I can’t recall a time in my life when “retirement” made sense. If you’re doing what you love, as I mostly have, then why stop?
But lately I’m starting to feel the passing of the years. Steadily encroaching physical pain plays a part (those kegs aren’t “liteweight” even when their contents claim to be), but worse is the psychological stress of the hospitality business, whether it’s the micro or the macro level. The new post-pandemic normal is abjectly abnormal, and that’s a challenge to navigate.
The disorientation is exacerbated by the dawning realization that in truth, my particular skills are supremely undervalued in the workplace (micro or macro). You know the time will come; you can only hope to delay it. It could be a problem when you start asking, “what does it all mean?”
Social media has rendered Americans null and void. Reading, writing and thought processes have gone the way of the Edsel, and instead life is a succession of flashing pictures and yammering adolescent videos meant for atrophied attention spans, repeated over and over again. Is this the way we’re intended to live?
I genuinely thought there was a place for the Old School alongside the contemporary social media rot; I still do, and I know like-minded folks are out there, but when everything’s reduced to social media to the exclusion of the real world, eventually there’s an unbridgeable chasm. We begin to think social media is the real world, and we keep doubling down on it even when tangible results are slim.
That’s an addiction, isn’t it?
I suppose every now and then one must beat a tactical retreat in order to advance the grand strategy. The larger question: Does an aging Don Quixote possess the energy to continue tilting at windmills?
My entire life in the profession of beer has been predicated on knowing as much as I could about all sorts of things in addition to beer and brewing, so as to tie them together in a narrative linking the pursuit of the perfect pint with the pursuit of knowledge itself, and suggesting that these pursuits should last a lifetime.
And my core obsession, with an occasional detour (15 years of craft brewery ownership, for one, which for me proved to be a bit like Michael Jordan playing baseball), has been to bring bits and pieces of European beer culture to SoIN.
I never kidded myself thinking it could be more than a handful of...Read more