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I am learning to live The Life

I worked this morning, but had the evening off. I’d planned to spend it indoors, taking it easy, sorting pictures from the trip over the weekend. I showered (after sweating profusely on the tour due to the humidity and sadly no refreshing rain), then sat down at my computer to work on the pictures.

First I had to read my feeds. Since I was gone all weekend, this was quite a lot of reading, all utterly inconsequential to my existence. I speak of lolcats and BBC News alike.

Then some friends who have guests from abroad wanted to go to Hofbräuhaus, which I absolutely was not in the mood for. After declining, I reconsidered, reasoning that I only have another week or two left in this country, and I should be spending every conceivable moment of consciousness with my bros. Picture sorting can wait, no?

But instead of beerhall ribaldry, a cake was baked, so the evening was spent unwinding in the kitchen. My metal friend Sascha dropped by, after hearing my persistent cackling from the balcony beneath his room, and we started talking. Opened a few beers. Kept talking. We drank all the beer we could find, so moseyed upstairs quick to scout for more.

We brought a guitar back, and had another beer together. It grew late, and the kitchen gradually disgorged its occupants, leaving Sascha and me out on the balcony, thumbing chords and mumbling about oblique motion.

We played songs to each other long into the night. The guy knows Omerta like the back of his hand, although he doesn’t like the range of the vocalist—which is actually quite comfortable for me. He can play Road Trippin’ immaculately. (His technique on acoustic guitar is far beyond what I can hope to achieve in even the next six months.) We of course played many renditions of Fiddler On The Green, which neither of us can sing, even after tuning down the halfstep that the song demands.

Windows all across the courtyard slammed shut as we sang into the night, and clanked bottles together, and laughed. After several hours, the guitar was set down, and we began to talk faster, yet more slowly. “What are you five favorite things?” I asked. Then he asked me. We argued about whether civilization is fighting against, serving, or merely operating within the grand structure of, biological evolution. We disagreed about the voicing of the G chord in the bridge to Omerta, and whether there’s a resolution for the minor second during that calculatedly laidback solo. Tits or ass? C++ or Java? Clapton or Iommi?

All the same shit as any night, but tonight with someone I deeply, truly respect. I’m not yet tired, but I really should get to bed.

The wisest person I’ve ever personally known, an ex-girlfriend named Julia, used to tell me that I am a “people pleaser.” I concern myself far too much with the happiness of others about whom I care little, and this can interfere with the happiness of those whom I love, perhaps myself included.

The slamming of those windows tonight was the heaviest riff I’ve ever heard. The windows that opened and stayed open were like the smile that creeps across one’s face while listening to the opening chords of Road Trippin’.

Baudolino answered: “Concern with pleasing humans causes the loss of all spiritual growth.”

Is it then too much to wish that the entire world sleeps tonight as smoothly and thickly as I already do?