of drinks in the Pirate’s Den after using fake ID, then making a getaway before the police pulled me over and asked for ID.

 

That’s never happened, but his did:

Last night I opened a bottle of wine, one of those with a wire cage and a bulb looking cork, a delightful rose from Hawk’s View Winery near me.

I poured a glass then tried to force an old cork back into the bottle.

The bottle slipped, I knocked my wine glass, and spilled everything on the counter and floor, including one less wine glass.

It was a new one.

After a quick survey I made a big decision: Is all the wine gone? Do I have more? Should I open another?

I checked with my wife. The answers were no, yes, and yes.

 

PS: Clean up your mess before starting another one.

PSS: If you buy nice wine glasses they don’t seem to shatter into as many pieces when they hit the tile floor.