Craft Beer, Vaccines, Trump And The Winds of Change in America

There’s a breeze blowing through our culture. A yearning to live a more authentic life. A search for something less contrived, less advertised. If it’s corporate or branded or the choice of the elite, well, it’s a little suspect, or maybe even an automatic joke. Not everybody sees it this way, but the breeze is blowing.

 

It's all craft beer in the Contrarian's beer fridge, leftovers from a recent din-

ner party. Not one single guest brought a corporate brew.

The craft beer world provides a thumbnail sketch of this movement. At some point in the ‘80s, restless American beer drinkers flocked to the broad varieties, quality and flavor of European beers. Once you’ve fallen in love with a full-bodied stout from the British Isles or a Belgian wheat, comic commercials filled with aging sports stars and girls in bikinis trying to convince you that Bud Lite is better than Miller Lite look embarrassingly lame. A small craft beer industry began brewing interesting, complex beers and grew until now virtually every corner of America has a taproom serving local brews. The folks drinking there are openly hostile to whatever bill of goods the corporate breweries are peddling. 

Go to one of the great Americana music festivals around the US and you’ll find these kinds of people drinking their IPAs and listening to music that doesn’t get played on the radio–wasn’t approved by somebody at the record company’s corporate headquarters. In recent years I’ve attended many, many big, sold out shows for acts that rarely or never get played on the radio. And much of what the radio plays, this crowd avoids.

The breeze is blowing through the food industry, too. We’re increasingly seeing small organic farms, small cheese and meat producers, people tending bees for honey in their backyards and planting gardens and canning their homegrown produce. There are people in my life who refuse to go to fast food restaurants and roll their eyes at the highway’s usual suspects – Applebee’s, Outback Steakhouse, and Chile’s - places derisively called, “McSitdown Restaurants.” Instead, they're looking for the oddball food truck or the little restaurant with local flavor owned by a mom & pop. Farm-to-table, vegetarianism, anti-GMOs, free range, organic, veganism; it goes on and on.

 

Home grown and canned peppers sit beside organic products in the 

Contrarian's frig.

Peek around any corner and you’ll find folks recoiling from the technologically filtered and yearning to be closer to the source. My three 20-something sons all have turntables and buy albums, not CDs or MP3s. They claim it has a warmer sound. In fact, last year more albums were sold than CDs in the US. 

I know young gals in their 20s who are knitting and others friends making their own musical instruments. If it can be made rather than bought, there's a growing movement to do just that.

I feel the breeze in my real estate business. A decade ago people were mortgaging themselves through the eyeballs to buy mega-square footage McMansions with vinyl siding and plastic baseboard, cheap cabinets and builder-grade carpet that was worn out in a couple years. Today, more buyers have saved a bigger down payment and they're buying smaller houses with higher quality finishes. It's less financially precarious and less superficial.

There hasn’t been a mass rejection of mainstream culture like this since that 1960s. And to a great degree I’m fine with that. It diversifies our economy and puts regular folks in greater control of their own world. But it’s not always a gentle, sweet breeze. Sometimes it’s an ill wind.

This breeze of doubt and suspicion also blew the anti-vaccine movement into our culture–the belief that those vaccines that have eradicated diseases worldwide and saved tens of millions of lives were more danger than cure. If fifty scientific studies can be ignored because just one said vaccines were dangerous, you’re supporting an outsider view to the point it could kill your children. And so, we’re seeing once eradicated diseases reappearing in the wealthiest nations on earth.

And this breeze blew Bernie Sanders to near the top of the Democrat ticket and Donald Trump to the top of the GOP, and thanks to Brexit it’s blowing England out of the EU. People are doubting old tried and true answers. It’s here in medicine and politics that I get nervous about this search behind the billboards and beneath the well-paved way of doing things. Just because you’re tired of the insider elite doesn’t mean the outsider is better. The outsider might be lying to you. The outsider might be more fake and corrupt than the well-paid corporate insider.

Because we were so fed up with "business as usual," the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are now almost completely void of statesmen. We've replaced pragmatic statesmen with angry, insurgent outsiders who don’t have the education, temperament, or the clue needed to strike a deal. Democracy is utterly dependent upon making a compromise–accepting that you won’t get everything you want and neither will your opponent.  

Deciding emotionally is the danger. Once you’ve done that, reason is out the door and you’re either ignoring one thing or pointing at another to justify your choice. Maybe the key is stepping away from the corporate and insider elite with an open heart rather and an angry resolve. Open hearts make for clear minds. Angry resolves lead to quick, cloudy judgments.

Now back to my local craft beer, organic chicken, and outsider music.

Click here to buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

 “A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

Sherri Wood Emmons, author of The Seventh Mother

Click here to buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

Hope & Redemption In The Midwest: The Salvage Man

It was 1994. I was restoring a Victorian era home in a growing community. Our family of five was pinching pennies on my meager teacher’s salary so I took to dumpster diving at old house construction sites and salvaging historic architectural elements at homes slated for demolition, reselling them to antique dealers. And leaving for school each morning I passed striking Firestone workers at the edge of my neighborhood.

That confluence of experiences laid the foundation for my novel; The Salvage Man. It’s the story of Dan Reynolds, a man who’s become invisible in a place where he thought he’d matter. In a startling moment of terror and wonder, he meets another soul as invisible as he is. Together, they seek redemption.

Buy a copy of The Salvage Man

Though a long time ago, I recall the events that shaped this story.

In the early morning dark, driving to work, I found myself behind a slow moving truck pulling a magnet that hung an inch above the street, gathering nails dumped by union workers to harass scabs. My town’s biggest employer, Firestone, was trying to break the union. The union-busting, picket-line crossing, slow-motion destruction of those jobs happened a few blocks from my home. The plight of those workers weighed on my mind. Their jobs were being sent abroad. The world was passing them by.

When I moved to this town in the late ‘80s, the population was 18,000 and growing. Many of those Firestone workers were raised here. I met blue-collar folks my age who grew up in a town they thought would be 10-15,000 people, where they’d have jobs of a certain kind and fit in socially in the life of the town. But even in the late ‘80s it was changing rapidly, and by the mid ‘90s, that world was evaporating. Today, our population is 55,000.

That growth and those new suburban residents created an economic vitality that overshadowed the fading blue-collar colors of the town. For the writer in me, that became Dan Reynolds’ background.

During the same period my little family lived in an 1890s house I was restoring. I took to dumpster diving for old house parts at demolition sites and stripping old houses prior to demolition. It helped me restore my home and provided extra cash as I sold truckloads to antique salvage yards.

Once, my neighbor Russ and I salvage cut stone steps from a neglected farmstead west of town. It was being demolished to make way for a new subdivision. The 1870s Italianate home was partially collapsed, leaning like a Dr. Seuss cartoon house. Russ had been inside already looking for salvage. Digging out the four-foot long stones that hot sunny day, I asked if there was anything inside worth taking. Russ is not prone to mysticism, but he gravely said, “Something bad happened in there. You can feel it. Don’t go in.” The cold insistence in his eyes convinced me. We muscled the stone steps into my pickup and left.

The setting for The Salvage Man

And The Salvage Man story percolated and evolved in my mind.

A few years later I salvaged again at a picturesque farmstead at the north end of town, across from the last covered bridge in the county. In my new position as a Realtor and the president of the local preservation group, I’d convinced the developer to save the pre-Civil War home. But the barn, grain bin, milk house and carriage house were all being demolished to make way for yet another new subdivision. I felt a deep sadness as I gathered doors, porch posts and shutters that had been discarded in the barn loft. The next week when I went back for more salvage, I found a staggering mountain of dirt had been moved, making a twenty foot deep dry mote around the barn, which was now perched on an island. It was a bizarre scene. Eventually the barn would be demolished and the ground beneath it also moved to make the subdivision’s retention pond.

It was there on that farmstead that I set the story of the Salvage Man, there that I imagined Dan Reynolds doing the same work I was doing, but he did it to financially survive after the strike. And like the old farmhouse Russ had entered, this one gave off an ominous feeling inside; dense, stale air, and dark rooms that put a tingle at the back of your neck and filled your chest with an adrenaline-spiked urge to get the hell out.

It is there inside that house, in that barn, and on that land that Dan Reynold’s life changes.

I imagined Dan not only challenged by the end of his factory job, but divorced at age 50, his kids grown and gone. All the things that once defined this silent, emotionless man–job, marriage, parenthood–are all gone. And his hometown is increasingly unrecognizable. To make him feel even shittier, the lone way he finds to survive is to “undress,” as Dan puts it, the town’s historic identity, to be sold off at antique stores before the rest is sent to a landfill.

But there in that house, in that barn, and on that land, Dan Reynolds finds redemption.

Ebook editions of The Salvage Man are just .99¢ for a limited time

 “A broken man, an abandoned house, and a lonely woman—all the makings for a beautiful, haunting tale of loss, forgiveness, and redemption. The Salvage Man is a lovely, bitter sweet story you won’t soon forget. I loved it!”

Sherri Wood Emmons, author of The Seventh Mother

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard

I Used To Read Magazines: Intellectual Atrophy In The Era of Social Media

Magazine pile in the den. Funny Times: The best bathroom magazine ever. 

Mojo: Perhaps the best music magazine ever. Perhaps.

I used to read magazines. A lot.

But that was before my iPhone–before it put blooper videos, friends’ vacation photos, snarky memes and angry political rants in my pocket. Before clients could text me at 10:00 at night or 7:00 in the morning, before NPR and ABC pushed news headlines onto my screen, before I could watch an approaching storm in near real time as I lay on my back in bed, the tiny screen and the morphing multi-colored weather system glowing before me.

Yeah, I used to sit on the porch and watch the storms, too.

I used to read long-form pieces on land planning, history, government policy, Hollywood trends and musician interviews. The magazines were stacked on the coffee table, kitchen table and toilet tank. I’m still drawn to the same material, but sound bites work better on that little backlit screen. And when I try to read New York Times article on my phone there are pop-ups screaming at me to click or buy or sign up for a monthly service.

It was so easy with magazines. The come-ons were printed on 3" x 5” inserts you just tore out and tossed aside.

In previous decades there were newspapers in the house, too. They laid open on Sunday mornings with jottings on the crossword puzzle, coffee cup rings across the masthead, torn-out coupons for $1 off State Fair admission, and jelly smeared across the president’s face, sometimes on purpose.

Yeah, I used to read newspapers.

The magazines were once thick – Rolling Stone, Time, Newsweek, Old House Journal. Like modern newspapers, they’re half or a third the thickness they once were. Nowadays only National Geographic offers as much content as before. That trustworthy bulwark is as good as ever. Old issues gathered in a willow branch magazine rack with dog-eared pages of recipes, gardening advice, and titles like 50 Ways To Occupy A Child On Summer Afternoons.

 

Magazine pile in the kitchen.

And there were novels stacked by the bed, on living room end tables, and laid open face down on lawn chairs. I used to travel to exotic, historic, and comic places with Earnest Hemingway, William Shirer and Tom Robbins. But the books are mostly lined up now, moldering away on shelves. These days I click on images of exotic places with headings like, “Wouldn’t You Love To Spend The Night Here?” or “The World’s 10 Most Breathtaking Vacation Destinations.” I do still read books, but fewer. I’ve even read some on my phone while riding an exercise bike at the gym: Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and the last two in the Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series. But reading a book on that little screen is miserable.

Yeah, I used to read lots of real books back then. It seems like a long time ago. Magazine, newspapers, novels and people were all deeper back then.

This summer I’ve taken to buying Rolling Stone and Time magazine and the New Yorker again, putting them in the same kind of places where I read them before. And I’ve made a conscious effort to waste less time on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, that aimless staring and scrolling that gobbles up 3, 5, 10 minutes at a time until I’ve pissed away an hour each and every day (that adds up to over nine 40-hour work weeks in a year).

This summer, I’ve pulled out the magazines and read. But that muscle called “the brain” is out of shape. I’m halfway through a 2,000 word essay on racial strife in America and find myself wishing the author would just get to the quick, satisfying takeaway I can claim as knowledge.

When you’ve been consuming so much brain candy, brain nutrition is a little hard to chew.

The bathroom magazine rack in the Meyer house.

I used to buy magazines I thought would spark my kid’s imaginations. I’d leave them within easy reach. When I found one folded open on the floor beside their bed– an article about deforestation or Led Zeppelin, I figured, “score one for Dad.” Funny, I forcibly raised them without televisions or computers in their bedrooms, trying to keep the brain candy from rotting their gray matter, but it’s me who spends his entire workday staring into a computer screen with a cell phone at the ready.

And the kids seem to have it all better balanced. I don’t think my 20-something, adult kids spend as much time on social media as I do. They get on, take a look, and get off. One of them even turns off his Facebook account from time to time, just to get more in tune with the real world around him. Yet, when I’ve been with them recently on the streets of Denver or Tokyo and we need travel, weather or restaurant information, they pop out their phones and find it way faster than I can.

So here’s to seeking balance. Wish me luck. Think I’ll order a magazine subscription for each of my kids, and myself, too.

Buy Kurt's latest novel, The Salvage Man

“Kurt Meyer’s The Salvage Man is a gentle Midwestern fantasy made up of one treasure after another. Part historical fiction, part love story, and part rumination on modern day life, this novel asks hard questions about the world we live in and the world we leave behind. I couldn’t put it down.”

Larry D. Sweazy, author of See Also Murder

Buy Kurt's first novel, Noblesville

“Meyer turns the pages of history with gentle care and a warm heart, creating a story I’ll remember forever. Thank you Kurt Meyer for opening a door to my beloved town’s past and allowing me to travel the streets and meet the people of Noblesville 1893.”

Susan Crandall, Author of Whistling Past the Graveyard