Drunk Blog #3

It didn't start out so good.

Not that it started out badly. Go to Ingþór's new place, have dinner, drink beer, talk about how cool it would be if Nick Cave and Tom Waits were sent to a little apartment in Rotterdam and told to make an album together.

Pleasantly usual.

Walk to 11, chock-full of girls old enough to be breathe-taking and young enough to be illegal.

Why would anyone drink Jager and milk?

Hit Celtic for a taste of real beer. Get reminded of how old I am by seeing people who were 8 when I first set foot on the island that's become my life.

Get told racist jokes. By an Icelander, who like many of his countrymen can't understand just how viscerally hurtful some words can be.

At that point, I pub crawl.

Along the way I meet The Once and Future Crush. Who is involved with someone. Someone who, even if they weren't kissing The Once and Future Crush, I'd still not really like. Kinda swarmy. But I'm nice. Polite. All those things that don't get you laid.

But anywho, I get a chance to talk to The Once and Future Crush, turns out, the crush is mutual.

That moment, shyly holding hands and knowing that despite all the stupidity and complications, the simple fact is that we like each other.

Perfect.

But, life being life and hence complicated, I have to leave.

Walk in the warm spring rain down to the Lebanese restaurant. Order my food. Listen to a bunch of twenty somethings try to get over the fact that although the place is Arabic, they don't sell fucking Doner Kebab.

Ragnar joins me just as my food arrives and we share a plate watching that beautiful Jordanian girl who's always on the plasma when I go there. The girl who could give Salma a run for her money. The owner jokes that he puts her on just for me.

So I drag Ragnar with me to Qbar, past the ambulances and police lights that habitually appear outside of Solon. Every weekend. Like clockwork. The fights and the mania a sort of modernized blood sacrifice to the dour old gods of the Norse.

Or maybe the Fates. Three women spinning and gossiping and waiting to cut the cord.


Where was I?

Oh.

Qbar.

Its three times as packed as last night, nothing but sweaty pulsing bodies and beer.

Any other night, I'd throw myself into it like a baptismal font.

But tonight, the bodies, the pulse, the pushing and bumping and sweat is an anticlimax.

My night was topped by a few minutes of clandestine hand-holding, looking into the face of someone I truly desire.

So I walked home, rain pouring off my newly shorn head.

What else could I do?