Life's Pleasures Quote by Santiago Durango

There is a whole scene compressed into that offhand confession: not the glamorized rock-star bender, but the scrappy, fluorescent-lit version where the intoxication is as much about economics as it is about escape. “Used to” does heavy lifting. It’s nostalgia with a wince, a way of marking distance from a past self without pretending it didn’t happen. The repetition of “very” turns the line into a half-laugh, half-shrug; you can hear someone telling the story with a smirk, undercutting any temptation to mythologize it.

The detail that lands hardest is “very cheap wine.” Drugs and alcohol are common currency in musician lore, but cheap wine pins the memory to a specific class reality: young, broke, and improvising pleasure. It evokes apartments with mismatched chairs, late-night rehearsals, and the kind of bonding that comes from having nothing but time, noise, and each other. The intoxication reads less like decadence than like self-medication and community-building, a low-budget way to turn boredom, anxiety, or ambition into something bearable.

Durango’s intent feels less confessional than documentary. He’s sketching authenticity by refusing polish. The subtext is that art scenes often run on a mix of hunger and anesthesia, and that the “good old days” are usually good because they were intense, not because they were healthy. The line functions as a tiny origin story: messy inputs, formative damage, shared mythology.