Waiting on the Keg

I have a very cool Cheers mug that I use so even if my bucket had a hole in it, I could still partake.

Some readers may remember a while back when I wrote on receiving a free half keg of Oatmeal Stout from one of my home state’s finest breweries. Afterwards, I gave up alcohol for Lent and tried to gain some clarity which I definitely found. Just yesterday I got another free keg, this one being a Rye IPA that is easily one of the best beers I have ever tasted and definitely worth the entire afternoon we spent waiting on getting it.

Religious songs for the non Religious

I would not consider myself a religious person. I am certainly not an atheist or agnostic or any kind of Satanist, I just sort of meandered through my Lutheran upbringing. I ambled through years of Sunday school and somehow also got confirmed, much to the happiness of my elderly mid-western Lutheran grandmother, although I always felt like I was just going through the motions. It’s not that I didn’t believe in what I was doing, I just never felt strongly about any of it and my main goal was to appease my grandmother and parents. This is not a good basis for strong faith.

Recently, I was walking my dog on a freezing cold Sunday morning when I heard the Avett Brother ‘s song “Me and God” on a gospel station I had flipped to because I was rocking my old FM radio since my iPod has no juice in it. I was having a rough morning, contemplating my love life, my hangover, and my general grip on existence in this long cold winter.  It was sunny despite the cold and the rays of light picked up the billions of tiny ice crystals on the grass of the field and I just thought “there has gotta be  a God”.

Unreal Shows

Unreal(istic) Live Shows

To complete a trilogy of entries on live music, I want to write about some shows I was not able to attend because of not being alive. I won’t wax poetic on about how music in my generation isn’t as cool and all that(….but it isn’t). Maybe it’s because it actually it isn’t as cool or more aptly, there hasn’t been the time to create the mythology around the music. Oh yeah, and I cannot forget the fact that the bands of today are alive and generally still perform while all of these bands do not or can not. We all want what we can’t have.

The first show I will never be able to see is easy: Hank Williams Senior, sometime in the mid 1940’s and with a good pedal steel guitar player. Old timey honky-tonk music may be the music closest to my heart for a myriad of reasons that warrant their own entry. But, to sum it all up, I think that type of music is as real as it gets and Hank is the godfather of it all.