A Bar from the High 210s (I of II): The customer next to me.

So the other week I went to this yuppie wine and beer bar in the gentrifying edges of the Puerto Rican neighborhood.

It was a very nice place, with a very nice, interesting craft beer selection (I know shit about wine and can't judge the winelist).

The bar was pretty full - 0nly 3 empty seats - and I took a place next to this mid-40s well-dressed (tanned white) gentleman at the bar.

After I got my drink, I started chit-chatting, and it turns out that he was a radical Catalan socialist who had been working the U.S. for like 14 years as a social worker employed with the city's public school system.

"Yes," he was like, "I am full of contradictions, I work for the state so one day there will be no state, when the workers own the means of production."

We talked for quite a while, and I asked him among other things about the Spanish prime minister Zapatero - "He has done some good things, but he is a tool of international capital" - and about the impending visit of the pope to Spain - "He is a fat pig with too much power."

He also told me that the Spanish Civil War was started by an uprising of the Catalan people, but history doesn't tell you that, and that for several years they had the only true socialist state that the world has ever seen.

Later, I asked him how he became a socialist, and if his parents were socialists, and then he started telling me about when he was 9 years old, and it was the time of year when gypsies came to his village to pick the olive crop.

"People made fun of them, 'They are so dirty, they are so filthy," but I feel sorry for them. 'Why?', they say, 'They are stealing!', and I thought, and I said, 'No, it is the land-owners who steal from them.'"