Dark Lord Day

April 26, 2009

This is a short story about Dark Lord Day told in the fragments of a blog post. It has no continuous narrative. It has no plot. Its meaning is based primarily on a nerdly obsession that I still haven’t figure out how to put properly into words.

The story starts with a pair of magic tickets – as if this is the story about a guy named Charlie and some crazy ass chocolate factory. The story starts with a question about quotas. It starts with message board rants and impatience to get said tickets. It starts with what was no more than some construction paper with gold lettering printed on it.

It goes something like this: We arrived in Munster by what we thought was 8 in the morning. We snuck out of West Lafayette while all the kids were still sleeping.  Turns out, Munster is on  Central Time/West Lafayette is on Eastern. We were in town, then, just before seven. Much earlier than even our early ambition expected. We made it to the Three Floyds Brewery and were not even the first to arrive.  By seven, to paraphrase Peter Frampton, the Alpha King had come alive. In the industrial park in this little town, cars were aligning the roads. A police force was out. Coolers were being led down the street. The Alpha King statue was protected by festival fencing. Even the brewery doesn’t trust the ways is admirers might litter.

As I tell this short story, an important point should be made: I hate crowds. I hate big events. I hate a lot of people around. I hate the congestion, the lines, the noise, the you name it. I hate the lack of food options, and I hate all the sweating going on. I hate the feeling of a large event: The we have arrived, The look at how cool this is, The excitement that kids get when they first go to Disney World or to a college football game. Sometimes I call this feeling “old age.” Sometimes I call it “personality.” Other times, it is merely a preference for the comfort of home, and the annoyance with shared space.

At 7, however, all was still tranquil. The insanity had not crept in. We were hanging out, eavesdropping on nerdly conversations (some kid pontificating on Dogfish Head to his friends – I felt like Woody Allen waiting in line at the movies  in Annie Hall), watching trades happen, and slowly regretting not bringing beer to drink at 7 in the morning. “It will be 7 in the morning,” I had thought the previous day. “I don’t want to drink that early. I am an adult. I don’t drink at 7 in the morning like a student in one of my undergrad courses that I teach.  Besides, I don’t give a damn about festivities.” I was, of course, wrong. I did not fully understand yet what it means to be a nerd at Dark Lord. I did not understand how commonality is the key trait of any drinking event (like bonding with a stranger or feeling a part of the One).

Others, no doubt, did understand the power of suggestive drinking. Around you, you see beers poured: Hopping Frog, Breakfast Stouts, Ten Fiddy, Great Divides, and you do not have a cooler of your own beer because you thought you were beyond the power of the festival. “I thought I could avoid the nerdliness,” I said. I was wrong again. it wasn’t even 9 in the morning. I had been wrong twice. That is two times more than all of last year.

By 8:30, however, we were allowed to line up. The small crowd surged to one docking bay and then another until they finally got the right spot to stand behind. The first picture is the front of the line. The second is the next section, and it marks just before where we stood. I didn’t even try to take a picture of the end of the line. It crawled away from the brewery. People in line shared war stories from the pervious year: where they stood, how they barely moved in three hours of waiting, what time they showed up, that they didn’t even get beer. We were at the end of the front wall, next to the grease bin. Around us wrapped the U shaped row of port-o-potties.  By 9, the johns were already filled with unpleasant matter.

And by 10:30, as others enjoyed the beer they brought along, the brewery put out beer to buy: Alpha King, Robert the Bruce, Pride and Joy, and Gumballhead.  Relief had come to those who thought they would outlast nerdly enjoyment. And with a magic ticket, you got a sample of this year’s Dark Lord. Pour your two samples together, and you have a fine glass (albeit plastic) of Dark Lord 2009.

We dd not suffer from waiting in line for a long time. The doors opened at 11, and by 11:30 we had bought our beer.  We had spent our money. We felt good about spending money for some reason. No regrets. No thought about what the hell we were doing. We had come to buy, and that was all that mattered. All that was left was to push into the next line! A mass of bodies lined up at a card table to buy other Three Floyds beers plus Pop Skull, a new collaboration with Dogfish Head. The pinnacle point of consumerism is the massive crowd. What are we buying and how much can we buy. This crowd, already giving off the feeling of sweat and excitement, threw dollar bills at the card table and walked away with beers that they didn’t know a damn thing about. “What style is this?” “Brown!” “Belgian!” “Something or other!” “Who cares!”

I don’t care about consumerism. Mostly, I embrace it. I watch TV, buy fancy beer, eat smelly cheese, and pay ten bucks for a pound of coffee because it’s roasted in the area where I live. I don’t need to critique the consumerism of Dark Lord; I willingly participated in it, and thus, I helped give it life! No regrets. I am, though, fascinated with the pull of such behaviors, particularly for the pleasure we get when a part of it.

And when that line is done with, we push into another line. Guest taps! 5 bucks a pop, five different beers each hour, and most of the five is done before you get a chance to try it (so much Pizza Port listed, none of it there each time I made my way to the front). I sampled: 2006 Bourbon Barrel Double Bastard, Oak Aged Behemoth, Firestone Walker Abacus, Flossmoor Station XIPA, Oak Aged Alpha Klaus.

If Dark Lord is anything, it is a massive line. A line next to a line next to a line. We share the Hunter Thompson sense of the weird here. At one point, I felt like I was 15 again, at some rock concert at the Hollywood Sportatorium.  Everyone is wearing a specific shirt (replace rock band with beer brand), people are sharing various substances outside in the parking lot, and pleasure is found in the swarm of people pushing against each other within the concert hall. At some point you buy a shirt (all the better to wear your memories) or a program, and you leave beat, wading through rows of parked cars, looking for a way out of this madness you participated in. That was Dark Lord. And it was great, no matter how many times I said to myself: But I’m an adult. I have a wife and a kid. Why am I doing this? What the hell is wrong with me? Am I so obsessed that I cannot see the bizarre world I’ve become sucked into?

And why did I drive six hours to a friend’s house, another hour and a half to an industrial park in Munster, and then do it all in reverse? For this:

Posted in dark lord