As I write these lines the editor of this column is preparing his birthday party. I won’t be able to go since my daughter is coming from Santiago, but from what we see, it will be an event with a live DJ band and the best food in the area. Good!
I like to celebrate my birthday. I love that everyone eats well, looks healthy and enjoys the moment. I feel good blowing out the candles and watching how the manga drinks, dances, laughs and forgets about the damn problems that this capitalist society has us involved in, where without money you are worth a ton. Anyway.
As I write these lines the editor of this column is preparing his birthday party. I won’t be able to go since my daughter is coming from Santiago, but from what we see, it will be an event with a live DJ band and the best food in the area. Good!
The Chilean and the Buenos Aires, especially, is bitter in its essence. “I don’t like celebrating my birthday. I prefer to spend that date alone and lock myself in the room. “I’m not here to spend money,” are part of the arguments to avoid confrontation with time, that damned time that defines us as beings and that is the only valid and current god.
I have celebrated my birthday in various ways. My big dream is to rent a bus that leaves Plaza Victoria with 45 crazy people on it, on the way to the Pollo Cumbión restaurant in Santiago. We will taste alcohol and drugs, as a small aperitif. Afterwards we will have lunch with those large pots with the delicacies of that place and we will get back on the bus. The return to Valpo will be quatic, listening to Charly, Calamaro, Sumo and Los Jaivas, while I continue handing out flasks and hallucinogenic and stimulant substances. Let it be noted that it is only a dream. A dream and nothing else.
When I remember my birthdays I have certain mental blackouts. I remember one in my house, emblematic, with the bolero singer Demian Rodríguez singing at the table at the top of his lungs “el cabrón de la Subida Ecuador”. A philosopher friend, along with his partner, drank almost 10 bottles of sparkling wine that my girlfriend at the time had given me. They rolled towards Germany Avenue, after giving a powerful juice.
Journalist René Cevasco celebrated a crazy birthday at his parents’ house in Reñaca, more than twenty years ago. Rock bands played live, with amplification. I started playing with knives with my brother Leo Palacios, who ended up cutting my finger and bleeding throughout the party. The chocolate came out like tap water. He was wearing an FPMR t-shirt, which he had sent me to paint. Thank goodness that at that time there were no cell phones with cameras.
I remember Javi Luco’s birthday in Peñalolen, where we went out like a dream.
The ones at Soda, in Concón, where you could easily go out with a tattoo on your face.
Those of Manuel Lema in Peñuelas, where our children learned the importance of wine in Chilean festivals and we took some terribly chambray excursions. And wow, the kids enjoyed the crazy things we did. They were wonderful years, all in a school van, on the way to that lake, that lake that is dry, like the memory of many.
Celebrating is always good. And celebrating that one has passed, another year of life, is brave.
Happy birthday to my editor and may your party be a success.
I’ll start planning my birthday party now. Things are getting worse. I’ll turn 55, a respectable number, and we’ll have to throw something out of the window.
But with moderation, moderation, restraint and a lot of composure.
Where did you see her!
Absinthe, autumn 2024
