Fear and Loathing in Uppsala

We were around Rejkaviksgatan on the edge of Ekeby when the Bushmills began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a little strange, maybe I better sit down," when suddenly there was a great roar and the bus was surrounded by giant bats.
I jest. Mostly. But I've just finished reading the Good Doctor's magnum opus for the first time, and I'm going to be making references to it like mad in this post. It's appropriate to the week I've had, believe me.
It is highly apt, for instance, that the book opens with a quote from Dr. Johnson, who himself was a strange, ugly, probably drug-addled man. It goes thusly: "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man."
You see, I think I'm out here, in the fringe of the Frozen North, looking for reasons to be alive. In response to my bitter reflections on love a few posts back, I have been repeatedly asked what the point is of living if I don't believe in love. "What indeed," I tend to reply, and while I realize I probably sound flippant, I mean it honestly. What genuinely is the point?
Perhaps you've read Proust? (Incidentally, someone please tell me how to pronounce his name. I've heard credible people say it both so it rhymes with "soused" and so it rhymes with "juiced," and have no idea which is correct. This is the great trouble with being largely self-educated: I'm always saying "Alcibiades" and "Xerxes" incorrectly.) A sizeable chunk of his Remembrance of Things Past is (in my opinion) an examination of whether or not love makes life worth living. He ultimately rejects this proposition, and examines ritualism and structured social relationships instead. This in turn is likewise rejected. Art and expression is considered, but while it is certainly close to the goal, it too is found wanting. Ultimately (in my view at least), he settles on memory as the solution, that we are what we make of our memories, and that control over defense mechanisms which alienate ourselves from our memories is the only way through which we can take away the pain of being alive and focus only on the good.
While I don't agree with Proust, I think I've embarked on sort of the same undertaking. I too have rejected the ideas of living for someone else, living for love, living for financial or material success, or any of the other things which our Buddhist friends and the unnamed Preacher of Ecclesiastes have long since told us are impermanent and only lead to further suffering.
So then what? What's the point of it all?

With that, I turned to the suggestion of Dr. Johnson and considered the various people whose lives and works have been impressive and inspirational to me, and noticed that they were unanimously loaded to the gills most of the time. So after writing my last blog post, having been more or less intoxicated for five days straight, I figured I might as well keep rolling and see if I could make it to a solid week.
That Wednesday is a bit vague. I know I went to class and was impressed by the difficult, specific, and direct questions my professor asked. I remember eating the little mandarin oranges to which I have become addicted (for the purposes of warding off scurvy, mainly) and sitting out in the living room with a bottle of Beam and a pile of orange peels, watching Jeopardy in Swedish.
Thursday I staggered downtown to a lecture being given by the head of the International Criminal Tribunal which has spent the last decade prosecuting Rwandan war criminals. I ran into Loufer and Aisling there, and went out for more drinks with them at Östgöta nation. We picked up a new Irishman whose name I do not know for the very good reason that I didn't understand a single damn word he said.
It was somebody's birthday there, so the place was full of Irish people and that one Scot who I see everywhere and who never remembers me. I had just taken out a 500 kroner note, and I felt bad about making the bartender break that big of a bill, so I just bought six beers at once and sat in a corner talking about democratisation and mass violence, drinking them in fairly rapid succession.
Everyone insisted that we go somewhere else (why do people always do this?) and of course that somewhere else cost money to get into, so I went home with Aisling, made a failed pass at her, and was given a CD of Tom Waits reading Jack Kerouac as a consolation prize.

I really intended to sober up on Friday. Really I did. It'd been exactly a week, which seemed like a nice, round period of time, but Emma and Tjis insisted that I go out with them and since I always say no and feel bad, I agreed.
We went to a place called Birgerjarl's (BJ's for short) by the river, where there's a long line of shivering Swedes and two Turkish dudes with a hot dog cart. We met up with Tjis's friends, all of whom do some sort of fabulously boring research regarding blood properties, and who are either gay, Kenyan, or both. Yes, Stan-the-Man-With-the-Tan was there.
BJ's is pretty much the world's most typical club. Think about a club. That's exactly what BJ's is like. Except since it's not a student nation, beers cost about six bucks. Fortunately, Tjis and I had split a half-bottle of Old Bushmill's on the way over.
I stood around for a while listening to the terrible early-90's dance music, watching the Europeans look like idiots. Let me show you what I mean:
Stand up from your chair. Now bend your knees a bit and raise your forearms so that they are perpendicular to the floor and your elbows are bent 90 degrees. Now shake your ass. Are you doing this? Because if you look like a goddamn idiot, then you're doing it right. This is how European guys dance.
Needless to say, this got dull pretty quick, so I walked home and crashed a corridor party over in building 4. Got home at around sunrise.

I have little to no memory of Saturday. I had a lunch date with the bartender mentioned in the last post. She showed up, despite my drunken texting of her earlier in the week, and we had a good conversation. We'll see when/if there's a second date, and how it goes. I believe I went to three corridor parties that night. I believe a snarky German named Bjorn gave me two mugs full of grog.

By Sunday night, time had become fluid and viscous. I had started to percieve the world in a manner which I can only term unique. I have disjointed memories:

I was sitting at a table in a corridor that wasn't mine. Tom Waits was shuffling on an iPod. I drew to an inside straight against my friend Rameel and won two hundred kroner.

I spent several hours talking with Caroline, watching her flick the ash of her cigarette into a cup which contained the desecrated corpse of her 3.5% beer. It soon was filled with that black, gooey, foul mixture of cigarette butts, tobacco, and other less-identifiable substances which will always make me think of that hellhole of a houseman's office in the Philly airport Ramada. I'd showed up to Caroline's place about eight drinks ahead, split a six pack with her, and she was already blasted.

I stood in Caroline's doorway not long after, making a pass at her. I don't remember what I said, but I probably deserved the formidable right hook she nailed me with. I straightened up, smiling around a mouthful of blood, and said, "You know, you can always tell when a girl likes you because she hits you with a fist instead of an open hand."
She punched me again.
"I rest my case," I said.

On the way out, I came across Loufer, who was bent over the back of a car, vomiting something bright yellow into the snow. I slid down next to him, our backs against the curb, trying to keep away from the rapidly-freezing puddle he'd made. He ate handfuls of snow to wash out his mouth and I offered him a drink from my flask.
It turned out his Morroccan hash connection had produced about a dozen tablets of mescaline. Loufs had eaten two and proceeded to watch Requiem for a Dream for the first time, which officially won him the award for Worst Idea Anyone Anywhere Has Ever Had in the History of Everything. I dragged him back to his building and left him in the elevator there, mumbling things and trying to grab something that wasn't there.

I got back to my corridor in time to watch the last fifteen minutes of the Super Bowl with Benny and Rikard and Robert and Jonah. They didn't know quite what to make of me, drinking my whiskey from the bottle, spitting blood, with a bruise shaped like Pakistan rapidly developing on my face.
"Find what you were looking for?" they asked.
"Christ," I said. "I hope not."