Today’s bullet point is borrowed from Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers (1930): “Hello, I must be going.”
Regular readers will recall that earlier this year, I announced that I’d be writing a book about beer.
I’m set to write a book about beer, or so this impending contract suggests
It seemed like a really good idea, since I’ve always wanted to write a book. Heaven knows, the words are there, somewhere. In fact, roughly 237,000 of them already have been expended in pursuit of forty forty-three years in beer.
The 40 Years in Beer Compendium: links, previews, and coming attractions
Today, an update. There will be no beer book, at least not the one for Bloomsbury Academic; not this one, in this format, at this time.
This was entirely my decision, and I withdrew from the beer book project just after we returned from Spain. Dating myself as a recent recipient of monthly social security checks, I may have waited too long to write a book. Conversely, seeing how well the late, great Bob Lane pegged me, maybe I haven’t waited long enough. This requires a short explanation.
I began coursework at Indiana University Southeast in the fall semester of 1978, having absolutely no idea what I intended to do with my life.
It should be obvious that I still don’t.
At IUS it was my good fortune to befriend Bob, who served as assistant basketball coach and intramural director. I found myself one day at the tender age of 19 spilling my guts to Bob about ongoing problems on the dating scene. He counseled me to be patient, offering a prescient observation that I’ve never forgotten, and might well adorn my tombstone.
I’m paraphrasing his words, though not by much.
“You’re a slow learner and a late bloomer, just like me. It might take you a few years, like it did with me. When everyone has gone around the circuit a few times, sampled some of the wares, and gotten wiser, you’ll start looking a lot better by comparison. Trust me. In the meantime, try to be a nice guy if you can manage it, and hang in there. Things will get better.”
I wasn’t always a nice guy. But things did get better, over time. Bartending helped teach me how to speak well enough to land myself in trouble here and there (another adage: be careful what you wish for).
Being a slow learner and a late bloomer no longer bothers me very much, and what’s more, why would I be any different now, at 65 years of age, than I was at 19?
The ultimate destination draws nearer, and yet the way one processes life’s experiences is probably hard-wired at this stage. I accept it for what it is. Need it fast? Want someone to make a quick decision on the razor’s edge? You’d best look elsewhere, because I’m not the one for that. I plod forward until ideas fall into place. Hopefully I jot them down when they appear.
Did I embark on the book project with high hopes? Of course I did.
Granted, I’ve never written a beer book before under proscribed circumstances of contracts and deadlines; nonetheless, I imagined that little chunks would add up to bigger ones. All it would take was time, just a few hours at the desk each day. For much of the year, that’s exactly how I approached it.
Unfortunately my results didn’t reflect the effort. It didn’t gel. I couldn’t find a voice to represent the book’s stated aim, which was not my usual sort of polemic. It came down to being a bad fit for the kind of writer I am, at this time in my life, during the tumultuous period we’re living through at present.
Which is to say, 2025 has been a year when death has not ever been very far away: the death of too many friends and acquaintances; the supposed death of craft beer (my attempted subject matter); and the death, or at the very least the attempted murder by oligarchs and fascists, of the nation itself.
All year long, my mind keeps skipping back to one of the most influential books I’ve ever read, A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman. In fact, I propose to end 2025 by rereading it. Tuchman takes a deep dive into the Black Death in the late medieval period, and no discussion about the Black Death is complete without a reference to the Danse Macabre, a medieval allegory about the inevitability of death.
In the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Death, skeletons escort living humans to their graves in a lively waltz. Kings, knights, and commoners alike join in, conveying that regardless of status, wealth, or accomplishments in life, death comes for everyone. At a time when outbreaks of the Black Death and seemingly endless battles between France and England in the Hundred Years’ War left thousands of people dead, macabre images like the Dance of Death were a way to confront the ever-present prospect of mortality.
The Danse Macabre has been haunting me all year. I know my little world isn’t remotely comparable to medieval times, although I suppose the prospect for us all was conceivable only five years ago during the COVID pandemic.
But all these intrusions of death, aging, mortality, decay and sheer stupidity have combined to regularly summon the black dog, if not the Black Death. Every now and then, it has been debilitating. There is comfort to be derived from George Carlin’s advice …
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… however, it’s awfully difficult to stop caring about the outcome. Actually, I can’t. As this realization sinks in, the black dog comes trotting back.
Consequently, looking at these matters dispassionately, unflinchingly and realistically, there was no way I could expect to perform to my own standards, much less anyone else’s, in following through with the beer book commission.
In the words of the late Melvin Lewis, my wife’s former co-worker (who sadly died earlier this year), it seems that I came down with a case of anal glaucoma.
My ass just couldn’t see me finishing the book.
As such, I exited before it became any more of an issue than it already was. So, let’s regroup.
At the moment, apart from my usual responsibilities at Food & Dining Magazine, I’m backing up 80 installments of “40 Years in Beer,” rereading them and making corrections before carrying on with new serialized chapters as before. Toward this end, there’s an effort underway to actually outline where I’m headed and what I’ll be writing.
This is the book I really want to write. The book I want to write is only half-finished, and unlikely to be published. The book I want to write is a vanity project, but it contains the stories I’m interested in telling. The experts always advise us to write about things we know, and I know what I’ve experienced during a career in beer.
Eventually this book is the one that will be completed It will exist, and it will be there on-line somehow for whomever wants to read it. This will make me happy, and I won’t make a penny from it. I don’t care.
As a bonus, a lot of what I managed to write for the abandoned beer book can be repurposed for my (generally) weekly “Hip Hops” column at F&D. I’m the only beer columnist left standing hereabouts, and I enjoy the futility of competing against TikTok.
Thanks to everyone who supported me during the past eight months, especially my wife Diana, who has been enduring impossibly trying times of her own as a federal employee amid the special never-ending idiocy of Trumpist Nothingburgers.
Huge thanks to Frank Thackeray for making the introductions, and to my publisher contacts in California, who were wonderful. I’m sorry it didn’t work out, everyone. In the end, it’s better for everyone this way, particularly me.
