DON'T TURN IT ON

When I stepped out on the front steps I could hear someone coughing up a diseased lung somewhere to my right, and the sounds of empty beer cans and casual littering off to my left.
So I didn't light my pipe but went back inside. An hour later there was drunken idiot-mumbling nearby. Okay, maybe I don't need a last smoke before bed. This morning the street was emptier and quieter, so I finally sparked it.

It struck me that street lights in the Netherlands weren't so bright, evenings were colder and darker. And the loonies weren't as loony either. Americans have a greater talent for insanity, probably encouraged by the street lighting here, because I can't see any other reasons. Well, other than drugs, politics, religion, capitalism, plastic consumer culture, reality shows on teevee, junkfood, and high fructose corn syrup. Plus inbreeding and the weather.
But I'm quite certain that that is it, it has to be the lighting.

Like bugs scurrying when you flicked the switch.
All you wanted was a cool glass of water.
What you got was an Orkin moment.


A bowl of pipe tobacco tastes much better in the morning than when the local booby hatch has let out later in the day. Peace, calm, mostly empty streets, aged red Virginia from Cornell & Diehl modified with some Perique and a touch of Izmir, a bent Dunhill patent number shape 56 that smokes like a dream, and the prospect of a second cup of coffee. Not black, but creamy, like the Queen of Sheba. I like my coffee like I like my women, nicely hued.

Okay, some similes suck like a shop vacuum cleaner. That's just the way it is. It's like all the words line up for their grand entrance in a teen beauty pageant and accidentally smear their make-up and look like a Stephen King clown lurking in a sewer. I don't know how that happens. That too is probably the effect of brightness.


It also strikes me that I am lucky to have the apartment mate I have. Many American women model their behaviour on Melanie Wilkes, the girls in "Friends", and the ladies in the Real Housewives franchise. Saps, drips, and sickening twittery twats.

Her and my minds spark similarly. But she is more nurturing than I am, which why the saner stuffed animals live in her room instead of mine.

The sanest ones on my side are the communist frog and the German intellectual raccoon (University of Heidelberg).



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