"...it isn't description so much as disguise."
Aimee Mann, Could've Been Anyone
9 February 2012
Tonight, I siphoned my very first batch of beer from the primary fermenter into the carboy.
Twenty-three litres of the rich-looking brown liquid raced through the siphon tube between the bucket on the kitchen island and the narrow-necked glass vessel on the floor; in the carboy, the liquid spiraled, impelled by the force with which it came out of the tube beneath its surface as the level rose, while in the white plastic bucket, little bits of hops deposited themselves on the sides as the level steadily fell.
It took several minutes, and was the most dramatic point of my brewing activities tonight. A close second would have been the specific gravity test, in which I took a sample of the still-uncarbonated beer and dropped a hydrometer in it. One point zero-one-eight, it read, indicating that the yeast and the malt sugars had, over the past five days, done their slow and patient dance.
Which itself holds some mystery. Even if one understands chemically and biologically what is going on, there's still an enchanting quality to it. In some ways it is simple and direct: bacteria feed on sugars in the water that have been put there by malted and boiled grains, turning those sugars into carbon dioxide and alcohol as their by-products. Nothing magical. It all makes sense.
The wonder is in the watching of the thing. I mixed everything on Saturday night, pouring in my hot water and my concentrated wort that came with the kit, topping it all up to the right volume and doing an initial specific gravity test. I checked the temperature, which was right where it should have been. Then I pitched in the yeast, covered the bucket with a towel, shoved it in a corner of the kitchen, and waited.
For two days, little, if anything, really happened. I peeked under the towel a few times, and saw that there was indeed a sort of foam on the surface, but not much was really going on. I could see the odd bubble break, but that was all. Then on day three, I didn't even have to pull back the towel as I leaned my head close to the bucket. I could hear the foaming. A quiet but constant sort of static. On day four, it was outright loud. This morning, it had gone quiet, and tonight the hydrometer told me it was time to rack it into the carboy.
And there it will sit for the next month, to settle, to clear, to become what it ought to be.
I've always been a little fascinated by the very existence of such a thing as beer, for the simple reason that it doesn't happen by accident. It may be the cumulative result of a series of accidental discoveries combined with some very deliberate experiments, but you don't find puddles of it in forests where ne'er a human foot has trod. To make it well requires careful and deliberate action, and even then we cannot do it ourselves. We put all the parts in place, but it is the yeast, not the brewer, that does the beautiful work.
Beer shares this genesis with bread and wine.
These past weeks have been marked by careful and deliberate action. By the honesty of others I have learned much about parts and places. I understand things, and myself, far more clearly than I think I ever have. I see where I fall down now, and I see where I've tripped others up. The process I need to undertake is becoming less cloudy; the steps are something I can do. But it all needs to ferment to become what it ought to be, and that part is slow, mysterious, and out of my hands.
The difficulty is in the waiting. But the wonder is in the watching.
8 July, 2010
They say you shouldn't let it build, like it's the pressure you really need to be concerned about. And they say you should make yourself heard, as though failing to do so was just a disservice to yourself and your own interests.
But that is so self-absorbed as to be nearly pointless. It's not the disservice to myself that I ought to be concerned with. It's the dishonesty of the thing, the lie of it that I tell without even realizing I'm telling anything at all, let alone a lie. Walking along calmly and upright as though there were no pit bull sinking its teeth into my heels. Not even glancing as the mosquito pierces my skin.
I don't know where I learned to lie like that. Or where I learned to think so little of people as to suppose that they aren't tough enough to take the truth. Perhaps it isn't condescension, though, but fear of them, of losing them, of making them think less of me. Any number of explanations, all of them probably worthless.
There is so much to be undone. Fixing and wrecking and fixing again, with an unclear picture, in this case, of what the whole thing ought to look like. If the creature is limping, the parts are in place...
No, I don't really know what I'm doing. But I'll try really hard to do it.
You're finally starting to say the right things and point the finger in the right direction. It's a start. I can only pray you'll put your money where your mouth is and follow through on this.
Because we need you and yours. Not just for your sheer numbers, but because whatever and however great our differences, at the end of the day we are under the same flag. The rest of us need to be able to feel like it's a flag we want to be under. The world is watching to see what exactly that flag represents, and all of their eyes are not on us. They are on you.
An enormous chance lays before you now. There is so much to lose and so much to gain. Don't flinch. As forgiveness is no substitute for justice, talk and sentiment and statements on airplanes are no substitutes for action.
Now's the time for you and your very fine hat to show us what you're made of.
Sometimes your greatest allies are the unlikely ones, the ones you never expected to find beside you on the same side of the barricade. It's even a little humbling sometimes to turn your head and see the face of your old enemy, rifle in hand, wearing perhaps a bemused or ironic grin but no less invested in the new task at hand. You both wear scars that you likely gave each other. Your sense of moral superiority, perhaps overdue for a thrashing, gets knocked down a peg or two. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," the saying goes, though I'm not sure where it really comes from. And that's the funny thing about some enemies: they fight just as fiercely beside you as they ever fought against you.
We need this to happen to us once in a while. When our old, or merely presumed, adversaries surprise us, when we finally discover that unexpected common ground, there's a little bit of our badly-beaten but precious faith in humanity that is restored, almost always at the expense of our own sense of self-righteousness. None of us has a monopoly on the moral high ground; our harshest critics and most vocal opponents probably share our stance on something and would gladly storm the gates alongside us, given the right particular battle.
It forces us to think better of others. And when we do, something else unexpected happens: we realize that it brings us far more happiness to think well of someone else than it does to think well of ourselves. That self-righteousness carries with it both an emptiness and a subtle bitterness that we don't even realize is there.
Nick Cave might have been wrong. Perhaps people just ain't so bad. Sometimes.
Sometimes you've got to wreck a thing a little before you can fix it. And sometimes that means that you've got to fix the thing a little first, just so that when you wreck it, you don't wreck it beyond repair.
And that first fixing can look so forced, so artificial, so oblivious to the actual problem, because it doesn't address the problem at all. It can't. The thing won't yet survive the damage that addressing the real problem will do.
So you tighten the bolts. You change the bearings and you clean out the filters. You sand down the rusty parts and paint the whole thing shiny again. You talk about the weather and ask about the trip. You pour your efforts into anything that can be made better without making something else worse.
Only then, when the whole shabang is sturdy enough and might stand a chance, do you take the axe to it and start cutting out the part that really went wrong in the first place. The sledgehammer and the blowtorch do their merciless work, and you fight with the last fasteners that hold that troublesome element in place, wrenching it free with all the finesse of a wolf pulling the flesh off its kill. There's no other way to get it out. And it's only because of all your other, seemingly unrelated, work that the whole thing doesn't crumble to pieces in front of you; it holds together. It bends, it flexes, it groans and grumbles and complains, it shudders and shakes under the blows of your tools, but it doesn't fall apart. It holds.
And if you've done it right, when the whole thing lies broken again, you'll find yourself looking down at something that is, without question, worth fixing. Because you, and everyone else around you, can see it as it always could have been. The damage doesn't look so bad now. 'It just needs a new whatzit, that's all,' people will say. And they're right. They're endeared to it now, and want to see it brought back from the edge. Even the adjuster wouldn't write it off now.
The surgery is over; there's a nasty-looking wound, some blood has been lost, but the heart is still beating.
Sometimes your life explodes like a grenade, all violent and dramatic and loud. Other times, like now, it kind of explodes more like a ballpoint pen.
You don't even notice it's happened, at first. You feel your finger slip but you think it's just the oil on your skin. Then you notice a tiny smudge of blue. And quickly, to your horror, you realize that half your hand is covered in the stuff, and it's gonna take ages to get it off.
Of course, it happens right at the critical part of the lecture, right after the prof says something like "Write this down and go home and memorize it, because you will need to understand this from here on in, and it's complicated".
And I just know, I'll deal with my right hand and then find ink on my elbow. I'll think I'm done, but there's some on my chin.
It's tiring. But you've got to get the stuff off.
Nearing the seven-year mark, I can't help but smile for where I find myself now, against all prophecies and warnings of boredom and mediocrity and divergence. Those naysayers are for me like so many doomsday preachers, screaming from a soapbox and barely able to contain their eagerness to say I told you so. Like I'm just not even really in the particular world they are lamenting the end of.
It isn't hope or optimism that comes when I think of it. Rather it is the exhilarating quiet that falls on you when you see that things are in their place. The comfort of a confidence in things to come. The fermented fondness for the scars of storms weathered and the matured appreciation for the DVD and bag of chips of a Friday night that is blissfully routine.
I knew I should have just gone to bed last night. And I certainly should have known I would spend more than half an hour down there when I headed to my office in the basement, but I don’t know that it would have mattered. It had been too long already.
The one string had been broken for I don’t know how long. Over a year, I’m sure. I hadn’t even taken the thing out of its case for ages, let alone played it. At times I wanted to, but the broken string slammed the door on that, and on any given day, buying new strings just wasn’t on the agenda. And the room in the basement was so packed and cluttered that the guitar wasn’t even easy to get to.
But now a couple of the things that were filling that room have disappeared, out of my way. And with a package of new strings that my lovely wife bought me for Christmas (thank you, honey) on another good friend’s advice (thank you, too) in my hands, last night seemed just fine. It didn’t feel right, in fact, to wait any longer.
And so I played. Remembering, with difficulty, songs and arrangements I’d loved at one time or another. Ignoring the sting in my uncalloused fingertips and the fret buzz I couldn’t quite get my hand to eliminate during bar chords. Singing like there was no one else in the house, even though there was.
I never put the guitar back in its case. I found the old guitar stand, stood it in the corner, and let the instrument sit upright on it, displayed, in full view from anywhere in the room, something important that had been brought back from disrepair.
And important things have fallen into disrepair. Not all of them are as simple to fix. Some are not fixed with paint or metal or just-wanted-to-see-how-you’re-doing phone calls or long letters explaining where we stand, though those events might be a necessary part. There is a necessary plunge into the unknown that, on any given day, just doesn’t seem to be on the agenda. And the plunge doesn’t come for Christmas or a birthday. You have to lace on your boots and step out into the cold and go get it.
It doesn’t feel right to wait much longer.