Beer and Friendship

Here is a recent advertisement for Carlsberg Beer. The connection is obvious enough - beer makes friends. To take this on as a logical premise would be a waste of time. Just to point out that corporations are taking everything we value in life and attaching them to products we have to purchase, well that's something that has been said many times before.

I chose to write about this because, in my very hazy memories of when I used to drink, the effect was precisely the opposite. Beer didn't make friends for me. Most of my friends chose not to be around when I was drinking. And when I started drinking all the time, they were gone. I'm not blaming them; in their place I would have made the same choice.

I don't remember much from my drinking years. There are three years - the last two I was drinking and the first of my recovery - that are completely gone. I have the occasional image without any context but that's it. My experience wasn't something you will ever see in a beer commercial.

That is, in a way, the point of most commercials. I would write more about this subject but everything I could come up with would be cribbed from David Foster Wallace's E Unibus Pluram - by far the most insightful look at television I've ever come across. It's published in his collected works A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. But you can likely find the text on the internet. It's longish and requires editing but struggling through it is worth the effort.

Foster Wallace was a suicide. I don't begrudge him that. It doesn't raise him in my estimation either. Some people opt out. So it goes. I sometimes wish we had his thoughts on the internet tho. I think the problem with writing about the internet is the stage of its development. When Foster Wallace was writing about television it was already on its way out as a technology. People writing about the internet today are about a likely to get it wrong as the people who wrote about television in the 1950s. Either it is nothing (a temporary aberration that will eventually become much more like something we already recognize) or it is everything (a completely species altering technology that will stretch into every corner of our existence). Both views are wrong because they lack the nuance that will tell us what the thing really is.

Note: Here is E Unibus Pluram online.