Beirupdate, self

J falls asleep at the bar on nothing but illness while a guy tells me about hashish in Lebanon and compares it to politics. Like a drug he says. A fear he says. A ten year-old boy knows more politics he says than you. Hitler he says wanted peace in his way. Ask anyone around the world. Even terrorists communicate a culture he says with bombs and threats and deaths and fear like selfhood. Meanwhile I work where wanderers fall, an English bar with football and Danish ale and Guinness. I work for my identity only and support a team no one knows and split the bar like a sword while J sings songs at home alone to echoes of rifle fire from moped thugs with reverb as though at war with houses. The next day we walk graffiti streets and disused carparks to the smell of piss before a call to prayer rallies a hundred men and we cross a sandbag walkway not unknown to northern France in nineteen seventeen. Martyrs Square sits inside highway tarmac and vandalized walls and bomb-shelter architecture. Of bulletholes. We answer the call among the shoeless others but as we enter the blue roofs and marble arches a van astrides the sidewalk all in earpieces and crewcuts and suits and Glocks away from which our gaze averts. A silence ripples the carpet all aligned in symbols as four women anonymize their selves behind a line of raised behinds. A clock tells all of time and a chandelier made of lies and lives and money dominates. We exit beneath a green man running through an open door. Later J gives a speech to a room full of hackers and lawyers about morality and theft and Aaron Schwartz while I meet a crazy with a United shirt who kisses and kisses and pushes me to be from England even though she’s never been. I make her vomit and the next day I steal from H&M but before I waltz I ask the guard for a pharmacy to buy own-brand rubber from which no one benefits.