Flies. Too meaningless.
Dominoes. Too tidy.
Fall. Falling. Fallen. From Insta to Twitter the announcements crescendo. In an instant, shared history ends. Lights off. Doors lock.
Oaks. Yes, that seems appropriate.
We, beer drinkers, are folks of lesser gods. The gods of the glass, the gods of the gaff. In every corner of every pub deities wink and nod, throwing omniscient cheers to those patrons who keep the candles burning and taps genuflecting. It is to them we owe our romanticized socializing, for them we seek weekly communion again and again in our happiest of hours.
In the industry, we call bars the “on-premise.” How ignoble and insulting a label for places where so many memories are born and killed on the back of dwindling night and nervous morning. Whether in an ancient Irish snug or modern American dive, draft-doused denizens are crucial seams in the fabric of beer-drinking identity. Without draft beer, the world feels antiseptic. All aluminum and adhesive.
A pandemic, it turns out, is near-fatal to the on-premise. Financially, first and foremost, but also culturally. Tap handles feed off the close-quarters revelry of shoulder-packed patrons. Six feet apart might as well be six feet under. Masks mask masques. Lines—at best packed with water, at worst stale beer—wince at their glycol vacation. It’s not a trip they wanted to take.
And we mourn.
Our favorite bartenders—out of work, fighting hydras with heads of existential and financial uncertainty. Our favorite joints—fearing death knells; not temporary or theoretical, but real, and permanent. Our “normal”—habits and routines and prosaic comforts, facing the guillotine of change despite our promises that we’ll be back. Eventually. Maybe.
And we wilt.
Who we are is clearly not who we thought, and where we’re going is clearly not where we planned. Roles shudder and balk at new and unprocessed responsibility. Parents become teachers. Teachers become everything. Our worldsmith forges anew, dropping a sundering that makes before seem quaint, now seem impossible, and tomorrow seem purely dream.
And as much as we’re broken, what of the lesser gods? Pub doors stay closed, shrines left unattended and abandoned.
I worry not for Ninkasi, Dionysus, Bacchus, or their ilk. These gods line the walls of general merriment, which, while location has shifted, has hardly ceased.
I worry for those little gods—the ones who rarely see their names in lights, are more likely to be graced in a urinal than an annal. The gods who make up the middle and the bottom, who we are likely more intimate with than the glorious above, even if we don’t quite know it.
What of the god of the perfect head of foam, his crown adorned with fluffy white? And of the god of phone numbers hastily scrawled on a cocktail napkin, his lips a flair of rouge and his eyes all a twinkle? Lest I mention the god of the Irish lock-in, a presiding dryad mixed of malt and mirth, watching over his brave few who say no to closing time.
There are a million of them—from the Sovereign of the Barstool to Lord Last Call—holding up the culture as Atlas held the sky.
An oak—regal and mighty and hundreds of years old—falls.
A loud crash.
If there’s no one in the woods to hear it, did it make a sound?
A virus—insidious and invisible and ignoble—rages.
A weak cry.
If there’s no one in the pub when the lights go out, does anyone notice?
