the perfect line.

Let me tell you about this guy, a Polish guy named Marius. Polish meaning from Poland and not pole-ish as in tall and cylindrical or polish as in shiny. Just to be clear.
He hooked up with my friend Superfast about a year ago and she liked him enough to introduce him to the rest of the zoo. God bless Superfast and her amazing ability to pick the strangest boys as accessories. The last one couldn't really speak english at all, and maybe this was part of the charm because Superfast never shuts the fuck up. And the first one, meaning the guy she was with when I first met her, was a pure dodgy dealer from sunny seaside Bray, a man famous for shitty deals to his friends and for punching holes in the wall during emotional moments. Crazy J's Snakepit (on account of the snakes, and also on account of Crazy J) was where they lived, a pretty nice flat in Rathmines with no lock on the building's front door and the occasional junky infestation in the hall. Classy like.

But that was a long time ago and far, far away. Marius is a different bottle of gin altogether. He's a big calm rugged chiselled dude all full of enthusiasm for everything and an aura of honesty and good will. It's a good thing he's not in the army because he'd almost certainly spend his whole time jumping on grenades and the like in random and unnecessary acts of heroism.
Marius is also a nut, of course, Superfast likes them nutty.

If I have learned one thing in my several years of consciousness, and there's little evidence to show that I have, its that everyone is a few diamonds short of a heist and the entire world is populated by whacky loons. That said, whacky loonery is relative and theres always room for erratics straying from the standard deviation.

On a night full of stories, in a land far from home, the sun came up sometime after 6am and buses arrived to take us back to town. Marius has a great affection for Cherub, as we all do, and none of us really get to see Cherub too often as he lives in the wesht, in one of them sparsely populated counties that never win anything in the GAA. Anyway Marius, in a heightened state of totally fuckedness, managed to engineer the boarding so himself and his good friend Cherub got the two seats up beside the driver, much to the delight of said sober and early-rising driver .
It was so important that we all knew of this marvelous feat. Marius propped himself up with this elbows on the back of his seat and his sunburn and his matching Hawaiian shirt and shorts combo, panama hat and aviator shades, calling out "Hey we got the best seats, me and Cherub, we got the best seats". And we weren't laughing at him exactly, well we were, but in the friendly way you do when your friend is visiting baloobas-town and doesn't seem to know it. He took mild offence anyway, maybe just because we were not as impressed as he thought we would be at his seating genius, and his honest, plaintive polish-accented voice rose up as he placed his palm on his chest and said "I just have to say what is in my heart".
Jaysus, I nearly suffocated with the mirth.
It probably didn't help that I was full of strong drugs, but even now in total sobriety it cracks me up, the earnestness of it, the ridiculousness of the scene, you couldn't invent him.

In spain, under an olive tree.

Them continental types do like their food, and after about twenty courses I had me an auld wander out to stretch the legs and maybe delay the early onset of unconsciousness.

Outside, under an old and twisted olive tree, I found a an old and twisted druid.
Not twisted in any overt way, but one look at his pointy eyeball and I knew he had himself convoluted into a loop of epic proportions.

The woad painted onto his face was beginning to pulsate and shift, a sure sign that he had enough random and conflicting hallucinogens, amphetamines, opioids, bad juju and crazy shit onboard to start altering other peoples perception of reality.
I was in that secure drunk gregarious place, waving a stogie about like I knew what I was doing with it and slopping gin on the paving slabs. I was dressed, snappily, as a Chinese peasant.

The Hairy fella had been on the receiving end of a succession of complementary offerings from the Spaniards, partly due to the mighty impression he made with his wedding ceremony and partly because he just has the head on him that people want to throw drugs into. Maybe they intuitively think he's in need of strong medicine. For his brain.
He has a measure of wisdom that reveals itself in wee slivers of time, between the moments spent assuming random wedding guests are prostitutes and moments spent getting lost in forests while on weekend visits to large cities that don't contain forests.

-KFS me auld scober, I have just the thing for you my friend, have you had one of these yellow pills?
-Not at all now Hairy, I'm in my undeflateable castle of groove due to the many, many gintonicos I've been swimming in, and also sure I've left all that auld craic behind me manys the year ago.
-Ah but KFS you forget I know you all too well, and this is very trippy stuff.

My little ears picked up and I could feel righty actually swivel foward a couple of millimeters.

-Trippy is it you say? stuff is it you say?
-Synthetic mescaline by all accounts my friend, you'll not do yourself a dis-service?
-Jaysus no, that would be criminal.
-Good man.

I was the proud owner of a golden capsule, snug in the centre of my palm, as the light glowing from the building behind me gave my gin a swimming-pool shimmer. The whole scene was permeated with an ethereal sense of adventure, there were rivulets of electricity running on the edges of everything. I was mostly just excited in general and all wound up with the occasion and the sense of marvellous dislocation, and rivers of booze and the miraculous intersecting timelines of all the good people.

And this is before I actually swallowed the magic bean. The night got a whole geansai-load more exciting shortly after.