GPOYW “I don’t know, you tell me” Edition

via the lovely Jessica

There’s a little cafe that I love here, where I spend a lot of time. The decor is kind of garish - quite, I dunno, orange - but the hospitality is warm, the music is either fantastic or terrible and nowhere in between, and it manages to be warm and smokey on winter nights and mercifully breezy on harsh summer days. I like to go there and read, or just while away the time when I’m done with work but am in no hurry to get home. The staff are a gaggle of women, who even by Budapest standards, are beautiful to the point of distraction, working under an avuncular old codger who oversees the place on weekday evenings. They’re all good folks, who’ll ask you about what you’re reading or tell you about their favourite typeface or lend you a smoke if you’ve run out.

People ask me fairly often if I’m homesick, and I always tell them there are places that I miss - bars, cafes, restaurants; notably pleasant little parks, cheap and cheerful sushi places, late night bratwurst haunts - but never an overwhelming craving for a holistic sense of New Zealand-ness, and I think I’ll feel the same when I leave here. Even though I feel my time here in Budapest is well and truly done with the final remaining weeks counting away, I think this little hideously decorated kavezo is a place that I’ll miss.

In a bathroom mirror, late at night, 2005.

He scraped away at six days’ accumulated scruff as best he could, against the grain with a dull razor blade. He rinsed his hand off in the tepid water and ran it across his face, grimacing at the realisation that he had missed a few spots. The woman he loved had told him Augustus abstained from shaving after Caesar died, and he supposed that’s what the week had been; a period of mourning. She had never seen him like this, and he worried what she might think. He worried that this pronounced stumble and its interruption of his unconcerned gait might cause her to rethink her opinion of him, and the cruel machinations of his imagination subjected him to visions of life without her; all of it straining the parts of him that had endured that initial, unexpected blow.

He had spent so much of his life plotting his own destruction that this sudden desire to create something had caught him off guard. Consciously aware of the fact that his afflictions had robbed him of so much, he was resolute in his desire to not allow them them to ruin the best thing that had ever happened to him; he was unequivocally certain that throughout his life he had been - or rather, had become - a disappointing son, an inattentive student, a deceitful friend. And though he was wary, as he had made the mistake before, of conflating another individual with his own redemption, he began to feel as though there was a faint glimmer of hope.

Overwhelming urge to listen to Rocket to Russia this morning. Never let it be said that I don’t do nostalgia.

Wellington, 2008.

It had been raining all week, and the capital seemed more downtrodden than usual. Howling winds began to sound like mournful groans. Perfect conditions to indulge in fantasies of life as a down on his luck film noir protagonist, soaked in equal parts rainwater and whiskey. It was a role that let me use it all, the surroundings, the weather, my alienation and inarticulable sense of being ill at ease, and fold it all into a coherent, viable narrative.

It reached its peak when, after falling rapturously for a friend of a friend which had promising beginnings, her interest apparently wained and things rapidly began to cool off. She started to screen my calls and ignore my texts, plans were quietly postponed at the last moment, sex turned into a joyless late night exercise that occurred whenever she was sufficiently drunk. And then, the inevitable: She left me for someone else. Who? Just someone else.

But, even prior to all of that happening, it was a dark period of my life. Despite it all I didn’t know how to begin to talk about it with my nearest and dearest (a small group who I love very much, who for whatever reason, put up with me). I suppose I just didn’t want to bother them. The closet I came were those nights I sat in my lounge, pretending to watch television when really I was transfixed by the bedroom light of a dear friend, visible just a couple of blocks away. I found something incredibly comforting about the having solid evidence that he was just over there, and awake. When I finally reached my breaking point months later, he was the first person I told. Sitting on his rooftop, exasperated and troubled, ex claimed “You realise I was thirty seconds away the entire time, right?” It was only then that I realised the ridiculousness of the whole exercise. We talked about things some more, and I notice he was scraping and picking at the skin around his fingernails, the way I do when I’m distressed. I promised that next time, I’d come running. We said our good byes and I went home to pack, and ready myself for the flight back to my parents’ place.

Months earlier, after the break up that left me so devastated, I was able to confide in one of my flatmates. We got hammered on cheap booze and strode out into the night, filled with bravado. For me it didn’t last very long. I excused myself, explaining that I needed some air. Leaving the club, I began walking through the downpour. Past the best little Chinese restaurant in the world. Past the grand old theatre and the monstrously ugly museum, and out away from the lights of the city until darkness enveloped me and I found myself walking along a road between a sheer cliff and the sea.

The whole trek was hazy. I can recall alternating between a purposeful stride and a defeated amble. I remember taking shelter in a phone box, smoking a cigarette and feeling as though it was the last bastion of civilisation. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t stand staring at the murky black depths and contemplate throwing myself to the waves. With the way everything had been going, I was indifferent to my fate. But on I walked, until I found myself at a familiar intersection.

It marked the beginning of a suburb that I knew relatively well. I had gotten to know it wandering its streets on bright autumn Sunday mornings the previous year, strolling beside a girl who loved me very much, accompanying her on her way to Sunday morning netball games. I would later break her heart for no good goddamn reason. The irony wasn’t lost on me, and as I wondered what sense of bizarre inertia had brought me to this familiar place, I doubled over and threw up.

In the cab back to the city, the driver didn’t say a word. I mumbled ‘Keep the change’ as I thrust a wad of small notes into his hand, hoping that’d cover him for however long he had to spend drying off the backseat which was now soaked through like I was. I lined up at the all night fish & chips place, made my order, and then felt entirely too restless to wait for it.

Nobody seemed to notice that I was completely drenched, especially not the doorman at the back alley bar where I had been ending most of my nights. He looked at my ID and grunted, letting me in despite my smelling appallingly of wet pants. I sat at the bar and the bartender (whose name I knew, but didn’t use) nodded curtly at me each time I ordered a whiskey, which I’d do by pointing at my glass and saying ‘Same way’ because I had heard a TV detective say it and thought it sounded cool. I sat there until closing, and staggered home as the skies began to lighten. When I got home I realised it was nearly time to go to class. I turned on the television, drew my blinds, and went to sleep.

Grinderman - No Pussy Blues

Grinderman’s self-titled debut was released in New Zealand in early March 2007, which was particularly prescient as at the time I was going through something one could refer to as the no pussy blues. Or rather, it was an incomparable, unrequited infatuation with a girl who wore a goddamn beret. But that’s kind of a mouthful.

Tom Waits - Just Another Sucker on the Vine [Instrumental]

I would like to propose a toast to watering holes in the Far East, to apocryphal tales of youthful intoxication, to long awaited reunions, and to fair winds and following seas be they literal or otherwise.

Interpol - Roland

2005, that tumultuous first year out of high school which saw me writing catalogues in Malaysia and saw me embroiled in a fairly intense whirlwind romance with an aloof barista, was scored almost entirely to Interpol’s first two albums. I saw them live that year as well (John Campbell was also in attendance, it was fairly odd; he’s quite short). Naturally, their music has a lot of deeply personal connotations for me.

Will I bother with the new album? Probably not. It’s kind of like getting back together with an ex: Sure, it’s a nice idea, until the reality of it all sets in, and then you wake up one morning asking yourself exactly what the hell is going on.

(Note: This post could quite easily also have been written about the new Kings of Leon album, due for release later this month. Likewise, they’re a band that are akin to a soured old relationship: Good early memories followed by a whole lot of horseshit; just like with that bitch Janine. Not that I’ve ever dated anyone named Janine, but it certainly sounds like the sort of name a dreaded ex might have.)

GPOYW My nineteenth birthday edition

A million years ago, I used to live with two other guys in a university-owned filing cabinet within pissing distance of the Beehive. We were as slovenly as you’d imagine; there were horrible bouts of experimental cooking, constant arguments with management, and ceaseless, half-baked scheming to get closer to this girl or that (whoever was interesting after the previous week’s rejections).

On a rare occasion of success, my flatmate and I both ended up having girls stay over on the same night. Which was doubly unfortunate for our third flatmate, a barrel chested horse thief by way of Buffalo, NY, whose bedroom was sandwiched directly between our respective bedrooms.

The next morning he emerged, eyes bloodshot and looking like a balled up old blazer, and hoarsely shouted, “All I could fucking hear last night was moaning!” He turned to me, and with added disdain said, “Except from your side. All I could hear was moaning and jazz!”