Beer

When I was a teen, I spoke as a teen and acted as a teen; but when I became a man . . . . . I think that was long-about 1965, when I started high school. But by the time I was a senior in high school, 1969, I was 18 and I decided to start acting like a man . . . My friend Ronnie had an old blue Ford sedan. On those Friday nights when we didn’t have dates, Ronnie and Keith and I would go cruising around town, visiting the local bars. Since we were old enough, we’d visit the bars to sit around and act like grownups, swigging glasses of Budweiser or Schlitz, maybe a Falstaff . . . listening to the sound track. There were a lot of popular songs to be heard on those occasions. Where I come from, Louisiana, soul music was the preferred sound trick most of the time. . . Sam Cooke, Otis Redding, Bobby “Blue” Bland, The Supremes. the Four Tops, Elvis, Ray Charles, Marvin Gaye. Then the music scene changed. It was the era when the Beatles and Gerry and Pacemakers, Dave Clark Five started working their way into the bars’ soundtracks. But for some reason, my memory of those Friday adventures always brings to mind Creedence Clearwater Revival. . . on the sound track of whatever bar we happened to be visiting. . . Proud Mary, Born on the Bayou, Green River, Bad Moon Rising, Down on the Corner, Fortunate Son , etc. Today, August 18, 2026, I was having Deja Vu, while my friend Rick was giving me a tour of his Topsail Island Brewery . . . because the tavern sound track featured a playlist for our boomer generation, which was refreshing for an old guy like me to hear. So who shows up on the sound track (wouldn’t you know it?) . . . Creedence Clearwater Revival! Of course. So I comprehend that not much has changed in the bar scene since 1969—at least for old geezers like me and Rick. Even though Rick’s Topsail. Island Brewery was established in 2024. I’m here to tell you that they are true to the authentic bar scene of our generation. When my old friend Rick wheeled his orange Jeep into the back door entrance this morning, Rick was just checking on a few things. We walked in the back door, and I was able to see the guts—the heart and soul innards— of a real brewery

Then we traipsed through to the bar itself, and out the front entrance, onto a large outdoor deck, where, in the evening, customers would be tipping a few mugs, perhaps bringing in some take-out food from Rick’s Restaurant, which is on the other end of the parking lot.

Walking out of the bar area, traipsing along the outside, we looked down into the duck pond. . . a pleasant site for visitors to watch as they’re imbibing a pint of Rick’s brew hometown brew.

Later, in the evening, we visited the brewery again, to enjoy a brew or two. But my brew choice would not be the old standards of Bud or Schlitz. Nosirree. The beer of choice is the hometown favorite, “Topsail Island Brew” brewed and bottled in Sneads Ferry, North Carolina, just a mile or two up the road from Topsail Island and the the Atlantic coast. And then we traipsed on over to Rick’s Restaurant and enjoy the evening meal, where the Topsail brews are included on the menu. Glass half-Full

Heat

In the beginning of all things great and small, Creator flung stars and planets into the universe. The stars provided light and heat; and so our planet was lit up by a star which we call the sun. Along with the light, heat followed. As life developed on earth, men and women found great benefits in the heat and the light. But we learned, early on, that there must be limits to the heat and light. Light was nice for awhile, but after about twelve hours or so, it was better to take a break from the light, by living, moving and having our being in the cool of the eventing and the restful dark of the night. And fire is very useful, but we have to be careful with it, so it doesn’t go hog wild!

In other observations, it was also obvious that, with the light, came heat, which was also quite beneficial, most of the time. But there were limits to what men and women could tolerate. We’ve learned in thousands of years of life on this planet that all things are good in moderation, This principle certainly applies to our life routines and habits. For instance, Florida is nice, but it’s awfully hot down there, and Alaska is nice, but it gets very cold in winter. So plan your travels and your visits accordingly. Minnesota is nice, but so is Louisiana, So plan your vacations and visits accordingly. This hot/cold dichotomy applies in any household. Maybe we have air conditioning in summer, but long about October, we switch to the heaters. In human society, we also have similar dynamics. Some guys are hotheads, getting all worked up with madness over stuff that just happens. Other people are cool, taking everything in stride, like, “no problemo.” When I mention hotheads, I can think of a few hotheads I have known, but mainly, what comes to mind are a few leaders in world history who made life miserable for a lot of people—or even worse—they killed a lot of folks for no good reason. For example, hitler and stalin, both of them cruel and destructive. . . and then, if that weren’t bad enough, along come whacko gunmen who start blowing people away in some public place for no good reason, like a murderous marksman in a high tower. . . or vlad the mad putin in Ukraine. . . or jack the ripper or the Boston stranger… all of them hot-headed whackos! The ancient prophets spoke and wrote about this tendency of some men to get very destructive in their depraved attempt to rule, and then destroy the world and its people. I don’t know, but I been told—and I read it in the book— that in the future time, some self-obsessed whacko may take hold of some nukes and blow the world to smithereens. What’s really strange about that is that the scientists who understand that complex nuclear weaponry theorize that the destruction will come in widespread super-heat. But here’s the weird thing about it; they say that after it blows over (however the hell long that takes!) the ultimate result will be a “nuclear winter”! Say what? No sh**!

Not to worry, though. Worry is a rocking chair; you rock and rock, but get nowhere. I think the poet Frost had this world figured out, to a certain point: “Some say the world will end in fire, some say ice.” But I say fughedaboudit! Whatever! If it come, it do, either way. . . nothing I can do about it. However, when it all pans out, or even if none of that terrible stuff happens in my lifetime, I’m placing my faith and hope in the Son of Man who was creating with Father and Spirit, back in the day. . . the very first day. You know “In the beginning. . .” Look it up in the old book. Then turn to the gospels where he conquers death itself, and reveals the divine purpose for all that hot and cold throughout history. Then turn to the final chapters. Read about the fire that will conclude the history of this planet. This hot and cold on earth has been going on, for a long, long, long time. . .ever since Creator moved across the waters and proclaimed Light into existence, and then gave Man permission to take charge of this earth. Glass half-full.

Life and Death

Wandering lonely as a cloud . . . through the ravines and the peaks of this amazing life. . .pausing . looking more carefully into the forest, . . as leaves begin falling in August, the first volunteers in a wave of seasonal rearrangement. . . stooping to examine veins in the leaf, feeling the breeze that separates another leaf from its life-branch. The leaf drifts to forest floor, joining the multitude of last year’s leaves. . . bowing to their destiny of dirt, which nourished the tree from which it fell, and will serve to nourish the neighboring trees. . . we discern the balance between death and life.

We become aware of evidence of processes we do not fully understand; we reach out to touch the substance of eternal LIfe that we hope for. Changing direction, adjusting focus, the aging human frame considers the veins in his arm, performing their bloody duty, standing more pronounced, at age 75, beneath the skin, carrying precious fluid to the micro-universe of a mortal body, a human reaching and hoping for an immortal destiny. . . wandering, wondering, we discover evidence of ongoing life; we encounter in our soul evidence of eternal life hoped for, but not yet seen, sustained by a faith that there was one Christ who conquered death itself. . . you gotta believe.

To make a connection between what we see, hear, smell and . . . eternity, we comprehend . . . every moment of life is precious. . . every day presents new possibility for rejoicing in the new day, the present day, anticipating days ahead, whether here in the forest, or . . .

Look up at the sky. Prepare to ascend with the clouds, as the rain ascends to the clouds before it returns to earth again. Milk every moment of life before the silver cord is broken, before the golden bowl is broken, before your trunk is taken. Live life to the fullest. . .(s)he not busy being born is busy dyin’. Glass half-Full

Carbon

In phase 8 of the universal creation, Creator summoned all the Elements together in order to give them purpose and function. Hydrogen stepped up quickly, so Creator designated him as #1. Then Helium came in and obtained #2. Lithium stepped up for the #3 spot; then Beryllium took #4, and Boron #5. The #6 spot was assigned to Carbon, and the rest is elementary history. Hundreds of thousands of years later, probably millions later, a certain writer, Carey, noticed some interesting characteristics about Carbon that he thought might be worthy of mention in the world wide web of information. . . interesting stuff to ponder. His early ventures into the wikiwatchee wild world of wonders brought him to an understanding that all the elements, all 103 of them, were grouped into catagories of valence. Valence is the power of any particular element to combine with other elements and entities. As luck and numbers would have it, carbon came in at the top of Group 14 in the elemental pecking order. Not a bad place to be, actually. . . as the great mandela of life and death on earth whirled through the ages, carbon was an activist, repeatedly getting involved all kinds of creational and evolutionary projects. Later when men started to figure stuff out, they found that carbon had played a highly constructive role in all kinds of projects. The evidence of carbon’s activism was left behind in limestone, dolomite, graphite, even diamonds!. Organic projects brought forth peat, methane, coal, natural gas, oil. . . did somebody say oil? Well, that’s the big one— the one that humans made best use for awhile, for a very long time. Initially, after discovery of oil’s many uses, they used it for fires to stay warm, later to heat up metals, such as copper and iron, silver and gold, for tools and precious trinkets. . . jewelry, religious ceremonies, all kinds of uses for carboniferous substances. A couple of centuries ago, men started using carboniferous fuels to power motors for industrial development, power generation and transportation.

What we later found out was that a lot of those carbon emissions from oil, gas and coal were wafting up into our atmosphere and wandering around with nothing to do except make trouble. They began to protest their degenerated lot in life, even though they had ended up at the highest levels. Together, they constituted a kind of atmospheric shield that tended to trap heat in the earth atmosphere instead of letting it escape into space where it belonged. Long about the year 2000, a vice president of the United States ran for president, but he lost. I won’t go into all the gorey details, but let’s just say. . . hanging chads and a scaliafied high court diverted his destiny from the white house to the high position of operating as counsel for the defense of the Planet and all the People and critters who live therein. Then a wide array of citizens’ activism opened up on behalf of the people and the planet, and those folks have been a good influence. The auto-manufactures figured out that we need catalytic converters to minimize those carbon atoms from wafting up into our atmosphere. And I think—at least I hope—that some of the power companies and co-ops have made efforts to minimize their carbon emissions. Now I haven’t really heard much about this lately, but I was practicing my ABC’s that I had learned in kindergaten, which I do every day when I read anything. . . and I thought about carbon, because. . . I don’t know, maybe because my name and “carbon” have the same three letters. At age 75, I’m closer now than I was before to that moment when my soul ascends upward

past earth, past the atmosphere, into the eternal realm where the Creator, the Lord, came down in His human identity. . . and suffered death so that he could overcome it, thereby demonstrating that you and I could overcome it if. . . if we are willing to go with Him. All will be well when I get past this earth and the carbons are all settled back down in the earth where they belong. Just sayin’. Glass half-Full

Those Russians

I entered this American world during a period of contention between the two primary nations who were arguing about who would be in charge of the post-WW2 western world. The funny that happened on the way to my early childhood was that American leaders were having about argument about who set the course for the rehabilitation and reconstruction of Europe. The Russians, commanded by Josef Stalin, were quite confident that it was their destiny to guide the recovering Europeans to a brave new world of communism. On the other hand, we Americans knew that it was our great post-war task to help the Europeans reconstruct, along paths of democratic and republican leadership. So there was this big worldwide controversy going on between us and the Russians, which was being acted out in the German lands where they were trying to rebuild that hitler and his third reich goons had turned into a disaster zone. Our President, Harry Truman, who had approved the use of the atom bomb in Japan, was doing the truly American thing. . . restoring peace and tranquility, everywhere he could, on both sides of the Atlantic. But on the other side of the Atlantic the Russians were getting all paranoid about us, because they thought we were out to get them. But we could care less about the Russians, because we were Americans, listening to daily news, watching America work itself back to peace an prosperity. But on the other side of the Atlantic, Stalin and his communist goons were trying to convert the ashes of Europe into a communist state, just like Karl Marx had predicted, about a century and half earlier. Conveniently enough, however, dictator Stalin died in 1953. Thank God! Then the Soviet politburo selected Nikita Kruschev to run the USSR. I have a childhood memory of a film clip of him standing at a podium somewhere blathering: “We will bury you!” Looking back on it, it’s like: Dude, what is your problem?! But they never did. Of course not. The Russians had some growing up to do. They had to learn how to evaluate their communist ways that their parents had left behind. It took them a while. They had to go through stages to get through their creepy, alienating ways of doing things. Berlin, the divided city in northeast Germany turned out to be their failed experiment in communist governance. President Kennedy had visited Berlin in the early ’60’s, when he rallied the west Berliners toward some capitalistic/democratic/republican considerations. He spoke to the Berliners; but he was also speaking to the wider world, when he said: “Let them come to Berlin!” thereby challenging the citizens of the world to go to Berlin, where they would see the difference between the Russian way of administering reconstruction and our American way of promoting liberty and justice for all. About 20 years later, President Reagan went to Berlin and launched, like star wars, the controversy to another level. He said: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” He was referring to the Berlin wall, but in a broader sense, he was implying: Tear down your communist bullsh**! Well, long story short, eventually the Russians got the message; they saw the writing on the wall; in perestroika, they began working toward a better system. After a while, a master technocrat bully, Vlad the Mad, wrestled control of the post-Soviet state. Under the guise of free market scenario, he opened the door for wise guys who knew how to manipulate to channels of power and wealth to take over and run the country. And he would supervise the evolution of communist bureaucracy to a kind of authoritarian hegemony, where the strong survive and prosper and everybody else learns to sink or swim in the brave new world of post-communist Putinism.

To be fair, I’ll mention that we Americans had a similar transition period, after the civil war. . . there was a time when the so-called robber barons were running the show of recovery from our post-civil war USA. Under Putin, the Russians are having their era of post-Soviet reconstruction and he seems to be opening the door for his robber baron buddies to assist him in running Russia. We shall see how that works. Maybe one day, Vlad the Mad will figure out that he doesn’t need to enslave the Ukrainians, where Russia began! . . . just to keep his fat ’n happy oligarchs running the show in Russia. And as Amos said to Andy, back in the day: “And I told him that!” Somebody needs to tell Vlad to lighten up. Smile, you’re on the world camera.Lighten up! Glass half-Full

Those Germans

I suppose it is my personal history that prompts this exploration of European history.Born Catholic, now Christian (alias protestant). With 75 years behind, I explore histories of what has happened in this world before I arrived in it. So I was pondering the Berlin crisis, a major European conflict. It started when the communist Russians, having secured northern Germany when the Allies defeated the third reich, divided Berlin, and built a wall through the city to keep their subjugated Germans from moving over to the western side of the town, the democratic/capitalist side of town, where they might escape Russian control. Venturing further into this topic, what I discerned was, this occupation of Germany was a very unusual development in history. It only happened because a cultified wildman took hold of the German state. The little dictator with the funny moustache was able to establish the third reich because they had gotten such a raw deal after the Versailles peace conference after the first big war of the 20th century. That raw deal, as far with the French were concerned, was a punishment that the Germans deserved after the near-total destruction of Europe after World War one, after the archduke of Austria had been shot in 1914. But the rest of the story, going back in time, is that those Germans were always a rebelious people, as compared to their European neighbors. I mean their restlessness had begun back in the 1500’s, when they divided Europe. They took it upon themselves to interpret the sacred scriptures for themselves, after Gutenberg invented the printing press and Luther was pointing out that the catholic superstate in Rome had not been getting the full message of the gospel distributed to common folk, because the Catholic church was too entangled in religion, cathedral-building, lifting golden chalices in grand cathedrals. . . instead of truly preaching the whole gospel. There was a lot more, you see, to that message of Jesus, assured by his Word and Resurrection . . . a lot more to it than rituals and cathedrals with awesome architecture that seemed to tower up to the heavens, especially if you were inside looking up. I mean, Luther and the Germans had a good point about religion. So. . . a rich German prince, educated enough to see what was really happening, and having wealth and resources enough to do something about it, protected Luther, defended him, and as the ire of the pope was getting hotter and hotter, the German strong man made a break, a permanant break in more ways than one. Long story short: out came what they called the Holy Roman Empire. So Frederick the Great became the first “Holy Roman Emperor”. Now, looking back on it, I think that newly-forged empire must have been what was later called the first reich. And the second reich must have been the one that the German princes, royals and electors established with German kaisers leading them from age to age. . . until Kaiser Wilhelm violated his sacred oaths in 1941 and started a world war because an Austrian archduke was shot in Sarajevo. And so. . . a few decades later, the the “third reich” was the one that hitler dragged into destruction when he launched his nazis and his luftwaffe and his clueless good germans into a third reich disaster that terminated in 1945. After that, the two strongest victors, Russia and the United States, still standing after world war two, divided Berlin. After that, the paranoid Russian communists, who had not yet figured out the fallacy of communism, divided Berlin, and allowed US Americans to take the western half and occupy it on behalf of the free world.

Thank you, Comrade Stalin, for liberating northern Germany from hitler’s third reich. We didn’t like your communism and your powermongering, but we appreciate it what your Russian soldiers did to stop the nazis and thereby provoked hitler into shooting himself in the head in Berlin. The last thing I remember, doc, we slid into Berlin, and the sound of a shot in Dallas in 1963. . . and President Reagan came in twenty years later and said: “Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And they did. The rest is history. The next thing I remember hearing about Germany was that the Beatles were singing in Hamburg. Talk about an improving state of affairs! Glass half-Full

Time

From that moment in 1963 when the school principal stepped into our seventh grade classroom. . . informing us of the assassination of President Kennedy, the tragedy of this life has lingered in the back of my mind. . . Our generation was insulated from real danger; we didn’t have to be shipped off to Europe, like many of our fathers did, to rid the world of nazi destruction, death and holocaust. Even so, the paranoia of our leaders re communist aggression provoked an over-reaction. So. . . many of us were shipped off to Vietnam to stop the communist insurgency. Eventually, our leaders decided that the effort was a waste of time, equipment and American lives. Long ago, the Psalmist left this observation: “The nations have fallen into a pit of their making; their feet are caught in the net they have hidden.” Things haven’t really changed much, except for the invention of the nuclear bomb. . . ‘nuff said about that. Be careful, all ye world leaders! Don’t do anything stupid. But I digress. On a brighter note, we know that this American experiment, lit up in 1776. has worked out very well for US for 250 years. Even so, there are tragedies that happen as we traipse through our history. . . lives lost in the Revolutionary war. . .slaves abused and slain before being emancipated by President Lincoln. . . lives lost in a civil war, lives lost as settlers moved westward, making war on native tribes, lives lost in world war one, lives lost in world war two, Korean war, Vietnam war, skirmishes during the cold war, even some Americans caught up in opposing war, desert storm, Afghanistan. . . And then there’s the toll taken by Time itself. We all have but one life to live on this earth. People are dying every day. . . in hospitals, in nursing homes, in accidents and. . . God only knows. . . Some of us know when our time on earth is ending, maybe if we’re laid up in a hospital bed with an advanced age, a mortal disease or injury. For others, the big chill happens when we least expect it, in an accident. . . One way or the other, it will happen to all of us. An ancient wise man wrote, while praying to the Creator, the Lord and Giver of Life. . . “Since his days are determined and the number of his months is with You, (Oh Lord) You have set limits that he cannot exceed” . . .

Like this tree, we sprout up, into a world of sunlight and fresh air, surrounded by other trees and critters, until, after fifty. . . or seventy years, the weak spots become holes in the plans that we made; meanwhile, all around us, the forest prospers. Birds sing, creatures traipse around us, even into us, exploring our inner parts for shelter. All around us the forest prospers, going on and on. We see our ancestors buried in the ground. . . leaves on the forest floor, turning into soil, turning into food for new saplings, and then. . . Time waits for no man. A bright mushroom pops up to add color to the dark forest floor. We won’t live to see it, but the other inhabitants of the forest will. Life goes on, and Time. . . Glass half-Full