Everyday Stranger

Diddly-Diddly Bands Make You Come Clean

Last Saturday night Best Friend, Dear Mate and I met up in a great pub in the center of Stockholm in order to commiserate. And talk about our holidays. And to consume mass quantities of beer. And my two dearest boys were also (as they say from their home country of England) "on the pull", a.k.a. trying to pick up a chick.

This was ok with me.

So we met up in an Irish pub in Stockholm that serves great beer, is run by an Irish staff, is usually filled to the brims with people from all countries and cultures, and has a live band playing most nights of the week. This weeks' band was a traditional Irish band playing what I like to call "diddly-diddly" music. You know, the kind with unusual harps, flutes, hopping beats that make us tap our feet and makes us all feel that if only we could understand the suffering that Frank went through in "Angela's Ashes", then we would be closer to the mother country.

(Please note: I am reasonably confident the Irish do not call said music diddly-diddly music. To each his own.)

We proceeded to have one hell of an evening.

Discussion started in right away-you know, the usual pub stuff. Ex-lovers, the meaning of life, solving the ills of big business, and how to end world hunger. Or in the case with my discussion with the Boys, we kicked off with class distinctions.

Dear Mate and I had started talking about this on the train. Like Mr. Y, Dear Mate is posh. He oozes poshness, which is something that Best Friend (who is not posh) and I like to take the mickey out of him about. I told Dear Mate that I believed he was from upper-middle class, whereas my roots are actually upper-lower or lower-middle (although I would say both my parents are now firmly lower-upper now). Dear Mate believes that the class you are born into is the one that you are stuck with. Best Friend backs that up.

But, here is the case in point I used then: Michael Jackson was born into (I believe) very firmly lower class. He now has oodles and oodles of money. Bad taste and extreme perviness aside, although it pains me in the extreme to say it, I would say that he is upper class now (just talking the financials here.) But the Boys feel that he isn't upper class since he wasn't born that way. However his children will be raised with oodles of cash (unless the Freak of the Week loses it all in court, that is) and so they will be upper class. And upper class implies social responsibility and the lofty goals those entail, so if freaky J actually contributed some of his oodles of cash to children's charities (as opposed to his defense funds) then he would be kosher.

By this reasoning, since I was born into upper-lower, I will always be upper-lower. However my life is much improved from a financial perspective over what it was when I wa a kid, and so my children may enjoy the status of middle-middle or upper-middle (should the job situation be fixed over the next few months, of course).

Good thing I only have a dog, at least he won't bitch to Oprah about his mediocre middle-class upbringing.

This talk then proceeded onto the ins and outs of child support payments and splitting up. Both of them are English with Swedish-based households, and they compared notes.

BF: So, have you checked the "you're going to lose your ass in this settlement" website?
DM: No, I only checked the "how to wiggle the percentages" site. But it was American, so it doesn't help.
BF: Did you use the one with the calculations of the point-based system that the children are in with regards to their intake of breaths on a weekly basis?
DM: Yes I did, but still found that I must pay a minimum of 5 pounds a week, although I can pay less if I am willing to forgo all orgasms for the rest of my life.

OK, this wasn't exactly what they said, but then my relationship that is splitting up is childless so this is all non-info to me. I drag the Boys upstairs to listen to the diddly-diddly music, and we are off.

We sit at a table with some Swedish computer engineers that brought their cameras, so I have a few shots of all of us. Dear Mate hit it off with a woman at the next table almost immediately (thereby having me dub him Flirty Spice in my mind for the evening) while we all kept drinking. Kilkenney for Best Friend. Guinness for Dear Mate. Bishop's Finger for me. Round after round after round. And in no time, we started to display our typical signs of being drunk. Dear Mate gets really chatty and flirty with the ladies when he's a bit pissed and Best Friend goes through swings of I-Love-my-Life and I-Hate-My-Life. He swings with more rapidity than others.

And me? I get really wound up and come across as Tigger on speed, pinging off the wall with concussion-possible speeds. This is before I reach the "I'm drunk" level, in which case I pass out completely at whatever locale I happen to be at-the table, the bed, my own dinner party. That night Dear Mate and Best Friend seemed to have kept my tipsy-ass in eyesight the entire time, I think to make sure I was ok.

Then little Helen (aka Beer Spice) found a lipstick on the floor. I proceeded to put the lipstick on the single men in the pub and ask them to kiss my cheek. I was a bit shocked to discover that almost all of the men were completely up for it (I was only rejected twice) and found it genuinely funny. By the end I looked like rosacea had really taken over my face, or else I had spent too much time in Candy' House of Pain.

Dear Mate's chick was apparently a bit envious and sour at my success with making the men laugh with the lipstick rountine (and was uncomfortable with the attention that Dear Mate and Best Friend showed me). Fuck it.

Pull the nails from your hands and use them to climb down from the cross, dearie.

As the night went on, so did the beer and the honesty. Dear Mate decided to opt out of his bit of flirty fluff. And as we were leaving at 2 am, bleary and beery, walking to the subway to take us all to our respective beds, Best Friend turned to me.

BF: How do I know that if I leave my wife and find another woman, that she won't dump me? I mean, how do I know if maybe I should just stay with my wife and accept a loveless and passionless marriage?

And thinking of Mr. Y somewhere out in the cold, blue world, I took Best Friend's cheeks in my hand and stood on tiptoes to look him in the eyes.

Me: It's called faith, baby. You just have to have it when it comes to love. Sometimes love is all about taking a chance.

And when his subway roared into sight and he got on, I realized that I really meant those words. Even for myself. And it's given me the strength to keep going.

These are my boys, who mean the world to me. Everyone, this is Dear Mate, me, and Best Friend. Boys, this is everyone.

-H.

PS-at one point yesterday I checked in on my blog and saw, in one hour's time frame, 100 people had trucked through. This either means that my stats are off or else something else is wonky (I have to go with the wonky part). At any rate, thank you for coming to my wonky little spot in my wonky little universe :)

PPS-Check out Ilyka's Best of Me Symphony. There is an entry from yours truly there. And Ilyka is very cool, hipper than I am I think, which gives me something to strive for.

PPPS-I have an interview today at 4:30 pm, an interview with Dream Job on Wednesday afternoon, and an interview with another company on Friday morning. Things are picking up. I even found out a way to maybe survive if Sweden rejects my citizenship. Fingers crossed, please. I need all the help I can get...I am off to London now, more from me shortly!

Posted by Everydaystranger at January 13, 2004 08:25 AM | TrackBack