Luisito, bloggies; Bloggies, Luisito

Oh, I'm sorry. How rude of me.

You haven't been properly introduced, have you?

Bloggies, this is Luisito.

Luisito, meet the bloggies.

Luisito and I met at a bar called La Carboneria where I used to hang out as a study abroad student in the Spring of 1998. People laugh when I tell them that here, because it's just so typical. La Carboneria can be a magnet for tourists, but locals like it too. Of course we met there. Of course we did, where else?

The first time I met him we were standing in front of this piano:

(I have no idea who the dude in the picture is)

It was a cozy little place, that bar.

There was never a cover charge and there was always live flamenco; real, hard, it's-an-acquired-taste flamenco, not the watered-down touristy version. You could smoke hash and nobody cared, and that we did. There was cheap wine to be drunk and people watching to be done, and oh, much Spanish to be learned.

I met Luisito through his younger brother, who, truth be told, I had a mad crush on but who kept telling me, "my brother plays guitar, you know. He's a wonderful guitar player...my brother this and my brother that..." And then one day he dragged this famous brother to the bar to meet me. Luisito walked in with his messy hair and his wrinkly Pearl Jam t-shirt.

That night he jokingly asked me to marry him. I jokingly said yes. I internally tried to reconcile the fact that I liked Pearl Jam with the fact that I thought I was too cool to like Pearl Jam.

Fast forward five years to 2003 and we were not-so-jokingly married, and the fact that I used to have a crush on my brother-in-law had become just bizarre.

Luisito is messy; he has messy hair. A lot of times he has a stained shirt, and his pants are all scuffed up on the bottom and fuck, why is he wearing those shoes? Where did he find them? I thought I threw them out. He has a slight unibrow that, on grounds of not giving a shit, he refuses to groom. He has relatively small hands that are perfect for a small-breasted woman. He has strong arms and not a lot of hair - but the hair on his chest forms a perfect Iberian Peninsula. He's not tall and thin like his brothers nor does he wear perfectly laundered clothes made in Italy like they do, but he is the most handsome of anyone in his family. He inherited the best of his mother and father's features, melded into a beautiful face; his mothers large brown Moorish eyes and perfect nose, his fathers large lips, while his brothers did not inherit such harmonious combinations, rather getting their father's enormous nose and small eyes and their mother's crooked teeth.

But, see, all I've done is describe a container.

Today we drove home from his hometown where we were visiting over the weekend and during the ride home Luisito spoke to me about containers and contents of containers and the sharing of the contents of containers.

He said that there are artists that are containers; for example musical groups that have the look, the demo where every track is perfectly executed. The marketability is there, the technical know-how has been made available, the money has been spent to churn out something likeable.

But you're not allowed to open the container.

You're not allowed to take away the sound technicians, the photographers, the just-so-care-free looking attire to see what is left. You are not allowed to remove what is money-driven, fame-driven or just plain driven by desperation for acceptance. The containers are tip-fucking-top, but there is no going deep and pulling out what's inside them.

The reason why you are not allowed to open the container is not usually because there is nothing in there, or because what is in there is rotting cabbage that has been left in the fridge for two weeks that could have been good but nothing was done with it.

Usually you are not allowed to open the container because of a lack of generosity. Maybe the containers don't know how to share their contents.

There are some artists, musicians, writers, whatever, that never hold back on any piece. They never say, "I don't want to run out of material, so I'm going to save this idea for my next piece, my next painting, my next post, my next album." There are those that put everything they fucking have within their soul because they know that creativity is not finite, but rather it expands when it's used with the whole heart. I don't know if this is the same as genius or if it takes this generosity for a genius to make themselves known.

So, my friends, meet Luisito. He's a slightly roughed up tupperware container, with a fucking five star gourmet dinner inside. And I'll lick the tupperware clean, because he's willing to give away all the contents anytime anyone opens his container. He doesn't save a morsel for himself, within himself. In every single thing he does, in every song he writes, in every project he works on, in every meal he makes, in every other human or animal he relates to, he pulls his whole heart out and just hands it to anyone and doesn't want any of it for himself.

He's never once held back.

Someday I want to say that I got to the point where I did the same.

I'm still learning, honey.

Eventoblog054 by JuanJaen from Flickr.
Eventoblog 081 by Juan Jaen from Flickr.
Luisito by Blues 2008.
Luisito and Blues circa 1998.

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