Rainy Day Project #4: Sunrise Strolls!

Greetings, Emergent Properties!

It's Friday everybody!!! Yaaayy!!! "Friday", too bad nobody really knows what the hell that means any more. Truth be told, nobody really knows what anything means right now. And that's ok.

But, you have to ask yourself, "Did we ever really know what anything meant?" Maybe it was just easier to lie to ourselves during those somnambulant salad days that were everything before about 3 weeks ago.

Monday was rough for me. I nose-dived into pretty fierce malaise and had zero interest in any of my social obligations. Of course, my social obligations were dinner and drinking with my fearless wife and foofly dog. But, for that, no freaking interest. But it was ok, I locked myself in my office with some Old Overholt and recorded music until about 3 in the morning. When I woke up the next day, I was born again in all the flavors of my typical rosy disposition.

The point is, we're all going to spin-out in our own time and in our own way during this thing. To be able to give each other the gift of space during that freak out and the promise of attention and love when we're ready again for it  is the best thing we can do for each other right now. (Unless, of course, you're a trained medical professional or someone assisting them, then there's more you can do.)

One of my favorite beers that we make is having it's debut in 16oz cans next Friday. Brainwash is a 7% wheat-based tart farmhouse made with Styrian Dragon, Mosaic & Huell Melon hops. It's fermented with this beautiful genetically modified yeast that sours beer without introducing any bacteria. Fuck yeah: Science!

Brainwash will go out to the city next Friday, West on Monday, North burbs Tuesday and South Wednesday. A fresh batch of Junior Astronaut Juice will be going out with that as well. We're not quite there yet, but we're getting dangerously close to Orange Sunshine season again. Stay tuned.

Music helps orient my brains when I drift too far from center. Califone's cover of Psychic TV's "The Orchids" is a track I come back to often and for all kinds of different reasons. "In the morning after the night, I fall in love with the light..." Isn't it amazing how humans can turn letters into words, recite those words to music and, abracadabra, you create real human emotion? What a world!

Speaking of mornings, I've gotten into the habit of waking up about 4:30 or 5am as of late. This gives me enough time to drink some coffee and get dressed before me and my fuzzy freakish friend head out for a sunrise stroll through one of Cook or DuPage county's lovely forest preserves.

There is a truly magical quality to the early morning. Whether it's the beginning or the end of your day, there's this quiet, steady energy to dawn you just can't get any other time. Maybe it has something to do with that rush of chemicals drenching down our nervous systems as the earth twists its way back into the fiery gaze of that big star up there in the sky. I don't know. I'm not a plumber, so I wouldn't know about these things.

It's been great aquatinting myself with a new Forest Preserve every morning. There's a site that lists all the trails in Cook county. You can search the trails and get directions to each of it's access points. Alternatively, you can search by preserve locations first. Every morning over coffee, Alice and I figure out where we're going. We pick our spot, map it and go.

I love urban forest preserves. All the lousy ways humans don't know how to live in the world come to stark relief when you drop the concrete. We are bad guests, to be sure. But there is beauty in the dream like way human crap rubs up against the wilds of the natural world. 

DuPage County has a similar website that lists sites to visit. It was in a preserve here in the far west suburbs that, one morning not very long ago, Alice and I came across clear evidence of goblin activity. This time of day is ripe for the fay folk, so, please conduct yourself with a little decorum and watch your ass.

Rainy Day Project #3: The Endless!

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." - H.P. Lovecraft

Week 2. The fourteenth day of this lockdown, the fourteenth hash mark cut into my arm. I'll be fine. I'm sure. I might just need to sprout more limbs.

I hope you're all reading during this thing! 

I'm a committed non-fiction creep by all accounts, but, this weekend I read my first piece of fiction in my recent crummy memory. I re-read Philip K. Dick's "Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said" and did it in a record two days. It felt great and was a delight to get back into that particular guided meditation that is a work of fiction on the page.

If you don't know, PKD has an uncanny knack that few authors have for generating very personal synchronicities for all readers of his books. I know, you always think it's just you, like you're the only cracker in the barrel he's speaking to, but you're not. Ask anybody who has ever read a PKD novel, his books freaking print synchronicities in his readers lives. Ask anybody.

I picked "Flow My Tears..." because of it's inspiration for our beer, KING FELIX, that we released last fall. With the Nelson Sauvin in there, It's one of my favorite DIPAs that we have made and I love the artwork that Mark did for the can. It also happens that one of the book's main characters shares a family name with yours truly. As I'm gunning to get real weird on this lockdown, I gotta front-load this noodle of mine with the shiniest confetti around. A PKD novel where you rub up against a character - even if only in name - is a good start to a weird time.

So, I swore to myself, when I started these Rainy Day Projects, that none of them would include TV shows or films. I wanted to give you all something other than passive media to occupy yourself with as we pass through this group initiation. Well, in today's third installment, I am already breaking that rule.

After listening to the (fantastic podcast!!) Weird Studies' episode on Jonathon Glazer's"Under the Skin" I decided to check it out this weekend. This is a brilliant, relentless & deeply disturbing meditation on beauty that will rip your mind apart. I highly recommend it, but, it's not why we're here today.

After "Under the Skin" finished, I was given several options for shows that must have fallen somewhere under the matrix of "sci-fi" & "mind fuck", "time loops" & "isolation". Combing through several options, I landed on "The Endless".

"The Endless" is about two brothers who, a decade ago, escaped what they believed was a UFO cult. Since leaving, their lives have de-performed in just about every way. After receiving a strange letter in the mail, they return to the cult for a night to see if it was as problematic as they had remembered.

I have a general rule that any movie that adapts H.P. Lovecraft, nods to H.P. Lovecraft, or has an H.P. Lovecraft quote for it's epigraph, I'm gonna love. And that was certainly true here. But, what "The Endless"  did that other giants like "Evil Dead", "From Beyond", "In the Mouth of Madness", etc couldn't do was to take the Weird and apply it gently to real, human concerns. To be fair, that's not always what I'm looking for when I head down that eldritch path to madness, but, these liminal days have made me soft and find me trying to understand these changes that we are going though - both willed and unwilled - in a context of me straightening my head, my life - my karma, if you have to - as if I'm preparing my house for death.

Why is that, you ask? Because we are. It might not be today, it probably won't be from the COVID-19 virus, but as sure as silly works great with puddy, my aging white ass is going to die. And so is yours. You might even say that this great pageant of beer, lovers, movies, food and show tunes is just a runway for the Big Forever: one good chance to work your shit out before you head to that great laundry heap in the sky.

And "The Endless" provides just that opportunity. And it adds it with the window dressing of time loops, UFO cults, trans-dimensional entities, meth addicts & synchro-mystic clues triggering flocks of birds. It's great! And fortunately, whoever cast this artful slog at familial goading knew that, for this thing to land properly, the brothers had to be extremely likable and have a sense of humor to  keep the audience moored against the larger, complicated themes.

You might could argue that the ending to "The Endless" is a bit tidy for what was served for dinner. Or, you could shut up and realize that the value of art is not for you to find problems in an artists rendering of their project, but instead art can be there to inspire, to remind you about life and to pose more delightful and interesting questions that will keep you up at night not being able to answer them. You could also argue that the ending moves this film from the genre of "Weird Sci-Fi" to the woefully underserved "Weird Magical Realism", always a gossomar's thread to my mind and always welcome just the same. I do hope you enjoy it.

Rainy Day Project #2: Meditating!

"Thousands were watching and no one saw a thing..." - Bob Dylan

At the tail end of my morning meditation today a good friend sent me the link to a new Dylan song, "Murder So Foul",  This 17-minute meditation on the Kennedy assassination lands like so many other points of Dylan's career: like a mid-wife or a signifier to a narrative that history has always leaned on madmen and geniuses to regale. 

Truth be told, we all have the same design on our ears that Dylan has, he's just spent more time using those little drums to his brain. Imagine a world where you saw with Dylan's eyes and heard with his ears. Imagine a world where you really saw with eyes and ears all your own.

In my limited experience, meditation helps with tuning in to that percussion section in your brain. Many of us have a little more time right now, why not use some of that time to explore the benefits of meditation?

There's a lot of confusion about what meditation is and isn't. Let's be clear, I'm notgoing to clear that up entirely right now, but I will say, if you've ever played music, or even listened music, or laid on the floor to pet your dog for a while, you've meditated. It's easy and we're all hard-wired with that feature endogenous. You might even say it's something that humans need to function properly, like digestion and dreaming.

Two easy meditations - both to explain and to do - are the corner stone to my daily work. Find a comfortable and quiet place to sit. Put on some appealing music (I'll use everything from Stars of the Lid to OM to Alice Coltrane depending on my mood) and sit or lay comfortably. For these two practices, I'd recommend sitting, cross legged or in a comfortable chair with your back straight.

Meditation 1: Close your eyes and breathe in through your nose, count to 4 (1, 2, 3, 4) slowly. Hold your breath and count to 4. Breathe out through your nose while counting to 4. Hold your breath out while counting to 4. Rinse and repeat. 

Start by doing this for 5 minutes. Something achievable that doesn't burn you out. And try to do it almost every day. If 5 minutes is easy, try 8. If 8 minutes is easy, try 10. Then 15, 20 and 30 minutes. If you can use longer time intervals for each step, try that, too.

That's it, you don't have to do anything but enjoy the quiet time and get a kick out of all the goofy things your brain will do when deprived of distraction. Enjoy your freaking breath, it won't last forever.

Meditation 2: The other meditation I like to do I learned from a friend who was part of Yogi Bhajan's 3HO. It's called Breath of Fire. For this, you just breathe in and out of your nose in fast succession. Try doing it to the beat of an upbeat song, something like Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" (if that's too fast to start, try something slower and work up to it). This one is going to cause a brain change, so take it easy and start short. Begin doing it for 1 minute, then extend to 3 minutes, 5 minutes and, if you're a real weirdo, go for 10 minutes at some point and ride the wohl whip!

I like to start with the Breath of Fire to get my mind right and then, once I've switched the gears with that, I recline into the breath meditation. If you need more guidance on meditation, check out Erik Davis' episode of his great "Expanding Mind" podcast on meditation.

Do it! All you have to do is Do. It. Change your life.

Imagine if even 10% of non-meditators started meditating during this COVID lockdown and maintained that habit as we move forward into the future. The world would change for the better for sure.

Good luck! And, if you have any questions, feel free to reach out to mind-control@ibw-chicago.com

Ok! Hang in there! Enjoy the meditating!

Rainy Day Project #1: The Invisibles!

Well, here we are. What is it? Day 3 in our group meditation on Death? 

How's it going for you?

Say what you want, but, to my mind, we all needed a few weeks unplugged from our lifestyle. And, truly, any day is a good day to contemplate your mortal (and immortal) self.

It's also always a great time to dig back into books that you've read in the past. Books - and, really, any great art - have that uncanny ability to change with you, to shift and open up in ways that, in the past, when you were a different person, they hid.

Grant Morrison's "The Invisibles" was definitely one of those books for me (along with Robert Anton Wilson's "Illuminatus! Trilogy" (duh), Kerouac's "On the Road", and Philip K. Dick's "VALIS" to name a few). Written at a time when, by any calculus used, the world was a better place - the 1990's! - Morrison put together what is essentially an encyclopedia of all the great tropes of the Weirdosphere. He's pulled everything into this narrative: DMT, Aliens, Terrance McKenna, Gnosticism, the Archons!, subversive sexuality, Voodoo, transgenderism, dream work, meta narratives, Magick, Spiritism, Rave culture, The Beatles!!, Philip K. Dick, you freaking name it and Morrison worked it into this beautiful graphic novel.

You can read "The Invisibles" in it's entirety on-line for $.99 per issue. That's a screaming deal and is a bit more ethical (and less risky) than downloading it for free and stealing money from Mr. Morrison.

And, if reading isn't your thing (it should be!) you can watch the now infamous Grant Morrison lecture from Disinfo Con back in 2000

So, between reading "The Invisibles" and watching Morrison's brain-bending lecture, you should be able to keep yourself occupied with some constructive rabbit-holes for a couple days. Read the book! Watch the video! Do the work! Change your life, my friends, now is the time!

OH! I cleaned out my office over the weekend! It felt great! And, during this lovely exercise to bring order back in my life, I found an old Pareidolia poster from our collaboration with Parachute back in 2016. You can buy this long sold-out poster from our store at https://www.ibw-chicago.com/cult-propoganda/pareidolia-poster-signed-numbered. There's only one, so it probably won't last. 

Also, while I'm busy selling you crap, the nice gentleman at Beer Temple will ship you IBW mind-enhancing beverages for a nominal fee. Here's the link: https://store2.craftbeertemple.com/illuminated-brew-works/ 

That's it for today's Rainy Day Project. I'm going to send these out every few days. I hope you find them helpful, fun or even stupid. I just hope you find them. I've got some fun stuff coming up (DIY Ouija Boards and spirit communication apps, dream work, psionics devices, links to on-line books, dumb drawing contests, all kinds of stuff that's all over the map) so I hope you stick around. My hope is to provide you (and me!) some alternatives to sitting around in our underwear and watching TV for the next few weeks or months.

Below my "so long" is a list of where and how to get IBW right now. This is a work in progress so please let us know if we're missing something. 

Also! I hope you participate in our daily toast on Instagram at 7:23 PM! It's fun and gives you something to look forward to each day. If you don't know about it, details are also below.

Ok! Hang in there!

XOXOXOXO,

Brian

---

There's a few places that will do delivery right now in Chicago. My understanding is that none of them are same day, but, if you want your IBW and don't want to leave your house, try the following:

All the Binny's are open and will do curbside pick-up or delivery within their range.

Garfield's will do curbside pick-up, delivery and shipping.

Beer Temple will do curbside pick-up, delivery and shipping, also.

1340BWS in the West Loop is delivering booze through Drizly.

Of course, you can always sign up for the Tavour app. Those guys are the greatest and do a great job of shipping you the most delicious beer right to your doorstep all the time.

There are several places in Chicago and the burbs that are just offering curb-side pick up right now. They are:

• Bottles & Cans in Chicago

• Leo's in Woodridge

• Beer Cellars in Glen Elly & Geneva

• Beer on Central in Evanston

• Green Lady here in Chicago

• Beer on the Wall in Park Ridge

• Beer Bazarr in Hainesville

• Local Foods in Chicago

• Beermiscuous in Lakeview (Chicago)

This is not an exhaustive list, but it is what we have intel on right now. If you don't see your favorite bottle shop (or YOUR bottle shop if you're a store owner) please don't freak out, just email us at mind-control@ibw-chicago.com and get us information on your store (or your favorite store). We will keep a collected list on our website.

If you want to buy draft beer, there are a couple of places we can point you to. Email us at the above email address and we'll find the one closest to you.

First off, for those of you who are without work: The Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), the Illinois Retail Merchants Association (IRMA), and the Illinois Food Retailers Association (IFRA) have compiled information on hundreds of temporary jobs at grocery stores and retailers throughout the state to meet the demand for food and supplies. Hopefully this will help some of you, our friends and neighbors.

Speaking of community, nothing says I LOVE YOUR STUPID FACE more than knocking glasses together. And, with this quarantine, that's going to be a part of life that we're all going to miss and miss hard. So everyday at 7:23pm we're going to post a photo on Instagram of one of our IBW cult members raising a glass and making a toast for something they love and want to make better. We encourage you to do the same thing.

It's real easy to participate:

• Post a photo of yourself with a beer raised and ready to consume on Instagram

• In the body of the Instagram post

• Add the hashtag #ILOVEYOUIMISSYOUIMDRINKINGTOYOURLIFEANDMINE

We'll collect these photos (use the hash tag #ILOVEYOUIMISSYOUIMDRINKINGTOYOURLIFEANDMINE so we can find them) and post them up to our website at some point when there's enough of them. It's a dumb little thing, but dumb little things are pretty freaking great, aren't they?

Ok, everybody, hang in there. Talk to your friends and family. Check in on everybody. Let's keep each other happy, healthy and growing during this challenging time. 

Where to find IBW while you Stay at Home...

Hi everybody!

We're reaching out to let you know about the best ways to secure your IBW during this episode of the Twilight Zone we've found ourselves in. I've got a few more announcements after I list the bottle shops and liquor store services available, so read on after that if you're interested.

There's a few places that will do delivery right now in Chicago. My understanding is that none of them are same day, but, if you want your IBW and don't want to leave your house, try the following:

All the Binny's are open and will do curbside pick-up or delivery within their range.

Garfield's will do curbside pick-up, delivery and shipping.

Beer Temple will do curbside pick-up, delivery and shipping, also.

1340BWS in the West Loop is delivering booze through Drizly.

Of course, you can always sign up for the Tavour app. Those guys are the greatest and do a great job of shipping you the most delicious beer right to your doorstep all the time.

There are several places in Chicago and the burbs that are just offering curb-side pick up right now. They are:

• Bottles & Cans in Chicago

• Leo's in Woodridge

• Beer Cellars in Glen Elly & Geneva

• Beer on Central in Evanston

• Green Lady here in Chicago

• Beer on the Wall in Park Ridge

• Beer Bazarr in Hainesville

• Local Foods in Chicago

• Beermiscuous in Lakeview (Chicago)

This is not an exhaustive list, but it is what we have intel on right now. If you don't see your favorite bottle shop (or YOUR bottle shop if you're a store owner) please don't freak out, just email us at mind-control@ibw-chicago.com and get us information on your store (or your favorite store). We will keep a collected list on our website.

If you want to buy draft beer, there are a couple of places we can point you to. Email us at the above email address and we'll find the one closest to you.

First off, for those of you who are without work: The Illinois Restaurant Association (IRA), the Illinois Retail Merchants Association (IRMA), and the Illinois Food Retailers Association (IFRA) have compiled information on hundreds of temporary jobs at grocery stores and retailers throughout the state to meet the demand for food and supplies. Hopefully this will help some of you, our friends and neighbors.

Over the next few weeks, I'm going to be sending out some Rainy Day Projects to help keep you all busy with things to do other than watch TV. To be fair, some of the projects might involve watching TV - some great series we've been enjoying, old movies, strange documentaries, that kind of thing - but I'm really going to try and focus on things like cool, free books on-line, dumb drawing projects, and some paranormal fun to try in your haunted apartment for when you're sick of talking to your room mate. This is a work in progress and will develop as we go along. But keep an eye on your inbox, our Facebook,Twitter and Instagram pages for updates. And, if you have any ideas, feel free to email them to me at t mind-control@ibw-chicago.com I hope this helps pass the time and bring us closer together as a community. 

Speaking of community, nothing says I LOVE YOUR STUPID FACE more than knocking glasses together. And, with this quarantine, that's going to be a part of life that we're all going to miss and miss hard. So everyday at 7:23pm we're going to post a photo onInstagram of one of our IBW cult members raising a glass and making a toast for something they love and want to make better. We encourage you to do the same thing.

It's real easy to participate:

• Post a photo of yourself with a beer raised and ready to consume on Instagram

• In the body of the Instagram post

• Add the hashtag #ILOVEYOUIMISSYOUIMDRINKINGTOYOURLIFEANDMINE

We'll collect these photos (use the hash tag #ILOVEYOUIMISSYOUIMDRINKINGTOYOURLIFEANDMINE so we can find them) and post them up to our website at some point when there's enough of them. It's a dumb little thing, but dumb little things are pretty freaking great, aren't they?

Ok, everybody, hang in there. Talk to your friends and family. Check in on everybody. Let's keep each other happy, healthy and growing during this challenging time.