Another thing that happens in my BBC radio play contest entry, soon to be written (due date 1/31/2020!), is that the border guards at US-Canada crossings are full of misinformation. “Each adult is allowed to bring two children, half a pound of cheese, and a loaf of black bread across the border.” There’s no truth to this, but we comply, since most of us couples don’t have more than four children total. (But imagine if we did!).

Other border guards get it into their heads that you aren’t allowed to enter if you’re not bringing with you, per adult, two children, half a pound of cheese, and a loaf of black bread, which gets everyone very confused. There’s this major snafu in which people are barred from entering the US from Canada without these items. Many have exactly two children and half a pound of cheese, but fail on the black bread. They get hollered at by the border guards: “This is pumpernickel!”

And there’s more.

I’m sure you’ve been wondering what my summer camping experience was like, when I recently went into the woods with my son and battled the elements. 

Let me tell you, the woods had no chance against us. We came with every tool known to man, plus a power cable that was about 250 miles long, which we fed out as we drove from home to the Moosehead Lake region of Maine so we could have access to electricity while out there in the wild. Because when you’re out there in the woods and it’s hot, it helps to have a small air conditioner for the tent. And incredibly, despite the human race’s ability to solve every thorny social ill known to man except how to prevent mass murders via military-style weapons, no one has yet figured out how to make a wireless a/c.

The extension cord also helped us charge up our electric knife, making it a breeze to carve up trout while out there in the field.  

My reputation as something of a history buff distinguishes me from very few men in the critical 51-110 year old age group that history advertisers target. And yet I tend to train my lens less on major world events, like wars and tsunamis, than on the mundane and commonplace.

For instance, what about urinals? There must be history there. It’s not like God gave us urinal-producing trees to pluck our urinals from. (Yes, I’m aware, if urinals grew, they would do so on the ground, like cabbage or watermelon, not in trees!).

Well, with the internet allowing any old fool to publish anything he wants, the blogger can quickly pivot from a treatment of the history of urinals, the bait so to speak, to an anecdote about this one time when, en route to the west branch of the Penobscot River in Maine, he stopped at a brew pub for his last bit of sustenance before heading into the wild, and the men’s room urinal was actually a repurposed beer keg!

What a hoot.

There is some synergy here, as beer makes the average blogger (not me) need to pee, and also I’m going to be in the woods, where basically everything is a urinal. 

Nine months ago – maybe more like 10 – I was a gainful beer brewer, extracting sugars from malted barley like a champ, boiling down the resulting wort with some Belgian candi sugar and mild hops, crashing the sweet liquid’s temperature down to what is tolerable to a hungry, awakening yeast cell, and then pitching the yeast like a fireballer in the ninth.

Do you know how many brewing awards I won? None. That was part of my art: to win no awards while brewing award-caliber beer.

Then I decided to stop brewing for a bit to put an addition onto my house, and it’s as if the whole beer industry fell apart. I come back from my brewing hiatus to learn that Boston Homebrew Supply has shut down. Zounds! How is a fellow supposed to surreptitiously brew a beer while his wife, who doesn’t read this blog (I think), is in Chicago doing who-knows-what with people from work? “In a conference.” Ha! Probably brewing beer with the gals, secretly, as we all know that women are poised to take over everything, including beer brewing.

But anyway… where was I? Oh yeah, Boston Homebrew Supply and its proprietor, Tom Casey, are no longer. Well, Tom himself still likely exists, but his venture and its website are now history.

Alas, I am made to go to the Modern Homebrew Emporium in Cambridge, or get my grains delivered in the mail, thus burning more fossil fuels and foreshortening the survival of our species by some fraction of a day. But at least we’ll have beer as we lurch forward toward the abyss.