I keep telling
the fucking guy, the dude in the mirror, that holy shit, he looks exactly how I
feel! It’s uncanny. Just un-fucking canny really. Every time I go there, be it crying or
snoring, he looks exactly as how I feel.
Anyhow, the night of the card game started off like no other night, a
few very different people crammed into a small room in some small town in
Chile. I kept thinking how funny it was
that certain traits existed. For
example, people from California seem to have a very distinct vibe. They use words and contexts in such a cool
and funny way. It’s almost ultra-personal,
so that despite no one else understanding exactly what the words mean, the
ideas get across quite easily, as well as the vibe of the whole deal. It’s quite excellent and pretty entertaining
in the right contexts, the right chemistries.
So as night fell, the game began, without my even really realising it,
and uncannily everyone fell into place to make a comedic situation which I
could write about, especially because English people are so fucking funny when
they’re drunk. Like what’s-his-face out
of Black Books. Anyway, I’d never played
the game before (I’ve always played the game), but everyone was all like, shit,
where are we and what are we doing, and where in gods’ names did our
inhibitions go? So it was funny of
course. Si, claro. I was outnumbered
a hundred to one, but I played anyhow.
Bitches everywhere, in the most conventionally respectful way possible;
it’s just funny to refer to them that way sometimes, especially if you’re a
spot of testosterone (if that) in a cloud of oestrogen, struggling to rise for
air but pleasantly accepting of the extensive moonlight shining all around you. The night was so young the whole time, like a
night that never got out of the house.
Those are generally the best nights too!
An Australian dude, an English girl, two Californian Americans, an
Austrian and a German, as well as a Chilean host. I mean, fuck…it just makes the best
juice. For one, how funny is it how
English people get drunk as fuck and tend not to pronounce the ends of words,
so they’re all like leaning on their shoulders and mumbling shit that sounds
again like it’s from Black Books: “No-, but-, I fough- ‘at ‘a ‘og ‘as ‘arin’ a’
me!” Honestly. It’s so hard to write, but so easy to laugh
at. Well, you’ve been traveling almost a
year, so maybe it’s no surprise that you’re lonely and drunk, and quite
possibly out for something hard and stiff, like a drink. Nonetheless, much humour, and quite frankly I
admire the card tricks you perform. She
once left for the night, said goodbye to the lot, then reappeared to play a
card game, as if nothing had happened.
With a bowl of cereal. After
walking into a wall. It seems like some
English trait, for a drunken English-person, to not really be phased by the
fact that they’ve said anything at all; they just leave, come back and join
back in, as though their departure were dreamt up by those around them. Completely irrelevant; and rightly so. Excellent.
Also, the chemistry with the Californian people is something from
another planet. Like, yo, wassup bitch,
damn girl, and all this mad lingo shit, up against this like ey, ‘asup ma’e,
ne’a knew you was li’e, drinkin’ an shi’, li’e, do’n worry ‘bout i’, ai’? And so on and so forth. Then she bends her eyelids around looking
like a fucking zombie and everyone freaks but fuck, for a person as drunk as
that I’m terribly impressed. Poor lonely
soul. Maybe. Or am I that?
I judge only because I can’t trust the man in the mirror—thanks MJ, I
thought I knew you. Anyhow, what if it
touches me in the night? It’s not at all
funny like you might think. We make fun
of a lot of things that are actually, plainly, quite sad. But yes, onwards and upwards, so on shall we
go until the soul is reached and is SOLD, two for a dollar. I suppose it was a pretty fun night, left
alone for a minute or two. See the
English girl kept trying to leave and bumping into walls and what not, showing
us pictures of her and a giant turtle, attempting to convey something, and we
all laughed but I did feel for her, because she was a lovely lass, with lots of
things to say and a great sense of being, but crikey, they could all drink a
bit. I mean, I planned not to, but from
the get-go everyone had a drink and I didn’t quite realise it’d be an
all-or-nothing -type thing, so I inadvertently joined in and tried not to be
the strange, quite, “Aussie” guy with not as much to say as the next Aussie guy
who seems to know everything about everything and also want to tell everyone
about it. Big old Callie girls, good for
a laugh and a chat when you twisted the conversation to something remotely
serious; and also, when they found something really obscurely humorous about
the English thing, I could see it clearly and thus was very, very amused when
they couldn’t stop laughing at say, her bumping into the wall when she said
goodnight, or her getting utterly confused at the card game we were playing, or
even more impressively, her card trick which defeated us all when we all
thought she was too fucked out of her brains to do much like anything at all. Or when she asked me out of nowhere whether
I’d like thirty gigabytes of media from her computer. Crikey, what a thing. Where did all my food go? Big Cali girls; they know what the fucks
goin’on. I knew it, as soon as I brought
those brownies out, or those Pringes, or the nuts—all gone within seconds. Mere crumbs remained of that one brownie I
spared. Crumbs on a table of
festivities. Christ. I knew it.
So why complain? Onwards and
upwards. The night ends with a subtle
twist to the left, see, an older German lady was hanging with a teenage
Austrian girl and of course the pull of conversation wins when I turn the
corner and chat away to the Austrian first about a comic kids’ show she’s
watching on TV, then literature and then politics and all sorts of shit,
because it’s awesome and easy to talk about for me, and who cares, and what
not. I think she’s some kind of genius,
about ten years ahead of her age and shrewd as a shrew. I keep thinking now about how as I ‘grow’, as
they say, all I do is become more like a kid, enjoying more infantile things
like getting dizzy; and all I do is become more drawn to kids and teenagers
that still have innocence—not in a sexual way—but because they’re less heavy
with shit than the others, less burdened with some weird sexuality, some petty
adult concern that needs a feed like the guinea pigs in the back-yard, less
drawn to “grown-up” things which I find myself less and less drawn to (but more
and more drawn to at the same time, like a bad magnet); and I guess, most of
all, that lack of pressure which conversation with a clever European teenager takes
for granted. Really, I mean, really, is
it not that we get more and more messed up as we age? That the more we are engulfed by the systemic
world, the more we are drawn away from it, given that we have natural
urges? Christ, let us free. We are, after all; there’s no turning that
about. Anyway, the beer was free and the
game is long over. Pesos are all yours,
ladies. Keep it real on the west
side. Cali forever, poesia para siempre. Eternal
like the flame. Until tomorrow…
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