undskyld

Today I made some friends named Katrine and Hakim — she a native of Denmark, him, of Morocco — who were on their third date and also at the craft beer and food truck festival on the Carlsberg brewery grounds that a brewer here who grew up in Durham like me and is a friend of my old friend got me into.

We sat together on a curb outside the event, passing two spliffs among the three of us and talking about world affairs and national shame.

I told them about Anthony Weiner and Huma and Hillary and about my idea for a shirt featuring the USAmerican flag and the words I’M SORRY in as many languages as possible.

The Danish is undskyld, they told me back, adding that I personally needn’t apologize, and I wrote it all down to remember.

Katrine photographed me deep in my international, ineffectual coin purse, fighting through the mis-math of trying to convert inadequate euro plus some rogue Antillean guilder into adequate beer fest tokens for buying Cambodian hot rock ’n’ rolls to share with my fest friends, two of three of whom would turn out to be vegetarian anyway.

Later I looked at how I also wrote the words tissekone and fisse, Danish slang for parts of a woman, and too drew a crude likeness of the Nike swoosh. No telling why. America, maybe.

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