Bat country!

My excellent Berliner friend Ben left yesterday. His first going-away part was last Friday, and coincided with Alexander's going away party, and a toga party that Jim and his short British sidekick were having. It was sort of like a big Venn diagram, but with drunken Europeans. I sat at a filthy table in building 9 (which is on the "other" side of Flogsta--the place is organized sort of like a bow tie, and nobody ever goes into the buildings on the other side...we're convinced they're full of morlocks) with Josh, who I forgive for being American since he knows a lot about film and about wine. He was on his third bottle of the night.
"Josh," I said, which was the perhaps the only truthful thing I said all night. "Ben's next going away party is on Tuesday. I propose, sir, that this is the pre-party. I have nothing whatsoever to do between now and then. I suggest we simply continue drinkin."
Josh was all for that, and told me something about Duesenbergs. I'd been hammering Old Bushmill's straight from the bottle all night, and was feeling agreeable.

I have learned many things over the past few days. I have learned that when you've been four sheets to the wind for three days straight, the process of taking a long walk in the cold to sober up for class is sort of like scaling a ladder to a blinding infinity and leaves you with the hope that whenever the world catches up with you, it will simply be so astounded by the state you're in to hammer down on you further. I have learned that the older I get, the more I travel, and the longer I stay drunk, the more I understand Tom Waits' later music. I used to be pretty strictly a "Heart of Saturday Night" through "Heartattack and Vine" guy, with the pinnacle at "Small Change," but by now I've swayed down enough badly lit cobblestone European alleys with enough strange people from strange places that I absolutely get the "Frank's Wild Years," "Rain Dogs," and "Swordfishtrombones" corridor. I know exactly what he means now.

Ben's last party was at GH nation (pronounced "Ghee-Ho" and stands for Gästrike-Hälsinge, which I bet clears everything up for you), a place reknowned for its prodigious selection of beer. I showed up two hours before everyone else, drinking slowly and alone in a dark corner, exercising my formidable powers of table-imperialism (it's basically a derivative of couch-fu, you see, at which I am an undisputed master) as a I annexed larger and larger tables in the name of Trevordom. I also got the bartender girl's phone number, since I am sort of a drunk in the classical sense of the word and can manage to pull off saying horribly objectionable things like this:
"So, what d'you say we get out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini?"
"But my clothes aren't wet," she said, laughing.
Slowly, letting the voice positively drip: "I bet you're wet somewhere."

Anyway, everyone showed up and the usual stuff transpired. I developed an appreciation for Bavarian hefeweizen, and learned the trick for pouring it into the giant undulating glasses it comes with. I cleared up some misconceptions a Dutch guy had about the Battle of Cannae
and developed a suspicion that Josh has a bit of a crush on me. After a while, the place began to look like this:




I met three Serbian guys and a Russian dude named Vladimir who promised to give me a call and invite me to their party next week. Once again my freakish knowledge of geography endeared me to them: Europeans are endlessly thrilled when they meet an American who can promptly place Vojvodina. I have high hopes that their party will involve invading smaller, weaker parties, ruthlessly attacking a couple members to drive out the others, and then seizing the beer left behind.

Anyway, eventually we spilled out into the street, the way you do. I have learned that I have little to no drunken patience: everyone else wanted to spend an hour standing around, smoking cigarettes, throwing snowballs, talking nonsense, locking and unlocking bikes, and so forth. I was not entertained:



See, my thinking is "It's cold. There is nothing to eat or drink here. There's nowhere to sit. Why are we not going somewhere warm, where we can sit and eat and drink? My plan is better in literally every way."
We also saw things like this:



Eventually we drifted over to Sofie's. She's one of the people who stripped and jumped in the river on New Years, and she and Ben have sort of been having a thing for a while. She lives about halfway between the center of town and Flogsta, so it's an ideal rest stop.
We sat around in her room, listening to Tom Waits and John Lee Hooker, while my good friend Rameel tried to make moves on a short Italian chick. Sarah sat on the floor in front of me and a massaged her neck while she passed me glasses of this clear, vaguely sour stuff that I guess is just called "Martini." I kept downing it in one gulp and shouting "Bah, anything less than 40% is a chaser."
Eventually I got bored and had the impression Sofie and Ben would like some time alone, so I managed to drag everyone out (by now our group had dwindled from about twenty to five or six, and the survivors were tenacious indeed) and started walking home. Sarah and I took a left about halfway there, because I walk a LOT and know a shorter way, but nobody ever believes me.
And then we proceeded to have the biggest, stupidest, most vicious fight I have ever had with anyone at any point in my entire life.
Many among you may be mildly amazed at this. I tend not to have fights, and I have trouble remembering many times I have ever actually gotten angry with anyone about anything. Annoyed, certainly. Frustrated, frequently. Exasperated, definitely. But genuinely angry? Not much, no.
Sarah has a remarkable ability to bring that out in me. And what is genuinely astounding is that I have absolutely no idea whatsoever how it started or what it was even about. Nor, honestly, do I much care. I got home furious and cold around six in the morning and poured myself a glass of bottom-rack bourbon and haven't looked back since. Hunter S. Thompson would be proud of me.

What I'm Reading
Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations (finally, and yes...it's amazing)
Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations
James Ellroy, White Jazz (in Swedish! Noir is great for that, lots of short, simple words, but compelling)
John Lampe, Twice There Was a Country: Yugoslavia as History
Tomislav Dulic, Utopias of Nation: Local Mass Killing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1941-1942. (This is my professor)
Ernest Gellner, Nationalism