Two Conversations

San José, Costa Rica

My last week in San José was kind of rough.

Dyan was understandably upset when I told her I was leaving in a week. She responded by trying to spend all her time with me and pushing me to express my feelings for her. I felt pretty bad, but I also started feeling less attracted to her.

The shitty math on love seems to be that the more you can't have somebody the more you want them. And the more someone throws themself pitifully at you the less you want them. I'm pretty good at being on both sides of that equation.

My relationship with Dyan ended with a bizarre text exchange we had while she was at work. She asked me to be honest and tell her if I fantasized about fucking Colombian women. I said, no, I actually don't fantasize about any particular ethnicity of woman.

She said that her friend had dated five foreigners in the past year and they had all left her to go fuck Colombian women. Her friend was probably right and she was probably just naive about men.

I said that I was sorry she was getting stressed about my hypothetical future love life, but that it was probably time to call it. She asked me to delete any pictures I had of her from social media, and we haven't spoken since.

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My last night in San José I went out with a couple Bay Area tech guys and drank expensive craft beers. We played Foosball and talked about craft beers, as hip tech guys are wont to do.

I myself avoid craft beers when I can and drink the local Budweiser. In Costa Rica that's Imperial. But sometimes you're upset about your love life and want to get drunk in whatever manner presents itself and sometimes that includes hip tech guys from the Bay Area who want to drink craft beers. C'est la vie.

The tech guys had an early bus to catch, so I stayed up without them at the hostel and had a vicious bizarre argument with a Londoner who had been skulking in corners of the hostel the past few days.

He was a black guy who looked to be in his late 20s, and he was an aspiring arms dealer. I'm not sure how being in Costa Rica was supposed to further that project, but it sounded like the main appeal of Costa Rica was that it was not London, where he had enemies.

The most coherent argument he gave me was that he wanted to sell guns legally so that the courts could force the people who owed him money to pay up. Sure, but why guns? That he could not answer honestly.

He gave me a bunch of justifications about how if he doesn't sell guns somebody else will and it's not his responsibility what people do with their guns. Yeah, but why do you want to sell guns?

I told him I thought it was a horrible goal to have in life, that arms dealing is one of the ugliest businesses in the world, that if he got off on the idea of guns and violence he may as well go find a gang to join, that there are easier less horrific ways to make money. In sum, that he and everything he stood for were bullshit.

We were of course sharing a dorm room together, and it did occur to me during the night that I had gone nose to nose with a self-proclaimed arms dealer and shat all over his business. Nothing came of it though. Ended up being just an ugly punctuation mark on my stay in San José.

In the morning I hopped on a bus and was gone.