The Dublin Castle

While the singer went inside to talk to the promoter and give out our demo tape, I stayed in the pub and had a pint and a cigarette. Suddenly an American girl looks at me and asks if she could sit next to me. It was early afternoon and there were a lot of other free tables, so obviously she made a conscious decision to sit with me and talk to me and have a drink with me because I was cute or whatever.

However, when she tells the story, she didn’t even see me, but had already made up her mind to sit at the first empty table. She came to check out a band she read about on Time Out, and she was early and uncomfortable so she ordered beer even though she hated beer, and she sat at the first empty table, determined even when she found out the table wasn’t empty because she had already made up her mind and was self-conscious and had to sit down before she exploded, and the young man sitting there looked harmless enough.

She had just finished college and was taking time off before starting law school. Now, a few days earlier I put an ad for a roommate in a local store and at the bottom I wrote, “Law school students need not apply.” I’m not proud of it; it’s just that you get to meet so many of them and they’re all the same, going to law school because it’s a good, solid, respectful job, and most of them don't think for a second who they really are and what kind of world they want to live in.

But she was different. She wanted to go to law school because she sincerely felt that even though the world was in many ways a bad place ruled by bad people for bad reasons, anyone can make a difference, large or small in other people’s lives, and for her law school provided the opportunity to make the world a better place.

I was in love.

Later that evening my date showed up. Anyway, the three of us went for a walk by the canal in Camden Town, and we told jokes and stories, and then my date took a taxi back to the hotel and I married the American girl and moved here.