For about a year and a half now, I’ve been told at least monthly by someone new that I should have a blog. I guess people think that I have something to say. Well,
Don’t you know that you just
Give the people what, give the people what
Give the people what
Give ‘em what they want?
— the O’Jays
But blogging is difficult. I was once at a weird house lecture by Tyler Cowen during which he pontificated, essentially, about how a nerd should achieve the good life. One takeaway point was that consistency is key; that things you put in effort into bring ever increasing dividends over time. What other advice could you expect from an economist? Thus, Cowen writes a blog post every day, without exception, and I guess that is part of the secret.
I admire that. Look at this list of planned posts by Andrew Gelman:
To be able to promise that much writing, planned that far in the future, on a project that is done as a labor of love requires a certain internal stability, a degree of faith in one’s plans and one’s future, that I do not think is so universal. Everyone embarks on a great project, of course – most people have children, say – but even in these great projects I think we mostly keep no more than one step ahead of the difficulties that are about to engulf us.
This brings us to the title of the blog. In a silly conversation a few years back, a friend complained that all he wanted at that moment was an abstract beer garden. It was early spring in Boston and if there was going to be a beer garden at all, it would be inside, or outside on the pavement, next to a dirty, busy street, with rickety chairs for seating. This would not do. The perfect beer garden would be a single table, on an infinite lawn of soft grass, with large, heavy wooden chairs and a soft sun illuminating a gently-poured stein that gleams under an azure sky. You would kick your shoes off and feel the loamy earth press itself into your skin. You would take a a slow sip, and you would look into the distance, at the infinite horizon hiding behind vague pink clouds, and you’d feel totally relaxed
The perfect beer garden could not exist.
I’m not as much of a beer drinker, but I do love coffee, and I do find myself in strange little cafes of all shapes and sizes. So think of these posts as being written by yours truly from a table in the corner of and abstract coffee shop, with one wall a roman relic from two millenia past, one wall industrial-grade brooklyn brick, one wall crumbled and opening into a field, with the dim sun filtering into my bowl of espresso as I sit here and say what I can.