WHAT HATH ALED THE HAMSTER: A BEERISTIC AUTOBIOGRAPHY - pt. 1

hello. i am new here. the out of towner. i know most of you, but, still, this is my first time here at beer club. actually, i'm at work right now, sipping coffee and still feeling the burn from a mcdonald's hot and spicy chicken sandwich. my first beer of the day is still a few hours away. anyway, i thought i might get started here by introducing myself. none of that boring who i am and what i do kinda shite. rather, i thought i might begin a batch of small posts talking you guys through my journey with beer. that seems like a good starting place. feel free to put off the reading of these until you have a cold one. i rather wish i had put off the writing until the same.

honestly, i do not count those cans of hot busch light in the workshed behind my childhood home, nor that bottle of night-train wesley and i snuck under my mother's nose, both in the ninth grade, as among my first drinks. and i conveinantly slide right over that bottle of cisco jeremy harrison and i split, that ended up splitting us, that same year as well. instead, i choose to fast-forward much further into my life when considering my first impressions of beer. i like to start in arkadelphia, arkansas smack in the middle of the dry county treeline where i attended a southern baptist university. i had every religious reason in the world not to start drinking. in fact, that's exactly why i did.

i had stopped by neil sullivan's house to chat with his roommate who, i learned, was not home. neil was sitting on the porch when i arrived. brooding. he had recently broken up with a girl. i also had recently broken up with a girl. we had both recently broken up with girls. we were not a good combination for one another. neil said, "kevin, i like you. have you ever drank a beer?" i said, "i've grown up southern baptist." he said, "then i'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine."

that night, i lost my beerginity to a six pack of heineken.

i branched out a little in the following weeks. though i still drank plenty of heineken, i found a small love for the coors light, the budweiser, the MGD, and the miller lite. i fell for a girl not long after that who liked beer. we would sit on evening swings in her backyard, working our way through all manner of embarrasing tales and sixers of long neck budweisers. she never wore shoes. this was the prime of my collegiate adolescence.

that summer at camp barnabas, i snuck a few bottles of coors light into the flamingo building out back. all the men of camp were gone that night, and i knew all those booze had to be sunk before the break ended. on a search for camp dudes, i bumped into chelsea reed robertson coming back from journaling at the laundrymat in downtown monett, missouri. i asked her if she liked beer. she said she was from texas. i said, "i'd like to introduce you to some friends of mine." chelsea and i sat on the backporch of the flamingo and sipped coors light from camp barnabas coffeemugs. we wore open toed sandals and talked about books. it was a highlight of that summer.