I AMsterdam... Who are you?

I don't know what to tell you about this place. There are no secrets here, only excuses to relieve the firm grip on reality.

And I'm clutching mine.

The people who come to Amsterdam are farm from beautiful. The tourist runs the city but this city will run you down. I'm not sure if these people know what they are doing but they flock to the city with backpacks filled with time and empty ambition. They stroll in with their dreadlocks and dollar sized earrings that expose gaping holes in floppy earlobes. They flood Centraal Station and pour into the streets. They seep their way to Dam Square. They loiter with guitars, hooked on hidden drumbeats only heard in their warping minds. They dress to impress their own style parading to the world a fashion of grunge meets goth meets Indie underground dance party.

I won't let myself fall in with the tourist crowd. I don't even pass the dress code at the door. Maybe one day I could turn my back on humble clothing and devote my attention to the traveller's chic black tastes.

But this would take years to complete the transformation from "collage boy casual" to the uniform of the Damists. I would need to stock pile weeks and months of facial hair and then carefully select what unique figure i could create.
A lightning bolt? Racing Stripes? Eurotails? Quite frankly, I do not have the time to grow a beard and it makes me itch.

I would need piercings galore. One through my lip, another along the bridge of my nose, and four more scattered through out the Netherlands of my body. But this would fear into my simple little life. Suddenly walking becomes a hazard. These little metallic knobs become landmines, accidents waiting to happen. What would happen if the hidden piercings were to get tangled in fishing wire or snagged in my clothes resulting in the severing or tearing certain unmentionable members.

As for tatoos. One is not enough. I would have to be littered with meaningful images like the virgin Mary, my son, or a jumping Japanese fish.

Enough said...

But those are just the Dam tourists. The Dutch are lovely people. Tall as you would never believe, with blond hair and light blue eyes. And here I am in peasants clothing and a head of hair that has not been this long for roughly 14 months.

I don't stand out but I'm not a part of their jigsaw...

People don't make eye contact in the big cities. London and Paris were too wrapped up in their own history that they keep rolling along. The sun sets and the neon lights wake up the tired lives. People pour out of the Underground or Metro and flood the streets but not like the Dam tourist. No, these folk have lives. They are managing their life (something the Dammers will learned to do five, maybe ten years down the line).

The city streets criss-cross canals and endless rows of crooked houses. Everything leans. This city is like a demented version of Disney's Toon Town and with the right kind of drugs you can recreate the cosmic colours of the magic kingdom.

The Dutch whizz by on bicycles built for getting from A to B. They do not notice the cracks in the streets or the people walking down the designated bicycle lanes. They are stoic faces speeding across bridges, talking on their mobile phones, reaching for their briefcase or purse, adjusting a bra, all while pedalling their soviet designed bicycles. You can tell that a factory has pumped out millions of these utility bicylces.

Amsterdam is a bike cemetery and the canals are their graves.

This is an evident problem around the city. They have managed to find solutions. Large ditch diggers operated by a long flat boat reach in and scoop up any solid debris. Giant mechanical arms pull out bicycles and pieces of cars everyday. It is a sight to see my friends.

Everything is a sight to see. This whole continent screams "look at me!" But when we turn to look all we see is some guy slumped in a chair smoking on a cigarette asking "Why me?"

An older man told us off the other day. He had been drinking for days and sleeping on the very same bench where he was sitting. His blond hair was aged and the stubble on his face declared that he had given up on his public appearance. The empty Heineken cans added to the decor of the cobbled stoned street. He hated his life and condition but he could not transgress his thoughts to turn his life around.

For him it was too late. The only thing he had left in the world was his ability to interact with his surroundings. And so he chose to interact with our tour group. The man sputtered something in Dutch. A cry that could have gone unheard. He spoke again, this time more direct. With anger and disgust he sputtered out more words, this time understandable to the majority of the group.

"Go home," he cried in broken English. "Go back to your airplane, back home. You ruin this city. You are not welcome here."

The man was thoroughly disgusted with all of us standing in front of the roadside statue. All he saw was 30 tourists (not the Dam tourist) making a mess of his country, inhaling on all the vices Amsterdam has to offer. This was an interaction between two polar opposites; the "haves" vs. the "have nots."

At the digression of our tour leader, the 'haves' released a communal 'boo' in retaliation for the man's drunken intolerance. I kept quite. I could relate to what the man was saying but I was not condoning his verbal attack. Our public shaming managed to break his morale but you could tell that his spirit had been broken years prior...

It was a scene that became epic in my life, even though I had nothing to do with it. I was there watching in a city built around tolerance and social freedoms.

The Golden Age of the Netherlands is so far gone but for some reason it's still pressing in my mind.