Never thought I'd see the day.....
Ah, where to begin................................
You’ve heard of an American in Paris right? Well this is something similar, only without Gene Kelly….. or music…… or Paris…… or talent for that matter........
…………………!
OK, I’ll Start again.
LB1 and I have been living on and off in Barcelona for the past ten years.
He’s American and I’m a Mick and we both work in more or less tekky jobs. We have each of us made feeble efforts to leave this city but have always somehow ended up back here due to some sort of emotional elastic band that tugs us no matter how far away and how cosy we get. I guess we should just own up and admit that we love the place. We now have Spanish spouses (or is the plural spice?) so any further attempts to flee the country will involve two veracious Latin ladies ripping our spleens out of our armpits.
For want of a less kitsch expression, LB1 and I are kind of soul mates. He gets a kick out of how many references to American junk culture that I get and I enjoy his Euro-American cultural perspective. (‘mid-Atlantic eurofag schizophrenia’ is the technical term, I believe)
We also have a lot more in common despite our separate origins:
As youngsters we were both nerd/jocks (Jerds? Nocks?) i.e. We played Dungeons & Dragons but were also fairly good at sports*.
(*LB1 figures that he was a second level jock and a fourth level nerd but that he rolled with a +2 when pitching a softball. I on the other hand was a third level jock and a second level nerd but rolled with a –1 when heading soccer balls due to astigmatism)
We both met just after arriving in Barcelona and were leaving behind us a couple of really awful break ups, so our first few months of friendship consisted of bouts of drunken misogyny in some of the dodgier bars of the Gothic Quarter – a bonding experience by any account.
Now, years later, I still get together with LB1 on a regular basis, usually on the wrong day of the week to quaff fizzy bottled Estrella and talk shite into the wee small hours. And what I have always admired about LB1 is that he is essentially a man of faith. Despite our advancing years, he still believes that we CAN solve the mysteries of life and work out all the worlds problems if we…just…have…one…more…beer.
Lately we have both become blog junkies and it occurred to me that all the drunkenly philosophical crap that we spout during our bodega sessions was completely going to waste. There’s a whole world out there that needs to know what a pair of sad, middle-aged pseudo-intellectual barflies that we are.
…..so here’s to bustin’ out of the bodega and going on line.
You’ve heard of an American in Paris right? Well this is something similar, only without Gene Kelly….. or music…… or Paris…… or talent for that matter........
…………………!
OK, I’ll Start again.
LB1 and I have been living on and off in Barcelona for the past ten years.
He’s American and I’m a Mick and we both work in more or less tekky jobs. We have each of us made feeble efforts to leave this city but have always somehow ended up back here due to some sort of emotional elastic band that tugs us no matter how far away and how cosy we get. I guess we should just own up and admit that we love the place. We now have Spanish spouses (or is the plural spice?) so any further attempts to flee the country will involve two veracious Latin ladies ripping our spleens out of our armpits.
For want of a less kitsch expression, LB1 and I are kind of soul mates. He gets a kick out of how many references to American junk culture that I get and I enjoy his Euro-American cultural perspective. (‘mid-Atlantic eurofag schizophrenia’ is the technical term, I believe)
We also have a lot more in common despite our separate origins:
As youngsters we were both nerd/jocks (Jerds? Nocks?) i.e. We played Dungeons & Dragons but were also fairly good at sports*.
(*LB1 figures that he was a second level jock and a fourth level nerd but that he rolled with a +2 when pitching a softball. I on the other hand was a third level jock and a second level nerd but rolled with a –1 when heading soccer balls due to astigmatism)
We both met just after arriving in Barcelona and were leaving behind us a couple of really awful break ups, so our first few months of friendship consisted of bouts of drunken misogyny in some of the dodgier bars of the Gothic Quarter – a bonding experience by any account.
Now, years later, I still get together with LB1 on a regular basis, usually on the wrong day of the week to quaff fizzy bottled Estrella and talk shite into the wee small hours. And what I have always admired about LB1 is that he is essentially a man of faith. Despite our advancing years, he still believes that we CAN solve the mysteries of life and work out all the worlds problems if we…just…have…one…more…beer.
Lately we have both become blog junkies and it occurred to me that all the drunkenly philosophical crap that we spout during our bodega sessions was completely going to waste. There’s a whole world out there that needs to know what a pair of sad, middle-aged pseudo-intellectual barflies that we are.
…..so here’s to bustin’ out of the bodega and going on line.
posted by Lung the Younger | 3:36 pm
1 Comments:
Heheh, nothing quite like a relative new-comer to comment upon a three-years' old post! Yet, I wanted to see what started it all, and more importantly--WHEN. Coincidentally we both started blogging roughly around the same time.
Good reading by the way.
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