Origin Story

A standard Gazi night. A standard come and have a drink message from George and Sara. A standard walk to my favourite metal bar, The Intrepid Fox. It was a walk I’d done many times, to a bar I’d been to many times.

There is a somewhat callous statement that can be made about repetition:

Few tasks are more like the torture of Sisyphus than housework, with its endless repetition: the clean becomes soiled, the soiled is made clean, over and over, day after day. ― Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex

Of course, you need to replace clean with drinking delicious beer and soiled with listening to dope ass music, but in general the idea holds; doing the same thing repeatedly is somewhat bland. Except sometimes it isn’t, and boy oh boy was that night one of those nights.

Sara introduced me to her friend; Matthias; a large, long haired, imposing Austrian man of fantastic demeanor. Matthias told me he played in a band. We got drunk and had some slurring conversation about do you have vinyls? and I want a first press copy of all of them motherfucker. Being Gazi, we went back to the underground pool to continue drinking.

This was the inception of the Parko night, and boy oh boy will that post forever remain a placeholder. The important part is that we left to get supplies at ~3:00am (?) and didn’t get back until 12:00pm. By the time I got back home Matthias and company had left the underground pool to catch their flight back to Austria.

The general sense was that he was a cool guy, but life is full of meeting cool people randomly and having them fade; and whilst a tragedy such is the way the cookie crumbles.

The Reunion

Cut forward to 3 months later. I get a message on Instagram from the big man himself. At this point I was living in Bogota.

Well shit, I guess I’m staying now. And I did. Living internationally as a digital nomad (current nom de jour) gives one a certain level of autonomy about when and where you are somewhere; provided there are no pressing work commitments or visa issues. I had landed in Bogota the night beforehand, and whilst I didn’t intend to stay here and was going to head down to the more touristy stuff, I decided to see how this unfolded and camp out in Bogota until it was time.

A couple of things happened because of this fateful message.

  • I discovered that I love Colombia. I like it so much that I committed to learning the language (Spanish) as a way to show respect for the country. I’m not sure if I can describe this, but it makes sense to me 🤷‍♂️
  • Being in Bogota led to the great turning point in my life.
  • I went to a live gig for the first time in 2.5 years (thanks COVID) and I remembered how much I missed that shit.

Closing Thoughts

I stayed in Bogota because of a single message from a guy I’d met for a few hours one night. It turned out to be the event that started with me orientating my life correctly. In fact a large reason this blog even exists is because of that night.

I don’t believe in predetermined fate, but only the way in which as an individual you manifest opportunity and react to it. The psueo-intellectual cynics among us would say something like the opportunity cost of staying in Bogota might be really high you have no idea. Perhaps they are correct, but the problem with this way of thinking is that you remove the human experience from living, and its important to celebrate your personal feelings of victory despite the barren coldness of the universe.

Matthias = 🤙🤙🤙🤙🤙 (5 shakas of legend)