Y2K Beer

Well it seems like life is finally starting to return to some state of normal after the whole storm/blackout/living in the Abbey ordeal. All things considered, this really sucked a major load of ass. While I am glad that I lost power at my home and not my workshop (trying to fill all those holiday orders in a dark shop would have been a worse nightmare than sleeping in my office for 4 days) the entire event was not as bad as it could have been. At least I did not have to tap into my secret stock of Y2K beer, the true marker of a disaster.

What is a Y2K beer you ask?

Back in the early 90’s when I was working on my undergrad (I have a degree in Rhetoric & Propaganda if you must know) I was attending a school that was the arch rival of the college my elder brother attended. Now being brothers meant that we were naturally competitive at just about everything. It was originally his idea, the bet, he loved football far more than I. The bet was simple, who’s ever team won that week the other owed them a 6pack of beer. If both teams won (or lost) it was a push so no beer was owed, but if one’s team won their week AND the other’s lost… well then that mean a 12 pack was owed.

Now this happened to be the year that my school, through some miracle or drug related scandal I’m not sure and don’t care, won every damn game they played. An entire season, undefeated. As if to add insult to injury, my brother’s school suffered their worst season in 60 years. These guys were loosing to the likes of St. Mary’s School for the Blind.

Needless to say my brother got tired of delivering a fresh half case of beer to me every week. Since we never bothered to put in a “no crappy beer” clause into the bet, my brother started going out of his way to pay off his weekly beer debt with the worst possible beer he could find. It started humorously enough with beer that featured wild life artwork and then quickly digressed into beer featuring cartoon wildlife. Till he found the ultimate beer, the beer that not even he would dare to drink. Generic beer. I have no idea where he found them, to my knowledge the whole “White label with black lettering” thing went out of fashion in the early 80’s, but somewhere he found a ½ case of generic beer.

To this day I have not dared open the cans for fear of what lay inside. Rather I stuck them on a shelf in my garage and during the whole “Y2K Disaster Hysteria” I branded them as part of my preparedness kit. My logic, if shit got so damn bad that I’m actually going to drink this stuff then it will comfort me as I lay dying or it will poison me and put me out of what ever misery is waiting for me.