My friend Jim is in Argentina. I imagine I will get to Argentina around the time it ceases completely to be cool. Same goes for Berlin.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying Jim’s blog he’s writing with his boyfriend, Apio y Albahaca, and one post in particular is killing me: Food = Love. “Food = Love” comes, of course, from the late, great Chef Barton Rouse, who had such a wonderful influence on us all in our highly moldable years (thanks to Barton, I have a greater appreciation for chicken feet, orgies and manscaping).

And Barton would be proud that Jim’s writing a paragraph like this one:

When you’re well fed and boozed, life is just better. You become relaxed, gracious, magnanimous. You don’t speak, you enthuse. You don’t get up, you rise. You don’t burp onions, you exhale. And you don’t vomit – you certainly don’t vomit, even after drinking a ginger cocktail and two bottles of Malbec – because the red meat absorbs all the alcohol. You simply glide slowly toward the door, carefully avoiding steps and tables.

Bon voyage, Apio y Albahaca. I live vicariously through your meat-eating.