Drugstore Gaucho

This is a Facebook message I wrote to a friend who was thinking about moving to Buenos Aires himself. It's funny how I respond much better to prompts than to total freedom. I blame education. Sam old buddy, howdeedoo, Funny you should ask a question that is so eminently on my mind. Regarding your questions, BA is exactly how I remember it. Kind of a pain of the ass, kind of great. The moneda situation has been rememdied, the people are still short tempered, it's still over crowded and a pain to get around anywhere. The primary difference would be my economic standing now that I'm here under my own power and, more importantly, earning in pesos. But even from a dollar perspective, the city is a little rough. Inflation has struck the city pretty hard in our absence, and food prices have also risen pretty extremely. Whereas before, on the dollar, I always said that Buenos Aires was not cheap exactly, but a surprisingly good deal considering what you were getting, now it has mov...

Hey. Been awhile, Drugstore-fans, hasn't it? Right now, I'm sitting at the table in the kitchen of the same house that I was staying in when we last met. It was somewhat freezing when I woke up this morning in the concrete box of mine on the roof, so I went to where I am now to seal up the kitchen and use the oven, thereby creating my own personal summer. I'm making banana bread, that wonderful method by which my mother prevented the waste of bananas. Of course, here, they don't recognize this as bread, so much as they recognize is as "budin," which I take to be somehow related to pudding. The nice thing about that is that it does give lie to the idea that banana bread might somehow be healthy, being that it is not, containing more sugar than all of the export of the Dominican Republic. I have successfully completed what I imagined to be the 0th and 1st stages of my plan here in Buenos Aires. In stage 0, I came to Buenos Aires, resumed with most of my old cont...

There's so much to say. Where have I been, what have I been doing? I know you'd like to know, or you wouldn't be reading. . How I wish I could Twitter every little inane thought that comes into my head and every strange happening that happens to me. For instance, the other day, I read about the saying here, its free to dream or dreaming is free, or whatever. And then I halfway managed to execute the phrase with one of my housemates and he taught me to use it more better. Then yesterday, I bought a scratchpad to write on and I remarked to myself that to dream is free, but to write it down costs 5 and 1/2 pesos. The last month or so has been so totally dedicated to finding a job and getting an apartment/place to stay. I like to think that I did good job exerting myself towards the goals, a commendable effort when its so difficult to chart progress. I often thought or writing a blog post solely about doing these things in Buenos Aires. I guess you're looking at the paragra...

"To a foreigner, a Yankee is an American. To an American, a Yankee is a Northerner. To a Northerner, a Yankee is a New Englander. To a New Englander, a Yankee is a Vermonter. To a Vermonter, a Yankee is someone who still has an outhouse." Everyone in a spanish speaking country has a nickname. Un apodo. So it seems, anyway. Mine is yankee. Except written yanki and pronounced shan-kee, due to the eccentricities of pronunciation here around the Rio Plata. Many people believe that this word is "despectiva" which I take to mean disrespectful. I tell them that it´s not and that the only time I´ve ever heard the word was mainly in the song Yankee Doodle, which does not cause me a feeling of disrespectedness, to say the least. Then I realized I´ve never really been to the South and I found this quote, which I assume to be something in general usage.  As a guy from the midwest, I said to myself self, huh, well I guess the word can refer to me. Now I realize that ...

Hello and welcome back. This blog is ready to begin in seriousness, once again, as I am back in America of South in the country of Argentina. This means a return to form in many ways, there will be a grand detailing of my adventures and misadventures, boring report of my success, hilarious recounting of my failure. There will be many awkward sentences that are born of a Spanish thought straying into my author´s consciousness and gumming up the flow as I awkwardly latinize words into existence that ought not to exist or throw phrasal verbs into the path of oncoming formal sentence structures, terminating in a little self-reference that hopes to excuse what is otherwise an unforgivable run-on? But what is different? Will it be different? Or will it be just more of the same DrugstoreGaucho, that dark-hatted figure, silhouetted in the doorway of adventure? The same guy that threw himself to the rapacious lions (first writing, loins) of the gay argentine dance club? That stalwart fellow tha...

Like I've said before, I've been at home lately--for more time than I have been since high school. I still consider myself an adventurer (and the real adventure will resume at the end of the month, Argentina bound) but I think I've been adventuring in new territory still, territory unused to the inquisitive stomp of my jackboots (purely figurative, I still wear flip flops everywhere). That territory is American society. Honestly, I would be skeptical of anyone that claims to be "adventuring" in their own society, but frankly my own interactions with nearly everyone and everything I come into contact to have such a sense of novelty and unfamiliarity it makes me recall vividly the experience of being in another country. On top of that, I am most definitely isolated from the bulk of society by my current living situation. I live by myself and can claim no strong connections to any of the social fixtures of society. I go to a jam session once a week where the other pa...