Coming of age, Pt.I

Friday, two weeks ago

I’m standing by the band as they’re setting up the stage and I’m thinking that all things considered, life’s pretty much come down to washing the Plax away from my mouth with Draft beer.
It’s Friday night and I’m meeting with this old friend of mine from back in High School and I’m at this rock bar and they have an actual archery range on ground level and for some reason loud music and stale beer do seem to go along with bows and arrows tonight. If that’s what “primeval soup” has come to, then Jesus Christ, let all of our tomorrows drench in booze.
Guy arrives and tells me we should move downstairs and farther from the band because it’s just too loud and he wants to talk to me, that we haven’t seen each other in years and etc. I crack some decades-old joke which ends up in my asking him if he’s turned gay as the punchline. He says Gosh no; I thank god it’s true. We’re both staring at this drop-dead little redheaded girl playing Robin Hood or Lady Marion or whatever nearby but neither of us actually do anything. Of course the kid did score with the prettiest girls back in the day.
He then tells me later that night it was fun and we should definitely do this more often. I shrug and for no good reason I say No, I don’t really think so, then take a cab home.

Saturday, two weeks ago

I’m walking by this very fancy street on Saturday morning and I suddenly stumble upon this cousin of mine and I show him my tattoo and he asks me to come over for a pizza later in the evening, which I promptly accept because to be completely honest with you I have absolutely nothing else to do for the rest of the day but drink vodka and orange juice while watching some movie or another on DVD.
So I get by his place and say Hi to his wife who’s a reporter or an editor at a very famous fashion magazine but I immediately sense something’s amiss because I see him kissing her on the cheek in a way that, well, not that it’s really strange but something doesn’t click. Or it does. And I ask them out of the blue if she’s expecting a baby or something and they ask me, duly dumbfounded, how the hell did I know that, that they haven’t told anybody else.
I just smile for about half a minute, a little proud of myself but actually damn prouder for them, and say congratulations.
It’s my first honest-to-god happy smile in (close to) a thousand years and I’m downright reeling for them.

Sunday, two weeks ago

On Sunday I get really drunk and nearly pass out watching old cartoons on TV then take a shower and head for the airport, suitcase in hand and the notebook in my backpack.
This is how I prepare this course I teach at work: I just don’t. I’m way too cool to prepare my classes beforehand; I enjoy doing the office-equivalent of parachute-jumping just because I can.

One week later…

Have you ever been down to C****, L****? C**** is f*cking amazing, I’d swear to god there’s about a restaurant and two bars per square inch and everybody drives big cars and the girls are nothing short of perfect. It makes me think that this is probably what California would look like if California were located on a third-world European nation or something. Does that make sense to you?
So we’re a few days into the week, I think it’s a Friday and we’re at this nightclub and they are playing Bangles and Bangles is followed by Midnight Oil, then Pet Shop Boys, Blondie, The Cure, and everything that’s really cool but short of Bruce Springsteen. I think I danced for like, four hours non-stop, then drank a lot of some really awful overpriced caipirinha which was way too sweet.
The next Saturday M**** which is this really cute girl from the local branch and her boyfriend take me to this restaurant that’s really high-class and stuff and we have pasta with shrimp and talk of mutual funds, the price of real state, and also of old 1980s boardgames and the silly stuff we did back in kindergarten and I’m thinking I’ve just met the first two really interesting people in a billion years.
Also, I finally found Streets of Fire on DVD.

Two weeks later…

Oh Monday and Tuesday pretty much boiled down to, Jesus f*cking Christ, I should be at this New Order concert back in São Paulo but for the oddest of reasons (which is work) I’m stuck at this god-forsaken port town (which is P****) and whistling Bizarre Love Triangle at every chance I get. This is what being an adult really feels like: No job means no money for the concert tickets while job means no time for the concert itself. But then I remember the DJ did play that very song twice on the nightclub a few nights before and everything is (half) cool again. Quoting from AC/DC: Come on, come on, do it for the money…
From Wednesday to the end of the week we headed down to I**** once more because, well, because a. It was close, b. We felt like going there and it’s our call, really, and c. There’s a lot of nasty stuff going on in there and sometimes we just got muscle ourselves into a situation, in the dead of the night. P**** sort of compared us to the Delta Force and I really laughed out loud with that one, but we did get into this big argument on Thursday but mostly because we’ve been traveling together for quite some time now and some cabana fever really shouldn’t be unexpected.
By Friday night I just missed my place, period.

One year later or a lot less

I have three weaknesses: Kryptonite, Heartbreak and Restlessness and the third one is sort of hovering above my head like some carrion bird from hell and I’m kinda… well, this job is so f*cking boring it’s amazing, all the gung-ho is gone, no jazz, nada. If not for the cool cool cool trips to cool cool cool places… And once that bit ends…

If you want me to be perfectly honest you I’m sort of tired of pretending to be someone I’m not: I should never be somebody’s role-model.
I am, after all, flawed.