MOVING DAY

Well, folks, it's been a year and a whole month since Doc left us. Oh, Discordia...

Not terribly long after I made that valiant attempt to honour his memory and write my last post, I found myself in th' kitchen as evening fell, studying th' label on a bottle of Icehouse beer.  Th' gears in my head began to turn slowly as I remembered that once upon a bye there was a review of it for this blog, a long time ago in th' wayback when blogging meant something; back before th' vast number of bloggers jumped ship for that newfangled FaceBonk and Twonker thing that got us thinking that if you can't articulate a thought in 140 characters you're a lousy storyteller.  Once upon a bye, my children, I was writing or contributing to about 6 blogs.  No wonder I needed a nap.

Social Zymurgy, Th' Culture of Beer started off back when I lived in Florida and had season passes to Sea World of Orlando.  They were, oddly enough, owned by th' A-B Budweiser people, and one of th' hidden perks of th' park was that if you made you way allllll th' way back to th' Hospitality Building, you could get free samples of beer in 12 oz cups.  You could also go next door and visit th' Budweiser Clydesdales and literally have a Bud with Bud, th' lead horse and th' biggest mammal with hooves I'd ever seen.  Call me crazy, but some of my happiest memories of Florida were just milling around, drinking in Bare Knuckle Stout and th' sunshine.

I decided that th' rest of th' known world should know about these rare "craft" beers that th' A-B people were making, and I started this blog and for several months filled it with a whole lotta' nonesuch.  In time, it seemed ridiculous that I had so many blogs to maintain, and it also seemed not quite right that everyone I knew was busy hammering away at their blogs, too, everyone EXCEPT Doc.  Good Ol' Doc would spend several hours a week reading everyone's stuff, but never contributed anything himself, other than comments.  Eventually it occurred to me that th' natural and Right n' Proper Thing To Do was turn SZ:tCoB over to Doc and let him make it his own.  Which he did.

Being a natural-born storyteller, Doc took to blogging th' way otter pups take to a wide Amazonian stream.  He originally stuck with th' charter of SZ and would review various new and interesting-looking beers, and then he went off into th' territory we remember him best for:  short stories, jokes (some of them just terrible), drawings, and video of him half-reading, half-performing what he'd written.

O'er th' last 13 months since his crossing, I've come to think of people's blogs a bit like houses on a street.  Doc's house was suddenly empty, and all th' lights turned out; no Gregorian Chant played from th' phonograph in th' front room anymore (to make a direct reference to th' Doc of John Steinbeck's "Cannery Row", which is how OUR Doc got his moniker).  I'd walk by and peek in th' windows (th' equivalent of going to th' main page), and now and then I'd open th' door and stand in th' front room (th' equivalent of logging in as a shared contributor), and I always wondered if there was something MORE I should be doing??

So, there I was, my bottle of Icehouse in hand, looking at th' wintertide scene portrayed on th' label, wondering if perhaps I shouldn't return to blogging myself...??  and as a way of doing so, of maybe going on o'er to Flannery's place and asking if I might not only have a set of keys to Doc's place, but if she would be willing to at least partially deed th' place back to me??

For, you see, I'd noticed a few things.  Electronic blog houses don't decay th' way corporeal houses do; there were no fallen ceiling tiles or burst pipes or rat droppings, though there were th' blog equivalent of several dead cockroaches lying about-- random comments from people who were clearly spamming, that I, as a contributor, couldn't delete.  But in addition to a kind of dusty, unlived in feel to SZ, I noticed there were unpublished drafts that Doc had left lying around, almost 40 of 'em, that I couldn't access or open up.  In th' house analogy, this might be th' equivalent of finding old photo albums or trophies in locked cabinets.  Suddenly, I wanted to know what was in those drafts...

Flannery handed e'erything o'er to me with her blessing, and for th' last several weeks I've been wondering what I should do with "my" new digs.  What would Doc himself do?  What would he want me, as caretaker of SZ:tCoB, to do?  I'm loathe to change anything, th' colour, th' layout, th' sidebar, and feel that perhaps this should be preserved more like a kind of museum:  we'll keep it th' way it was when Doc was here and this was his space, and we'll come in now and then and keep it tidy and swap stories with visitors who stop by, and maybe open up some of those cabinets and take out those unfinished drafts, open a beer, and read through 'em to see whats to be done.  maybe they could be published as stand-alone pieces, or perhaps they might be co-authored, finished in Doc's style by those who knew and love him.  Maybe we'll just sit back and review this beer we just opened, too...

Maybe...