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.
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.
I am at the wrap party for a film featuring lots of dancers so obviously I am not dancing and the bar ran out of beers so I have been drinking one that I found after going around and testing all the unattended bottles for the optimal equilibrium of not empty and room temperature so I could know for sure it was abandoned.
Tepid Beck’s goes excellently with baklava, especially this baklava, which is excellent itself, dripping with honey.
Also now I see that this found beer is alcohol-free, which is probably why it was abandoned.
