alcohol
You try out writing in the second person
Back at the Ved Amagerport apartment, I make myself a bedtime shandy of Ribena and Carlsberg cut with a lot of tap water.
Is now the part when I try out writing in the second person? Ahem:
Back at the Ved Amagerport apartment, you make yourself a bedtime shandy of Ribena and Carlsberg cut with plenty of Copenhagen tap water. During the kitchen portion of the apartment tour, Inga told you the tapwater here is excellent, which is good to hear because you’ve been drinking it for two days yet. You think it tastes funny nationwide so far but are so very spoiled by New York City. Later, during the bathroom portion, Inga told you the water is also very hard — a lot of Danish calcium — so the temperature knob of the shower faucet doesn’t move as easily as a user might like. Later still, you try writing in the second person and find it horribly, prohibitively audience-conscious.
Pjiake
At a beer festival today I drank a New England-style India Pale Ale called New Copenhagen IPA from a København brewery called Jacobsen. The brewer, whose name was Pjiake, which maybe I will one day name a boat, was very nice and smart but not interested in unpacking with me the myriad layers of globalism behind how this beer came to be and came to be so called. Every time I mentioned it I would pronounce it the Danish way, like København, I guess because I am perpetually trying really hard to fit in and pronounce things in the local parlance i.e. pretentious, and then he would say it back like Copenhagen, I guess because they are trying to do an American-style beer and part of that is the American pronunciation. What a stupid perpetual motion machine of othering and fetishism we were.
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.
berliner boyfriend
I said,
Here is my new boyfriend on the boat:
