wed 05 nov 2008 08:34:47 — witte de withstraat
it's been foggy
it was foggy in amsterdam for two days. fog makes amsterdam prettier, i like the depth it gives.
sometime monday, my mobile phone started to die. first it became a deaf telephone -- i could call and speak to people, but could not hear them. i could still send text messages. now, it won't even hold a charge. so it's a dead and goner, needs to be replaced. anyone who needs to speak to me meanwhile will have to call my desk phone, or email me.
monday night marinka received a big care package of food from her parents in pomorie. all kinds of good stuff with names i can't remember.
tuesday night i went out for the first time since my return. i walked over to sound garden and sat at the bar writing in my notebook, and drank a few vaasjes of budels at eur 1,90 apiece. "man dat is goedkoop," i told the bartender, and he reminded me that this wasn't leidseplein. then jk and dvr and an old man named "young dave" came to play pinball there until about halfway through the horror movie (tuesday is film night?). i didn't stay out late, didn't drink much, i got home by ten, talked to jk for a while then went to sleep.
i was awakened at four in the morning when marinka knocked at my door cuz djox was upstairs visitng. they'd been out all night, and now marinka was baking. of course, what else do you do at four in the morning after carousing all night? i got fed, i sat on the kitchen floor eating some kind of puff pastry made of bladerdeeg and cheese with some bulgarian sausage in it, and on the side some real tomatoes from someone's real garden in pomorie. if you can ever get a real tomato, it's a good idea to eat it, cuz they may not be here forever.
"so how are you, how was america?" djox asked me.
i was like, "uh ... i need coffee."
when i got back down to the kelder, CNN had just declared barack obama the new president of the united states. in the chicago crowd, jesse jackson had tears of joy etc. i think even oprah was there.
obama seems more black now than during the campaign. i mean not physically, but TV wise, in they way they're presenting him. it's like he's required to be historically, epically black for a moment, in a way that wasn't required last week.
maybe soon all those newly blazing blathering CNN stars who've made names for themselves this season, by crowding greedily elbow-over-elbow at that silly table behind their barricade of stickered laptops, and talking and talking and then talking about the talking, can just go fade away for a while. maybe they deserve a rest, and maybe so do we.
the garden cat situation has changed here while i was away. instead of a handful of furtive abutter-cats using the underside of the porch as a right of way to the opposite fence, we now have just one whiny black and white puss with a red sequinned collar, who insists on attention and repeatedly darts back into the kitchen after you scoot him out.