READY TO CONQUER THE WORLD

What does the average Dutch American multi-lingual middle-aged pipesmoker living in the Bay Area want when he gets home from Marin? I feel that I am in a position to answer that, what with being representative of the type. I want some coffee and not to talk to anyone for about twenty minutes at least.

See, I've started taking my daily amlodipine besylate at tea time. Late tea time. Around five o'clock. Which means that irritability -- always a factor because I am a rather ornery sort even at the best of times -- and painful aching of the pedal extremities both start kicking in on the bus, and I'm in a fragile AND horrible mood when I stumble off at around seven thirty.

On the plus side, I can fall asleep more easily now.

I was afraid I'd have to cut out coffee in the evening like a decrepit old limp biscuit, such as many of the people I know, but once I figured out that it was the bloodpressure pills, life improved considerably. There is a renewed glow to my mien now. Yay!

That cup of coffee after returning home gives me the vigour to go out and despoil continents, enslave their peaceloving nature worshipping peoples, dig mines with robots on one of the moons of Saturn, eat the dodo to extinction, and start a dinosaur farm in wildest Africa.
Netherlanders are men of blood: rebels, brigands, and incendiarists.

Also dumplings. Dumplings help immensely. My apartment mate got some dumplings from the new place around the corner, and they were very enjoyable. Dumplings are the new ramen. Everybody has discovered them now. White San Franciscan America has discovered them. Of course, the resident Toisanese speaker (apartment mate) and Cantonese speaker (multi-lingual Dutch American pipesmoker) already had great familiarity with dumplings ages ago -- we've always been ahead of the curve -- but this neighborhood now has dumplings within claws reach. So it's a considerable improvement.

This area is also known for the local donut place, a late night cult favourite, and as a Dutch American I feel somewhat responsible for the millions of people killed by too many fatty fried snackipoos for too many years. Heart disease, kidney failure, diabetes, sugar jag insanity, gout, and just sheer stupity. But proud too. Genocide is in our DNA. We taught the natives scalping for fun and profit, our kinfolk wiped out an entire island in the East Indies for sober business reasons, distant kin coined the term 'apartheid', and we introduced English settlers all over to edible food, bad beer (a direct ancestor of mine was brewmaster and miller in New Amsterdam), and sugar jags coupled with acid indigestion, both of those last mentioned being caused by donuts. Go ahead, eat an entire bag of them.

We also introduced gin to the English, and their society has not been the same since. Their urban working class found their lives enriched and enlivened by the new beverage and became an object lesson for societies around the globe.

Quite a list of achievements.

[NOTE: Demented old lady outside the donut place on my way home this evening. Quite an unprintable vocabulary. Calmly, clearly and very loudly enunciated. Intelligible for over a block. A credit to her ethnic group (white). Such diction! And she had made an effort to apply make-up before leaving the house today, not very well and certainly without sound judgement, but she believed in being presentable. Fit for the social hurly-burly. Probably needed a donut and a drink.]


We were quite "efficient" in Atjeh, Bali, Jawa, Suriname, and West Africa.
Caffeine and sugar had an awful lot to do with that.
La mission civilisatrice.



Afterword: much of this essay was inspired by someone recently accusing me of being a collaborator and accomplice of genocide because of my support for Israel. Okay. What of it? The Israelis are amateurs in that field. Rank amateurs! They are far too humane. We Dutch are professionals. The Levantine and Syrian Arabs wouldn't exist any more if instead of the British and Zionists, we had been involved. Nothing but sweating backs in sugar cane fields.

Anything else you want to blame me for?
I'll go Dutch on you.




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