Cheap is Good

We had a guy at the paper mill, he had a real name, but everybody called him "Sauce" because he drank a lot of beer. He never came into work drunk, at least not so that you could tell. Looking back on it now, maybe he just stayed drunk all the time so that it became his natural state. He took an early retirement option that they offered because he didn't like some of the changes they had made in the work system. I didn't see him for a couple years, and then one day I saw him riding a bicycle way out in the country. I stopped and offered him a ride, he put his bicycle in the back of my truck, and we talked as I drove him to his destination, which was a bar that was miles from town. He told me that, the last time he was arrested for drunk driving, the judge said that he had to either give up drinking or give up driving. So he sold his car and bought a bicycle, which he used to make the rounds of all the bars for miles around Cheboygan. He said it was a good life and that he was happier than he had ever been. Sauce told me that, while all beers are not alike, one is just as good as another, so you might as well buy the cheapest brand you can find. If you are drinking a certain brand of beer and somebody gives you a different brand, the first one will taste a little funny, but the second one will taste just fine.

I think Sauce was right about that. I took a blind taste test once because somebody challenged me to tell the difference between Stroh's and Pabst. The bartender lined three glasses of beer up on the bar and I tasted each one while blindfolded. One I was sure was Stroh's, one I was sure was Pabst, and the third one I declared to be none of the above, maybe Budweiser. Everybody laughed when the bartender revealed that all three of them were Pabst, and drawn from the same tap. They were surprised, though, when I declared that, since I don't normally drink blindfolded, I intended to stick with Stroh's. Years later, when I couldn't find any Stroh's in our local supermarket, I remembered what Sauce had told me about beer. He used to drink something called "Old Milwaukee", but I couldn't find that either. They did have Milwaukee's Best, which was the cheapest beer in the store, so I tried that. Sometime after that, I found myself in a restaurant that carried Stroh's, so I ordered one for old times sake. You know what? I decided then and there that I liked Milwaukee's Best better. than Stroh's after all.

The thing to remember about the Constitution of the United States of America is that, without the constitution there would be no United States of America. First you had the states, sovereign and independent, and then they ratified the constitution which bound them into the union. I read somewhere that some of the Founding Fathers did not expect the constitution they had written to last long. They believed that, in a decade or two, a future generation might decide to scrap the whole thing and start all over. To do this, they would need to call another constitutional convention, but they never did. Maybe it's because the constitution contains an amendment process, or maybe it's because the Supreme Court developed as a vehicle to re-interpret parts of the constitution from time to time. For whatever reason, our constitution seems to have stood the test of time. Like the Bible, some people swear by it and some people swear at it, but it's been around for a long time, and it's not likely to go away anytime soon. Deal with it!