Friends are good.

Friends are good because they drink my beer. Not just the beer I make, either. I'm egotistical enough to think that drinking the beer I make is its own reward. I'm not a master brewer or anything, but I brew good beer. And if you don't like it, drink something else.

What I mean is that friends help to deplete my stock of beer. At any given time, there's more than a case of beer in my fridge. And my beer cellar holds some ten to fifteen cases of beer (most of it in 12 oz. bottles, but a considerable amount in other odd sizes as well), about half homemade and half store-bought.

I'll admit it: I buy a lot of beer. I'm not like some of my friends, folks who spend a couple grand a year on beer. I wish I could do that, but spending nearly ten percent of the family take-home pay seems to me to be a wee bit excessive. Five percent, I can see. In fact, that's probably where I am, especially if you consider what I spend on beer-making supplies. But my friends are good enough to plow right into the beer in my fridge, making room for more beer to be purchased. I like to buy beer. I like to drink beer. My friends are instrumental in facilitating both activities.

My friends are also nice enough to let me ramble on a bit after a couple beers. Anyone who knows me is quite aware of my manic tendency to take over a conversation after a brew or two. Often enough, my wife Barbara whacks me over the head with a bottle (or uses some other similarly subtle reminder), but such remedies come only after I've monopolized the room for a few minutes. My friends are nice enough to let me say a good portion of my piece (no matter how absurd it might be) and not hold it against me. I'm sure they laugh about it behind my back, but hey, that's much nicer than throwing it back in my face. None of us are perfect, and we don't need to be reminded of that every freaking moment of the day.

My friends eat my food. In this particular case, I am talking about food I made with my own hands. Among many people (my friends, in particular), I am known as the beer guy or the guy who cooks. The truth of the matter is that I probably do know a bit more about beer than many (though certainly not all) of my friends, but I am an merely average cook. An adventurous one, to be sure (I really don't like to cook the same thing twice, though it's easy to throw a new wrinkle or two into the same basic stir-fry), but not particularly accomplished. Most of the time, I don't even know if what I am attempting has a chance of working out. Real friends eat my mistakes as well as my triumphs--and they're always sure to tell me what they didn't like, so that the next time I can try to make something better.

In short, friends are the people who best explain who you are. The easiest way to understand someone else is to see who their closest friends might be. A large portion (though by no means a majority) of my friends are journalists or people who have once been journalists. That's how I met them--my wife is a reporter. But we became friends and remain friends because of picayune personal traits that somehow click. By and large, the people I hang out with most often are avuncular egotists--or folks who are happy to hang out with an avuncular egotist like myself. We're people who (speaking generally, of course) like to eat, drink and be merry, and we're not above a dirty joke or coarse language, though we try to be somewhat circumspect around the kids. And, yeah, at this point in my life, a lot of my friends have kids. Part of that is age, and part of it is that you simply can't get hammered at the house of single friend and hope that your spawn doesn't destroy the place. Part of being comfortable is sitting in a kid-friendly house and not worrying about the destruction being wrought by little savages.

Why do people become friends? Why do they stay friends? I'll leave those questions to the sages and the poets. I'm simply glad that I have a few, and I'm glad they stop by now and again to drink a little beer.

Jon Worley would drink less if he had fewer friends, but he doesn't think that would be a good thing.