Guinness Draught Stout

 

It is a can of Guinness.  You drink it.

(March 26, 2022) I like Guinness.  It tastes good.  It's... brown, in my synesthetic palette of flavors.

The best Guinness, I am told, is at the Guinness factory.  I think it's in Dublin?  You can google that if you need to.  Several years ago the Guinness company agreed to stop using fish bladders as part of the recipe - no, really, you can also google islinglass if you need to.  So that Guinness would be vegan, you see.  But there's nothing like them fish bladders for clarifying beer, right?

The second best Guinness is in Boston.  Sorry / not sorry, London, but there's some history there.  Let's drink another beer and think about horrors of history for a moment?  Or - and we're supposed to be about wine here - maybe not.  If you want to make friends in an English-speaking country you can go to a bar and say something like 'Fuck The English Colonialist Bastards' and you'll be fine.

I had a pint glass thrown at my head once, the first time I had Guinness, in Boston at the Irish pub down the street.  We ordered Rolling Rocks but some dude in a suit scoffed, and Becky asked him what was up, and he ended up buying us rounds of Guinness.  Well, he was buying them for Becky, because of sex and pretty-girl-energy and all, but whatevs.  I bought the next round and then we did a shot of whiskey and then another round - anyway, Becky ended up stealing two pint glasses and she threw one at her boyfriend's head, but her aim sucked so it was really my head but she missed.

Guinness!  I was on the river once - I think it was the Red Cedar, in my memory; East Lansing Michigan.  So a few years after Boston.  We had a party the night before with a keg of Guinness, and so we put a bunch of beer into empty Coke 2-liter bottles and sat in the river and got drunk again the next afternoon.  There was a leaf - the river was brown with tannins from the Cedar trees, but then the leaf was really a tendril.  A 2-dimensional intrusion from a 4-dimensional animal making a connection.  With me.  And the beer.  I was suddenly filled with despair, and existential dread, because the flesh was a cancer that contained minerals and ideas, both of which were perverted by my blood and fats and horrible, horrible meat.

As I looked around, drinking beer from a plastic bottle, all the sounds of the river and the campus turned into static and my 'friends' and 'other people' stopped and turned their heads to look at me, with their eyes melting and running like wax down their faces.  It was my fault, after all, and so I needed to be here, to absorb their sins, and face penance for despair and the thoughts, and the minerals, trapped inside of the meat that I thought of as my self.

I looked around and nodded, and then picked up the 'leaf' and swallowed it as one does with a communion.  this was right.  this was just.  this was my life now, in the water and the motion of Hydrogens connected with Oxygens with the other meat things frozen and accusatory and dying in front of me.

I am still there.  YOU are still there, somewhere, with your eyes melting as you accuse me of things that are both entirely my fault and are in no way connected to me, the ideas of me, because the flesh is Horrifying and Miserable and

and I am trapping minerals inside of my meat which is an unpleasant place for metallic elements at the best of times and

and my thoughts desire to escape into the aether like caged birds because the emotions - no, they are not what motivate thought, they are the trap that thoughts gravitate towards, the light to the moths, the vinegar to the flies, and

And I drink more Guinness from a 2-liter coke bottle.  It makes sense and I nod.  My thoughts strive to join the fourth dimension but I keep them trapped inside of me, trapped with the iron and calcium and sodium - Sodium!  It could burn so brightly! - and Chlorine and all.  I am the evil I fear and the monster is me and your eyes bleed like wax dripping down a candle.

We finished the Guinness and stumbled home.  Several of us were old enough to go to the bar and so we did that thing, still wet, and drank more Guinness.  The meat is horrifying and impure.  Afterwards we went to a hot tub place and sat in warm water with bubbles, and when I laughed at how evil we were, with the meat and the thoughts and the metals - well, .  Well.

Do you know what an Irish Car Bomb is?  I mean - okay, up several paragraphs and seriously, Fuck the British Colonialists and all, right?  But.  Is a drink, where you get a shot glass with half whiskey and half Bailey's, and you drop that shit into a mostly-full pint of Guiness and then everyone slams that shit back.  You try to finish your drink before the other meatlings.

I am the fucking champ at Irish Car Bombs and if I am ever challenged to a duel that will be my weapon.  Because fuck you is why and then we get drunk.

I first learned about these in grad school where my cohort went out to drinking and so I did too.  I came in second place in the first round but then - well, I was me, and if it is your first time in Car Bomb Club, you HAVE to drink.  After a few that sentence made a lot more sense.  I wore a suit to the bar, for some reason that escapes me now, and stumbling home I threw up into the bushes.  My tie wrapped around my hair to hold it back and I only got a little puke on my shoes and then I was looking at a reflection of myself.  My 11 dimensional string theory self.

So I have an advanced degree in mathematics, for full disclosure.  There are some things in 11 dimensions where the math works nicely, but maybe that's not the best basis for a good theory of physics?  Especially because we have our 3 spatial dimensions, and one time dimension, and scale and 'color' (like for quarks, not for like how Guinness is brown), and then horror and fear and despair.  And two more dimensions that I don't have words for but they're not super great to try to describe if you want to stay 'sane' in this world of meat or have 'pleasant conversations' or 'make the sex with another meat thing' or anything.

I mean they have other names for the things that live there.  They have different names for the 11 dimensional versions of us.  To them 'joy' and 'love' and such are meat conditions, the same way we see addiction to meth, or capitalistic greed or something.  And so I asked the metals that I trapped inside of my meat what they thought and was told BURN BURN BURN which - I mean, that wasn't the worst advice I'd ever heard, you know?  It made sense at the time.  But a couple of the dimensions that I was looking at were my guilt and my pain and those parts had some other things to say to me.  Things about my worth in the... the world?  That concept breaks down a bit.  I was a meat thing - like a virus, designed to trap thought and metals into a horrific form.  Emotion?  My reaction was an even worse degradation of potential.

I still like Guinness though.  I am drinking one right now, with my flesh.  If I am destined to be a horror and a cancer in the universe I'm going to lean into it and enjoy another beer tonight.

Guinness is the most delicious beverage I've written about and between it, and coffee, and cold water - is a toss-up what I like best.  I give it a 'let's ignore that your intestines have crawled outside of you' out of 'cosmic multi-dimensional horrors' but maybe it's more like a 10 out of ten.