On Being Terrific
I’m almost 48 and I’m in a car driving 15 hours to drink beer. I’m a grown man with a wife and two kids and a good job making a road trip to the East Coast so that I can stand in lines in a South Boston pavilion and drink small pours of beer. If only the Dean could see me now, I think. I’m sure he wouldn’t renew my chairship.
We were on our way the Copenhagen Beer Celebration in Boston, now relabeled the Copenhagen Beer Festival in Boston. There is nothing particularly Copenhagen about the event other than the giant Mikkeller banners marking the event’s entrance. The original Copenhagen Beer Celebration was in Copenhagen. I was there, too, two years ago during a visit to Copenhagen to scout out the school for our study abroad program. I didn’t go to the celebration, but I walked by on my way to War Pigs and saw the line that stretched outward from Øksnehallen toward the meat packing district.
In addition to attending all three sessions at the Copenhagen Beer Celebration, I became entangled in two Facebook threads oddly focused on me. One involved my travelling companions pledge to make me eat at Taco Bell during the trip and the other centered on a beer it forward contest in a Facebook group we belong to (COCBLOK) regarding how many times the three of us would poop over five days. The tie breaker was to guess how many times I would poop.
I like to imagine that I’m known for the three monographs I’ve written, the many articles and chapters I’ve published, my beard, my pizzas, or some of my more advanced achievements in life like actually fixing the broken light switch to our pantry. My ability to poop several times a day is a talent/ability, no doubt, but not one I imagined others would find interest in. Yet, our Facebook group’s members were interested. For some reason, 17 times in five days is considered abnormal by many people. Abnormality attracts.
Two days after we returned, I sat through the promotion awards ceremony that our college holds every year for newly promoted faculty. The chairs, like me, have to say nice things about our colleagues who have been promoted. For two and half hours, we listen to soul draining speeches about how great someone is and how much they’ve achieved during their time at UK. Their feats, we are led to believe, are truly abnormal. The epideictic practice of praise is marked by occasional humor but, most often, by sleep inducing exclamations. The dinner feels like I am standing in a long line that never shortens. And since our department begins with the letter W, I am always the last to give the speech. In these types of ceremonies, I’m reminded of notable food personality Kenny Shopsin’s remarks that no one is great. “Once you realize you’re a piece of shit, it’s not so hard to take,” he says in the documentary about him, I Like Killing Flies. “Feeing you’re a good person all the time is a real responsibility that’s hard to live up to. Being a piece of shit and occasionally doing something that is good and true is a much easier place to be. I always try and raise my kids to see that they are not that terrific.” We spend a lot of time in the university each year, on the other hand, making a few people feel that they are terrific, and not pieces of shit. Award ceremonies are the primary vehicle for doing so. The award ceremony, for promotion, teaching, research, or something else, does not focus on occasionally doing something good; it pretends that the individual under discussion is always good. In other words, it ignores the very likely tendency we all have to be pieces of shit at some point in our professional lives.
I did not expect an award for eating a burrito and queserito at a Taco Bell located inside a gas station somewhere in Pennsylvania. I have spent most of my 47 years not eating fast food, partly because I think my eating habits are, to quote Shopsin, terrific, whether or not that is really accurate. Most people, it seems, eat at Taco Bell. Only I consider eating Taco Bell abnormal. Nobody, however, thinks it’s abnormal to spend a few thousand dollars on a dinner catered by the campus monopoly food service which features six month old IPAs and salmon burnt into charcoal. After we finished our meal at Taco Bell, I waited to take another shit. For some reason, it didn’t happen. I ended my five day streak at 17.
We drove 30 hours so that I could tick almost 180 new beers. Beer festivals are about being terrific. Featured brewers, special releases, one offs, big barrel aged stouts, rare sour beers, hazy hoppy difficult to get IPAs unless you go to the brewery and wait in line. These items are the markers of abnormal terrificness in the world of craft beer. Out of the more than 5,000 American breweries currently operating, only a few earn the label of being so terrific that they are featured at events such as the Copenhagen Beer Festival/Celebration. There exists a major responsibility toward the beer nerd community when a brewery obtains such status. Expectation. Acquisition. Whale slaying (the whale is the rare beer one is able to secure). Beer nerds expect the beers to be terrific. Out of the hundreds of faculty in a given college, most will never obtain terrific status in the eyes of their administration. They may be promoted, they may even get a promotion speech by their department chair in a two and a half hour ceremony featuring inedible food. But for the rest of their academic lives, they will be considered the equivalent of any other faculty member who teaches each semester and does some research.
I would hate to admit that Taco Bell was better than the campus catering I ate during the promotion ceremony. The Taco Bell burrito is pretty bad. Melted cheap cheese overpowers most of the ingredients and the tomato and lettuce lack any flavor. Any meat could be inside the tortilla since neither the chicken or ground beef offers beyond being tasteless protein. Taco Bell, however, is better than salmon that tastes like charcoal or poorly roasted potatoes or a salad opened from a bag and an undrinkable local beer that is six months old. Neither, of course, is terrific. One does project itself to an audience of nicely dressed academics, though, as terrific even if it is a piece of shit. The other owns up to its status within the food world.
When a beer festival ends, the question we most often ask is: what was your favorite or what were your stand outs? This is a question of being terrific. Something had to be terrific. In a university ceremony, we isolate colleagues and argue that they are, indeed, terrific. In an elaborate setting with tablecloths, colleagues wearing ties and suits, servers who bring us drinks, and “free booze,” the ambiance suggests being terrific. This event is only for the terrific.
For some time, the university has adopted the slogan of “excellence” as its own version of being terrific. We all seek excellence (as opposed to being pieces of shit, I suppose). Such was Bill Readings’ canonical critique of university policies as neo-liberal (though they are often not neo-liberal at all, just excuses to not fund initiatives or programs), and such is the counter focus of university memos, promotional materials, and internal communication. Universities are not against being excellent or terrific. We “aspire” to imagined rankings among top-20 universities by buying students with merit aid, promoting more Vice Provosts, or, at the least, keeping campus catering employed. Being excellent is, in some ways, like being a highly sought out beer at a Boston beer festival. Top 10? Top 100? The best. Gold, Jerry. Gold.
It took 15 hours to drive home. We stopped at 11:30 p.m. at Hoof Hearted’s brewpub in Columbus, Ohio. The brewpub was closing in half an hour, so I ordered a flight to share. At midnight, we drove back to Lexington. Hoof Hearted is a pun of Who Farted. Many of their beer names reflect this type of humor, humor that my six year old son enjoys, and I often encourage at home by telling poop jokes: Girth Brooks, Group Saxx, Konkey Dong, and Tub Life, among others. Nothing excellent in image, one might say. In fact, these beer names sound more like an admission to being a piece of shit. That is, the beers are very good and highly enjoyable, but the projected image leans away from rankings and acceptance and more to the open admission that no one is that terrific, no one is that great, and sometimes such openness goes a lot farther with individuals that the opposing pretense university life celebrates.
