Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Photo Credit:Chris Wyman One summer after I graduated high school, I worked at a resort in Northern Wisconsin wrangling bears and mowing lawns, but truth be told I spent most of my time collecting garbage. An older, German gentleman, Hans, and I drove around in a blue late 1980s F-150 truck, picking up garbage from assorted cabins around the property. He would play polka music on cassette tapes and tell me stories about his younger days. On the days that he was off work, I would drive without music and collect the beer cans that vacationers left in the cabins. If they left food or beer behind, it was fair game, so I had a seemingly endless supply of cheap beer that summer. I did not buy light beer like Keystone, Coors, Busch, Miller, and others, given that I was a Heineken and Newcastle man in my misspent youth. My friends were pleased when I always had extra beer that no one had to purchase. The bear wrangling was less dangerous than it sounds because they were leery of us...

It is time for another trip to the cabin to still my quaking nerves and temper the shift of my lofty or scattered ambitions. I am stressed by the upcoming move and the shifting of time that makes me older but not wiser as I battle my apprehension and dismiss the fact that I actually graduated with a Ph.D. no less, but I can never appreciate my good luck or all the hard work that went into finishing the dissertation, many of it at the cabin. I pack a small number of records; we changed the rules this year, only ten, but both Donny and I are bringing more surreptitiously, unbeknownst to all except each other. We knew we each would and discussed it more than usual, sifting our collections for the unknown, we grabbed albums to introduce to each other like new friends.   After last year's AC/DC debacle, where he tried to play the discography and was shut down, the decision was made (by who?), in passive voice resistance, to bring albums that were near and dear to us and ...

It snowed a lot this weekend. Safely ensconced in the house, I spun records and created my annual weird music Christmas mix. It was just the break I needed, neglecting student papers, dissertation rewrites, and the outside world. I drank a few beers and brass monkeys, while getting down to the business of distraction. Here's to the new year! It is certainly on its way. Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas-"Ain't No Hole in the Washtub"

Birthdays were much easier when I was in my twenties; hungover and unredemptive, I would head out early the next day with energy to spare. Now I want to be in bed early, contemplating what needs to be done the following day. Responsibilities are tantamount to a contract with myself that won't allow me to go wild, but to cower in corners, shielding my eyes from the light. This year, after much bitching about the Star Wars holiday and acknowledgment of celebrity birthdays, among them Mike Dirnt and Audrey Hepburn, my wife and I headed out for drinks and dinner. We sampled food and alcohol at Hopvine Brewing Company in Aurora, where I consumed a flight of all but one  of the beers on the menu, and then dutifully recorded them on Untappd, the perfect app for documenting my drunkenness, as my colleagues keep telling me. I'm seemingly the only one around here that checks off the boxes and tries a new beer at every sitting, except for many of my Wisconsin friends who shall remain na...