Still Life with Empties

Now this is a very St. Louis scene for me. Sure there are porches like this all over, but I don't encounter them anywhere else in the numbers that I do when I visit St. Louis in warm weather. Admittedly, this was not taken last weekend, when it would not have been warm enough for such a scene to be captured. But this is a favorite from a year ago, and now I have the venue to show it!

I like that this was taken at, not after, a party. For the moment the party has moved elsewhere (to the back yard, I think) and left its remnants on the front porch. I also like the black void beyond and the white paint splatter up the brick wall. It looks to me like a spray of sparks from space. Or something.

For those who aren't familiar, I found this review of Stag beer on ratebeer.com:

Here in Southeast Missouri, we call Stag by several nicknames - Stay Til All Gone, Steak Taters And Gravy, and Belleville (IL) Budweiser [my emphasis]. A dry beer, very filling, never had a hangover on this stuff, albeit quite a few upset stomachs. Plenty of taste, if you can stand it - also, plenty of aftertaste ,again, if you can stand it. Just hasn’t been quite the same since Heilemann swallowed them up. Kind of like Busch Beer after they redesigned the can and dropped the Bavarian logo - something was changed. Back in the early 80’s, Stag was one of the last to stick with the two-tap (upper and lower) keg - back then - considering the college pallate - Stag out of a keg couldn’t be beat.