I am German and French-Belgian. Well, American, but because everyone else is constantly celebrating their heritage I follow them off the edge of the cliff. We all do one thing in life well and well, I drink beer. In high school and college I was not a beer fan. Drinking any alcohol made me puke. I had a soft stomach and at least one Mad Dog 20/20 experience to convince myself of this. Senior year of college I became a fan of Miller High Life, the self-proclaimed “Champaign of Beers” thanks to my 19 year old cousin. For five dollars and seventy-five cents I could get a twelve pack on the way home from my on-campus janitor job on a Friday night. That twelve would last me all weekend. I did not go to bars in my college town because I was not a bar type and the idea of being around other guys charged up on beer and hormones and scouting for the same kind of girls made me wonder how long it would be before I was thrown through a window or cheap shotted. I had witnessed a drunken co-worker who liked to run his mouth get thrown into a plexi-glass window of a bar in my college town. The aggressor repeated several times that he was a law enforcement major as he assaulted my friend. The irony floored me before the beer could. The apex of that experience was this: as my co-worker was being pummeled and thrown into windows the police stopped by and told another of my co-workers that he had to pour out the bottle of beer he had snuck out of the bar moments earlier. The Police Academy movie series could not have scripted that scene any better.
These days I drink beer at home and do my thing as husband and father. I am a beer snob because of my dad and it was because of me and my sister that he was able to do that. When the two of us were kids my dad drank crap like Schaefers and Keystone. Now that we are both out of the house my parents have more money to spend. My dad became a drinker of finer beers like Guinness and Heineken. At that time I was a Budweiser and Bud Light kind of guy who did not think beer could taste good but did not care as long as I could get a good buzz on at a Rams, Blues or Cardinals game. Then I started mooching beers off my dad at family gatherings and the Heineken and Guinness did their job on me and the rest is history. From that point on I dove headfirst into beer snobbery, which according to beeradvocate.com, makes the rest of us beer drinkers look bad. Beer snobbery is not a bad thing, I personally believe that shitty beer makes us beer drinkers look bad. If the United States government ever wanted to try Prohibition again they could do it this way: Outlaw shitty ass beer. Every beer sold in the United States would be required to appear before a beer panel in Munich, Bavaria, Deutschland, God's self-appointed capital of the beer world, and the panel would tell the White House and Congress whether to allow that beer to be sold and served in the United States.
In addition to my constantly evolving interests in beer I have taken another new step in my life: I now have a dog. Unlike many Americans and most people I know personally I have never had a dog. Because of this I had no idea how to act around a dog and if I went to a friend's house and encountered the family dog I would inadvertently back the thing into a corner or get nervous when it stuck its face in my crotch looking for a sniff of naughtiness. Dogs can pick up on what a person is feeling and never cared much when they figured I wanted them to go away. Dogs tortured me in that way, though I did like the beagles my hunter grandfather had when I was a little guy. I once went to school with dog shit on my shoe because I had been playing in the beagles' pen the night before. When I realized I had it on the bottom of my shoe I scraped my foot against the bottom of my desk and kicked the shit across the aisle. Then I played stupid. That kind of thing worked a lot better back then than it does now.
After an attempted break in at my house my wife and I decided it was time to get a dog and so we did. I am still getting used to him and I think he knows it. He likes my wife much more than he likes me. She knows how to act around dogs. She grew up with the animals and is as good of a mother to that thing as she is to our kids. If only we got a tax deduction for the dog the way we do for our kids. I would like him a lot more if that were the case. What I have noticed is this: loud music gets him going. If he had thumbs he would be the equivalent of any metalhead who thinks Metallica is worth a damn these days. I gave up on that band after the Black Album was played to death on the radio. Moving on to Megadeth was a great move and it is possible that Dave Mustaine's revolving door of a band is better than Metallica at any point in their respective careers. But my dog is a Metallica dog. He is as dark black as is possible and perhaps it would please him if I slapped a sticker of a coiled up gray snake on his sides. Then I could rename him "Black Album" or Sandman or something Metallica-related. It is possible that he dances to the Master of Puppets album. It could be James Hetfield's barking-like vocals that get him going or the idea that Metallica has crunchy sounding music that reminds my dog of crunchy dog food or dog biscuits. If only he could learn to play the guitar and bark in rhythm I could put him on tour.
Until then I will keep drinking beer and thinking about a name for my dog's heavy metal band. That will involve many trips to the local booze palace.
I don’t drink often, but when I do, I drink often.
