Hey Paul, Are You Rolling?

I miss Santa Cruz.  I miss the serenity.  I miss the look of traffic with no new cars in it.  I miss the free bread, the preciousness of sunshine, milf-o'clock at Kelly's, Marlee and the saffa, the Hippy, the Monst, the 903, the Lane, west cliff - and east cliff, I guess.

Is life so nonchalant?  I guess?  Yeah, I guess.  So the metro bus in my face so reminds me.  Washington and Pacific, I guess.  I miss the serenity.  The calm on the morning sea.  The brisk sunlight and the morning breeze.  Those mornings, after nights hard slept, with that yoke of reality on my shoulders and in my mind, heavy on the breath.  Those winds, soft as they were, pushed that yoke off, past the mind and the breath, off-shore and out to sea.  To the edge of the bay with the rest of an ominously puffy and low marine layer, like a little patch of sunny coastline that escaped the morose grasp of cloud cover consuming the California coastline that winter day.  I looked towards the lighthouse, which was visible, but the massive fog front had swallowed the pier behind it.  That day I truly understood the devote passion of ancient sun worship.  It calms the mind and ignites the skin; enchanting, that little cove town.  Enchant me again LA.  Push away this haze in the day, rest my soul and find me on my feet, always marching on, past norcal living towards the future, not looking back, just remembering fondly, eyeing that sunset on a light breeze to the horizon's not muddied by this growth on the coast.  The sky lights up like an acid trip and everything before me becomes a perfect silhouette.  I'll be waiting with baited breath as this place slowly becomes familiar again.  For better or for worse.

[piss break]

Ralph Steadman did Santa Cruz

I miss Santa Cruz.  I miss the serenity.  I miss the look of traffic with no new cars present.  I miss the free bread, and milf-o'clock at Kelly's French Bakery.  I miss Marley and the Saffa.  The Hippy.  The Monster.  The 903.  The Lane and West Cliff (and East Cliff too, I guess).  I guess?  Is life so nonchalant?  I guess?  Yeah, I guess.  So the metro bus in my face keeps reminding me.  That's Washington and Pacific for you, I guess.


I miss the serenity.  The calm on the morning sea, the brisk sunlight and that morning breeze.  Those mornings after nights hard slept, with that yoke of reality weighing on the shoulders and mind, breathing heavy and anxious.    Those soft morning winds always had a way of pushing that yoke up and over, past the shoulders.  Past the mind and the breath, off-shore and out to sea, to the edge of the bay with the rest of an ominously low and puffy marine layer.  And when I looked around and at where I was sitting, it was a bit queer, like a little patch of sunny  coast that had escaped the morose grasp of cloud cover consuming California's shoreline that winter day.  I looked towards the lighthouse, which was visible in the distance, but the massive fog front had swallowed the pier behind it.  That day I truly understood the blind devotion of ancient sun worship.  It calms the mind and turns the skin into something living once again.


Enchanting, that little cove town.  Enchant me again, LA.  Push away this haze in the day, rest my soul and find me on my feet, always marching on, past NorCal living towards the future and not looking back.  Just remembering fondly, eyeing that sunset over the Pacific, and with high clouds and a light breeze so the horizon's not muddied by our burning, blazing existence down south.  Then the sky lights up like an acid trip and everything before you becomes a perfect silhouette.

Quote of the Day: Don't Bother With Boring

"The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing but burn, burn, burn like fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'"
~Jack Kerouac

Tall Man

Where is this going.  And what have I to show for it.  A shallow grave.  It's a song, a little banjo ditty by The Tallest Man Alive.  It's where I am, looking up, seagull V's catching the eye.  The sun at my back and my shadow before me.  And the light late-afternoon breeze coaxes the grass to dance among the still ivy.  All those serene white-sailed silhouettes are pointing to port.  The ocean in the bay is calm.  No swell, just that texture going off towards that hazy horizon, with Monterey looming in the distance.  It's just idling by, life, and I don't see it's direction.

I just feel it in my bones, in my legs looking south.  Towards the future, towards something else, away from this quagmire, this place of reckoning and tenacity.  Drag this tired body home to the familiar.  The nostalgia, the waking dream of LA.  I'll bring by grave with me and I won't be found.  Just sit in it cross-legged, eyes at ankles and watch the feet go by.


Amuck in the absence.
Get up.

[getting up]

Amsterdam: Storm Coming

We talk to Katinka and agree to meet her back in front of the station.  It's now mid-afternoon, and to put it subtly, the station is now quite a scene.  Like something off a grainy television news broadcast in the 1980s. What a difference a couple of hours at the park can make.  Amsterdam had been a ghost town when we'd first arrived early this morning and now this.  It seems as though every Dutch nationalist in Europe is now gushing into the city via the train terminal it seems.  Pouring out of the main gates towards the city center.  An orange mass with no end and no beginning, bustling by with a commotion of chants and cheers and vuvuzelas.  Orange smoke rises from flares held high amongst all matter of banners and signs and pretty Dutch girls on shoulders.  Amsterdam police stand idly by, trying to look professional and not as ecstatic as the rest of their fellow countrymen.  Why? It's in the job description, I guess.  They're still all smiles though.  I mean, after all, under those uniforms and silly hats, they're still Dutch.  And man, let me tell you; the Dutch are among the nicest people you will ever meet, ever.  Should you chance to meet them that is.

Katinka picks us out of the crowd and rides up to us, smiling of course.  Brief introductions, hugs (at this time, I somehow manage to drop the sunglasses I'm wearing and at the same time step on them, but that's not really important).  Katinka's English is perfect, something about as commonplace in Holland as a bicycle.  Katinka's bicycle, on the other hand, is a piece of shit.  A smart buy, she tells us, as most of the nice cycles get stolen.  Since we don't have our own bicycles, Katinka takes us on a metro line that shoots us right down Van Hallstraat, her street.  She lives in the northern outskirts of the city where all the buildings look the same.  Same number of stories, four (or maybe five).  Same faded brick facade.  Same doors.  Same windows.  Same strange hook at the tippy-top of each window column.  When the bus slows and stops at our stop, Katinka makes a bee-line for one of the dozens of identical doors on the block, and we follow.  She lives with her sister in a third-floor flat that can only be reached by navigating a rather skinny and curious case of stairs that coils its way around and up, past other flat doors and seemingly random short ledges in the ceiling.  The stairs are short and steep and have many sharp corners, and it dawns on me that it must be impossible to move anything bigger than a chair into a flat this way.

"That's what the hooks outside are for," informs Katinka.  "When we are moving, we move the big things - couches, tables, beds, things like that - we hoist them up with pulleys."

I know at this point, I'm shit-tired, both from walking around in the stifling heat with that heavy pack on my back, and from just a general lack of nourishment and proper hydration.  And we're still kinda high, so that whole pulley system blows. My. Mind.  Her flat follows in step with the stairway.  One skinny, tall hallway that runs to the back of the building.  Two small bedrooms.  A quaint living room.  The kitchen is actually in the hallway towards the back, with the refrigerator, the sink, and the stove all pushed into one wall before the back patio.  The bathroom's just as intriguing.  The shower, sink, and toilet all share the same, small tile floor.  The only thing distinguishing the parameters of the shower is the presence of a simple shower curtain cutting the room in half.  Again, my mind; blown.  It reminds me of the bathrooms on Mike's sailboat back home, except now they aren't in a boat setting, they're in a house setting.  I guess if you live on a boat, this probably isn't all too exciting, but on the flip side, the tiny palaces we call bathrooms in the US would probably rock your socks off.  And I bet bidets would just make your head explode (messy) or implode (impossible, but at least not that messy), or whatever better conveys a sense of shock and awe.

It is that mindset that we have currently found ourselves in.  So we smoke another spliff out on the back porch past the kitchen.  It overlooks a central courtyard of the building complex surrounded by about a hundred units just like Katinka's, and there is a netting that hangs down from the top of the building to the bottom so that when you look out, your eyes first focus on the netting before adjusting to the backdrop. I assume it's to keep trash from being flung into the courtyard, but it also gives the place a caged feeling that might very well agitate a claustrophobic.  There's not much about the flat that would appeal to a claustrophobic, come to think of it.  However, none of us are claustrophobic, to my truest recollection; we're just stoned, so we soak it all in.  The audacity of the moment, we relish it.  Back in California, our friends are trudging along.  Mike's cranking out some summer school classes in Santa Cruz, Taylor and Dylan and Kam are all busy at work in the City, each week their eyes looking always to the weekend, towards some base excitement and thrill at the end of each weekly tunnel to gun it through.  That light that we're all running towards in our lives.  Grant and Max and I are basking in it.  Under that glaring gloom of cloud-cover and behind the jailhouse netting, we're basking in it with a spliff fiddling between our fingers.  We're a mere five days in and smiling high at the sheer length of this trek before us.

Katinka is not high, nor does she smoke even.  She tells us that most Dutch citizens don't actually, and that it's seen more as a tourist attraction.  Something you do when you're fourteen, but now it's just more of a novelty.  Maybe more so for her.  Katinka's in graduate school on the road to receiving two masters degrees.  Insane.  That must cost a fortune.  "And you're working too?" I ask.

"No, just school right now."

"That's insane.  So your parents are paying for school?"

"What?"  She's genuinely shocked.  And then there's that look in her eye of vague recollections becoming less vague, like someone remembering a funny joke.  "Aha, that is right, haha!  You Americans pay so much money for schooling!  This is crazy! No one pays for school here!  It's free."  Oh, the devils of socialist society.  "The government gives me money to live while I'm a full time student as well so I don't need to work."

I can see my father sitting in the back of my head telling me it's not all whistles and rainbows.  Don't think for a second their country's not facing a big ole' mound of debt as well.  And their unemployment, why it's higher than ours is.  Really?  Truth.  But hey, we Americans aren't ones to talk right? And what've we got to show for it?  World presence?  I guess.  As Katinka's goes on in perfect English about all the gleaming pillars of Dutch society, one can't help but think of the alternatives.  So we're both in debt, sure.  But everyone here in Holland is super smart.  Everyone speaks two or three languages.  Katinka told us we'd be hard pressed to run into a Dutchman or Dutchwoman that didn't speak English fluently.  And so it is.  There's not one episode of a language barrier in Holland.  And for the first time in my life, I truly feel like a stupid American.

It's sort of something that just slaps me in the face.  We meet up with a bunch of Katinka's friends on the lawns out in front of the bar where we're going to watch the Final.  A canal runs between the lawn and the street, and we walk up to a group of five or six Dutchies talking Dutch, drinking beer.  They're all smiles, dropping their conversations, introducing themselves in their polite English, casually.  There's the small talk attributed to excited young foreigners meeting, talk of the game.  They talk to us in English and to their fellow countrymen in Dutch and they don't miss a beat, back and forth, to the point of almost nonchalantness. Well, as nonchalant as one can be before watching their national team compete in the World Cup Finals.

The experience unfolding around us easily puts all American sports gala events to shame.  Practically all of Holland is in Amsterdam for the game, donning varying amounts of orange attire.  The entire city is orange, and the lawns and surrounding bars are packed, sweating orange.  To my effort, I'm sporting my trusty orange flannel which seems to suck the sweat out of my pores. Max had bought a bright orange shirt with the national emblem on it, and somehow, somewhere found this dutch maiden's cap with fake pigtails and orange ribbons.  And well, Grant has his mustache.  We fit right in, squeezed between a couple of Dutch girls on the stairs in this packed brick warehouse bar with a hundred other Orange fans.  Spain's national anthem plays, and then Het Wilhemus, the national anthem of Holland.  It's in Dutch, shocker, I know.  So we don't know any of the words, which is a bummer.  That doesn't mean we don't sing our over-heating heads off at full volume, trying to keep tone in the beginning before just shouting ecstasy and exultation headlong into the thunderous, drowning chorus of an entire nation together as one.  In the bar, our mix-up, our little charade, is a drop of rain in a hurricane.  It's everything that sport ever is, or has been, or ever will be hopefully.  They show helicopter footage of Dam square and the massive expanse is covered in an orange blanket two million strong, so dense, so thick that the whole thing, from the air, has the appearance (to a drunk American) of some miraculous orange singing garden at the palace of the King.  It's beautiful.  Exciting to the point that my hairs all stand on end, and like a flower I feel it suck in that thick intangible hanging heavy over Amsterdam, walking hand in hand with the hot summer afternoon, the smell of spilt beer and sweat and passion and joy and an incredible anticipation, the likes of nothing I think I've ever felt before.  The anthem finishes, but everyone just keeps singing to full lung capacity.  By this point, Max, Grant, and I are just jumping and jumping, holding on to our beers and each other's shoulders, yelling, "jaaaa, JAAAA! JAAAAAAA!" through chokes of ecstatic laughter.  The players jog to their positions and for the life of me I can't remember who's kicking off.  Like it matters.  There's a silence as the referee raises his whistle hand.  We all look at each other.  Our faces are dripping with sweat and beer.  Grant's and my hair have been reduced to wet mops.  Even Grant's mustache is sweating.  Max's lush, plush locks are heavy with beer.  We don't seem to mind.  Pure joy cakes our faces, like little kids on Christmas morning, only drunk.  That's what it feels like anyways.  Drunk Christmas morning (not to be confused with hungover Christmas morning).  And already things are beginning to sway, yet, miraculously, we each manage to catch the other two dead in the eye at the same time.  Hands tighten on the shoulder and we nod in agreement.  "Good call, guys."  And the whistle blows.

Forms

There's crusties in the corner of my eyes so they're slow to open.  I've never been one for dreaming (like I really have a say in the matter), so mornings like these are usually greeted with an empty mind.  And an empty mind is always quickest to fill.  So what's the first thing to seep into consciousness?  Why, it's her of course.  Who?  Her.  The universal her.  The epitome of the gender opposite as it pertains to me, and she has three faces.  But not really.  Just two.  Smiling, laughing, frowning, and bitter.  Just one to be true, because truly, credit is to be given to the hollistic power of feminine beauty, and a beauty's ability to layer.

(continued)

For instance, now.  This moment.  Despite all intensities of focus, an empty espresso cup standing idly by, I still find myself uncontrollably intrigued by what seems to be God's latest attempt to boast his prowess to me at creating perfection in the feminine form.  When the Greeks talked about form, or the elemental form, it was an idea at it's basest, most true and perfect definition.  Something that everyone and everything strived for consciously, unconsciously, throughout their entire existence.  Every rock trying to be and look like the most elemental form of a rock.  The rock that everyone thinks about when they think about the idea of a rock.  Every tree wants to be that tree that we see ourselves sitting under on a hot's summer's day in our mind's eye.

The problem for that tree and that rock is that is that they can never achieve this.  Out of all the trees in the world, but one is the tree I see.  The first tree that flashes to me, across my waking thought, I see.  I don't even know if it's a real tree I see.  Perhaps one from the past, or one from a dream.  Some people think they know their tree.  But presently, that tree is not the tree it used to be.  The tree they remember, the tree they see.  That tree is long gone, and even so more longs to be seen perfectly.  As that form.  The tree that we always see, awake or dreaming.  The tree it used to be.

The problem for humanity is that this is all in our mind.  And when I look up again, I see it.  Perfection writhing low so that her shoulder blades push hard and pivot around the front edge of her chair.  Her neck's arching to see whatever nonsense she and her companion are studying.  And as she stretches and slides lower like the prettiest of metronomes, the bottom of her tight black tank catches, letting an angel's lower torso and rib inking breath in the slight breeze and sunlight air.  Her hips thrust as she stretches, only to slide down again lower back onto her heels with her knees bent.  And in yoga pants?  Why, God?  Why?  Is that a little nose piercing right above your nostril?  Stop it.  Please.  How's one ever to focus.  One more glance.  She's brown-eyed and smiling.  And she can probably sense my aggravated distraction the way bears smell menstruation.  Who studies like that?  Unless she's one of those souls truly aroused by knowledge.  I guess it could also be the coffee.  Wait, no.  Every one here has coffee.  She's the only one I see hip-thrusting in her table space.  It must be the knowledge.  And the yoga pants.  And I think shes older than me, but not by much.  'Tis cruel this God of mine, but more humorous I think, delighted by happiness and in love with beauty.  Beauty in everything.

But by now, I'm used to her games.  And as I think back, that awful sense comes over me that this is an event of marked regularity.  To be used to her games, to that blooming distraction.  Ugh.  Such a thought of stark realization.  It's something one tries not to dwell on, lest one wants to loose the wind in his sails.  The somberness of the situation, and the reality of Greek philosophy.  That the perfection that drives us is never achieved, no matter how many times it's chanced upon or observed.  And it's not just aesthetic.  The beauty of appearance is only an ingrained filter.  Beautiful perfection is so much more.  It's in a dream or locked in a memory.  Something that will never be present, just always over the next ridge, or back behind the last one.  Take a deep breath, and try to forget all this.  Ignorance is bliss.

Amsterdam: Werthimpark

After much ado and one or two wrong skinny alleyways, Grant finally GPS's our way to a green patch on the map, a park we're hoping.  And a park it is.  A quaint, little gated thing shored on one of the canals.  We make our way to some shade under a tree by the canal, and we shed our packs with pack-mule exultation.  It's not 11:00 yet, and already we're short-winded and sweating our balls off.  Maybe it's all the still-water canals and all the muggy hours of sunshine, or maybe it's just the Nordic countries, but Amsterdam is humid as fuck.  Moisture clings to the skin in a way that doesn't look like sweat, but instead like some heavenly gloss applied by the gods so that everyone's skin glows in the sunlight and everyone is just that more beautiful.

But presently, that isn't the matter of our focus.  We're in Amsterdam.  We've had our breakfast and purchased four grams of marijuana from the bartender at a corner shop.  We'd ordered off the menu.  And now, finally, pack-less, our toes frolicking in the damp, humid grass by the canal, it's time to indulge.  Grant does the honors, rolling a beast of spliff while Max and I give our legs a stretch with smiles and giddy anticipation plastered on our faces.  Some toe-touches, some side lunges, no big deal.  It's the middle of July, the dawn of the World Cup Finals, and we're in Amsterdam.  In the face of our total lack of pre-conceived planning, we're here.  And Grant's done rolling the spliff.  So now what else are we to do, other than lay back and watch the sky change behind the tree branches.  As the spliff makes it's rounds, we go silent and the music from that tiny little speaker on my iPhone is now somewhat audible.  It's a couple tracks by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros I think.  And I think I wiggle my toes in delight.  And when I look down at them, the canal comes into view and the jolly Dutch boat-owners mozy on by in their water-bound carriages down the parade circuit that is their life, ever amused by their slowly changing audience of spectators.  Thank goodness for safety goggles.  The fade on my white sunglasses make head-bobbing an entirely new experience, as the trees and clouds above get darker and then lighter, and then darker again to the meter of a slow, slow metronome.  But always, everything is bluer and mine eyes a mystery.  God, I love these sunglasses.