Ride John Barleycorn, Ride!

John Barleycorn is the personification of barley and, subsequently, beer. It’s taken from an English and Scottish folk song. I figured leading with that was classier than, “Colt 45 was the first beer I got drunk on.” Regardless, I’m going to focus on the latter.

It was the summer between 10th and 11th grade and I was playing city league basketball with my best friend and a bunch of other really fun guys. We didn’t necessarily win a lot of games, but we had a great time. Our coaches were a couple of guys that didn’t seem much older than us, and one had a pretty bad stutter. When he called 20 second timeouts, we’d do our best to frustrate him to the point where he’d stutter too much to make his point in time. Diabolical, I know, but even he and the other coach seemed to think it was kind of funny. Anyway, the point of that tangent is that we would occasionally goad the coaches into getting us beer, and the first time they conceded, we got Colt 45 and that night we rode John Barleycorn hard and put him away wet. I’m not really sure what that saying means, and I don’t feel like turning my safe search off to find out, so draw your own conclusions.

As for the rest of this piece, I found the cowboy in the street and mounted him on a horse made of chess pieces and safety pins. There’s a small Pony Baseball metal plate over the can’s mouth hole because I had it and it fit the theme, simple as that. Lastly, the can sits atop 2 parts from 2 candlestick holders.

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