warm beer and cold meat
Undisclosed London Location: 8;41 AM (Sunday 25 June 2006)
Somewhere in the depths of my depraved reality I found my self drinking mai tais in the basement bar of the Savoy Hotel on a random Tuesday morning near the end of June after cashing in on a room I didn’t pay for and in a vain attempt burn this cash cow for all it was worth. This all would have made the lead of a great story; far better, in fact, than the awful truth that finds me slumped on my sofa at 8 am Sunday morning with a vicious headache and stone dry—except for three cans of warm Kronenbourge and some mystery liquor someone brought back from Andorra, a cross between Absinthe and Gin something I wouldn’t touch unless I was a raving alcoholic lunatic and Britain was in the throes of heinous bout of prohibition, which isn’t exactly so unlikely that I would count it out completely, and I will get back to you on that after tonight’s England/Ecuador game. Also, this is not to imply that I haven’t had cocktails at 10:30 in the basement bar of the Savoy on a Tuesday, but that was for a completely different and somewhat professional reason, and this essay is about the god-awful truth of my life, and there is nothing truthful about my professional life. There, I’ve said it; a maniac reveals the mendacious reality of the Academy on Sunday morning. But I digress.
Right now, my life is far, far away from luxuriating in the Savoy. I’m wound like a top with an ever-impending deadline, and 10000 more words to go before I sleep—or to be more accurate, hop a Lufthansa charter to Budapest via Munich. My face still hurts from that base degenerate’s sucker punch, and though I’m pretty sure I didn’t crack a bone in my hand as it tore through his face, it feels like it and right now, between disjointed sentences it is currently resting in my ice bucket that normally utilizes its cooling power for rum—but I finished that on Friday. So it is for all these reasons I found myself at a barbeque last night somewhere in the far south of London full of a bunch of Kiwis, Aussies and the odd German girl who would have loved to go back to my suits over looking the Aldwych Strand—and probably would have settled for a quick hump on Tooting Bec Common. But last time I went in for that sort of thing, I ended up lost in Balham, and it took me 3 months to convince the cop that she and I had completely and diametrically oppositional world views and probably couldn’t come up with something that resembled a convivial relationship. Though, last time I heard, she met a nice bloke with the same episteme who’s also currently being implicated in that terrorist scandal on the East End where some kid was plugged because he was suspected of being a terrorist, accused by someone who had heard, from someone who’s brother knew a guy that heard in a bar that the owner’s kid bet that the guy who was actually shot might be a terrorist—or through some other faulty cop logic. My God, digressions all over the place; we’ll see how the score works out in the end; I just got word from my mobile communications unit (MCU--not to be confused with MPU which is mobile party unit, AKA a coat with many, many pockets utilized for the smuggling and or transport of malt beverages to places where said materials are prohibited) that the German girl will be at today’s BBQ, and she’s ‘l-king f-wrd to c-ing me,’ so there will be plenty of time for freaky Olympics later.
So, let see; BBQ last night:
It was a nice event and a proper celebration of meat on the grill with a good mix of booze and people typical of any housewarming gathering in high summer. I took my usual position in the doorway dividing the patio from the kitchen—or in more technical terms between the hot meat from the cold beer, taking a page out of Harper’s book where, to meet people in a foreign environment, he stresses the importance of being in the way. From my vantage point, perched between the high stress of the hardcore drinkers (mainly the Aussies) and lazy curls of cannabis from the Kiwis, I was able to see the division of nationalism. And, since I only knew two people there, who think of my social ‘abilities’ as legendary, the others regarded me with the awed deference reserved for high-powered acolytes and seriously deranged felons, characteristics that raise one’s pulling power to new heights—hence German girls named Nichol who now track my movements like I was an endangered African rhino.
Holy Jesus, even I don’t understand what I’ve just written making me skeptical that anyone in the ether would have any clue. And here I was trying to make sense of the odd socio-political scene that has ensnared us all, but for that I’d have to start over again, and that’s way beyond my powers today—since I have another BBQ in the afternoon with some drinks at the Waldorf in the evening before I hit the hard one this week to finish so I can finally and assuredly go on vacation.
Bringing me back to my original point—that I don’t have one. Which, in it self, may be the true point that there is none. Not on the sub-atomic or grand-universal level, but it’s funny to think about the levels in between the really big and the really small where our own private realities converge into something that may intimate meaning. But I’m jangled right now and not thinking in terms of meanings or even complete sentences, and frankly that mystery liquid in my kitchen is looking better and better, so I’ll sign off before I embarrass myself even more by this uncontrollable drivel.
Somewhere in the depths of my depraved reality I found my self drinking mai tais in the basement bar of the Savoy Hotel on a random Tuesday morning near the end of June after cashing in on a room I didn’t pay for and in a vain attempt burn this cash cow for all it was worth. This all would have made the lead of a great story; far better, in fact, than the awful truth that finds me slumped on my sofa at 8 am Sunday morning with a vicious headache and stone dry—except for three cans of warm Kronenbourge and some mystery liquor someone brought back from Andorra, a cross between Absinthe and Gin something I wouldn’t touch unless I was a raving alcoholic lunatic and Britain was in the throes of heinous bout of prohibition, which isn’t exactly so unlikely that I would count it out completely, and I will get back to you on that after tonight’s England/Ecuador game. Also, this is not to imply that I haven’t had cocktails at 10:30 in the basement bar of the Savoy on a Tuesday, but that was for a completely different and somewhat professional reason, and this essay is about the god-awful truth of my life, and there is nothing truthful about my professional life. There, I’ve said it; a maniac reveals the mendacious reality of the Academy on Sunday morning. But I digress.
Right now, my life is far, far away from luxuriating in the Savoy. I’m wound like a top with an ever-impending deadline, and 10000 more words to go before I sleep—or to be more accurate, hop a Lufthansa charter to Budapest via Munich. My face still hurts from that base degenerate’s sucker punch, and though I’m pretty sure I didn’t crack a bone in my hand as it tore through his face, it feels like it and right now, between disjointed sentences it is currently resting in my ice bucket that normally utilizes its cooling power for rum—but I finished that on Friday. So it is for all these reasons I found myself at a barbeque last night somewhere in the far south of London full of a bunch of Kiwis, Aussies and the odd German girl who would have loved to go back to my suits over looking the Aldwych Strand—and probably would have settled for a quick hump on Tooting Bec Common. But last time I went in for that sort of thing, I ended up lost in Balham, and it took me 3 months to convince the cop that she and I had completely and diametrically oppositional world views and probably couldn’t come up with something that resembled a convivial relationship. Though, last time I heard, she met a nice bloke with the same episteme who’s also currently being implicated in that terrorist scandal on the East End where some kid was plugged because he was suspected of being a terrorist, accused by someone who had heard, from someone who’s brother knew a guy that heard in a bar that the owner’s kid bet that the guy who was actually shot might be a terrorist—or through some other faulty cop logic. My God, digressions all over the place; we’ll see how the score works out in the end; I just got word from my mobile communications unit (MCU--not to be confused with MPU which is mobile party unit, AKA a coat with many, many pockets utilized for the smuggling and or transport of malt beverages to places where said materials are prohibited) that the German girl will be at today’s BBQ, and she’s ‘l-king f-wrd to c-ing me,’ so there will be plenty of time for freaky Olympics later.
So, let see; BBQ last night:
It was a nice event and a proper celebration of meat on the grill with a good mix of booze and people typical of any housewarming gathering in high summer. I took my usual position in the doorway dividing the patio from the kitchen—or in more technical terms between the hot meat from the cold beer, taking a page out of Harper’s book where, to meet people in a foreign environment, he stresses the importance of being in the way. From my vantage point, perched between the high stress of the hardcore drinkers (mainly the Aussies) and lazy curls of cannabis from the Kiwis, I was able to see the division of nationalism. And, since I only knew two people there, who think of my social ‘abilities’ as legendary, the others regarded me with the awed deference reserved for high-powered acolytes and seriously deranged felons, characteristics that raise one’s pulling power to new heights—hence German girls named Nichol who now track my movements like I was an endangered African rhino.
Holy Jesus, even I don’t understand what I’ve just written making me skeptical that anyone in the ether would have any clue. And here I was trying to make sense of the odd socio-political scene that has ensnared us all, but for that I’d have to start over again, and that’s way beyond my powers today—since I have another BBQ in the afternoon with some drinks at the Waldorf in the evening before I hit the hard one this week to finish so I can finally and assuredly go on vacation.
Bringing me back to my original point—that I don’t have one. Which, in it self, may be the true point that there is none. Not on the sub-atomic or grand-universal level, but it’s funny to think about the levels in between the really big and the really small where our own private realities converge into something that may intimate meaning. But I’m jangled right now and not thinking in terms of meanings or even complete sentences, and frankly that mystery liquid in my kitchen is looking better and better, so I’ll sign off before I embarrass myself even more by this uncontrollable drivel.
posted by Ben-in-UK at 11:11 AM
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