Happy Birthday to Me -- Photo of the Week 26 January 2009

I call this "The Best Birthday Present, ever."

Compliments of my man DJA, who I owed an organ of some sort before, but to whom I am now even further indebted. (I somehow managed to escape college without student loans, yet have relinquished the ownership of my kidneys and liver for a ping pong blade and some bottles of root beer. Stunning.)

Anyway, you should have seen my face when DJA handed me a Spiced Wafers box.

JD: Oh-- Dave, spiced wafers? Really, you shouldn't hav--

And then as I took the box in my hands, it was obvious from the heft that I was not handling a box of pre-opened spiced wafers packaged in the 70s. I opened it, and Henry was staring me right in the face. I may have quoted Saul verbatim from Ocean's 11, when he's watching the money from the casino vault being loaded into bags:

That is the sexiest thing I have ever seen.

To a NW kid living on the east coast with no easy access to Henry Weinhard's Root Beer, that statement is not far from the truth.

Non-west coasters at the party were unaware of the significance of what I was cradling, but my trembling hands, bulging eyes, and Turret's-like outbursts of incoherent English were indicators that I had just received something of importance.

I suddenly became the Frodo in a room full of Boromirs and Gollums. Some (the Boromirs) hadn't actually had a Henry's before, but that did not lessen its strange appeal to them -- they knew it was special; others (the Gollums) knew what Henry's was, and wanted to take it from me more than anything. Someone (AM -- I know it was you) actually had the audacity to hide two bottles in the couch cushions. On my birthday! Unforgivable.

Well, my paranoia aside, I wanted to recommend Henry Weinhard's to you by describing it as "delicious" or "addictive," but that's like calling Tracy Morgan "crazy" or Kurt Cobain "depressing." Technically and definitionally, I'd be correct, but a one-word description doesn't convey all of the little subtle nuances that make it so special.

You just need to try it for yourself.