Brewed Musings

Brewed Beverage of Choice: A Pint of Olde Suffolk Ale (An Oak Aged Old Ale from Jolly Ole England!)

Books Recently Read: The Nez Perce Indians and the Opening of the Northwest: Alvin Josephy; Hold the Enlightenment: Tim Cahill

Several months ago I was in Seattle for the wedding of two very dear friends of mine. While in the city I was able to hang out with my friend, The Hazletok, who now lives on the East Coast and we taunt each other back and forth about drinking beer in nice weather, late at night, or in the presence of a beautiful woman. (Hazletok by the way did all of the real work in setting up confucianbrewer.com.) Hazletok and I also share a common interest in another brewed beverage, coffee!

One morning we found ourselves up at an ungodly hour for two people who were supposedly on vacation. What did we do? We grabbed our books and headed to the cafe. And it was while we were at that cafe I realized that I was not doing any “studying.” The enlightenment came as I peeked up from Big Sur, a book I had read twice already to see The Hazletok reading a thick book on, if memory serves me correctly, Oppenheimer.

There are very few people who can challenge me just by being in the vicinity. Hazletok is one of those people. Over the past several months prior to this enlightenment I had been musing on something that had been bothering me but could not put a finger on what it was. The lack of “studying” was apparently what had pushed me into my ferocious bout of lethargy. Now I was bound and determined to cure the ailment as soon as I got back to my native Portland.

As I peroused my book case looking for the perfect book to be the bandage, one stuck out: The Nez Perce and the Opening of the Northwest. This was a book I had tried once to finish but my mind was still in adolescence at the time. Six hundred pages on something as deep as the history of the Nez Perce is not something a 24 year old should tackle. Since moving to the Northwest though I had become more tempted to take out the book and finish it. Now my chance was upon me.

It felt good to be in the thralls of “studies” again. (I keep putting “studying” in quotes because while I am not going to school, as a Confucian, Buddhist, and historian/philosophiser, I will constantly be studying til the day I die.) I tried taking a class at the local community college several years ago, but it did not work out. The teacher told me that I could be teaching the class, which ended all the enjoyment of it knowing I was not going to really learn anything new. But now I was learning something new and different on my own terms.

It takes some very thick skin to study Native American History. It is history and you have to treat it as such. But as a man of Wonder Bread descent studying American Indian History, there has always been a nagging fear in the bowels of my mind. The fear is that one day I will run across a relative in my research and it is quite apparent that person did not do something of valour.

And there it was, on one of the pages, staring at me with its black and white ghoulish eyes, the name of one of my father’s distant relatives. My fear had been realized. This relative, I am sorry to say, was part of one of the deadliest massacres in Nez Perce history. My heart sank. My stomach was ready to revisit the lunch I had eaten earlier. I wanted to shed a tear, but the thick blanket of skin I grew at my days at UWM did not allow it. And so I was left to process it. Several hours later I was pages past it, but it was still lingering back there in the dark recesses.

It is easy to say we are not our relatives, because of how true that statement really is. I am not that man. I’d like to think that if I were living back then, I would not have followed in his shoes. But that is irrelevant. The important thing to remember while studying history is not what happened when and where. I will be the first to tell you I cannot remember certain dates that are supposed to be “important.” And yet I graduated with honours in History. The important thing about studying, history or anything, is how we can use it to better ourselves and the community around us. It is amazing what one can learn simply by sitting silently in a cafe miles from home.

Prost!

the confucian brewer

PS: Today was Columbus Day. In the future refuse to celebrate it!