Self-Help in the Lucrative Field of Dreaming by Mr.theTinfoilSombrero
As Bill Sees It
It is so great to plan out a book. No. (I can't remember how I originally thought it.)
It is so great to plan out a book. To plan out a long trip. To map out a vast conquest.
There's that moment—those images—of standing before a shimmering castle, of walking into
the forest, of boarding a creaky old boat that will take you out to sea. There is no port too far, no
star you cannot name, or travel to, if it's within the laws of the physics of the book you create.
He did not know how wide a country, arid and precipitous, must be crossed before the traveler
through life comes to an acceptance of reality.
* * *
Those who were going to take part in the social evening came in.
—W. Somerset Maugham,
Of Human Bondage
Saint Arnold Bishop of Metz, FR. (600 A.D.), concerned of the dangers of drinking impure water, warned the peasants:
"Don't drink the water, drink beer, from man's sweat and God's
love, beer came into the world"
"Beer is proof that God loves us."
—Benjamin Franklin. 1
1 "You know, Ben Franklin never really said that."
Welcome to the Secret of Beer Nite
Lofty Miss Fellows2
Let us ponder the literary tradition—step-by-step, in all of its ragged dignity—of Beer Night, and
how it all began.
Of the eight writers who still attend, each must have a different story. And coming from
storytellers, each beginning is subject to the whims of temperament; the afflictions of memory;
the desire to lie, exaggerate, astonish.
When she was a lot younger, Lofty Miss Fellows once visited the home of the legendary
author rumored to have attended Beer Nite long before she ever became famous. Occult with
expectation, even her bones felt a shimmer, Lofty followed the floral, confusing directions that
the author had described as the way to her house, which did not fit with the exacting, detective
work of her genre.
She wrote of true crime—did the ancient anchorite—and her estate grew to be enormous,
perched above a stone covered beach that looked out across the green shores of Vashon Island.
And she filled that three-story house of extraordinary windows with so many yellowed
newspapers and county files and boxes of research—not to mention all manner of household
clutter—that she and none of her three adult children could live there anymore. So she bought
the next house over, a squat little thing, the old servant's quarters to a house long torn done.
Even her cats preferred it.
2 "I'm kind of liking the idea of Joan of Arc saying, 'Beer is proof that God loves us'."
Everyone has an image of the perfect writerly cottage. This was one of them—the
seclusion of a single place, a cottage barely big enough to support the baggage and energy of just
one person for whom the material world had condensed to its essence. One of her cats"a butch,
fat, black and white thing—jumped up through the stacks of boxes and up onto a large dining
room table. Its stark, marble eyes conveyed mastery of the universe, and the middle of the table
had a fall-themed centerpiece of faded plastic pumpkins, plastic fall maple leaves, and never-lit
orange candles grimy with age and cobwebs. Surrounding the table were eight chairs, each with
a formal dining room table setting, and on one of the plates was a bowl of kibble and lumps of
dried canned food. Here was where the interview would take place, and here the cat began to
gnaw and the cat food crumble. The cottage was small but through its three perfect windows was
a view spectacular—just utterly expansive. You could see from Three Tree Point all the way
down to Tacoma. It took a tug and a barge, or a container ship, traveling at 21 knots, a full
twenty minutes to travel the length of this view. From this distance, it seemed the boats weren't
moving at all. But they were.
The beginning of Beer Nite is like that.3
3 "Ben Franklin had to have said it. It's firmly established in the cannon of urban legend."
Mr.theTinfolFoilSombrero 4
Frank's first Beer Nite was a little different. It happened back in Montana, back when the
drinking age was 18. There he was, full of the vibrant energy of youth, in a bar with his buddies
on a summer afternoon in Fairfield, Montana where he grew up. He saw the root beer-colored
light that filtered in through the smudged windows. He saw it was dark and full of a smokey
wisdom. It made him feel as though he had walked into an altogether different world—one
secluded and left behind by the Great Plains of North America that stretched out beyond the
door.
"You see that guy over there," said one of his friends.
Frank looked over and beyond the pool table was some guy asleep against the wall.
"That's the famous writer."
What Frank remembers most was the famous writer's Mark Twain mustache. Asleep, the
writer had a Mark Twain mustache and a Wild West hat. He looked a little absurd in his get up.
Everything else about him was asleep. Some of his old writer friends looked like they wanted to
wake him, and others wanted to just keep playing pool. At the time Frank thought it was Kurt
Vonnegut there asleep beneath the Mark Twain mustache and Wild West hat. For some reason
Frank thought that Kurt Vonnegut came from an island in the literary sea of the Puget Sound of
Washington which had a mythic ring to it because Frank had lived in Montana all of his life. But
Frank knew better now. Now when he tells the story,
he says—
"I met Richard Brautigan once."
4 "Nowhere in any of Ben Franklin's actual writings does that quote ever appear."As Bill Sees It 5
If you ask Lofty or Bill, they'll say it's a continuation of their old school days. How they met for
beers after college graduate classes. And how they kept on meeting after they each began
teaching evening classes of their own in the writing of fiction to professional adults. For well
over three decades now, they lived at night in the Land of Fiction. They taught, they read, they
thought hard about what was wrong with the story and how it could be improved. It was a matter
of grave, utmost obsession, to plunge oneself deep into the unchartered dream of humanity's soul.
Ok dive now into the metaphor of 'the Obscure, Tenacious Pearl Diver." Think also of
the lone sea diver in the allegory The Pearl. Ever the trespasser you go down, into the stolen
metaphor, as far as one can go, into the mindscape, into the deep. It is not the ocean, and it is
not quite you, but it's everywhere, it's your only escape, your last chance, to find yourself, in
only a metaphor. It's not even yours. To think on it alone is not enough. You have to write it out.
And bring back the treasure. Map out something that no one has ever thought of or dreamt
before. In pursuit of the hunt, you're compelled to the desk in your basement where you work,
your obsession drawing you out further and further away from the routine tranquility of the
neighborhood cityscape above. The closest the balding, middle-aged Flaubert ever came to
getting his stockings wet from his own tenacious metaphor was dipping his quill into the India
ink of his well. Still he went down. So do you. Into the deep. You wrack the inner dark till your
ears pound. You have to kick to stay down, as far as one can go. That is the maxim. The writer's
curse. Your face turns blue. The bravery of discovery is at hand. The metaphor gives way. The
ocean dissolves. There's only a darkness, not quite an element, where you swim through the
wreckage of dead marriage, failed ghosts, lurching monsters that move more slowly than your
imagination can stand. You reach out but grasp nothing, and keep reaching, beyond the edge of
the mind. Beyond concepts and words, still you flail on. Empty-handed, you burst up to the
surface, and climb up onto yet another stolen boat, this one a little dinghy that Kafka dreamt up,
for the hunter Gracchus. In it, you find there is no rudder (there never was), and a faint wind
draws toward you from death's icy depths.
5 "Even so, the statement proves nothing. Just exactly how does beer prove divine love? And how do we know
this God exists? And how can we be sure this concept loves us?"Early to bed, early to rise . . .'"
Could the student who sought them out ever learn to tell the story properly? Going on
three decades now, issues of plot, tone, and tense riddled their brains. They met lovers and
eventually husbands or wifes in this pursuit. How to tell the story? This was the Holy Grail. They
kept on.
Tuesday and Thursday nights were the most predictable for classes, ending at 9 pm. This
left a comfortable forty-five minutes to get to the beer. Because Milton found the idea of a night
organized for the drinking of beer pleasurable to his pursuits, he sent out the announcement
every Monday night in the form of an email. Who will join him for a Wee Dram , a Flagon , a
Tankard , a Pint? 6
Every Tuesday night: same place, same time.
On cyber winds, the group email arrives.
Who will attend?
6 In the booth La Mothra sat, meeting the people of Tuesday Night for the very first time. They seemed a little odd
to her "old and odd. Of course they would sit around talking about old, dead, white people. What else would old,
almost-dead, white wanna-bees talk about? Where were the candle-lit cafes of Paris?—that's what they dreamt of,
right? The accordions, the guitar! But mostly they just sat there in their costumes of the university professor, or the
semi-retired lawyer turned artist—and a few younger, like herself, with that curious spark of the poet or the grad student,
with the self-consciousness of a hyper-active mind overflowing with a special kind of knowledge that the
world cared nothing about. She doubted whether any of those present would ever put themselves out there in a
poetry slam, exposing themselves in the neon beer light as a focused silence descends over the tables. But no. No,
they just sat there huddled behind their pints, jolly-eyed and listing a bit from the weight of their imaginations, and
also, she felt as though she'd known them for a forever it seemed, a forever that began around 8:15 on a Tuesday
night.
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