ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings, beer and food work just fine.

Forever grateful to those readers who examine this column on a weekly basis, allow me to offer an update about the columnist's life.

Since 2005 I've been writing beer columns (and lately the occasional restaurant feature) for Food & Dining Magazine. A few weeks back came the opportunity to provide several short web site posts each week in addition to the quarterly contributions. To be succinct, this suits me. Naturally there is a learning curve, and each day I'm exposed to something new and useful.

Pints&union will be one year old on August 1, and as the beer programmer I've settled into a routine. My expanded responsibilities at Food & Dining constitute a second layering of duties, suggesting closer attention to time management than I've generally been able to muster during my life as an adult. These days I'm wagering that old dogs can learn new tricks.

Departing the New Albanian Brewing Company in 2015 wasn't merely stepping away from a job. It brought to a close almost three decades of this business defining my life. I had no way of knowing that the legal settlement would take two and a half years to facilitate, and little notion of the length of time required to cobble together a post-brewery career.

At this precise moment four years later, it's coming into view. Retrospection is the process of thinking about past events. There is a necessary condition to wax retrospectively, namely sufficient time to gain perspective, and consequently it seems as if I now possess a four-year degree in adaptive reuse -- of myself.

But the reason why today's column is from April 30, 2015 and not July 25, 2019 is because I'm on deadline to complete two pieces for Food & Dining's forthcoming issue, a beer column about Saisons and a feature on Bourbons Bistro. 

As always, thanks for reading and your thoughts are appreciated.

---

ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Last Thursday I had the great pleasure to take a break from New Albany’s trials and tribulations and spend the day and night in Lexington, Kentucky, as the guest of Transylvania University’s philosophy department.

To be sure, there have been times in the past when Lexington wouldn’t have seemed such a savory destination for an overnight pleasure trip.

After all, I was raised in Southern Indiana, and college basketball naturally prefigured the rural moral (and genetic) code: Indiana University in Bloomington was the beneficent locale of the grail, while the University of Kentucky represented a snarling, lowdown devil. I imagine it wasn’t easy for my mother, who was a UK graduate living in a small Hoosier burg, and subject to commensurate suspicion.

Of course, it’s all bunk, and the whole point of the exercise is to show the many possibilities for mankind’s advancement, from primitive sporting totems and rituals all the way through reading actual books.

I’d been warming to Lexington for a long time, even before February of 2014, when the University of Kentucky hosted a symposium on craft beer writing. I was fortunate to be numbered among the speakers, and the experience was very rewarding.

One of the symposium’s perquisites was a pub crawl with a van and designated driver, and that’s when it became clear to me that Lexington is a fine beer and food city, with cultural enclaves, shops and historic neighborhoods for wandering, even if the prevailing one-way street grid is maddeningly archaic and begs for immediate jettisoning.

Anyway, when Professor of Philosophy Peter Fosl suggested I come visit, it was just a matter of coordinating calendars.

---

Transylvania University is among the nation’s oldest institutions of higher learning. For those like me who persist in associating the name with Count Dracula’s purported home base in Romania, the Latin roots are precisely the same: “Across the woods,” which in this specifically American sense means west of the Alleghenies. Prior to Kentucky’s statehood, it was called the Transylvania Colony, and belonged to Virginia.

My wife Diana accompanied me, and we arrived before noon, parking the car at the Gratz Park Inn. It was a short, pleasant walk to Peter’s office. His typically small and book-filled work space reminded me that there had been a time in my life when I assumed teaching would be my ultimate career choice, once I got around to making one.

It never happened. So it goes. There’s always professional drinking.

My eyes immediately were drawn to a framed event poster of Christopher Hitchens’s speaking appearance at Transylvania University in 2004. It was Peter’s doing, and he said that Hitchens, who remains one of my personal heroes of writing, was a model among high-profile visitors to the campus, accepting a lower than usual fee and volunteering his whole day to various activities rather than merely speaking and running.

Hitchens also stayed in the Gratz Park Inn. Granted, I’m a bush leaguer compared with Hitchens, and yet the symmetry was appreciated, and a degree of separation now has been shaved.

Peter had arranged for me to meet with philosophy majors over lunch at Transylvania’s cafeteria, the overall excellence of which conjured unsettling thoughts of the available “food service” during my own college days at IU Southeast. I certainly hope it’s better there now.

Later in the day, there was a faculty reception at the home of the humanities division chair. I concocted an impromptu beer tasting from selections they’d thoughtfully provided, including NABC and local Lexington breweries (West Sixth, Country Boy and Alltech). There was ample time to explore on foot the Lexington neighborhood around Transylvania, including the West Sixth and Blue Stallion breweries.

---

Getting back to my real reason for being there, Peter wanted me to share my experiences as a philosophy major in the real world, and honestly, it probably helped me as much as it did the students I met at lunch.

As the years roll past, it’s easy to forget the epiphanies and milestones that helped make us what we are today. For me, one of these was IU Southeast and my path to a Bachelor of Arts degree, with a major in philosophy.

My father’s goal for my post-high school career was for me to be awarded an athletic scholarship. This idea was a laughable non-starter, as I possessed considerably more skill as a clubhouse lawyer than an athlete. Eventually, out of sheer inertia, it was concluded that a semester or two at IU Southeast might lead me in a direction -- and boy, did it, though my parents probably regarded it as the proverbial wrong turn at Albuquerque.

My life in academia began with miserable failure, and I’d have flunked out entirely after a semester if not for my advisor’s suggestion of Introduction to Philosophy, a discipline he was unable to describe or explain, but recommended because after all, I’d be compelled to gather a few humanities credits for the core no matter what major eventually was to be declared – or branch of the military joined.

The instructor was an adjunct faculty member by the name of McCarthy, who by the standards of New Albany, circa 1978, was a veritable space alien who excelled in computer programming, of all things. In fact, before the semester was over, he’d gotten a job working with computers in New York State, and was given special dispensation to commute to New Albany for improvised weekend class sessions. One of them took place at the long defunct Leno’s restaurant.

But before all of that, we gathered at a classroom in Hillside Hall, and Prof. McCarthy greeted us with a warning, which I now paraphrase:

“Welcome to Philosophy 101. If you’ve chosen the university experience as a means of compiling a perfect 4.0 GPA, then I recommend you drop this class and choose another, because I do not award perfect scores. There is no such thing as perfection, and if you disagree with me, be prepared to argue your case logically. It won’t matter, because you’ll still not receive an A for this class. Would anyone like to discuss the nature of perfection?”

I was hooked. After all, it might prove to be my only class where a B was possible, much less perfection, and I was all too acutely aware of my own imperfections.

Coincidentally, a push was underway to begin a full-fledged philosophy program at IU Southeast, and soon I met Dr. Curtis Peters, a Minnesotan-turned-New Albanian who sold me on the idea of majoring in philosophy.

In 1982, I became the first IU Southeast philosophy graduate to amass all the necessary course credits while attending the New Albany campus, compiling a cumulative GPA in the vicinity of 3.0, thus handily proving the McCarthy axiom’s innate wisdom. I promptly set about answering the question, “What does a philosophy degree get you?”

For me, it was the opportunity to be a bartender, work in a package store, substitute teach and work numerous other less enriching part-time jobs in route to my eventual way station in the restaurant and brewing business.

However, as should be obvious by now, a philosophy degree has not ever been about specific vocational training. Rather, it is about learning how to think, and yet even this standard falls short in explaining the impact on me.

Philosophy reveals the primacy of knowledge itself, something not unexpectedly absent from high school, where I skated through, almost entirely unchallenged save by a handful of teachers who saw something in me that I didn’t, or couldn’t, grasp. Bookish and introspective by nature, there wasn’t much added reinforcement to high school for me.

Beginning with McCarthy’s introductory philosophy class at IU Southeast, it was like the clichéd light bulb’s illumination: Ideas really existed, and they actually mattered. Ideas had systems, and mankind would be living in metaphorical mud without them. Philosophy taught me how to think, and moreover – perhaps most importantly of all – that it was okay to think. Only then did I realize that high school choir and a brief foray into theater taught me more about life than playing competitive team sports. Muscle tone pertains to the brain, too.

These many years later, have I always live up to the promise of these youthful intellectual ideals?

Of course not. I’m human, and sometimes metaphorical mud wrestling in the marketplace of venom, if not ideas, is a great deal more fun. It remains that the study of philosophy opened my mind and changed me for the better. It cannot and probably should not be the primary course of study for all university students, but it wouldn’t hurt to be an elective for most.

Thanks to Peter, Jack and everyone at Transylvania University for a timely opportunity to re-examine my premises.

---

Recent columns:

July 18: ON THE AVENUES: I'm a citizen of the universe, but I can't take a photo to save my life.

July 11: ON THE AVENUES: Trieste, New Albany and the meaning of nowhere.

July 4: ON THE AVENUES: The 2019 remix, "You want some fries with your redevelopment?"

June 27: ON THE AVENUES: Mourning (and alcohol) in America, circa 1984.

ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

ON THE AVENUES: Getting back, moving forward, drinking coffee.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

There’s a venerable joke, wherein a man dies and is transported to his permanent home on the other side – not high in the sky astride a cloud bank with a harp (the instrument, not the lager beer), but to the other place.

After ID checks and processing, the devil’s service associate shows the man his various options for eternal punishment, each worse than the last, until finally there is a seemingly benign alternative. In a room with pleasant classical tunes playing, people are standing knee-deep in raw sewage, sipping coffee.

The man takes his place in the coffee line, but before he’s even been handed a mug, the supervisor appears.

“Okay, coffee break’s over. Back on your heads.”

For reasons that remain obscure, this joke always resurfaces just as the taxi rolls to a stop in front of the departures terminal at (fill in name of the European airport), and I must sadly face the facts, because by the end of the day, the coffee break’s over -- and it’s back to NA.

Yes, the missus and I just returned from a week in Tallinn, Estonia. It was the first foreign excursion for us since my failed mayoral bid last year, and the concurrent period of my ongoing disassociation from the New Albanian Brewing Company.

This latest stint abroad wasn’t nearly long enough for me. Are they ever? However, a seven-day coffee break is better than none at all, and thankfully, in addition to the sightseeing and “continuing education” aspects of the journey, there was ample time for thinking and conversation while drinking.

This always pleases me.

In 2015, when I took a leave of absence from NABC in order to campaign for mayor as an independent, there wasn’t much time for reflection. I leaped from one treadmill to another, shifting overnight from devoting a disproportionate number of waking moments to beer and business, to embarking on a breakneck municipal affairs learning curve.

It was only after my final decision to leave NABC, and the subsequent thumbs-down electoral verdict from our voters, that strange things began popping in my noggin.

Not to put too grandiose a spin on it, but it just might be that I’m rediscovering the joy of pure discovery, or vice versa, many aspects of which were placed into cold storage during that quarter-century of involvement in the food and drink trade.

---

Late last year, I commenced an obsession with YouTube documentaries, to which I’d previously been indifferent.

First came a wave of videos about Eastern European history during the Communist era. Then I shifted into current events in and around Estonia and Sicily, where we’ll be visiting later this year.

For decades, an interest in volcanoes had remained latent. With Mt. Etna in our future, it suddenly resurfaced. Besides that, I haven’t been to Italy since 1989.

After reading a biography of poet Ezra Pound, whose Italian sojourn yielded mixed results, my gaze shifted to documentaries about all sorts of writing and writers. First came Englishmen (Larkin, Burgess, Amis), then expatriated Americans in Europe (Hemingway and Fitzgerald), but also a few Americans remaining stateside (Philip Roth and John Steinbeck).

In turn, this yielded to visual artists, primarily painters: Kokoschka and Schiele from Austria; Englishmen Sickert, Bomberg and Nash; Magritte and de Lempicka in Paris (1928). There also was a fascinating BBC series on the origins and artistic uses of the colors gold, blue and white. It’s something that never occurred to me.

Admittedly, apart from a film about the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, these various immersions have occurred within the familiar outline of the "Western" canon. There have been far too few diversions to topics that don’t feature white males like me, although one of two current reads, The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America, has been nothing short of revelatory.

The same is true of the 14th-century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron. If you believe that writers of the Renaissance have nothing to say about sex, and in particular, about diverse female perspectives, it’s time for a reappraisal. 650 years on, the naturalness and candor of these vignettes are astonishing.

Being at loose ends is simultaneously daunting and liberating. Previously, I’ve likened it to awakening from a self-inflicted coma. Personal interests long submerged beneath the weight of My Life in Beer and Brewing are returning with a vengeance. Of course, they never went away. I scratched these various itches throughout the NABC era in my available time, but now there’s a window allowing better concentration, and while the coffee break lasts, I’m undeniably fortunate.

---

It remains true that music is vital. In musical terms, I generally prefer listening in the present tense, not the past. This does not stem from a desire to be hip and trendy. Rather, it’s an expression of evolution as an individual, feeding fresh data into the system to see what comes out the other side. What interests me is the way I hear music, and how this process changes along with my own growth.

My simple goal is to keep abreast of what’s new in music insofar as it pertains to whatever styles of music make me happiest. As an example, while rock and roll may be “dead” as a genre, the world still manages to disgorge youthful rockers, and some of them are damned entertaining.

I customarily allow myself to listen to “oldies,” but only in a controlled and rationed context. The ghosts of my consciousness are profuse and insistent, and they cannot be allowed to frame the present via the past, especially since in musical terms, the reactions engendered are so very personal.

The idea is to interpret one’s past through music, not relive it.

When my father was a much older man, the way he heard Glenn Miller’s songs owed directly to his first experiences with them, as a Marine in the Pacific Theater during World War II. My dad played these songs for me, and to this very day, I hear them differently, as a boy in the milieu of the 1970s.

Same tunes, radically different worlds – and yet a common language of enjoyment for both of us.

It so happened that two weeks ago, it occurred to me to make a list of my favorite 1990s albums, because an oddity had become apparent and needed to be addressed.

Rock and pop releases from this decade are of inestimable and deeply affecting value to me, and yet I’d gotten to the point of excluding them entirely from the rotational retrospective, even past my own point of calculated limitation.

Why was I doing this?

Well, sometimes it takes a martini to sort through it. For me, the decade of the nineties was about building a pub and pizzeria business. It was a period of personal and professional inception in many senses, which led to other beginnings as well as a few ends, and these albums were absolutely integral to all of it.

They were the soundtrack, inexorably connected to those crazy times, but since the jury’s out with regard to many of those memories, the music becomes just as complicated.

In the present time, with an altered personal view of my relationship to the beer and pizza business – pride, disillusionment, appreciation, annoyance, and perhaps stages of mourning that I didn’t even realize were being suppressed – my ever-alert inner watchman seems to have filtered the playlist to protect me from possible discomfort.

Well, enough of that.

I believe it’s time to move past my mind’s weird and circuitous coping mechanisms, reclaim the music I cherish, and restore it to a place in the narrative. Once the 1990s album list is complete, there’ll be an exception to normal practice, and over a period of days, I’ll listen to them all.

Given that the list is close to 75 in number, perhaps it will take weeks, and that’s even better.

Because: If one serving of coffee is all that stands between upright bliss and deluge revisited, then we’d best make it a bottomless cup. There’s more time to learn things that way.

---

April 28: ON THE AVENUES: You know, the two-way streets column I wrote -- 7 years ago, in 2009.

April 21: ON THE AVENUES: The Green Mouse tells all.

April 14: ON THE AVENUES: Forever NA, the wrong way ... from 2012, through 2014, to 2016 and beyond, forever more.

April 7: ON THE AVENUES: The Six Session Beers of Session Beer Day.

ON THE AVENUES: Hello, I must be going.

ON THE AVENUES: Hello, I must be going. 

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

Almost every other month for the past seven years, I’ve attended a Wednesday meeting of the directors of the Brewers of Indiana Guild.

For a long time, these meetings were held at Broad Ripple Brewing Company, Indiana’s first brewpub in the contemporary era. Later they shifted to Sun King Brewing Company (downtown on College Avenue), the state’s second largest production brewery behind Three Floyds.

More recently, the guild has rented an office suite in the basement of an apartment building, formerly a warehouse, just north of Massachusetts Avenue. The new location is a 20-minute walk from Sun King, and I’ve taken to parking there and enjoying the stroll.

Yesterday I was in town by 10:30 a.m. for a 1:00 p.m. meeting, so there was time for a longer walk, south and west past Bankers Life Fieldhouse and Lucas Oil Stadium, followed by a lunch of delicious stuffed grape leaves at Grecian Garden in the City Market, ground floor, right by the front door.

Marina Mavrikis’s pastitsio is to die for, too.

There’s a place called Henry’s Coffee Bistro on East Street, a block off Massachusetts Avenue on the way to the guild’s office suite. My habit is to stop there on the way for an espresso. At meeting’s end, the path back to Sun King leads past St. Joseph Brewery, operating in a church sanctuary by Lockerbie Square.

Yesterday I bought a growler of Popemeal Oat Stout there and brought it home to accompany a dinner of leftover Finnish-style Cod Bake and seasoned rice. Baltic Porter might have been a better choice geographically, but I wanted a beer around 5% abv, not 7%.

---

Wednesday was my second visit to Indianapolis in less than a week. On Saturday, Diana and I drove up to the capital for the guild’s annual Winterfest at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, and although I’d expressed eagerness to sample beers with 7,000 of my closest friends, we never actually made it.

Therein lies a story.

We departed New Albany for Indianapolis on Saturday morning immediately following restorative Honey Creme doughnuts, wasting no time because we wanted to explore the Fountain Square district, which is southeast of the city’s epicenter via Virginia Avenue and the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, an urban walking and biking path running alongside the street.

Had the date not been January 30, it would have been a gorgeous spring day in early April. After coffee at Funkyard Art, we browsed a few shops, then enjoyed a beer at Fountain Square Brewing Company. Our choice for lunch was the End of the Line Public House, which reminds us that Indianapolis’s long defunct street cars used to turn around right across the street.

Seated close enough for inadvertent eavesdropping were two couples talking about Winterfest, which at this point was about two hours from starting. One couple had tickets, and the other did not.

The ones who didn't had come from out of state for the occasion, and apparently the Indianapolis residents were supposed to have purchased four tickets, but somehow dropped the ball. The festival was sold out, and they were debating creative ways to gain entry.

Ironically, I’d started the day with four Winterfest tickets. Two were my director comps, and two were given to me by a friend in Louisville. He couldn’t go, and asked me to give them away, which I did – at Fountain Square Brewing Company, where the bartender was maintaining a waiting list.

Had I known … at any rate, the out-of-towners at End of the Line were growing desperate, and it was an easy fix to make. I gave them our last two tickets with only one small caveat. They were to find Salt Creek Brewery's booth, say hello to my friend Brad Hawkins, and have a sample or three for me.

I hope they had a good time. All’s well that ends well, and we spent the next few hours enjoying the great outdoors, walking Virginia Avenue into the heart of downtown, looping past Monument Circle and the City Market, and stopping at Chilly Water Brewing on the way back for another round of beers.

The urban changes along this corridor between downtown and Fountain Square are utterly fascinating, but in fact, most of downtown Indianapolis is a construction zone. Dozens of buildings are being erected, many of them residential.

These days, I know too much about social justice issues, like America’s worsening affordable housing shortage, to accept all of what we saw at face value as “progress” absent qualifiers. Just the same, the scale of investment and activity is staggering.

More importantly, there is a brewery every half mile or so, enough to suggest that maybe we’re winning at least one revolutionary battle.

---

The weather was much cooler on Wednesday, and the long walk through downtown Indianapolis was bracing. Fortunately, sweet and tart Avgolemono (lemon and egg) sauce and intensely roasted coffee can take the chill off any overcast day, and the exercise felt good.

In due course I tendered my resignation from the board, effective on Sunday, March 6 -- the date of the guild’s annual meeting, which caps its second annual Indiana Craft Brewers Conference weekend in Ft. Wayne. Accordingly, it will be my final hurrah as a director. I’m eager to see who is chosen to occupy my seat.

In general terms, a director serving on the guild’s board must be a brewery owner. Technically, seeing as there has yet to be a final disposition of my ownership shares in NABC, I might choose to continue as a guild director until the buyout is resolved.

However, with the number of breweries in Indiana now topping 120, it’s a good time for me to say goodbye. New (and hopefully younger) blood can come aboard and begin learning how things work, because there’s much work to be done.

Whether guild, business or career, stepping aside is the right thing for me to do. It isn’t easy. Reinvention is necessary, and it’s also a bear, especially the methodical process of stripping away these comfortable layers of self-identity. It’s natural to swaddle yourself with layers of familiarity. Without their protection, suddenly you feel naked and vulnerable.

Does one even have value without them? Do I?

Yet, in some ways, it’s also like shedding scar tissue or waking from a coma. Gradually, interests and inclinations buried for a quarter-century beneath the rote daily checklist of business as usual are re-emerging, stumbling dazed from exile, blinking at the revealing light.

I’ll miss the Wednesdays in Indianapolis, except at some point I won’t. There’ll always be the option of driving up and wandering the city – or spending time in Columbus, Evansville or Needmore (home of Salt Creek). Plenty of quality time remains. Life is good.

It was a hell of a guild ride, boys and girls.

Someone keep throwing punches on my behalf, will you?

---

Recent columns:

January 28: ON THE AVENUES: They're surely not ROLL models.

January 21: ON THE AVENUES: When I grow up, I'd like to be alive.

January 14: ON THE AVENUES: Should the Queen fail to rescue us, there's always H. L. Mencken.

January 7: ON THE AVENUES: You know, that time when Roger interviewed himself.

December 31: ON THE AVENUES: My 2015 in books and reading.

ON THE AVENUES: Gin and tacos, and a maybe a doughnut, but only where feasible.

ON THE AVENUES: Gin and tacos, and a maybe a doughnut, but only where feasible.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

It was very strange.

For about two weeks after Thanksgiving, I averaged around nine hours of sleep per night.

Given that the norm is closer to six, such episodes of prolonged unconsciousness puzzled me. Exercise and food consumption were constant, and as for the drink – well, not much at all.

Come to think of it, maybe that’s the real problem. Sobriety has a dependable way of accentuating the negative, especially here in Logic Cleansing City.

Other explanations are possible. While it’s been warm outside, it’s true that winter is here, and with it the usual black dog’s visit, bearing “seasonal affective disorder” tags. Still, this is an expected annual occurrence, and surely doesn’t account for the recent outbreaks of narcolepsy.

Maybe it’s something else entirely.

Recalling the presidential election in 2000, Al Gore famously observed that you win some and you lose some – and then there’s this little known third category.

That must be it: It’s the business of residency, because there’s nothing like living in limbo to make a man sleepy.

---

In major league baseball, the period just prior to the trade deadline sometimes can be vitally important for teams needing to make personnel changes, either big or small.

A common ploy among teams looking to deal players of marginal value is to showcase them with more playing time in actual games, and kicking the public relations department into higher gear.

“Three Finger Malone’s best days might well be behind him, but he’s always been a clubhouse leader, the fans love him, and look – he went three for four just the other day. Sure, they were infield hits – but boy, wouldn’t he fit perfectly on the bench for a contending team?”

Ever since that day so long ago when David Duggins reminded me of how much money he might be making in the private sector, as opposed to his pro bono sinecure as New Albany’s economic development director, I’ve been observing his batting average.

Currently it has dipped well below the historic Mendoza Line (.200), with an entire industrial park as yet unoccupied, and job losses piling up from the likes of Pillsbury, Sonoco and Indatus.

So, it should come as any surprise that the Gahan Mum Sox has long ceased measuring Duggins’ job performance by actual statistical results, seeing as no measure of creative sabermetrics can rectify this pattern of recurring sow’s ears.

Rather, he has become the modern-day equivalent of Joe Pepitone, who compensated for diminished output on the field (off the field was another story, wink wink, nudge nudge) by looking extremely sharp during the course of consistent underachievement. No player theatrically risked career-ending injuries in diving for unattainable grounders like Joe, who “couldda made us proud.”

Perhaps this explains why Duggins lately has been the point man for virtually every other presumed “quality of life” TIFFED-up "quality of life" project apart from those actually providing pay packets to a permanent labor force, as pertains to what every other municipality in Indiana except New Albany seeks under the mysterious code word of “jobs.”

Just this week, Duggins was publicly lauded by the M. Fine assisted living reboot developer, for whom the city has done nothing (it's the state's tax credits, natch), as well as lovingly credited by another corporate bigwig receiving voluminous taxpayer largess: Flaherty and Collins, low-risk builders of the Break Wind Lofts at Duggins Flats.

Duggins also gloriously shepherded the farmers market pole barn, painstakingly measured the distance between flower pots on Main Street, and is being leashed to the future of the doggie aquatic center. In fact, he’s gotten more ink since the election than the mayor himself, and it can mean only one of two things.

First, that Duggins is Gahan’s heir presumptive, a queasy prospect alleviated somewhat by his residence outside the city’s electoral limits in Clark County, and by Paddy Mac’s dibs on the position.

Second, that he’s being showcased by the city (and its ever loyal, albeit it understaffed newspaper stenographers) as a prelude to a triumphant return to the private sector in genuinely moneyed places like River Ridge, with its intriguing natural habitat of One Southern Indiana propaganda flaks, corporate wildebeests -- and let’s not forget the eternal Bud Light Lime fountain.

That must be it: The business of irrelevancy. After all, there’s nothing quite like living in style to make a man substantive – and get him traded from the Marlins to the Yankees.

---

As for me, my name is Mudd, and I’m one to talk, aren’t I?

No, really. I most certainly am one to talk – and to write, publish and disseminate. I've no plans to drop from the ranks of gadfly. The problem is that it’s a bit early to see how things will develop, and consequently, I’m inconveniently between crusades.

And to be honest, being between crusades is a big problem for me.

There is an intense emotional attachment to the things I do, major or minor. A bar-owning friend pointed to it recently, observing that for him, beer was just a part of the overall business, while with me, it was a crusade and an existential struggle. He’s right, of course. Without a revolution, I’m reduced to the indignity of clean living.

The mayoral campaign was like this, but it’s finished. Politically, I'm stymied, and if there is to be another beer-related crusade, it must wait until “The Big NABC Exit” is negotiated, which is ongoing and looks to be on track to take a while longer than I’d hoped.

I’m beginning to relate to Andrei Sakharov’s internal exile. However, I’m vaguely aware of what needs to happen. John Lennon did it when he took his five-year hiatus from the music business, tending to son Sean while Yoko shrewdly managed the money. When Sean was older, Lennon came back.

The comeback was cut short by an assassin’s bullet, but the lesson remains valuable, as such:

You’re in a different place, psychologically, and so you step away for a while and resolve to return when the pendulum has started swinging back in your direction – hopefully, on your own terms. Of course it’s easy to retreat from the world when you’re rich as Lennon, and yet there’s something to this for all of us, isn’t there?

It isn’t the same as retirement, which is predicated on a permanent detachment from work. It isn’t saying, “I’ll work no more forever.” Rather, it’s a process of regrouping, to take stock, do what one must, and then do it again when practicable.

But when it’s more than a job, and when it’s a crusade you’re looking for … then maybe it’s time to concede that the crusading urge itself is the underlying friction point in need of attention.

Lennon sang: “I just had to let it go.”

That must be it: The business of impassivity. The obvious drawback is that I’ve no idea how to achieve it. However, I must let go of something, for a little while, and let the pendulum work its way back.

Because I know it will. There'll likely be no column next Thursday; it will return on the 31st.

---

Recent columns:

December 10: ON THE AVENUES: Truth, lies, music, and a trick of the Christmas tale (2015).

December 3: ON THE AVENUES: Who (or what) is New Albany's "Person of the Year" for 2015?

November 26: ON THE AVENUES: Faux thanks and reveries (The 2015 Remix).

November 19: ON THE AVENUES: Beer, farthings and that little-known third category.

November 12: ON THE AVENUES: The mayor’s race was about suburban-think versus urban-think. The wrong-think won.

November 5ON THE AVENUES: Confusion, exile, ignobility and resistance.

Last call: "After a quarter century, Roger Baylor will move on from New Albanian Brewing Company."

Just in case you missed it yesterday, here is the reason why folks should always spend months and perhaps even years reading between the lines to decipher cryptic hints.

There is no firm timetable for the process, which involves approximately 395 details painted in varying shades of "what about this or that?" Just know that my decision to leave the business has been made, and exactly what comes next depends on the will of New Albany's electorate.

As for the story: Kevin Gibson gets it right, for which I'm much appreciative.

After a quarter century, Roger Baylor will move on from New Albanian Brewing Company, by Kevin Gibson (Insider Louisville)

... Roger Baylor, well known for his long career in beer and brewing, is now running for mayor of New Albany. If he wins, that will be his new focus. If not, well, he’ll look for another path to follow. Either way, his position as the public face of New Albanian has come to an end. He already had announced he would step away if he won the election — instead, he’s moving on ahead of the decision. It was simply time, he says.

Regarding his growing involvement in local politics over the last few years, Baylor tells Insider, “It seems to be what I’ve been interested in for a while now and seems to be what I spend a lot of time on. That might actually tell me something about where my head is.”

And while he still enjoys beer and brewing, it’s become more of a hobby-level interest, in part because of the popularity of what is now termed “craft beer.”

A future mayor? An ex-brewery owner? 30 years later, there's another fork in the road, and I'm pumped.

Thirty years ago, I closed my eyes wide shut and jumped -- not so sure where or even if I'd land, but firm in the realization that I needed to do something to change my life.

I packed a gym bag, converted my life's savings into traveler's checks, bought a plane ticket and a rail pass, and went to Europe for three months.

It doesn't sound like much, and in the cosmic scheme of things, it wasn't. Millions of human beings have done the same, in different ways in different times. I'm just a speck, but it's the only speck I have, and I needed to relaunch the whole process of figuring out exactly who I was, because back then, the mechanism had stalled.

I was fortunate, and the plan worked. Europe made me what I am today, or more accurately, my stubborn determination that Europe would make me what I became actually bore fruit. It has been one hell of a ride, with only a handful of negligible regrets.

Three decades later, it's time for another jump, and another relaunch. It's been time for quite a while. The public end of this process began this morning with the publication of an article by Kevin Gibson at Insider Louisville: After a quarter century, Roger Baylor will move on from New Albanian Brewing Company.

The private side has been cogitating for a very long period. True, the devil's always in the details, and numerous stories might yet be written about how we got here, but there are three main bullet points that matter to me right now:

I want to be mayor of  New Albany, because this city desperately needs challenging from someone like me, and it's our time.

If not mayor, then I'm looking forward to a "solo" career as yet uncharted; NABC has been and will continue to be, so don't worry.

I am quite serene about these and other developments.

Thanks to everyone expressing support today and in the weeks to come. If not for that first leap back in 1985, I'd have gotten to know precious few of you, and be the poorer for the omission.

The following was published last week at Potable Curmudgeon. I may even have intended it as prelude. The 1985 travel series will continue in fits and starts, as I have the opportunity to write.

---

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 15 … The traveler at 55, and a strange interlude.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

(Fifteenth in a series chronicling my travel year 1985)

In 1985, I wasn’t a very good flier.

Given my lack of experience in the air – in life itself – perhaps this is understandable. Up until then, I’d made only two round-trip flights ever, and the first one was when I was a small child. It was a prop plane, and the destination was Detroit. We taxied forever.

That’s all I’ve got.

The second was in 1978, to San Francisco and back, and it was unpleasant in the extreme. I probably required sedation. My problem wasn’t an aversion to enclosed spaces, or to the Hare Krishna devotees still roaming airports back then, but a fear of heights, which plagues me to this very day, even if I’ve gotten better managing it.

Consequently, the prospect of leaving on a jet plane instigated a fair share of anxiety. Everything about it made me nervous, and to make matters worse, I’d gotten absolutely hammered in Chicago the night before the flight.

Boarding Icelandair for Luxembourg via Reykjavik, and the long-awaited adventure of a lifetime, I was in the throes of a brutal hangover, immune to any hair of the dog, constitutionally and existentially challenged, and with certain doom lurking just around the corner.

Was it too late to call the whole thing off?

At least there was a bright side. I wasn’t in the smoking section, which in those days still existed in the back of the plane. Strange, isn’t it? Using the toilet meant cutting through a wall of cigarette smoke, and of course, one couldn’t just step outside for a breath of fresh air.

Later I realized that for a nicotine addict, being deprived of cigarettes stood to greatly compound the sort of fears gripping me, and in physically wrenching ways I’d mercifully never understand because I didn’t smoke.

However, the Rubicon was ripe for crossing. After the usual pleasantries, instructions and delays, we took off and soon reached cruising altitude. The trip was inexorable and irreversible. Europe finally was coming, and I could feel the level of stress slowly ebbing.

Then there was a random act of turbulence, and the plane abruptly took a big, swooping roller coaster dip.

WE’RE ALL GOING TO DIE.

Pulse skyrocketing, my heart pushed into my throat, and with a panic attack about to ensue, at least I had the presence of mind to look around the cabin, where dozens of fellow passengers were snacking, reading, talking and napping, utterly serene and oblivious to the commonplace.

Relief yielded to chagrin as I worried whether anyone else had seen me lose my composure.

In short, it was my life of naïve underachievement in a nutshell, but a good lesson for a hick from somewhere near French Lick: Fake it until you can make it. Just stop, look, listen and imitate. I tried mightily to apply it once on the ground, and for the thirty years since, with only varying degrees of success.

Eventually I became a better flier, although it didn’t happen overnight. By the 1990s, I actually began looking forward to transatlantic flights as the only time I could be untethered, relax and not be bothered. Nowadays, these commuting hours are sacred times for decompression and meditation. I’ve come a long way in this regard.

---

As noted previously, one of the factors most influencing my decision to spend three months in Europe in 1985 was an absolutely debilitating level of self-doubt. It’s nice knowing you’re capable of connecting with reality just enough to get by, but sheer hell being bright enough to realize you’re doing nothing and going nowhere.

Would I return to university and get my public school teaching credits? What about law school? I’d done relatively well on the LSAT. Maybe get a real job at last, instead of stringing together part-time gigs?

In fact, I was damned fortunate to have the space for dawdling rumination. There were no wars to be drafted into fighting, no nearby mines with coal for extracting, and no babies with mouths to feed. I worked, ate, drank and slept alone, because it hadn’t yet occurred to me that the opposite sex’s interest in knowing me just might be enhanced by me knowing something about myself.

Looking back after three decades, it’s quite clear that once I’d made the decision to spend time in Europe, it was necessary to up the ante. To be sure, it was a legitimate fork in the road for me, but one I didn’t randomly encounter. It was self-engineered.

I’d never spent so much time working toward something tangible. Traveling simply had to be an act of self-redemption. There was no Plan B, apart from returning home and following meekly into the mundane world of home, car, job and IU basketball season tickets.

I had to jump, damn it, and trust the parachute would open.

Fortunately, it did.

---

Thirty years later, with the consummate luxury of perspective, there are times when I’d like nothing more than to return to the blissful, uncomplicated life of the 24-year-old me (who celebrated his 25th birthday in Leningrad), except I’d have to retain what I’ve learned since, and there’s the eternal rub.

No debt or encumbrances and dumb as a rock, or achieving periodic glimpses of wisdom amid being mortgaged to the hilt, both literally and figuratively.

I’ll settle for the latter, because in 2015 it comes equipped with my partner in life, without whom little of it would make much sense. Her presence does not prevent me from trying to imagine a simpler all-around existence, one allowing for a return to those long-ago fundamentals – and that’s what they were, too: Fundamentals.

It was about fundamentals, basics, and growing into a conceptual framework for interpretation of much that followed 1985. Eventually I witnessed the collapse of the post-war European order, stumbled into a career in beer, experienced the transformational impact of the wider-wired world, raised my share of hell, learned, fought, loved, lost and even sometimes won, and now, 30 years on, it seems that I’ve arrived at another of those forks in the road.

Once again I’ve gamed it, because a change has to come, but this time there’s a twist.

The fundamentals that most interest me are currently are undervalued in my career in beer, but they’re sorely necessary in a broader sense in my city, New Albany.

That’s the first fork, and it’s irrevocable. I’m running for mayor, and soon, I intend to be an ex-brewery owner, although I know it will take time to complete the forms.

The next choice is just over the horizon, and depends on the whim of the electorate. Win or lose, it’s time again to jump, and trust the parachute will open.

I trust it will.

---

Previously:

The PC: We pause Euro '85 to remember the Mathäser Bierstadt in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 14 … Beers and breakfast in Munich.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 13 … Tears of overdue joy at Salzburg's Augustiner.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 12 … Stefan Zweig and his world of yesterday.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 11: My Franz Ferdinand obsession takes root.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 10: Habsburgs, history and sausages in Vienna.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 9 … Milan, Venice and a farewell to Northern Italy.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 8 … Pecetto idyll, with a Parisian chaser.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 7 … An eventful detour to Pecetto.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 6 … When in Rome, critical mass.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 5 … From Istanbul to Rome, with Greece in between.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 4 … With Hassan in Pithion.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 3 … Growing up in Greece.

The PC: Euro '85, Part 2 ... Hitting the ground crawling in Luxembourg.

The PC: Euro ’85, Part 1 … Where it all began.

ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings.

ON THE AVENUES: Until philosophers become kings.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

Last Thursday I had the great pleasure to take a break from New Albany’s trials and tribulations and spend the day and night in Lexington, Kentucky, as the guest of Transylvania University’s philosophy department.

To be sure, there have been times in the past when Lexington wouldn’t have seemed such a savory destination for an overnight pleasure trip.

After all, I was raised in Southern Indiana, and college basketball naturally prefigured the rural moral (and genetic) code: Indiana University in Bloomington was the beneficent locale of the grail, while the University of Kentucky represented a snarling, lowdown devil. I imagine it wasn’t easy for my mother, who was a UK graduate living in a small Hoosier burg, and subject to commensurate suspicion.

Of course, it’s all bunk, and the whole point of the exercise is to show the many possibilities for mankind’s advancement, from primitive sporting totems and rituals all the way through reading actual books.

I’d been warming to Lexington for a long time, even before February of 2014, when the University of Kentucky hosted a symposium on craft beer writing. I was fortunate to be numbered among the speakers, and the experience was very rewarding.

One of the symposium’s perquisites was a pub crawl with a van and designated driver, and that’s when it became clear to me that Lexington is a fine beer and food city, with cultural enclaves, shops and historic neighborhoods for wandering, even if the prevailing one-way street grid is maddeningly archaic and begs for immediate jettisoning.

Anyway, when Professor of Philosophy Peter Fosl suggested I come visit, it was just a matter of coordinating calendars.

---

Transylvania University is among the nation’s oldest institutions of higher learning. For those like me who persist in associating the name with Count Dracula’s purported home base in Romania, the Latin roots are precisely the same: “Across the woods,” which in this specifically American sense means west of the Alleghenies. Prior to Kentucky’s statehood, it was called the Transylvania Colony, and belonged to Virginia.

My wife Diana accompanied me, and we arrived before noon, parking the car at the Gratz Park Inn. It was a short, pleasant walk to Peter’s office. His typically small and book-filled work space reminded me that there had been a time in my life when I assumed teaching would be my ultimate career choice, once I got around to making one.

It never happened. So it goes. There’s always professional drinking.

My eyes immediately were drawn to a framed event poster of Christopher Hitchens’s speaking appearance at Transylvania University in 2004. It was Peter’s doing, and he said that Hitchens, who remains one of my personal heroes of writing, was a model among high-profile visitors to the campus, accepting a lower than usual fee and volunteering his whole day to various activities rather than merely speaking and running.

Hitchens also stayed in the Gratz Park Inn. Granted, I’m a bush leaguer compared with Hitchens, and yet the symmetry was appreciated, and a degree of separation now has been shaved.

Peter had arranged for me to meet with philosophy majors over lunch at Transylvania’s cafeteria, the overall excellence of which conjured unsettling thoughts of the available “food service” during my own college days at IU Southeast. I certainly hope it’s better there now.

Later in the day, there was a faculty reception at the home of the humanities division chair. I concocted an impromptu beer tasting from selections they’d thoughtfully provided, including NABC and local Lexington breweries (West Sixth, Country Boy and Alltech). There was ample time to explore on foot the Lexington neighborhood around Transylvania, including the West Sixth and Blue Stallion breweries.

---

Getting back to my real reason for being there, Peter wanted me to share my experiences as a philosophy major in the real world, and honestly, it probably helped me as much as it did the students I met at lunch.

As the years roll past, it’s easy to forget the epiphanies and milestones that helped make us what we are today. For me, one of these was IU Southeast and my path to a Bachelor of Arts degree, with a major in philosophy.

My father’s goal for my post-high school career was for me to be awarded an athletic scholarship. This idea was a laughable non-starter, as I possessed considerably more skill as a clubhouse lawyer than an athlete. Eventually, out of sheer inertia, it was concluded that a semester or two at IU Southeast might lead me in a direction -- and boy, did it, though my parents probably regarded it as the proverbial wrong turn at Albuquerque.

My life in academia began with miserable failure, and I’d have flunked out entirely after a semester if not for my advisor’s suggestion of Introduction to Philosophy, a discipline he was unable to describe or explain, but recommended because after all, I’d be compelled to gather a few humanities credits for the core no matter what major eventually was to be declared – or branch of the military joined.

The instructor was an adjunct faculty member by the name of McCarthy, who by the standards of New Albany, circa 1978, was a veritable space alien who excelled in computer programming, of all things. In fact, before the semester was over, he’d gotten a job working with computers in New York State, and was given special dispensation to commute to New Albany for improvised weekend class sessions. One of them took place at the long defunct Leno’s restaurant.

But before all of that, we gathered at a classroom in Hillside Hall, and Prof. McCarthy greeted us with a warning, which I now paraphrase:

“Welcome to Philosophy 101. If you’ve chosen the university experience as a means of compiling a perfect 4.0 GPA, then I recommend you drop this class and choose another, because I do not award perfect scores. There is no such thing as perfection, and if you disagree with me, be prepared to argue your case logically. It won’t matter, because you’ll still not receive an A for this class. Would anyone like to discuss the nature of perfection?”

I was hooked. After all, it might prove to be my only class where a B was possible, much less perfection, and I was all too acutely aware of my own imperfections.

Coincidentally, a push was underway to begin a full-fledged philosophy program at IU Southeast, and soon I met Dr. Curtis Peters, a Minnesotan-turned-New Albanian who sold me on the idea of majoring in philosophy.

In 1982, I became the first IU Southeast philosophy graduate to amass all the necessary course credits while attending the New Albany campus, compiling a cumulative GPA in the vicinity of 3.0, thus handily proving the McCarthy axiom’s innate wisdom. I promptly set about answering the question, “What does a philosophy degree get you?”

For me, it was the opportunity to be a bartender, work in a package store, substitute teach and work numerous other less enriching part-time jobs in route to my eventual way station in the restaurant and brewing business.

However, as should be obvious by now, a philosophy degree has not ever been about specific vocational training. Rather, it is about learning how to think, and yet even this standard falls short in explaining the impact on me.

Philosophy reveals the primacy of knowledge itself, something not unexpectedly absent from high school, where I skated through, almost entirely unchallenged save by a handful of teachers who saw something in me that I didn’t, or couldn’t, grasp. Bookish and introspective by nature, there wasn’t much added reinforcement to high school for me.

Beginning with McCarthy’s introductory philosophy class at IU Southeast, it was like the clichéd light bulb’s illumination: Ideas really existed, and they actually mattered. Ideas had systems, and mankind would be living in metaphorical mud without them. Philosophy taught me how to think, and moreover – perhaps most importantly of all – that it was okay to think. Only then did I realize that high school choir and a brief foray into theater taught me more about life than playing competitive team sports. Muscle tone pertains to the brain, too.

These many years later, have I always live up to the promise of these youthful intellectual ideals?

Of course not. I’m human, and sometimes metaphorical mud wrestling in the marketplace of venom, if not ideas, is a great deal more fun. It remains that the study of philosophy opened my mind and changed me for the better. It cannot and probably should not be the primary course of study for all university students, but it wouldn’t hurt to be an elective for most.

Thanks to Peter, Jack and everyone at Transylvania University for a timely opportunity to re-examine my premises.

---

Recent columns:

April 27: ON THE AVENUES MONDAY SPECIAL: Et tu, Greg Phipps? Or: Anger and the electoral variability of transparency.

April 23: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Anachronisms and intellectuals, here and there.

April 16: ON THE AVENUES: Say a prayer for NA Confidentialas it conducts this exclusive interview with Councilman Cappuccino.

April 9: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Complexities and simplicities in Boomtown.

April 8: ON THE AVENUES SPECIAL: The proper separation of church and council.

Personal change, political change, and why the orangutan sleeps tonight.

When you've been in the principled position of political opposition for 35 years, having realized long ago that the problem isn't so much Republican or Democrat, but America's non-thinking, two-party dysfunction itself, then election results so disappointing to others are like water off a duck's back.

Floyd County hands its Democrats a purely epic, top-to-bottom beat down.

Here's an essay from a few years back. I like it because of this impeccable conclusion:

We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.

Exactly.

Forget Shorter Showers; Why personal change does not equal political change, by Derrick Jensen (Orion)

WOULD ANY SANE PERSON think dumpster diving would have stopped Hitler, or that composting would have ended slavery or brought about the eight-hour workday, or that chopping wood and carrying water would have gotten people out of Tsarist prisons, or that dancing naked around a fire would have helped put in place the Voting Rights Act of 1957 or the Civil Rights Act of 1964? Then why now, with all the world at stake, do so many people retreat into these entirely personal “solutions”?

Part of the problem is that we’ve been victims of a campaign of systematic misdirection. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organized political resistance.