Making Friends
Making new friends in a new city can be a challenge. It seems to be one part luck and one part skill. Maybe you stumble into a solid crew or maybe you travel from one friend island to another in search for your Wilson. To the later, there may be some simple questions to determine if you need to raise the sails. For example, asking:
Do you have any food recommendations?
No recommendation is a big red flag here and certain recommendations are at least a yellow. Let’s say they follow-up your questions with one of their own, “Have you ever been to a Brazilian steakhouse?” To this end, the words being produced by this person start to become mumbled and slightly incoherent while you start taking stock into other characteristics. You notice this person is secretly jacked under that oversize t-shirt and aggressively interjects “fuck” into sentences where it doesn’t belong. You notice a picture of their family on the desk behind them and that their kids are not kids but adults. This person is like 50+ years old, but looks great! You start to think maybe the secret to youth is massive piles of endless meat until you put that little flag up. You decide, I’m going to a fuckin Brazilian steakhouse tonight! You leave the conversation for a new one and the search for friendship continues.
Tiki Culture
I can’t attest to being into tiki culture since I have no white-colored goatee nor enough tropical shirts, but I fuckin love music with animal sounds. I mean, someone goes to college for four years to audio engineer perfect bird sounds and I couldn’t thank them more. And they don’t just go willie nilly placing bird sounds everywhere, they thoughtfully arrange them among other jungle sounds and instruments. Maybe there should be an alignment of the conga drums with each bird bark as if the player is playing the beat on their little bird bellies. Then there is the type of bird sound cause there’s A LOT of birds out there. Maybe they go big with a long screech or maybe it’s more appropriate to have a quick, high pitch “caw!”. The possibilities are endless, and we’ve talked about birds so far. In some songs, if you’re lucky, you’ll get some non-tropical animals like a turkey or rabbit. So next time you’re sippin’ on a Jungle Bird or a Captain’s Grog, put some tiki tunes on the stereo, sit back, and imagine a pack of turkeys running through the Amazon. It’s a magnificent, pleasant thought and hell, we need more of those these days.
