A few months ago we ended up back at this guy's house after a club or something I guess. This guy and his girlfriend were very interesting people in that in my experience with the people I meet here no-one is really much into films and literature and stuff like that, certainly not to the point of having strong (very strong it turned out) opinions on them and deep knowledge. So a few of us were chatting, I dunno, like a long time (say fifteen hours or so) and he was expounding his theories on, art and Tarkovsky and Bergman, and his girlfriend who was much younger was a film maker and maybe even more knowledgeable. Both very forthright, filled with strong opinions on how to live your life, on what is important... I suppose he could have been called an existentialist maybe. I dunno. He was very convincing, he thought it was very important that people SHOULD know about culture and art and what it means (which was particularly attractive to me at this point cos while I don't literally believe that myself I was getting tired of the way that just no-one knows who, I dunno, Polanski is), and he had said that he had used to do martial arts of some kind as a sort of mental exercise - he insisted that he was in no way competitive, that he did not fight to win, rather he did it purely as a rigorous and theoretical abstract self-experiment or something. And at this point he was carrying us all along with him. I began to feel rather shallow for caring about whether or not I win when I play squash or football. And then the subject got on to food. I thought as a man of culture he might be a great chef or gourmand or something, but I'd got that totally wrong, he started laying down the law on people wasting their mental capacity on caring about food, taking pictures and showing them to their mates and so on. I sort of ventured that it might be good to know about wine and probably muttered something about how it might be an interesting thing which could bring its own rewards but he just brushed that aside, spoke eloquently and at length about how bourgeois thinking about wine and food was. Basically we were awed into submission by this incredibly knowledgeable superman who knew what was important and what wasn't. I was on the verge of changing my diet to brown rice every day, adding the bare number of flavourless nutrients necessary to stay alive. I was gonna take up boxing or something and I definitely was not gonna learn anything about wine... in fact I would make an effort to erase any of that worthless knowledge that I had accidentally picked up thus far on my journey through life and replace it with watching the three obscure Fassbinder films that I had still somehow not quite got round to. And I would do it as soon as I got home.
But then... I really don't know where this came from... but it felt as though he was crescendoing, as though after all this build-up Pedro was about to tie it all together, he paused as as though delivering his final, most important maxim, the key which would hold together all of his other grand theories in one mega-theory and reveal to us mere mortals the secret to truly being a man. Actually it literally was that in a sense, cos he said "If I had a small penis I would kill myself." - and I was kinda like..."Yeah man, yeah, so right... er, what?" He was "Yep... if you have a small penis you have to kill yourself. What is the point in living if you have a small penis?" - and a that point I did begin to question whether or not he should be my new guru, maybe he didn't totally have all of life's priorities figured out completely. Maybe we were just all on drugs.
So what I'm saying is, I suppose, I haven't learned about wine yet but I'm not ruling it out at this stage. And I'm not gonna kill myself.
