March 20, 2007

“Rock Under The Sun Trampy…..”

Unfortunate list of casualties from St Paddys night include:

•Phone (admittedly an annual occasion at some point)
•Another pair of knock-off Sunglasses
•several lighters
•15000 Malawi Kwacha
•1 bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey.
•Plot for several hours.

They will be missed.

Those reading whom I’ve lost details for, pls email your number using the usual mail/link on the side there and I’ll restart the book on when I am next likely to lose my new phone from today (I’m still on the same number btw).

The thing with losing a phone is not the phone - it’s all the numbers of folk you’ll never get in touch any other way than calling when you are next in their neck of the woods.

I think maybe most are stored on the sim card I have in Holland though.

But It’s also all the pictures and video you have on there.

Especially the ones from Jakarta

.

ahem.

Friday and drinks in the tea district turned to meeting Paul and the girls at local den of funk named Twigga - there were a few of the younger crowd out and about on a fisherprice-my-first-night-out type of affair - 15 year old girls hurling in the corridors while young guys try to start fires with their eyes type stuff - gets in the way of people actually having a good time when the bar looks like kindergarten, so we moved on to the hip-hop cave of Tuska.

As people tired we dropped them back at Doogles before John and I moved on out to Kambaa - local den of iniquity - I got myself into trouble dancing with some girl who I was one sentence away from taking back to my place and leaving John where he stood - luckily the image clicked into my mind of Yuni dressed up as Rock chick after that Jakartan Rolling Stones night and I resisted the considerable temptation that was practically pole dancing before me and said my goodbyes.

I tell you - that night back in 2005 - Yuni wearing slashed up Rolling Stones shirt with rope-laddered tassles up the back - rock chick hair - eye liner - denim short-short skirt - Fuck-me Knee high boots - Tequila shot belt with bottles in the holsters.... that’s when I fell in love with that girl - that night - sure-sure.

I had a picture on my phone......

That was an image I had to conjure again when we returned to Tuska around 4am and ended up dancing with a girl from Mozambique called Antoinetta - who accompanied us to Sunnyside where we danced on chairs again. I again made my plea for escape and we moved to some locals bar in the middle of nowhere - I was truly wasted by this point - normally I’ve levelled out by this time of the morning - sort of drunk myself sober - done the round trip so to speak - but I was in the hurt locker and vision was an issue - it was the sort of place Nic Cage finds himself in from that Sierra Leone scene in Lord of War - I also think it’s one of the few times in life that someone could say I was drunker than John - that’s proper drunk - to be drunker than John at 8am is like a higher plateau of drunkeness - box2 drunkeness almost.

When we made it back to Pauls, (after arguing with the Doogle’s door staff about the time breakfast should be served) it was too early to wake him so I could crash on his couch and it was simply too much of a mission to consider driving back to my place in Blantyre, so I curled up in the sun on a rock outside Johns house, as he passed out in his doorway.

About as far away from a picture of sobriety as you can get - that’s cross the road and throw-small-change-at-me-alcoholic-reprobate really isn’t it? not good.

I don’t think the drinking here is like Jakarta though - in Jakarta I think indeed I had a problem for a little while - it was daily and it was at home and on the big nights out it was too concentrated in short spaces of time - but I came to my senses and it passed - here, although the whiskey flows freely and the wknd nights last till dawn, we dance while we drink so you never really get too fucked up beyond all recognition - although falling asleep on the rock is obviously a bit trampy, I offer the simple excuse of an exhausting drive home and tiredness in my defence.

Which may not stand up in court but it’s all I got at the mo.

It’s a red-flag then - ”No more excessive drinking to the point of sleeping on rocks in the sun at 830am” - would the honorable judge of karma duly note that last admission in writing and offer it for referral if there is anymore such tom-foolery in the near future.

I say “near” as it doesn’t do anyone any harm to drink all night and sleep on a rock every once in a while.

Builds character.

So then came St.Patrick’s day.

The wknd at Gecko when we had that big party had led to me being asked to sort the music out for a St Patrick’s shindig that was taking place in Blantyre - small venue, but well set up with a good crowd and Paul helped out with hiring an amp and speakers. Once I had woken from a snatched couple of hours sleep in the afternoon, we headed over to Adele’s place and set up shop - broken as I felt, I soon was back on something resembling form after getting a good feeding at the Bar-B-Q and indulging in the rather potent green punch that was filled up in one of the water coolers (genius idea - remove water - add punch - self serve green evil). I was presented with a packet of Benson’s and a bottle of Jameson’s Irish Whiskey for my pay and then I set about playing from 6pm till 4am - messing with the computer hooked up to the amp and twiddling equalizers and volume control’s while playing the best of what I had.

All was going really well until around 11pm when I was passed a ready rolled joint of some very potent Mari-Jo - I pretty much stopped smoking the delights of Mari-Jo back in 2000 when I came back from Malawi the first time around - you see, once I came back from 6 months of no longer smoking it, my tolerance level had disappeared and I no longer kept pace - also I just generally preferred being sharp and able to think again - getting stoned on Mari-Jo no longer felt the way it used to - now it just put my head in a cloud of confusion and seemed to make me less sociable and more withdrawn, so I just figured I’d had a good innings up until then and left it at that.

So as I knew that my smoking days were over and my tolerance levels are now around zero, I left the J sitting there on the mixer for an hour or so until I did what any half wasted individual would do - said “Ah fuck it” and smoked the whole damn thing in the time it takes to smoke the average cigarette.

Initially no problems - nicely rolled, mellow buzz, sweet taste - but then 10 minutes later it was like a Pirate Galleon to the back of the head and my mind went to Mars - absolutely spoon-faced.

What ever the fuck was in that joint, it’s not what should of been on the menu upon re-entering the world of smoking Gods greenest for the first time in a mighty long while.

Suddenly Moonbatted out of existence, I had considerable difficulty messing about with track listings, playlists, mixing faders and equalizers - Paul had also explicitly explained that when the beat ratio ojeni went up into the red light area ojeni, I was supposed to turn the volume down a bit to make sure the whole thing didn’t automatically shut itself off - I had been pretty good about this so far - but now I couldn’t really focus on the lights any longer.

There was a big whitey on the horizon and I fucking knew it - in such situations to avoid ”pale-face porcelain-god praying in the form of upchuck”, there are three main answers:

1) Water
2) Chair

3) and finally - stop drinking fucking strong Irish whiskey for a bit.

You see my initial theory upon head-caving was that if one type of fuckedupness fought and overpowered the fuckedupness of another type, then I would go back to being whiskey-drunk instead of super-stoned.

This Doesn’t Work.

It’s like trying to put out a fire with alcohol.

Just makes a new monster that’s more difficult to control than the first situation.

It’s like kicking a Gremlin in the ass and have him turn into Godzilla.

It’s high end stupidity.

But it made total sense at the time.

So once I’d picked up the pieces of my mind and put them in some form of order, I hoped no one had noticed that the songs had been pretty much sorting themselves out at random for 30 mins or so and got back to the job in hand.

I hadn’t really enjoyed being so wrecked you see, it was like I’d tipped my mind into and abyss and had then spent the next hour or so abseiling down into the darkness to try and find it - when what I really should of done was enjoy standing around with a stupid grin on my face while relaxing into the music that I was (supposed to be) playing.

Later I finished off the Jameson’s as 4am rolled around and I decided to go check out what was going on elsewhere in town - there had been a big bash for 300-400 people at Doogle’s that the girls had gone to - sure enough, upon arrival I found Rose and Ziegler still going amongst the remains of the party before me - we gathered up a few other stragglers and headed to Tuska and on to Sunnyside for dawn - where people danced on chairs - again.

Unsurprisingly, this 4am to 8am period is when the sunglasses and phone met their doom.

Last call Doogle’s for fry-up breakfast - and then I made a bed out of some uncomfortable metal chairs.

Slightly trampy.

But not rock under the sun trampy.

Spo | March 20, 2007

Spo
Location:Gecko Lounge, Cape Maclear, Malawi.

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