Amsterdampened

Have you ever tried walking through a white cherry Icee? I did for a third of a fortnight.
This post aims to be as fragmented and difficult to navigate as the purported Venice of North, the gritty city whose grid's inspired by spiderwebs.

A-dam is bizarro Berkeley, if the latter's intellectual backbone were replaced by a mercantile one. It was a twisted sort of homecoming, meeting Dave (Minc) and Greg (Sherman) there, eating Mexican food at La Margarita and Rose's Mexican Cantina... Comfort food for us Angelenos. Watching Curb Your Enthusiasm for the first time, albeit huddled around an 8" portable dvd-player, could hardly seem foreign in any country.

Sights seen: Rijksmuseum, Pancake Bakery, Heineken Experience, Van Gogh museum, testament to a man who didn't decide to become an artist till 27, course he only lived a decade after that...

As a temporary expat (which doesn't exist), I've had Ernest Hemingway on the mind. Relatedly, the explosive passing of Hunter S. Thompson (a man who meant nothing to me when he was alive and holed up in his Colorado compound) has exerted some post-mortem literary pull on me .

He too idolized the way Hem lived and wrote, but unlike me, also the way he died (self-inflicted shotgun wound). Must creation always be so sacrificial?
Elana and I have had many conversations on the overlap between art and depression, but does the first really require the second?

It's all so predictable, and anyone/thing extreme (HST par exemple) is just dependant on and reacting against that paradigm. What needs to be prescribed is a proactivism, soberer and in better spirits than Hemingway or HST could provide...

In any case...

Amsterdamage

Soporific, torpid, corporate canal land of lotus-eaters,
Where the coffeeshop counters culture
And sensi seeds are no beanstalk’s beans
Cause Jack ain’t going nowhere.
Anne Frank's intact inside but has a different veneer
And Rembrandt’s brush whitens the mind’s teeth
I know little about Vermeer.
Of all the lowlands a crime rate of 0%,
Because nothing, neither evil intent nor accident,
Can smear your reputation when all exposure
Has been declared decent.