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Beer Moms

October 10, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

My mom has supported pretty much everything I’ve ever done. Some good things, some bad things, all decidedly not “mom” things. I have distinct memories of her driving me to Sally Beauty supply to buy red, green, and blue hair dye during my high school punk rock phase. She encouraged my third grade choice to pick up the violin despite absolutely no prior interest in music beforehand. Her soccer sideline war cry – a British homage to Xena: Warrior Princess – rose high above the other moms cheering on the team. Whatever random hobby or sport or occult dabbling I pursued and perused, my mom was right there to say, “sure, sounds fun, what do you need?”

But as I’ve done that maturity thing, moved onto and into my own life of paychecks and mortgage and marriage, it’s been harder for my mom to stay in touch with my hobbies. She used to see me everyday, was party to my ups and downs, joys and woes, tastes and distastes as if she was a living part of my psyche. But now she only sees me through our occasional visits, my smattering of social media updates, and these blog posts. Her connection to my interests isn’t as strong as it was when I was still dependent on her for cash and car, but her passion in supporting me has not waned at all.

Last week she showed up at my house with a random six-pack, hoping, with that adorable anticipating look only a mom can give, that I’d never tried the bottles she’d journeyed to find especially for me. As I can barely keep track of my own progress in the impossibly massive offering of beer in this country, I couldn’t well expect her to know exactly what I’ve tried over the years. But she managed, probably using that inborn maternal instinct, to find 4 out of 6 that I’d never gotten my grubby little beer-mitts on.

She went out of her way, in the only way she really could, to acknowledge that she still supports what I do, even though it has long evolved past skateboarding and Operation Ivy. She wants me to know, on even the most basic level, that she’s there to help me in anyway she can. It all may sound like something expected of a mother, but my mom has this ability to make the smallest gesture – like 72 ounces of beer in a cardboard conveyor – echo and resound into the deepest corners of my soul.

A lot of us chase hobbies that aren’t exactly mainstream. Writers are often chided for “wasting time” on something that doesn’t matter, or they’ll never do anything with. Beer enthusiasts are often just equated with educated drunks. A person who writes about beer…I don’t even want to know what they say about me.

But there’s my mom, not judging, not caring, finding me new beers to try in an attempt to make me happy. Despite not knowing anything about beer, she knows everything about me.

So raise your glasses to all the beer moms, beer wives, beer brothers and sisters, beer friends. All those people who support you in whatever it is that makes you happy, regardless of what the rest of the world thinks. It’s these people, those constant champions, the unwavering stars in the northern skies of our minds, that light the way when we get lost in the sprawling dark of self-doubt.

And when you’re fearing that snarling beast and your dreams feel wet and heavy, remember that someone, somewhere, is gently cradling a bottle, wondering if you’ve tried it.

mombeer

For the record, I’d only tried DFH Indian Brown and HS Cutlass.

How to Choose

February 11, 2013 · by Oliver Gray

Life is a huge, open-ended Choose Your Own Adventure book.

At any moment, no matter the circumstance, you have some level of choice. You can choose which pair of pants to wear (if any), what to believe and what to deny (and what to tell others to believe and deny), or which flavor of Doritos would go best with your Lean Cuisine (Cool Ranch, by the way).

You can choose what to do with just as much ease as you choose what not to do.

You have more options than your brain can possibly process.

You can choose anything or nothing or something or everything.

What do you choose?

  1. You choose to stop reading this blog post. Close your browser window.
  2. You choose to keep reading this blog post. Continue to the next sentence.

You are progressing through your very own tailor-made, hyper-personalized adventure, one choice at a time.

You might associate choice with “big” or “important” concepts: whether to buy a manual or automatic, a Colonial or a Tudor, paperback or the Kindle version.  It’s easy to forget you’re even making choices when the robotic perfunctitude of your daily life turns most little choices into exercises in the process of elimination. You may choose to eat cereal for breakfast, but since you only have half a box of stale Cinnamon Toast Crunch left your choice of cereal is predetermined by your available resources.

You may also automatically assume that your choices are limited by the choices you have already made: you can’t choose a new career because you already chose one years ago, or you can’t choose to be healthy and fit because of all the other choices that made you not so healthy and fit. This seems true because you’ve formed habits. Habits are just big collections of choices that have turned into semi-permanent mental constructs like carefully stacked Lego blocks made of pure destiny. Even though they seem like cumulative life-definers, these habits are sickly and squishy, only as strong as the weakest choice in the theoretical chain.

You can, at any moment, make a decision that undoes all of your previous decisions, to your advantage or to your doom.

That is the great secret of free-thinking; you can and should and will make your own choices. Sure, some will be harder than others, and some might be unfairly influenced by external mind-goblins. But each choice is perfectly yours. Even though the outcome may be grim, you always have a choice to go against the forces pushing you in one direction.

You have to be active in the decision making process. Each thing you decide should be intentional and deliberate. Don’t get sucked into the undertow of choices that make themselves. If choices define your life, and you’re not actively making said choices, who is defining your life?

The great news is that our reality, even limited by our relatively small ability to perceive the electromagnetic spectrum, is exploding with choice. Sit and think about everything you can do right this second. You could jump up from your computer, go buy 25 kittens and a huge package of catnip and just roll around in kittens and catnip for hours. And that’s just one thing! No one is stopping you. Only you, questioning my sanity (and possibly your own, if you’re considering it), are stopping you from hopping in your Prius and going to PetSmart.

Very rarely are you in a position where your choices are truly limited. Sometimes, a choice that works best for you just requires some less-orthodox and deeply critical thinking. The concept of coming up with choices in seemingly no-choice situations has been around for a long time. A lot of people call it “problem solving.”

Following our passions comes down to making choices that feed, not starve. Being active instead of passive. Do you sit and watch another hour of TV, or do you use that hour to write a short story? Do you eat four donuts and sit around in your unwashed boxer-briefs, or do you eat a tasty spinach avocado sandwich and go for a jog? Do you diligently work on improving your skills, or just hope that one day someone will notice you and hand you a delicious burrito of success wrapped in a tortilla made of thousand dollars bills?

Do you put what makes you happy first, or do you put what makes other people happy first?

The world is at the doorstep of your brain. You just have to make some choices.

What do you choose?

  1. You choose to keep putting your passions second or ignore them completely. Go to Kristen Lamb’s Blog: “The Land of Good Enough“
  2. You choose to spend your time and energy on your passions. Go create something and be blissfully happy because you’re awesome.
I used to "play" these books all the time as a kind. And by "play" I mean "cheat my way through to see all the possible outcomes."

I used to “play” these books all the time as a kid. And by “play” I mean “cheat my way through to see all the possible outcomes.”

Craft and Draft: Thinking versus Knowing

October 16, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

The late-October NaNoWriMo runway is littered with the corpses of tens of thousands of would-be novels. Lots of these stories were cleared to fly, passed all the safety checks, but at the last minute, without warning, exploded into an awesome burst of words and pages. If we could recover the black boxes from this mangled writing-wreckage, it’d would be pretty easy to prove that the pilot (read: author) was responsible for the crash.

In my little online social circles, this time of year is made up of three definitive stances:

1) The battle criers: Those people who are feverishly looking forward to NaNo. Those people who already have their pens laid out in a perfectly perpendicular manner. Those people who can and will take time off work to make word count.

2) The wafflers: Those people who just aren’t sure. Those who think it could be fun, but don’t want to commit. Those who have a good idea that could be a great idea if it was given the chance.

3) The defeatists: Those who can’t imagine being able to write a novel in a month. Those with every excuse you’ve ever heard, and then 10 more. Those who treat writing as a novelty, not as a necessity.

I don’t need to talk to the battle criers; y’all will do your thing regardless. It’s not the defeatists I want to talk to either, most of them won’t even make the attempt, making my cheerleading nothing more than words wasted.

It’s you wafflers. You know who you are. You love to write – and are probably pretty good at it – but you haven’t given your work the time or credit it deserves. You don’t take the time to focus on your craft because you feel like it is a waste of time, in a world where you don’t really have any time to waste.

I know the feeling; you’ve got a lot of other stuff to do. Job. Kids. House. Video games. Expensive drug habit. I get it, I really do.

But if you love to write (and I mean “love” in the dirty, visceral, would-stab-a-dude to get to your keyboard, kind of way) then you are only hurting yourself. The longer you go dismissing your own passions and skill, the weaker that skill will become, until it is a shriveled up domovoi who does nothing more than languish around your psyche like an unwanted, unwashed house guest.

I’d be naive to think one little poorly proofread blog post could magically change your mind, but I still want to pass along the one little thing that helped me turn the corner with my writing and let me embrace it as something that I can and should and will do:

Don’t think that you want to write, know that you want to write. Don’t think you are a good writer, know you are. 

Thinking you can do something opens a door in your mind, an hidden back entrance that allows doubt to park his U-Haul and move in permanently. Thinking you can do something sets up parameters in your mind where defeat or failure is an acceptable outcome. Thinking is for philosophers and politicians.

But knowing you can do something? Oh man. When you know what you are capable of, there is no room for doubt. He can knock at your door all he wants, but your confidence just calls the cops and has him arrested for stalking.

The great part about knowing something is that it doesn’t even have to be true at this very moment. You can know that you have the potential to write a novel that will be popular and sell, and it will set you on the course to do just that. It’s an affirmation and a reassurance all rolled up into one cozy feel good blanket of self-imposed awesomeness.

So, don’t make excuses for yourself if you really want to do NaNoWriMo.

Know you can do it, don’t just think so.

[Saying or text appropriate for a motivational poster goes here]

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