John Barleycorn must die

By Bill Pearse on March 13, 2026 • ( 0 )

We woke to snow. Hardly a flurry in the lowlands all winter, but finally it came towards the end. Tired from being up late I had to come downstairs to sit in the dark and be with it, the vibe. When it snows the best part is how it collects in the tall trees around our house and accentuates the natural beauty of the Pacific Northwest. Two deer appeared and I rolled an apple to one.

We got on the new schedule. Why couldn’t we stop monkeying around with clocks every six months? Why couldn’t our president do that?

The cobwebs we had in our garage were the ropey, thick kind you expect to see in kids’ haunted houses or on amusement park rides, webs so thick it was hard to imagine what size spider had so much spit. The power had gone out the other night and I needed to run the generator. Over winter I can go months without noticing what’s happening in the dark of the garage. These were all legacy webs from last fall. The garage could be a metaphor for the dark quarters of the soul.

It was probably tasteless to write about my experiences with A.A. though it dominated my thoughts. For a group that has no real rules was I breaking the only one, the anonymity part? Or going against the spirit of humility and selflessness? I filled up on books. Then came across one by Jack London, his memoir on drinking. Who writes a memoir like that? It was called John Barleycorn.

I thought it funny we used to party to a record with that name in college not knowing anything about the story behind it or what it meant, that John Barleycorn was a personification of alcohol. Jack London described it like the devil, a necromancer.

I was just in the store and they were playing that music overhead, Steve Winwood’s band Traffic, from the record John Barleycorn Must Die. And this week with our daughter home from college and turning 21 we had some chats about her conflicts with drinking too. I texted her therapist thanking her for her help and she consoled me by saying it can be hard to watch someone else’s journey, but I’m confident she’ll be alright.

Then I listen to all these stories in my group meetings and reflect on my own, and Jack London’s, and it’s such a funny thing. It isn’t just about the alcohol I’ve discovered, it’s the other character defects the alcohol exacerbates to where you can’t draw a line between cause and effect, it’s all a tangled mess. For some it’s just better to abstain.

I stopped on the third of the twelve steps but decided I’d pick up there again. This is where the prayer and god part starts, what turns a lot of people away. But maybe if you could believe John Barleycorn was the devil you could accept the need for a higher power and stop trying to fight him yourself.

Our daughter had left some Tarot cards behind, a few of the major arcana beneath her bed, some real important ones like The Lovers and The Devil. In fact the lovers seem to be the same couple who are chained to the devil, but if you look closely the cuffs on their ankles are loose enough they could free themselves, if only they knew how.