The saying goes that you’ll never meet your future wife in a bar and I think there’s a lot of truth in that, but man-o-man, if I had to write a list of all the twisted, crazy fuckers who’ve ended up being great friends that I met in bars, it would be a goddamn mile long!
Mr D was one of those fine, upstanding maniacs (read this story as proof). I met him on a night when I was playing a gig in Grahamstown. He was knocking back a pint of stout and eyeing the bar like at any minute he might pull a knife out and lay into someone for making eye contact, so naturally I walked over and started up a conversation with the man.
We struck up a friendship that I regard as a personal best based on the acres of common ground we shared through the bands we listened to, the questionable literature (mainly comic books) and movies we were into and our common appreciation of the whisky-drinking, hard-living, party-loving legacy artists like Jim Morrison left as an example for us mere mortals to live up to.
And man-o-man, did Mr D and I live it up. We eventually worked as barmen at the same dodgy-assed pizza joint where our only mission from one shift to the next was to see just how drunk we could get without passing out / getting fired.
Those were the old days, the bad days, the all or nothing days. It was blood for blood by the gallon and we were ready for war 
Over the years we went our separate ways. Mr D now teaches English in Korea, but recently we’ve been able to stay in contact thanks to the blog site he started, Mindgun.
The man is a killer photographer and actually worked as a staff photographer for The Argus (among other papers) in Cape Town before he left for Korea.
His mission with Mindgun is to take a picture everyday and write a couple sentences / paragraphs about it so his photographic muscle doesn’t atrophy while he’s over there.
I’ve thrown in a couple of my favourites below and as you can see, he’s no slouch behind a lens.
He’s a great writer and an even better shooter so his site gets my full recommendation as an awesome place to stop by when you have a minute. It’s also pretty fascinating to read about Korea and his experience of it from the cuisine (pig spine soup and dog penis fish) to its culture and history and Mr D is right in the thick of it, guns blazing, writing about what he sees in the only way he knows how – with 100% unashamed honesty.
So be a pal and bookmark the man’s site, you’ll be a better person for it.
Otherwise have yourselves a killer weekend party people, I’ll see you all same time, same place on Monday.
Until then
-ST
Russians are a weird bunch at the best of times. The only first-hand experience I’ve had of them was when J-Rab and I were in Thailand on an island tour with about 30 of them in a speedboat with us.
