A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.
Yesterday (Wednesday, October 22) marked the 10th anniversary of NA Confidential.
In contrast with 2013, when the blog’s ninth orbital marker almost escaped my scrutiny, I anticipated this year’s birthday well in advance, going so far as to promise a party in celebration of making it a whole decade.
However, upon further reflection, there’s no pressing reason for a gathering. Rather, all we need do is gather at the pub of our choice for commemorative elixirs (Progressive Pints are my drink of record) and call it good.
Ten years is a long time. Admittedly, I’ve been guilty of fudging just a bit those times when I claimed the blog was conceived as a direct result of massive personal despair in the wake of George W, Bush’s re-election. Obviously, the actual birth date in October preceded Elector Day in 2004.
In retrospect, it is perfectly accurate to say that the grim promise of four more fascistic, wasted White House years merely exacerbated the development of an epiphany already budding.
During the years 2003 and 2004, several previously disparate threads gradually were being woven together. The most significant factor was my own renewal of life; my first marriage had ended, and a new relationship was under way. We felt sure enough about future personal prospects to begin shopping for a house, and in 2003 came the purchase of a home located on Spring Street, in what we now think of as Midtown. Come Halloween 2014, it will have been 11 years living there.
Trick or treat?
If we’d only grasped the civic foreshadowing.
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Even before the ink was dry on our bouncing baby debt, there had been dozens of walks and bicycle rides through the deserted wastes of a criminally neglected downtown, with a huge question eventually looming over all of it: Why was New Albany’s devastated downtown different from those vibrant quarters I’d visited in other countries – in other states?
Was it somehow unavoidable? Could it be they knew something we didn’t? If so, why weren’t we emulating it? Was it money, politics, culture … or something in the water?
The questions mounted, easy answers seemed frustratingly elusive, and I began to detect ground shifting. Thoughts previously devoted to escapist obsessions (generally, variants of beer and travel) began turning toward an as yet undefined context of rootedness.
Surely, something could be done, right there in the core.
NABC already was brewing, but it was only a small facet of the “good beer bar” business model. It began to occur to me that the answers to these questions of everyday life in one’s place of residence impacted this model. As a brewery, perhaps NABC was transitioning toward a fuller embrace of local existence. Might brewing make sense as the ultimate, local, creative act – in fact, what we should be aspiring to achieve?
This emerging epiphany was about place, and one’s place in it. As the presidential election year of 2004 advanced toward the pathetic re-enthronement of the worst American chief executive ever, an absurdity began gnawing at me.
Most of us spend vast chunks of our lives living in a specific place, but spend much of our time debating issues far beyond it. Granted, being aware of the world outside remained absolutely vital, and I wasn’t about to renounce my planetary citizenship, but when it came to action, as opposed to verbiage, what chance did I have of influencing the tragedy of a second Bush administration?
To devote precious psychic energy debating these faraway issues left none to apply to matters nearest me, when these were precisely the sort of local conditions best addressed through direct participation. How to make things better right here, outside the doors of my home and business?
The comparative odds were 1 in 300 million, or 1 in 37,000. Which would you choose?
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At this juncture, a deeply personal proclivity came into play, because what I decided to do at first was write about it. After all, everyone's entitled to my opinion, although some might say that writing and action aren’t the same things at all. I disagree. Ideas, words and how we use them do matter.
Quite early in my life, it was obvious that being able to arrange words on a page was essential to my being. I don't know why. It just is. Through most of my adult life, I have awakened to a jumble of thoughts centering on topics for the day, along with thoughts on how this jumble might be untangled and organized. They must be written, as soon as possible, in order to expel the current crop of thoughts and make room for others.
I suppose it’s a compulsion of sorts. Music always plays in my head, alongside sentences forming there. I'm convinced that when these idiosyncratic synapses cease to occur – or when math and numbers finally start to make sense to me – death will be imminent.
Concurrently, what better way to facilitate these needs in 2004 than electronic media? It required no start-up money. I could write locally, and disseminate globally. And so it has gone, from then until now. It builds character, and makes me a better gadfly.
On the occasion of this 8,027th post, thanks to Jeff, Randy and Lloyd for contributing over the past nine years, and to all the green mice, moles, agitators and malcontents who help our ideas to gestate. Thanks to my wife for tolerating my writing and cage-rattling compulsions. Thanks especially to you for reading.
Lastly, thanks to the late, great Howard Zinn for demonstrating the fundamental veracity of a people's history, and the critical need for it, because while this blog is as imperfect as its originator, the intent all along has been to provide New Albany's “other” side. Doing so has required a learning curve, but I'm damned proud of the results, and I think we've helped provide a body of work and an alternative record, while offering more ideas per square pixel than New Albany’s local political power structures and non-local media combined.
Not everyone agrees, but I think NAC is ridiculously underrated, but it doesn't matter all that much. It's their loss. That's life.
Somewhere, it's beer-thirty.
Congratulations on 10 years of prodding. Would have raised a pint in celebration but still a couple of weeks away from the end of my discharge plan. Cheers, anyway.
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