Dave Barry: Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits

Now I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: “Dave, I hear what you’re saying, but wouldn’t laws such as these constitute unwarranted government interference in the private sector?”

The answer is: Yes, they would. But unwarranted government interference in the private sector is a small price to pay if it draws the government away from its efforts to revitalize decaying urban areas. The government inevitably tries to do this by installing 60 billion new red bricks and several dozen vaguely old-fashioned street lights in an effort to create a look I would call “Sort of Colonial or Something.”

The government did this to a town right near where I used to live, West Chester, Pennsylvania. This is a nice little old town, with a lot of nice little old houses, but about 10 years ago some of the downtown merchants started getting really upset because they were losing business to the “shopping malls,” a phrase the merchants always say in the same tone of voice you might use to say “Nazi Germany.” Now, as a consumer, I would argue that the reason most of us were going to the shopping malls was that the downtown

stores tended to have window displays that had not been changed since the Truman administration, featuring crepe paper faded to the color of old oatmeal, accented by the occasional dead insect. And the actual merchandise in these stores was not the kind you would go out of your way to purchase or even accept as gifts. We are talking, for example, about clothing so dowdy that it could not be used even to clean up after a pet.

What I am saying is that the problem with the downtown West Chester stores, from this consumer’s point of view, was that they didn’t have much that anybody would want to buy. From the merchants’ point of view, however, the problem was that the entire downtown needed to be Revitalized, and they nagged the local government for years until finally it applied for a federal grant of God knows how many million dollars, which was used to rip up the streets for several years, so as to discourage the few remaining West Chester shoppers. When they finally got it all together again, the new revitalized West Chester consisted of mostly the same old stores, only in front of them were (surprise!) red brick sidewalks garnished with vaguely old-fashioned streetlights. The whole effect was definitely Sort Of Colonial or Something, and some shoppers even stopped by to take a look at it on their way to the mall.

I gather this process has been repeated in a great many towns around the country, and it seems to me that it’s a tremendous waste of federal time and effort that could otherwise be spent getting rid of the extra “e.” I urge those of you who agree with me to write letters to your congresspersons, unless you use that stationery with the “old-fashioned” ragged edges, in which case I urge you to go to your local Flanagan’s and impale yourself on one of the farm implements.

Recently, I began to feel this void in my life, even after meals, and I said to myself: “Dave, all you do with your spare time is sit around and drink beer. You need a hobby.” So I got a hobby. I make beer.

I never could get into the traditional hobbies, like religion or stamp collecting. I mean, the way you collect stamps is: Every week or so the Postal Service dreams up a new stamp to mark National Peat Bog Awareness Month, or whatever, and you rush down and clog the Post Office lines to buy a batch of these stamps, but instead of putting them to a useful purpose such as mailing toxic spiders to the Publisher’s Clearing House, you take them home and just sort of have them. Am I right? Have I left any moments of drama out of this action sequence? And then the biggest thrill, as I understand it, the real payoff, comes when you get lucky and collect a stamp on which the Postal Service has made a mistake, such as instead of “Peat Bog” it prints “Beat Pog,” which causes stamp collectors to just about wet their polyester pants, right?

So for many years I had no hobby. When I would fill out questionnaires and they would ask what my hobbies were, I would put “narcotics,” which was of course a totally false humorous joke. And then one day my editor took me to a store where they sell beer-making equipment. Other writers, they have editors who inspire them to new heights of literary achievement, but the two major contributions my editor has made to my artistic development are (1) teaching me to juggle and (2) taking me to his beer-making store where a person named Craig gave me free samples until he could get hold of my Visa card.

But I’m glad I got into beer-making, because the beer sold here in the United States is sweet and watery and lacking in taste and overcarbonated and just generally the lamest, wimpiest beer in the entire known world. All the other nations are drinking Ray Charles beer, and we are drinking Barry Manilow. This is why American TV beer commercials are so ludicrously masculine. It’s a classic case of overcompensation. You may have seen, for example, the Budweiser or Miller commercial where some big hairy men are standing around on the side of a river when a barge breaks loose and starts drifting out of control. Now real men, men who drink real beer, would have enough confidence in their own masculinity to say: “Don’t worry; it’s probably insured.”

But the men in the commercial feel this compulsion to go racing off on a tugboat and capture the barge with big hairy ropes, after which they make excited masculine hand gestures at each other to indicate they have done a task requiring absolute gallons of testosterone. Then they go to a bar where they drink Miller or Budweiser and continue to reassure themselves that they are truly a collection of major stud horses, which is why you don’t see any women around. The women have grown weary of listening to the men say: “Hey! We sure rescued THAT barge, didn’t we?!” And: “You think it’s easy, to rescue a barge? Well, it’s NOT!” and, much later at night: “Hey! Let’s go let the barge loose again!” So the women have all gone off in search of men who make their own beer.

Some of you may be reluctant to make your own beer because you’ve heard stories to the effect that it’s difficult to make, or it’s illegal, or it makes you go blind. Let me assure you that these are falsehoods, especially the part about making you go bleof nisdc dsdfsdfkQ$$%”%.

Ha ha! just a little tasteless humor there, designed to elicit angry letters from liberals. The truth is, homemade beer is perfectly safe, unless the bottle explodes. We’ll have more on that if space permits. Also it’s completely legal to make beer at home. In fact, as I read the current federal tax laws—I use a strobe light—if you make your own beer, you can take a tax credit of up to $4,000, provided you claim you spent it on insulation!

And it’s very easy to make your own beer: You just mix your ingredients and stride briskly away. (You may of course vary this recipe to suit your own personal taste.) Your two main ingredients are (1) a can of beer ingredients that you get from Craig or an equivalent person, and (2) yeast. Yeast is a wonderful little plant or animal that, despite the fact that it has only one cell, has figured out how to convert sugar to alcohol. This was a far greater accomplishment than anything we can attribute to giant complex multicelled organisms such as, for example, the Secretary of Transportation.

After the little yeasts are done converting your ingredients into beer, they die horrible deaths by the millions. You shouldn’t feel bad about this. Bear in mind this is yeast we’re talking about, and there’s plenty more available, out on the enormous yeast ranches of the Southwest. For now, your job is to siphon your beer into bottles. This is the tricky part, because what can happen is the phone rings and you get involved in a lengthy conversation during which your son, who is 4-1/2, gets hold of the hose and spews premature beer, called “wort,” all over the kitchen and himself, and you become the target of an investigation by child welfare authorities because yours is the only child who comes to preschool smelling like a fraternity carpet.