Circles

[dayonfire]

It was another interrogative morning. Questions tilting at everything.

The news, the reason for so-called entertainment, the validity of art.

Some days you wake up and walk outside at dawn and see the indigo world waking up, and anything more seems redundant, a culture working hard at padding a resume.

Comments

[anonymous]

I seems like it wasn't that long ago that the only beer you could purchase in a bar or liquor store was of the watery massed-produced American variety; unless, that is, you wanted to pay more than double for an import that left the Dutch laughing at the wharf. The big joke in the canal boat tours in Amsterdam was that they pumped pure spring water deep out of wells for domestic beer, and used canal water for the beer they sent to America.

What happened? In most taverns you can now fill up on several decent quality European-recipe American-made brews, at little more cost than the standard swill. Brew-pubs and larger craft breweries have sprung up everywhere. Beer is good again. When I returned from my first extended stay in Germany in the 1980s, it hit me how much crap beer was being produced, sold, and swallowed. There is a still a lot of it out there, but even the bottom of the barrel has improved. What happened?

Someone started brewing good beer, at home, in small batches at breweries, and found there was a demand for it. As more was produced and sold, tastes began to change. It took 80 years, but beer finally recovered from prohibition.

The written word has never been banned in this country, so there has always been quality available. But like beer, the thirsty masses devour trainloads of cheap Gothic Romances, magazines, and celebrity autobiographies, because that's what's there, and that's what they want. Like beer, there are thousands of shade-tree poets and novelists preparing their special brew, wondering why there is so much crap out there.

Serve it up cold, in a frosty mug, with a creamy head, and someone will take it. Beer? Poetry? What's the difference?