Were it not for the impossibility of it, or maybe my lack of entrepreneurship, by now I’d have invented a beer machine. I don’t mean a machine that requires you to steep grains and boil wort and add hops at specific times and take gravity readings, but a truly magical machine into which you add water and maybe a few dry ingredients, set it, and forget it. Two weeks later, you’ve got an effervescent concoction on tap that makes friends and family euphoric.

I needn’t tell you, a voter (hopefully) and maybe even a beer drinker (surely), how important both beer and voting are to our democracy. Voting is the ultimate expression of our citizenship rights; beer soothes the burn when the dink the opposing party has inexplicably nominated somehow bests your sensible candidate.

I’ll be honest and say that I’ve been steeling myself against another improbable victory by President Conspiracy Theory by enjoying a beer every now and again. I’m also planning to tap an ale or two post-vote as a celebratory beverage, or maybe to drown my sorrows.

Good ol’ beer. It’s that versatile.

I would like to say, in the nicest and humblest terms possible, that I am probably the best thing that’s ever happened to you.

I’m sorry, let me clarify: I’m not “probably” the best thing that’s ever happened to you. I am the best thing. And I say that with compleat and utter hummility. With no spelling errers.

Think about it. Who’s been better to you than me? Your wife? To hell with her! And to hell with your kids. You should swap them for Greenland! They are a compleat joque. Their not even in skool. And they where masks, which is unnecessarry.  

I want to be clear that I say all of this in the nicest and most respectful way possible because, let's face it, I'm incredibly humble.

Young people are always asking me if I ever saw the Beatles, or the Doors, or the Glenn Miller orchestra. And whether calculators had been invented by the time I was in grade school. What about toilet paper?

Soon I’m rubbing my temples, irritated as hell. I inform them that I was born in “the sixties,” which means Glenn Miller had been dead some 20 years and Jim Morrison was already three-quarters of the way through his short life, which would be over before I was 8. Not to mention that toilet paper had been clogging up toilets for centuries prior to that.

And believe me, no one saw The Beatles.

A more apt question is “Did you ever see Rush?” In fact, I didn’t. And no, I don’t have a good excuse. Among my earliest LP record purchases, probably via the ubiquitously advertised “Columbia House 11 LPs for a Penny” deal, was the Rush album 2112, which I quickly wore out, playing songs from it like Passage to Bangkok over and over while I pretended to keep up with the drumming of Neal Peart.

Suddenly it was 2020 and Neal Peart was no longer with us, as they say, and my chance to see these rockers and all their odd Canadianisms had vanished like moose into the woods of Ontario.

So heap your derision on me, for this was indeed among the great failures of my rock life.

I don’t lie very often, but I’m thinking I should start. Lying is getting to be a more and more accepted communication device, and I feel like I’m missing out on the enjoyment of it all.

I’m not saying I’ve never lied. As a bona-fide Catholic boy I went to confession as required, and I always confessed that I lied, so I must have. On the other hand, that was an easy way to get in and out of the confessional box in short order. And what else was I going to say? “Bless me father, for I have sinned. And I coveted my neighbor’s wife”? I didn’t covet any of my neighbors’ wives, and had I said that it would have been a bald-faced lie, requiring yet another confession.  

However, I did tell little white lies here and there, like the time my Dad asked me if I had brushed my teeth before going to bed, and I said “yes,” at which point he pulled out my toothbrush from his luggage, where it had been since we left that morning from our beach vacation.

Kids in grade school told much bigger lies than anything I could muster, and I wonder if they are now succeeding in life better than I am, thanks to lying. One classmate claimed that he looked in the mirror in the boy’s room and his face was covered in scars and huge stitches, the result of some tricks played by Satan (or else he had recently seen Poltergeist). Another time this same boy claimed that he’d ingested mercury. How we young kids came into possession of a bottle of this liquid lead (did someone bring it in? Was it the school’s supply?) is unclear, but I remember its unbelievable heft compared to a similar volume of water. We spilled it onto the floor and watched it bead up, and someone told the nuns that a boy had licked the mercury. Our mothers were constantly warning us against licking mercury (“You’ll lose your penis if you lick mercury!”).

OK, that was a lie. My parents never told me I’d lose my penis.  

Anyway, the nuns were ready to haul his lying ass off to the hospital so he could have the mercury eliminated, so he suddenly had to shift gears and admit to his unlikely yarn.

Nevertheless, lying to my fans and supporters is always an option.