ON THE AVENUES: Magic and loss.

For one who is accustomed to recording his thoughts on paper, because he has always understood in his particular case that writing is the very best way to make sense of things, it follows that once properly ordered, thoughts can make the leap from written to spoken language. 

Not before.

In short, if I cannot articulate a topic in writing, chances are I’ll do no better trying to explain it to you in conversation.

Some might say this process is bass-ackwards, given that the implications are broader than the enumerated recipe for Cincy chili or a description of what happened on a certain day in Moscow in 1999. Also involved are feelings and emotions encompassing far more complexity than the norm, which must be retrofitted in writing so I can convey them in chatter.

Naturally small talk can proceed without pre-authorization. That’s what it is: small, mostly inconsequential, and how about those Packers? An absence of forethought has fewer implications when little more than the meaningless passing of time is the goal.

But as the far too often maligned band Chicago’s keyboardist, singer and songwriter Robert Lamm once observed, “Time passes much too quickly, when we’re together laughing” (Beginnings, 1969), and later, “Forever is a long, long time – longer than we ever realize” (Forever, 1986).

“I wish I could sing it to you,” crooned Lamm during Nixon’s first term.

I’d settle for being able to write it, and now I’ll try to do so.

---

A close friend from high school died recently. In itself, while profoundly sad, this isn’t unusual. It happens in turn to all of us, and with each of us.

Every rose has its thorn, and every beginning an end. We are finite creatures. We come eventually to a conclusion. In Lamm’s 80s-era ballad, he spoke of “forever” not as the cosmic duration of his love; rather, the active element of love ends with his death or his lover’s.

Consequently, Lamm promised, “I’m going to love you the rest of my life.” Life spans are the delineation of love, and a terminus. The word “forever” then is repeated, but ignore this. It is necessary for the song’s musical arrangement to make sense, not the sentiment itself.

After all, this is a pop tune, not theology.

When I say we were close friends in high school, it’s a statement of fact. We were very tight then. And, factually, our friendship did not survive for very long after high school. Alas, it wasn’t merely the expected usual happenstance that we went our separate ways, although geographically, we surely did.

There was a rupture of some sort. It definitely was an estrangement. A point came when he left no doubt that we were no longer friends. I’d run into him here and there, at reunions and occasion visits home. He’d acknowledge me, but a stiff Arctic breeze ran through the courtesies. I cannot recall having a substantive conversation with him literally in four decades.

Happily, by all accounts he lived a vigorous and productive life in California during the past 30-odd years, both professionally and personally. A lovelier family would be hard to imagine. To me, they’re his greatest achievement. His career in the film industry was stellar. None of it comes as a surprise to me, because we all knew he was destined for great things. There was no doubt.

And yet, those decades are Lindsey Buckingham’s second-hand news to me. My high school friend chose to exclude me from his life. My affection was unrequited. In the words of the Hoosier novelist, so it goes.

It puzzled me greatly for all those years, and always will. It also hurt tremendously, because to be brutally frank I idolized him, from the moment we became friends in 1974-75 all the way to the present day, even two weeks after he was claimed by cancer, far too young.

It’s an injustice, the c-word. I’ve been in pain and anguish, mourning his passing as intensely as that of my own two parents. My eyes are wet writing this. I feel so bad for his wife and kids – and one grandchild, I think.

Obviously, there’ll be no resolution now. Lamm was right. Time passed much too quickly; the laughter stopped too soon, and forever remains a long, long time.

But I will say this.

A few years ago it occurred to me that I’d always blamed myself for committing the offense, for doing “something” – whatever the hell this really means – to prompt the estrangement. Evidently it was easier, or maybe simply less painful, to carry this burden of guilt with me than admit that maybe my hero was anything less than perfect.

So, finally I stopped blaming myself. It wasn’t easy.

Life’s a mystery, and human beings are not mathematical formulas. We all are flawed, each and every one of us. Kaka can and will occur. I have dark patches, and the black dog has been known to come around. Maybe with him, too.

I’ll always dearly love my friend, and smile when I think about the old days – good, bad or otherwise. We were a good team, while we were. I’m sure he had his reasons, and I respect them. In the end, our separation was as much his loss as it was mine, a 50-50 split.

You did good, Mikey. You absolutely rocked it. I’ll always miss you. I’ll never forget you.

Goodbye.

---

It’s funny, but for a very long time I resisted the urge to refer to myself as a writer, perhaps because we’ve grown up in a dysfunctional society that can’t fathom a person “being” something if it can’t be measured by time sheets or a tax return.

That’s bogus, of course, but it’s precisely who we are.

I’m the first to concede that four decades of purported adulthood spent writing sentences probably haven’t earned me a single year’s poverty-level American wage. Fortunately this isn’t the only way to look at it. Writing is what I do, irrespective of other considerations, and it’s been a part of what I’ve always “done.”

As far back as my package store days, stocking the famous “import door” of the walk-in cooler in the barren physical and intellectual wasteland of early 1980s downtown New Albany, I photocopied sheets at my own expense with beer prices and descriptions, and handed them to regular customers in lieu of a web site.

For the first ten years of the Public House, I wrote, edited and published the FOSSILS homebrewing club newsletter on basic sheets of paper with staples and stamps. The club was non-profit, but since our business hosted the majority of meetings and club members also were regular customers, there was a tangential and mutually beneficial relationship with revenues.

There you have it. I’m a writer.

I think and process information in terms of writing.

Most of the time I follow my muse from sheer compulsion, not in pursuit of pay. At times, the money comes. To me, it’s all good. We shouldn’t be asking people what they do for remuneration, anyway.

It’s gauche.

In closing, here’s a snippet of dialogue from Warren Beatty’s epic film Reds (1981). Beatty, as journalist/socialist John Reed, is meeting with factory workers trying to unionize when the cops arrive to break up the "unAmerican" gathering.

Cop: This is an illegal assembly.

Reed: Excuse me, Officer. These men have the legal right to assemble. That's all they're doing.

Cop: We know what the hell they doing. What the hell you doing?

Reed: Me?

Cop: You.

Reed: I write.

Cop: You write? You wrong. Get him out of here!

Let the record show I have NOT so much as implied or suggested in the slightest that the policeman is employed by the city of New Albany.

In any event, my name’s Roger, not John. 

---

Recent columns:

September 17: ON THE AVENUES: Stuck inside of Nawbany with the Flanders blues again.

September 10: ON THE AVENUES: The Weekly Wad lives on in the minds of malcontents.

September 3: ON THE AVENUES: If you really want to be my friend.

August 27: ON THE AVENUES: Structural racism, white fragility, and my old school.

Kurt Vonnegut: "There is no shortage of wonderful writers. What we lack is a dependable mass of readers."

Maybe first I should learn how to type.

Meanwhile, Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite Hoosier -- Vonnegut and maybe Hoagy Carmichael. Dark or black humor was a Vonnegut trademark, and I intend to bear this in mind as New Gahania lurches forward into the next four years of payola and arrogance.

We'll be compelled to laugh, a lot -- and hope for deliverance from the indictments.

Kurt Vonnegut on Making a Living as a Writer, by Kurt Vonnegut and Suzanne McConnell (The Nation)

You probably won’t have to endure the downsides of fame and fortune. But you can emulate the upsides.

... Joseph Shipley, an Indianapolis native, related this anecdote as I was assisting the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library table at the Brooklyn Book Festival one recent September. As a sophomore in high school, just after reading Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, he passed Kurt Vonnegut himself on the street one fall day in downtown Indianapolis.

“I know you!” Joe blurted.

“No, you don’t,” Kurt replied.

Read my food and dining (and drinking) news items at Food & Dining Magazine.

It has been something like 15 years since I started writing beer columns for Food & Dining Magazine, and since 2016 I've been branching out to the occasional profile and feature.

Effective right about now, I'm contributing two or three weekly news items to the website. A few of them have been published already; the list is here. Subject matter is all over the map, and that helps make the job fun. It's similar to what I've been doing here at the blog, with a different framework.

You are invited to tune into Food & Dining Magazine's web site or Facebook page and read all about it.

A pundit's life of living publicly, or wow, it's been a while since a nice, healthy Sunday rant.

Roughly once a year I feel compelled to issue this explanation of a pundit's life as lived in public view, so here goes.

I'm fairly confident that after 30+ years as an employee, owner and employee again, working in various sectors of the food and drink business, I've made many more friends than enemies. If this weren't the case, it's hard for me to believe I'd have gotten this far. If you're one of the enemies, you may not be reading these words, but a few thousand friends and casual acquaintances might be doing so.

I thank you all, and especially those who hold the old-fashioned view that it's possible to agree here, disagree there, and remain friendly all the while.

As such, just know it's a point of pride with me that I've seldom found myself unable to have a beer or coffee alongside a person with whom I disagree. The act of sharing a table can have a remarkably salutary effect; amazingly, it often leads to a state of co-existence approximating "live and let live."

Exceptions? They exist, and prove the rule.

Yes, I have lots to say and I'm not shy about saying what I think. Concurrently, anonymity does not jibe with my system of values -- never has, never will -- and whatever I say or write always comes with my name attached to it, come what may, right there, openly and perhaps even "bigly."

There's no stealth, surprises or male cow feces in my writing life. At times I'm right, other times wrong, often both simultaneously, and because life's a dialectic, the processes of self-knowledge and learning never, ever stop. In fact, being wrong is necessary to even begin understanding what's right. Cherish being mistaken, and appreciate the lessons you are taught as a result.

I'm six feet four inches tall, and weigh too damn much (okay, around 255 lbs), the point being invisibility isn't a likely outcome for me. I stand out in a crowd, that's just the way it is, so I might as well remain transparent and out in the open. There are dozens of ways to reach me, to tell me what you think, to differ, to agree, and to get down to a dialogue -- or tell me I'm an asshole. Trust me, you won't be the first.

But there's one thing I'll never understand, because as outspoken, engaged and polemical as I can be, it has not once occurred to me (hypothetically) to call up Robert Massey, the Louisville Orchestra's CEO, and tell him we can't buy concert tickets any longer because I heard the principal cellist say she dislikes Pilsner Urquell.

Because: her dislike of the finest Pilsner-style lager this planet has yet to produce has absolutely no bearing on her ability to perform the music. It is no reflection on Massey's stewardship of the orchestra, and matters not one iota as to our appreciation of the musical experience. It's a dog that won't hunt and a complete non-starter.

It would be petty and rather childish for me to feel this way, to have this reaction or worst yet, to act on it. If I did, Massey's response should stress that how one functions as an employee is one thing, and what he or she believes, does and says in their free time is something very different.

Right? Now the weary sighhhh that always concludes these digressions.

NA Confidential welcomes submissions, contributions and thoughts. Am I spot on or full of it? Write and tell me why, and our readers can be the final judge. The metaphorical door is always open. You must only resolve to make use of it, but none of this can occur if you're unwilling to be as open with me as I am with you. 

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

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

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

On being a writer, Ernest Hemingway suggested leading with truth.

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”

Much later, Stephen King elaborated.

“Sometimes you have to go on when you don't feel like it, and sometimes you're doing good work when it feels like all you're managing is to shovel shit from a sitting position.”

The summary already had been offered by Mark Twain.

“Write without pay until somebody offers to pay.”

These thoughts are prompted by a question many of you have asked me.

“Now what?”

Well, if you figure it out, let me know. Just remember that we’re speaking personally, not in the municipal sense.

The political aspect of the query has been answered for now, although it bears repeating that during the mayoral campaign, I always sought to remind listeners that politics at the local level isn’t about “me,” but about “us.”

Will any of “us” remain here after four more years of Gahanism?

Conversely, and in vocational terms, what comes next is highly individualized, because it addresses what I’ll be doing with the rest of my own life. Chapters are closing and eras coming to an end. Like most other facets of one’s journey through this world, the future is overwhelmingly gray, and as yet amorphous.

Throughout the year, I’ve said that I’ll be selling my share of ownership in NABC to my business partners. This statement of general intent remains accurate.

However, it should surprise no one that the process for doing so always stood to be prolonged, and it is quite likely to take a while. There are nuts, bolts and legalities to be sifted through. Disentangling may well become a full-time job, and unfortunately, this position is pro bono – at least until it isn’t.

Consequently, for perhaps the only time in history, allow me to summarize my innermost condition with words penned by Southern rock legend Charlie Daniels:

“They’re my troubles; don’t let ‘em worry you none. When I signed on to be a man, I figured I was gonna have some. Like I say, either way – go or stay – you ain’t gonna change my life.”

About my high school listening habits … yes, they were a bit different back then. The world changes, and so must we.

---

Obviously, business matters eventually will come to rest, and there’ll be a resolution. Meanwhile, it would be helpful for me to determine what I intend to do after leaving a quarter-century-old sinecure, large chunks of which are of my own creation.

In fact, the possibility that I might choose to grow up some day has occurred to me from time to time, and I’ve frequently joked that one’s marketability isn’t necessarily enhanced by being the undisputed best-ever person to perform a job you designed for yourself.

Or, put another way, working long enough for yourself can make you unemployable. I’m about to find out if this is true. So it goes, come what may, and dial your own cliché.

I always wondered what this would feel like, and now I know. Sans the stereotypically abrupt, earth-shattering epiphany, it’s something that transpires over time. Your consciousness evolves. You become aware that one reality has passed, and another awaits. The feeling is daunting and liberating all at once, and it’s a bit scary at times.

What does it all mean?

Honestly, I don’t know.

Looking in the metaphorical mirror, I’m no less entrepreneurial in disposition than before, and remain zealously committed to the same principles of economic localism and independent local business advocacy which have served as motivation throughout my career.

As for beer, it’s been a big part of my life, though never the only part. I believe there’s still a place for me in it. However, the simple fact is that I’m not very interested in owning another beer (and food) business. I’d rather help other such businesses, perhaps through education, training and organization.

This is why I’m bullish about the future prospects for the New Albany Restaurant and Bar Association as a professional trade group. Unity among the purveyors of shared interest stands to lift the segment and take it to a higher level. I’ll help NARBA in any way I can.

Of course, I’ll also continue to write. In the end, writing is non-negotiable.

---

For me, writing is both compulsion and sublimation. I often wonder how it came to be this way.

Why is it necessary for me to unburden myself of thoughts, feelings, venom and delights, along with any other notions humans find themselves in need of releasing to the world at large, through this demanding medium of the written word?

It probably goes back to being a reasonably intelligent only child, and trundling off to the first grade with two bad legs requiring bulky exterior braces, as well as a speech impediment, one subsequently addressed with corrective therapy. Neither of these conditions was painful physically, but psychologically they were burden. In retrospect, these and other childhood health issues made me feel inferior.

On top of all that, we lived outside of town, and there weren't many other kids nearby. My social skills were stunted, and it would be an understatement of colossal dimensions to merely say “he was shy.” Rather, it was a crippling, oppressive and introverted shyness. Literally, I didn’t know what to say.

My father was a profane and outspoken extrovert who viewed potential human redemption exclusively as a function of team sports, and he meant well, but if I'd have been able to communicate and cooperate with others playing games, there'd have been no issue in the first place.

Books were my solace. What I liked to do most of all was read, and it was through reading that I gradually learned the merits of writing as a means of being able to express what I couldn't manage to say aloud.

It was only much later, when I got into the pub business, that I finally learned how to speak, and to address people directly with thoughts previously reserved for pen and paper.

By now, most readers know that my interest in better beer brought me into NABC. It was opportunity, circumstance and serendipity, not an MBA or previous management experience at a chain restaurant. After a few years behind the bar, it all started to make sense.

And yet speaking remains hazardous and always will. There is no "cure" for shyness. Your brain continues to work as before, while you ceaselessly and remorselessly treat the daily symptoms.

Learning to interact with others made me a better bartender and informed my writing. Moreover, it was a way of breaking out of my inner little boy’s ongoing prison and finding common ground with fellow humans.

People?

They can be almost as interesting as words … at least some of the time.

---

So, now what?

Insofar as I can control my future progress, perhaps a bout of personal discovery, as prompted long ago by Michael “Beer Hunter” Jackson’s astute observation: “The pursuit of the perfect pint should last a lifetime.”

Words may be substituted for “pint” according to your own tastes and disposition.

Is there money to be made by following my writing muse? Will I become a greeter at Wally World? Is another political campaign likely down the road? Who was better, Charlie Parker or John Coltrane?

So many questions, so few answers. Then again, Beer Zen 101 always held that it’s less about the destination than the journey, precisely because the only finish line we share is the one marked Death, which always comes into view soon enough. It’s time to find another path less traveled, and get with it.

I’ll close with a request of the sort I seldom make: Please wish me luck – and as always, thanks for reading.

---

Recent columns:

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.

October 29: ON THE AVENUES: A year later, the backroom politics of pure spite at Haughey’s Tavern still reek.

October 28: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: How many businesses already have died because of City Hall’s street grid procrastination?

October 26: ON THE AVENUES EXTRA: Gahan says speeding sucks, but street safety can wait until after he is re-elected.

October 22: ON THE AVENUES: My career as a double naught capitalist.

October 19: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Courtesy bicycle to the Hotel Silly (2010, 2013).

October 15: ON THE AVENUES: To the New Albanians, each and every one.

October 8: ON THE AVENUES: There’s an indie twist to this curmudgeon’s annual Harvest Homecoming column.

Sunday morning coffee reading: "Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity."

The author does not begrudge Orwell's talents. Rather, he feels "less well-disposed to those mediocrities who slavishly worship at the shrine of St George."

A Point of View: Why Orwell was a literary mediocrity, by Will Self.

... The trouble for the George Orwells of this world is that they don't like the ways in which our tongue is being shaped. In this respect they're indeed small "c" conservatives, who would rather peer at meaning by the guttering candlelight of a Standard English frozen in time, than have it brightly illumined by the high-wattage of the living, changing language.

Orwell and his supporters may say they're objecting to jargon and pretension, but underlying this are good old-fashioned prejudices against difference itself. Only homogenous groups of people all speak and write identically. People from different heritages, ethnicities, classes and regions speak the same language differently, duh!

The Economist on Richard III.

Before my job at the long defunct UMI Data Courier back in '88, I didn't know what The Economist was. It still isn't entirely clear, given that the Brits call it a newspaper, and to Americans, it looks like a magazine. Maybe I saw a few issues in college while amassing information for my term paper on Eurocommunism. At any rate, once I began abstracting  The Economist, I was hooked. Apart from a few fallow periods when money was tight, I've been a subscriber to the print edition since 1989.

What continues to impress these many years later is the uniform style; numerous contributing writers with distinctive voices, but written and edited into a "house voice." Prior to my immersion into the Internetz, The Economist was my weekly recap of the planet: Current affairs, politics, economics, science, books, and the very first article I read upon arrival, the obituary at the very end.

This week's essay about the deceased exemplifies the publication's sense of both style and humor: Richard III (Richard Plantagenet), dead since 1485, but whose bones recently were rediscovered and positively identified, having spent the past five centuries in a shallow grave beneath the stones of an abbey, itself long since transformed into a parking lot. The obituary fuses history, literature and science into a clever but respectful summary of a life relinquished in the distant past.

I appreciate good writing, and this is good writing.

NO VIPER, toad or hedgehog; no unformed bear-whelp, or lump of foul deformity. Instead, the man dug up from the car park of Leicester Social Services in September had, for the most part, an ordinary shape. His height was a little above average for the time when he had lived. His limbs were regular and delicate—almost feminine, the scientists said. Pace Shakespeare, there was no withered arm. There was, however, a severely sideways-twisted spine, the result of scoliosis that had probably emerged in adolescence. It would have put one shoulder higher than the other, making him stand shorter than he was. He might have needed extra cushions in his chairs, and extra tugs when putting on those robes of green velvet and crimson cloth of gold so lovingly detailed in his orders to the Wardrobe. But then a king would get that sort of help anyway.

Novelists and non-fiction: Frank Bill's House of Grit.

Late last year, when we first encountered Frank Bill's name, he was advising readers of Granta to avoid the vicious, meth-laced ganglands surrounding S. Ellen Jones Elementary School.

Pair of sneakers beats a full NSP house?

There has been an animated off-line discussion about this piece, which appeared in Granta way back in September, when our attention was diverted from gangs to gaping bridge holes. My guess is that Bob Caesar won't be asking Mr. Bill to write the forward for James A. Crutchfield's bicentennial book.

There's still trouble in the heartland. Now it's out there in the fields.

OPINION

Scorched Earth in the Midwest

By FRANK BILL

Published: July 28, 2012

Corydon, Ind.

Enlarge This Image

John Sommers II/Reuters

Withered corn plants on a drought-stricken farm near Evansville, Ind.

IT’S July and the temperatures throughout southern Indiana and northern Kentucky are an inferno, in some cases scorching to over 100 degrees, and we know it’s not even August yet; it’s only going to get hotter. Several days in a row I get a mind-splitter headache; it’s so bad, it hurts to blink.

Frank Bill is identified as the author of a "forthcoming novel" called Donnybrook. His web site is Frank Bill's House of Grit.

Alexander Cockburn.

As a hick from somewhere close to French Lick, muddling along from regional backwardness to a place approximating planetary citizenship, I first became aware of Alexander Cockburn's work not during my university tenure, but while working at UNI-Data Courier in 1988/89.

The task of abstracting The Nation generally fell to me. It radically enhanced my radicalism, with Cockburn's "Beat the Devil" column a major factor in this wonderful education. What I remember about his writings is a fierce, tenacious, unyielding prose style. I borrowed a phrase from Cockburn that I still deploy today: "Health fascist."

"Rest in peace" simply doesn't pass muster in this instance. Perhaps "polemicize in perpetuity" makes more sense.

Alexander Cockburn, by James Fallows (The Atlantic)

... As Michael Tomasky points out in this appreciation, Alex Cockburn essentially pioneered the modern persona for which Christopher Hitchens became much better known: the fancily Oxford-educated leftie Brit litterateur/journalist who would say all the outrageous things his bland Yank counterparts lacked the wit, courage, erudition, or épater-spirit to utter on their own. As both Tomasky and James Wolcott make clear, Cockburn was far more committed and purposeful in his outrageousness. His own brutal obituary about Hitchens both explains and exemplifies the differences. Short version: Cockburn said that Hitchens always knew just how far he could go; Cockburn knew, and kept on going.

It isn't always my decision.

The Sherman Minton Bridge was shut down on September 9, and the general election followed on November 8. During that two-month period, NAC has averaged close to three posts a day. Usually I aim for two. Some admittedly were throwaways, but overall, considering everything that's been happening around these parts, the greater workload has seemed justified. Readership has nudged up accordingly, and you are duly thanked.

For those afflicted by a fatal facility to write, compulsion and obsession can become easily intertwined. During periods like this one, it isn't just that I feel obliged to report what's going down. It's that I feel driven to interpret events, to relieve my muse's incessant demands and to comment for posterity. For me, it remains much as blogs were originally conceived, in the sense of them serving as public diaries.

But never let a writer tell you that he or she doesn't care if anyone reads their work. Whenever I hear of being bashed for something I've written, I laugh loud and long. Seems they just can't help reading what annoys them most, and they're weaker for it. It matters less that they're anonymous, and more that they've beaten themselves from the outset by being unable to look away.

Having made these observations, I sense that this spike of productivity may be coming to a close. It isn't the first time you're heard me say it. There's a lot to do at those two places where no one ever goes, because we keep selling more of the beer no one ever drinks, and as a result, I'll be forced to cut back at the blog no one ever reads. Time to take it easy for a few days -- if the muse permits.

A columnist no longer, for now.

It was a strange morning. After 111 straight deadlines successfully met, my Tribune column is on hiatus. While the ostensible and stated reason for the stoppage is my candidacy for a city council seat, we also all know there are times in everyone's life when multiple considerations cross. So it is in this case, too.

There's the campaign rationale, and there's the impending merger of the editions, which might turn out to alter the rotation of local columnists whether I'd like it to or not. Changes are always possible when management shifts.

There's also a good bit of fatigue, personally. It isn't as easy as it sounds to tap the creative process on demand, and for it to be that draining takes away some of the fun. Finally, there's a desire to return to beer writing, which I might be able to do with the News & Tribune in the future. Where this future takes my attempted local newspaper wordsmithing is anyone's guess. I suppose it will be clear as soon as I lose or win.

I suspect it will provide more time to practice longer-form blogging, like I used to do, at least until new challenges come along. As an example, there's the parks piece published earlier this afternoon. Some housekeeping and touch-up decorating is overdue; a plan is afoot to update the blog's appearance and perhaps add more content, and this will rollout (if at all) concurrent with a candidate's web site. Look for it soon.

As always, your patronage is appreciated.

Open thread: How do we cope with the theory and practice of New Albany?

Four years and 2,200 posts ago, we made an assertion and asked a question. The assertion remains unchallenged, and the question is unanswered, although we've certainly devoted much consideration to it:

New Albany is a state of mind – but whose?

Beginning on January 8, I’ll be taking a step into uncharted territory when my first Tribune guest column is published. The plan is to submit 900 words each week. No stipulations have been placed on the content of these columns, and while there is no denying that the blogging experience will come to bear on the finished products, I was an essayist before I was a blogger, and there is a certain style intrinsic to the print format that will take time for me to master.

That said, I’ve already informed my wife, closest friends and confidants that given the task at hand, I’ll need help – not in writing, but with ideas and creative prodding.

On Sunday, I obliquely referenced one possible angle for my approach in the columns of Jeffrey Bernard. Also, most of you know that HL Mencken is a vital and continuing influence. In their respective ways, both of these writers devoted their words to a catharsis of sorts, and I've always felt the same way.

Stated simply, it goes something like this: How does one cope in a place where one's own worldview is devalued in cultural, political and institutional senses?

And, what is theory and practice of New Albany, why does it prod me to catharsis in writing, and how do we (collectively, you and I) cope with it?

Your thoughts are appreciated.

Upon closer examination, it's business as usual.

Let me tell all of you something that's important to me.

When I post a blog that is available for viewing by anyone on Planet Earth with access to an Internet connection, I've done so for a reason. Actually, for two reasons.

First, I hope someone reads it. Moreover, I hope many people read it. I don't publish for any other reason, and I can't fathom why anyone would.

Second, my name's right there. It's my writing, and no one else's. You may agree or disagree, and that's fine. But they're my words, and I intend to take ownership of them, thank you.

Until today, I never thought that what I do in terms of writing is particularly noteworthy, precisely because it seemed to me the very nature of minimum default. Today, for reasons that I'm asked not to reveal, suddenly it looks like my minimum default constitutes incredible courage and genuine principle.

And that's a sad, sad thing, for all the wrong reasons. I'd love to tell you why, but I can't. So be it.

There for a fleeting moment I thought there was light at the end of the tunnel.

Instead ... well, just take it from Kurt Cobain: "Whatever, never mind."

New Tribune guest columnist in January.

Last Friday afternoon I met with Steve Kozarovich, publisher of the New Albany Tribune, and agreed to write a 900-word column on a weekly basis, beginning Thursday, January 8, and running on Thursdays thereafter. It is a (modest) for-pay gig, joining paid columns I write biweekly for LEO and quarterly for Food and Dining magazine.

This announcement is provided as a courtesy to the publisher, who now has the opportunity to begin fielding complaints before the column actually appears.

The column will be of general interest, including beer, travel, local events, and plenty of atheistic, progressive, left-wing rabble rousing. It seems the advent of Barack Obama is the perfect time to torment the local yokels in such a fashion. If there aren't periodic letters of outrage emanating from Greenville and Dewey Heights, then I'll not have been doing my job.

I've been writing as much as possible lately, both here and at my other blogs. Part of the reason is the possibility of the column assignment. It's like going into training and building up seldom-used muscles for the task ahead, and similar to spending a year learning to communicate with bankers and others whose dialects are unfamiliar.

After all, there's still a brewery to build. More on that later in the week.

To know me well is to know that the art of communicating through the written word is dear to my heart, and throughout my life, the ability to write has constituted perhaps my most fundamental link to the world outside my consciousness.

There have been written successes and disappointments along the way, but the compulsion has become far clearer to me this past year, as I've actively engaged my upbringing and can see now that my commitment to education and knowledge was a reaction to a blue-collar father whose ability to express emotion was limited primarily to anger and annoyance. My way of rebelling was to become good at the things he wasn't (writing is one) while remaining true to the indignation.

I laughed while writing that, by the way. Like my father before me, expressing irritation has never been a problem for me.

During what has amounted to a professional career in beer, I may have become infamous in other fields, yet writing remains the prime defense mechanisms of choice, and a means of articulating and explaining myself when the spoken word fails.

And, while there has been a love-hate relationship with myself and the newspaper these many years, I can state without hesitation that had the Tribune not improved recently, I wouldn't even consider doing this.

Wish me luck. More importantly, wish me improved work habits. I'm going to need them. When the columns begin flowing, I'll come up with a way to link or reprint them here or elsewhere. Also note that your ideas are appreciated. Ideas hatched here are fair game for exploration and improvisation at newspaper column length.

It's going to be fun.

Time: What a concept ...

A reader has asked why there seems to be less “abundant” writing here than there was before. That’s a good question, and I’ll see if I can answer it.

The simplest response is that there has been precious little time for writing. If you know me well, you know how difficult it is for me to say no or to sit still – unless it’s time for a beer break. That’s a blessed exception, and one that I cherish down to the last drop, though not as often as people think – or I’d like.

I generally don’t kill time sitting in front of the television set because there isn’t enough time to read, learn and grow to permit “American Idol” to intrude.

I have a career that is still evolving and probably always will, an existing business to keep running and growing, a projected business expansion to get started, and what seems like two or three other lives to live somehow and somewhere within in the mix—family, bicycling, cleaning the house, planning travels, cooking dinner … you name it.

Yes, writing is essential for me; without it, I’m unhappy, but there are times when it must take a back seat, and does so, albeit grudgingly. You don’t know how hard it is to look your long overdue muse in the eye and say: “Not tonight. I must attend a performance of the Conjoined Councilmen.”

(If their tone-deaf ramblings didn't inspire sufficient bile to produce words, the free price of admission would be even more worthless than their vision of life. I suppose I should be thankful for such exceedingly small favors.)

For whatever reason, I harbor the belief that “retirement” is a concept not applicable to my life. To stop working, thinking and learning is to be waiting to die. Type “A” I’m not, though certainly manic on occasion, with more ambition than I tend to acknowledge, and consequently, leisure time is merely the tail, not the dog.

When it comes to the subject matter for which this blog has become locally, shall we say, notorious, I take the obligation to inflict my views on the city with a seriousness that reflects a fundamental work ethic that should be apparent by reading the preceding.

To look back on the past four years in the context of this chronicle and my own personal relationship with the city is to see steady evolution inward, both in the manner by which my passion has been drawn toward the urban experience downtown, and also by my involvement in matters pertaining to it.

I joined the board of Develop New Albany more than a year ago, and was appointed by Mayor England to serve on the board of the Urban Enterprise Association beginning in January, 2008. Permit me to say only that the view is somewhat different from the inside looking out, and I know now more than ever before that while freedom of speech isn’t negotiable, perception of reality on the part of others should never be taken for granted.

It’s February, 2008, and the local mood might be viewed as transitional. It’s a presidential election year, with national economic trends intruding on the disastrous Iraqi incursion as a topic for barroom discussion. Indiana’s media has been obsessed with exaggerating the dimensions of the state’s property tax “revolt,” which more than anything else is a red herring of truly colossal dimensions, but then again, both sex and disgruntlement move units, don’t they?

New Albany’s new mayoral administration and a reconfigured city council have been on the job less than two months. A handful of recent reversals aside, good things are breaking downtown. My optimism is guarded, but genuine.

That’s it for now. Thanks for coming by.