JULY 19, 2017 // COMBAT BOOTS + FLORAL PRINTS

OSLO, NORWAY
I got to Oslo yesterday after staying up all night in Bodo the night before.  I hadn't realized how little I'd eaten in two days. Left my apartment with a weird hankering for Vietnamese food. Wandered around my new neighborhood and saw a "Lille Miss Saigon 1" w/ black and white artistic photos on the wall and a floor that looked like they never did anything to change it from its former self of being an empty retail space. 

Two Vietnamese ladies, one old, one young, were whispering to each other behind the counter.  I ordered a bahn mi sandwich from the young one and ate it like a heathen. Then I ordered another and ate slightly more slowly. I felt great afterwards and went for a long wander. I saw a huge waterfall going through the middle of the city where civilized rich descendants of Viking rapers were drinking a high quantities of two foot tall beers on a deck that was an impressive feat of carpentry right over the edge of the falls and out the back of a stereotypical Norwegian cottage built into the side of the little canyon. (Think red, steep and tall w/ ladders for stairs, black gabled roof, high amount of windows)

I did not dare partake in the deck life, as I could tell the atmosphere was very expensive. So I walked down the side of the little mountain trying to escape a former ballet dancer who crossed my path and stuck to it for some time.  She'd lost the confidence of her little dog due to drug addiction. I felt so sad for her which is my fault, and not hers. 

At the bottom of the descent I found a bar playing 70s rock and roll music by the side of a park that charged 4.50 for a pint, which is an anomaly is Oslo. There I sat on the sidewalk outside and listened to two Moroccan men angrily talk shit to each other and then bursting into hysterical laughter time after time.  Also, over the course of the two hours I sat on the side walk thinking,  I saw eight or nine attractive girls wearing narrow variations on an imaginatively tailored, floral printed dress and combat boots combination.
They passed by at intervals of every seven minutes or so.  When I waved at them, they would each wave back the same way and make the same face presumably that I was making, and then we would each start laughing. Near the end of this repeating phenomena, I saw some soccer toughs, and decided to test if I was dreaming.

The toughs were looking at me out of the window of a shiny, bright red bus and I waved at them. They waved back. I gave them a hang loose symbol. They gave it back. We all started laughing. As the bus pulled away the last in the procession of flower printed dress with combat boots girls arrived. She looked at me then through the window at the soccer toughs on the bus pulling away. She stood next to me and waved at the soccer toughs, all of us laughing very hard. She then pointed at me and walked a way while her friend dressed in leather looked on disapproving. 

Then a six foot eight inches tall, fierce faced, old man who was drunk and presumably worked at the bar limped over and picked up all the empty glasses from the Morrocan men's table where one of the jokesters had fallen asleep with a lit cigarette.  The giant piled the pint glasses eight glasses high, cradling them in his right arm, holding a crumpled, burning cigarette in his left. As he limped away I said "thank you" for some reason and the mask of all the winters fell from his face and he said "thank you, thank you." He then carried the glasses back into the bar where Graham Parsons was playing and the bartender was eating a pizza and talking on the phone. 

I didn't want to go, but thought it wise if I did and walked home.  Once back at my apartment I listened to baseball and ate grilled cheese before falling asleep for 12 hours straight. The room was hot and the air was still.