"Earful of Beerfools"

-A day in the life of Monkey Business Mayhem-

There are two very distinct yet equally annoying reasons why I wear earplugs at work. For the last five months while living in Southern Arizona, the rock-climbing guide work hasn't quite been paying the bills, much less helped to save for an international climbing excursion. For supplemental income I've been going down to Tucson to work for Nimbus Brewing Company and Taphouse.

Which brings me to earplug reason number one; Upon walking into the factory-sized storage and bottling section of Nimbus, one is often greeted by the obstreperous blaring of Ranchero music. As Chewy(Hesus) and Franky(Francisco) grease the bottling machine, the music seems to grease their joints as they move along and sing to the beats of tuba and accordion.

Earplug reason number two; The greasy, aforementioned machine -- yeah, it needs grease. It hails from a soda bottling line circa 1956. Without grease, it wails high-pitched sound waves worse than fingernails on a chalkboard. And although the bottling machine is incessantly screaching at us, it seems to be providing something of a tutorial as well. For someone as mechanically disinclined as myself, it's been a great learning process; watching a machine fly apart, get creatively repaired, and then fly apart once again in a new and interesting way. It eventually puts out the cases and pallets of beer before they go off to the distributor. As rewarding as it is to crack a cold one after a hard day of work, I venture to say that drinking your work is even more rewarding.

When the Ranchera has become too much and the bottling ends, I remove the earplugs and strike up conversations with employees and patrons. Part-time street musicians, part-time vagabonds, full-time drinkers, and just about everything in-between. More days than not, in chatting with folks there, I think to myself, "is this a dream or am I truly hearing these words? I was recently sharing travel stories with a nutty Cajun, and out of his mouth came, "...Oh yeah, I remember the worst sunburn of my life. My buddy rented an island in Belize for a month. One afternoon I was laying in the sand of the foot-deep water for hours, rolling on thirty-seven hits of ecstasy and looking up to the sky when I felt claws all over my chest. I looked down to see a whole string of land crabs were crawling right over me. One of them had a can of Guinness Sausages and it wouldn't let me have them." -and so on and so forth, preposterous storytelling from desert rats and eccentrics.

As stimulating as the sounds at Nimbus can be, they leave me yearning for the crisp sounds waiting for us amongst alpine plateaus and massive granite towers.