B4TW - Sam Adams Octoberfest
This is going to be a big weekend. On the good side, we have the first NFL Sunday of the year. On the bad side, we have the 10th anniversary of 9/11. I'm a bit of a 9/11 junkie, I watch all the shows recapping the events of the day, I find others' 9/11 stories interesting, I take it all in. Somehow the 9/11 shows never capture the WTFingness of the day. We were going about our day, then all of a sudden everything stopped and anything could have happened and we would have believed it. At various points in the morning, we thought the White House was attacked, the Washington Monument bombed, of course the Twin Towers attack and the Pentagon attack. We didn't know where the President was, Rudy F...ing Giuliani was heroically giving out whatever information he could getting Ny'ers out of Manhattan in an orderly fashion. That morning, you just had no idea what was going to happen. I only knew that I was pretty safe since I was in a 1 floor bunker in Wichita nowhere near Boeing or the Air Force Base, the only things in Wichita with any sort of military value. We didn't even know who the hell was doing this to us.
The facts of the day are now well documented, maybe that's why it's so hard to capture the feelings of that morning. That evening I went to the liquor store that Wes Port and I owned in a poor part of Wichita. When I say poor part of Wichita, imagine Wichita and how crappy it is, then imagine what the poor part must be like. We had homeless people who lived in the little fenced in area on our property where we threw broken down boxes. The area was so poor, those homeless people sometimes had more money than people who actually lived in houses in the area. There wasn't much around this neighborhood that you would call a public gathering space so they just kind of wandered over to the liquor store. People just wanted to be around other people that night and watch the news, which had very little information. I've never experienced anything like that night, it was awful, but made you feel good for being American. I spent 2 or 3 hours, selling nothing (it may have been the lowest volume day saleswise we ever had), just talking to the people of the neighborhood.
After we closed up the liquor store I grabbed a sixer of Sam Adams Octoberfest (it's possible it wasn't Octoberfest, but another Sam Adams fall seasonal, I remember it as Octoberfest) to take home and drink while watching the same news I'd been watching all day. Would they find any surviviors, were we at war, WTF? I drank Octoberfest after Octoberfest, staying up too late, drinking too many and went to bed still shocked.
So, because of the date, and because it goes with football and because it's what I think of when the weather has just the nip of cool in the air in the evening, the beer for this weekend is my September 11 beer of choice, Sam Adams Octoberfest.
The facts of the day are now well documented, maybe that's why it's so hard to capture the feelings of that morning. That evening I went to the liquor store that Wes Port and I owned in a poor part of Wichita. When I say poor part of Wichita, imagine Wichita and how crappy it is, then imagine what the poor part must be like. We had homeless people who lived in the little fenced in area on our property where we threw broken down boxes. The area was so poor, those homeless people sometimes had more money than people who actually lived in houses in the area. There wasn't much around this neighborhood that you would call a public gathering space so they just kind of wandered over to the liquor store. People just wanted to be around other people that night and watch the news, which had very little information. I've never experienced anything like that night, it was awful, but made you feel good for being American. I spent 2 or 3 hours, selling nothing (it may have been the lowest volume day saleswise we ever had), just talking to the people of the neighborhood.
After we closed up the liquor store I grabbed a sixer of Sam Adams Octoberfest (it's possible it wasn't Octoberfest, but another Sam Adams fall seasonal, I remember it as Octoberfest) to take home and drink while watching the same news I'd been watching all day. Would they find any surviviors, were we at war, WTF? I drank Octoberfest after Octoberfest, staying up too late, drinking too many and went to bed still shocked.
So, because of the date, and because it goes with football and because it's what I think of when the weather has just the nip of cool in the air in the evening, the beer for this weekend is my September 11 beer of choice, Sam Adams Octoberfest.
