Learning To Be What You Need

February 11, 2024February 11, 2024 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Would you have wanted you (as you are now) in your life when you were a kid?

I know it’s not always wise to start off blogs with a question like this, especially not one that “buries the lead.” Normally I try to start off a bit more gently- a good anecdote that puts the topic in context, or generally coming at a deep topic sideways. In this case, though, I feel like any attempt to answer a loaded question like this can only be given in story form. Ultimately, it makes us check in on our own stories. Has time actually conferred wisdom and maturity? Did we become the mentors and guides we would have wanted?

I don’t know, but I hope so and I’m always trying. That’s where stories help- we use them to understand character and how we write our own every day.

*“Fairy tales are more than true: not because they tell us that dragons exists, but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.” –* Neil Gaiman

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A Story Worth Telling in a Way Worth Hearing

February 5, 2024February 5, 2024 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona Multi: sed omnes illacrimabiles Urgentur, ignotique longa Nocte, carent quia vate sacro.
(“Many heroes lived before Agamemnon, but they are all unmourned, and consigned to oblivion, because they had not their sacred bard.”)
– Horace

I first read that quote on a webpage of Latin mottos where it was offered as just the first statement- “Vixere fortes ante agamemnona”- to mean that heroism exists even if no one notices it. Ironically, or perhaps appropriately, this is a perfect demonstration of the power of the pen. The quote itself extols the role of writers and poets in giving heroes immortality.

The metacontext of the quote is that when Horace wrote the passage in his Odes, he was simping for the original “sacred bard” Homer, author of the Iliad where Agamemnon’s story is recounted. Some translators have taken a little poetic license on this and interpret the passage (the way I first heard it) as “Brave men lived before Agamemon, but they died forgotten, for there were no poets before Homer.”

The meta-metacontext is that, if you read the Iliad at all, Agamemnon is pretty much an absolute knob, a coward, a monster, and absolutely responsible for all of his own failures including and especially his own death. So millennia of writers and poets have been needed to burnish his story into anything remotely resembling a hero.

That’s what we in the creative business call “serious workshopping.”

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Food and Drink- Keeping it Local

January 27, 2024 / The Black Hat Baker / 3 Comments

Growing up in my wine enthusiast father’s house, I started learning about alcohol at 13. My sisters and I were passed small sips of whatever he and my mother were drinking, gently quizzed on what we tasted and smelled as far as our early-teen brains could describe ”flavor notes,” and then given an instructive lecture on that particular wine, where it came from, what caused those flavors, and the idea of terroir– that you could taste the unique chemistry of the soil and climate in the products of it’s earth.

I can tell you now that, despite my father’s instruction, I never really fell in love with wine. Unless it’s especially unusual, I will always enjoy wine as “interesting fun grape juice.” Unless it’s terrible, then I just don’t finish.

My dad was not speaking into a void though. What he said DID land and plant a seed, although it grew to be more inclined to beer and liquor, which I can say I then cultivated with the hearty fertilizers of sociology, history, anthropology, and being really damned curious when faced with the unfamiliar-but-promising.

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The Staff Of Life, Liquified

December 31, 2023January 6, 2024 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

“Beer was liquid bread. Bread was solid beer.”
– Tom Standage, “A History of the World in Six Glasses

Walking in is as different at every beer hall as it is the same. Different decor, different vibe to the place, different service… different menus to be sure. Behind it all is a shared sensory vocabulary, however, that make each reminiscent of the others.

The arrangement of tables in the hall, sometimes, so that there is a selection of intimate booths for those who want to drink alone or in very select company and long linked tables for boisterous get-togethers and ersatz parties among colleagues. The general geography- you can see the seats and you can see the bar (the style and texture of which again reflects the mood and vibe of the place.) There is a clear order of operations to be observed here. A ritual to be followed and walked as carefully and unconsciously (for the faithful) as the Stations of the Cross.

A selfie of the author wearing an olive green newsboy cap, green tweed vest, and white shirt raising a pint of dark beer.

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End-of-Year Reflections

December 30, 2023December 30, 2023 / The Black Hat Baker / Leave a comment

When exactly does a journey end?

If you are looking to go somewhere new or better, ideally you find yourself in a different place, put down your stuff, and start about the task of living a new life in your new location. Joseph Campbell’s famous “hero’s journey” structure includes The Return- our brave hero, having crossed the border of the known into the unknown on their grand quest, returns across that border to the world they knew significantly changed.

Maybe they brought the “Magic Medicine,” as Campbell calls it, to solve a problem and the quest of seeking and finding the Medicine was only the first (albeit largest) part. Tripitaka, having successfully reached India and received the sutras from the Buddha along with his assistants Monkey, Pigsy, and Sandy, must now complete the quest by returning to China with them. Frodo, having seen the One Ring destroyed and the quest complete, returns home to free and rebuild the Shire.

For Tripitaka and Frodo, though, that still wasn’t the end of their stories. Tripitaka and his friends are magically whisked back to India after finishing their delivery and receive their ultimate rewards: Buddhahood for Tripitaka and Monkey, and sainthood for Pigsy and Sandy as their undertakings on the journey expunged the sins that set them on the road in the first place. Frodo, forever wounded and traumatized by his quest and prolonged exposure to the evil of the One Ring, realizes that he “can’t go home again” and leaves Middle Earth to seek peace and healing in the uttermost West.

Returning home but returning differently is just as much a journey as finding yourself in a new place- you set down old ways and start the process of living again as someone new.