Keystone keynotes mark the High Life

By Timothy Faust     9/18/08 7:00pm

In the span of one weekend sometime in the early 2000s, I watched both A Walk to Remember with a then-girlfriend and the DVD of the Green Bay Packers' 1997 Super Bowl victory. Contented with these emotional highs and lows, I thought I was pretty square with the whole "sentimental depth" thing. How terrifyingly foolish! It is only because I lived in a frat house that I have learned the painful error of my ways and discovered the true poignancies of life. It turns out that we humans had it wrong the entire time: Life's emotional benchmarks don't come from love, hate, trauma or success. They come from a can, and the only way to get them out is through the greatest of all mankind's devices: by shotgunning a cheap beer.The first frat brother with whom I lived taught me about beer and, as a result, turned me into one of those people. You know which people I mean - there's one at every party. A dude, probably wearing a shirt with some sort of collar, leaning against a wall and holding a bottle label-side-out staring down everyone else in the room. A beer elitist. A beerlitist. One of those guys who shows up to a party, puts his own personal six-pack of Three Floyds or Dogfish Head in the common room fridge, and then gets pissy when some dumb freshman, breath bathed in the odor of Natty Light, grabs it for a game of Flip Cup. Good beer was for drinking, I thought, and bad beer was as useful as a second Rice CoffeeHouse.

The second frat brother with whom I lived taught me how to shotgun a beer. His lesson may have been the greatest gift of all, even better than the time I got Nintendo's Paperboy on Christmas 1992. I say this with absolute certainty: Neither man nor god could hope to invent a means of drinking a beverage which could ever surpass the glories of shotgunning it. It is not because I enjoy shotgunning beers that I praise the act so highly; in fact, the whole process usually takes me a pathetic four and a half minutes (with breaks) and often ends in vomiting.

Instead, it is because a feeling of insurmountable power rushes through my nervous system as I jam my old bike key into the bottom of a beer can. To flip the can aright and pull open the tab is to feel myself erected above the world, brain tickled by the enhancement of my senses. The acidic gush that forces itself into my throat (and sometimes lungs) is a Niagara Falls or an Old Smokey; an awesome display of Nature's fury worthy of any ninety-nine cent postcard or family camping trip. When the urine-colored spray makes a mess of my shirtsleeves, as it invariably does, I am marked not with an embarrassing sticky mess but a badge of virile masculinity and courage.

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A little over two weeks ago, I was trapped on my back in tiny CoffeeHouse for an hour, trying to shove tremendous trays of cookie dough into spaces much too small and banging my elbows all over the place. Frustrated, I walked outside and shotgunned a beer. Last Monday, before the first Packers quarterback other than Brett Favre started a football game at Lambeau Field, I stepped into my bathroom and shotgunned a beer. This weekend, after Ike finished ravaging Galveston and Rice went wet again, I perched on the Brown balcony and shotgunned a beer. Should something go terribly wrong and I manage to procreate and bring forth a child into the world, I will shotgun a beer in the ER, and I will shotgun another at his or her wedding. Given the opportunity, I would demarcate every significant event in my life by shotgunning a cheap beer.

The beer's not the important part, really: I cannot think of any act, big or small, that cannot be emotionally or dramatically heightened by sucking something carbonated out of a hole, whether it's a Miller Genuine Draft or an energy drink or just some carbonated water. The shotgun is life's exclamation point, but the sort of exclamation point that can go before a sentence as well as after it, kind of like a Spanish one, I think. I don't know if citizens of Spanish-speaking countries shotgun beers, but I'd like to believe they'd agree with me.

I've read in some greeting card somewhere that we're all on a journey which begins the day we're born and ends the day we die. The next time you find another journeying stranger at a party, I ask you to move past the brew he's holding, whether it's Goose Island or Keystone. I ask you to raise your can to his (or hers) as a mutual celebration of the turbulences of life. Then turn your can sideways, jam a pen or key into its side, and let your emotions (like the yeast within the brew) ferment.

Timothy Faust is a Brown College senior and Backpage editor.

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