AFFORDABILITY: An amazing thing is the Post Office box, separate from my house, where when I used to do my zine regularly, magical oddball shit would show up all the time. Not so much in recent years because I don't do tangible things anymore, I just put dumb shit inside the internet's guts and people read it and are like "lolol" but their day just flows on along. Sometimes they send me an email that basically says, "Hey, your blog is awesome," but that's about it. I used to get naked Polaroids of chicks, weird wrestling tapes of handicapped Japanese guys wrestling each other, porn, belt buckles, adult Mexican comic books, mix CDs galore, patches, other weird zines, and fan letters from prisoners in Tennessee, on the regular. Now all I get is a fucking email now and then. Fuck man, we haven't progressed at all, we're just more easily able to delude ourselves from realizing we hate everything in our lives. Well, last week I got an email from my man Ten Dollar David (all people I used to write about in my zines had nicknames and he got that nickname because one time I woke up from a really strong drunk in a strange house, which wasn't unusual because I was technically homeless at that point in life, but the odd part was I was in Williamsburg but didn't remember anything outside of Richmond happening, but my man Ten Dollar David took me to his work where he washed dishes so he could borrow $10 from his boss and I could catch the train back to Richmond) asking me if I had gotten his package. I said no, because nobody sends me shit so I never check the PO Box. But I had to go dry some work clothes because my dryer still wasn't fixed and it makes sense to spend $93 one quarter at a time over the course of four months rather than buy the $50 part and fix it. Well, I had thirty minutes to kill while the clothes dried, and the Ms. Pac Man machine in the laundromat has ripped me off enough already, so I walked down to the post office after hours where there was a big key in my box meaning I had packages in one of the boxes in the lobby. Hooray! It was a couple beers well wrapped and an English soccer magazine. This was the awesome beer of the two beers I got, because it is from Russia, and Alexander Ovechkin has made me a fan of Russia. But it was free, and just showed up at me, all for reasons I know not. To me, that's what America should be all about. But I guess it's more about ripping people off and being able to retire early in life and live off the exploitation of others. Which sounds communistic, taking me back to the whole Russian thing. 13 out of 5.
DESTROYABILITY: 9% Russian alcohol kicked my ass. I wish I could find this locally because I'd drink the fuck out of this (except I bet it's too expensive in real life). I've not been a big fan of the super stouts in my lifetime, but this winter has been one of the worst two in Virginia in my 37 years alive on this stupid planet, and there's been at least five inches of snow on the ground for the majority of the past two months, and I have to slop through it to feed animals or do anything at all beyond the two paths from the cars to the wood pile to the house, so my soul has grown cold. Not in a negative attitude type way but in a just used to the cold. My bones are cold. And this fucking beer made perfect sense to me. I actually went outside while drinking it and kicked it at the back of my truck looking up at the stars analyzing the sky and thinking, "Yeah, I see why motherfuckers drink the thick and warm beers in them Slavic areas," because it's like pouring an alcoholic afghan into your guts. 9 out of 5.
LABEL AESTHETIC: A very nice label with a ton of information about shit I didn’t need to know about, simple stylings, and it gave me something to decipher upon while warming myself with the brew-dog in hand. Plus it had Russian alphabets on it, and I’m in “Alexander Ovechkin is tha best ever” mode after he had his rabid toothless sheep ice skates at the Olympics. That dude is all sorts of great, because how many superstars of a sport have been the hardest ones too. It’d be like if Barry Sanders played football like Mike Singletary or Michael Jordan acted like Bill Laimbeer. His total destruction of Jaromir Jagr in the preliminary round was the greatest piece of live hockey I’ve ever been lucky enough to be watching on the television screens, except for maybe that one Red Wings/Avalanche game from way back where the goalies were fighting each other center ice. That was a pretty cool too. I wish there was a bar that sold this fake Russian shit on tap and I could go watch the Caps play the Penguins in the Eastern Conference finals this spring and get drunk and hate on the very probably stupid Pittsburgh people that seem to be in every sports bar on earth. 5 out of 5.
CORPORATE MASTER: I am mad confused at this point, because it is a Russian imperial stout (complete with Russian words and shit), but it also is called “Le Coq” which sounds French, and it’s made by a Harvey’s Brewery in England. I guess that’s the nature of this modern world, all smalled down by our global connectivity. This is fine, because I can imagine Russian mafia types dealing with a British brewer who employs soccer thuggish types in his breweries, and it’s all just crazy white fuckers getting drunk and wild. Ultimately, that’s all I am as well. 5 out of 5.
OVERALL AMBIANCE: Drinking this beer, which came in the mail, during the midst of a long, snowy winter, when I was dragging trash bags of washed clothes to the laundromat to dry since I couldn’t afford a new heating element just yet (spending way more than $50 of quarters in the process, making me wonder why I couldn’t just have all them quarters at once and buy what I needed to make my life easier, which I guess is the problem with my entire doomed life in a nutshell), this beer going into my system did more than just be a beer. It made sense. It was one of those moments of clarity where you go, “Oh yeah, now I know why these Russian fuckers make their beer taste like this.” It has put Russian Imperial Stouts in my lexicon as something to enjoy. In fact, it’s cold and windy as fuck today and I’m gonna go look for some Russian beer for after work for tonight, because it makes sense. Used to be I thought Polish Porters were the deal for that, but after a few too many internal piledrivers from Okocims and Zywiecs and such, I think I’m gonna roll Russian. It also begs the question why the fuck does American beer get made the way it gets made? Not to sound all beer snobby, because I could give a fuck about what the rest of the world thinks of us, but what the hell man? Don’t Americans like getting drunk and tasting things? Are we that fucking myopic in our own ignorance we’re like “fuck yeah man all I eat is tasteless red meat full of carcinogens and all I drink is tasteless watery alcohol unless I can’t get drunk and then I drink syruppy chemical water sodas”? It’s depresssing as fuck. And then the only alternative is your left wing proud-to-spend-seven-times-as-much-because-then-it-must-be-better alternative types, who are just as annoying. Man, I was born into one shitty ass country. Oh well. It’s all I know, so fuck you rest of the world. 9 out of 5.
TOTAL RATING: 8 & 1/5 STARS!
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