The rolling throne is officially back online, and the story of how it happened belongs in a tech-noir comedy.
My regular wheelchair guy rolls up to the house in all his dreadlocked glory—and yes, I’m entirely serious, full-on majestic dreads. But he didn’t come alone. He brought three separate physical programmers with him. And no, I don’t mean a three-man IT strike team of human coders. I mean three literal, physical proprietary programming boxes—heavy-duty hardware bricks built specifically to force a handshake with the chair’s brain.
We’re halfway into this digital seance, the tech fighting with the hardware boxes trying to get the salvaged joystick my father had shipped me to actually talk to my rig, when he suddenly stops, blinks, and says, “Wait a minute.”
He remembers that someone had just donated an old chair to him, and it was currently sitting in the back of his van. By some absolute cosmic alignment, it possessed the exact same model of joystick we were fighting with. A joystick, mind you, that they were literally about to throw into a dumpster. He runs out to the van, strips the part off the donor rig, and brings it inside.
Now, look—he should have just handed me the entire donated chair as a backup. He didn’t. The bureaucracy remains undefeated. But he did plug the salvaged joystick into my rig. The system caught the signal, ran an automatic firmware update on the spot without needing the programming boxes to intervene, and came alive. Just like that, I’m rocking a basically brand-new joystick, and the red tape actually parted to clear me for a whole new chair configuration down the road.
Naturally, with the throne temporarily resurrected, there was only one logical next step: heading over to The Brewing Projekt. It was too damn hot to actually sit out on the patio today, but escaping the heat inside with a cold pour was exactly what the doctor ordered.
The Pine Needle Curse
Standing at the bar with a fresh pour, watching the afternoon slide by, the absurdity of the fix got me thinking about the dark ages of my palate.
For years, I wouldn’t touch an IPA with a ten-foot pole. My entire frame of reference for hops was Summit IPA, which, to my distinct memory, tasted exactly like liquified pine needles mixed with battery acid. I avoided the style like a bad frequency. I was strictly a dark beer guy—porters, stouts, anything that didn’t taste like a Christmas tree.
I thought I knew what I liked. I was dead wrong.
Enter the Parched Eagle
The total demolition of my biases belongs to one man: Jim Goronson.
Back in the day, Jim ran the Parched Eagle Brew Pub down in Madison. It’s gone now, unfortunately, but that little taproom was holy ground for a paradigm shift. Jim handed me a glass, bypassed my defenses, and made me realize the absolute error of my ways. He didn’t just pour a beer; he shattered a stereotype. He showed me what hops could actually do when handled by someone who knew what the hell they were doing.
I’ve never officially given the man his proper props, but Jim totally changed my beer-drinking life. 100%. One pint broke the curse, and now? I’m a certified, unrepentant hophead.
I enjoyed a stellar pour, grabbed a 12-pack of citrus IPAs to take home to the AC, and toasted the ghost of the Parched Eagle. Cheers to you, Jim. You saved me from a lifetime of boring glass, and cheers to the dreadlocked tech and his inventory of heavy-duty programming gear for keeping the wheels turning.
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