Welcome to Amsterdam, Venice of the North...if things get really bad, you can always go to Amsterdam, from Spinoza to Camus, Amsterdam gives equal fall for all. For some unknown reason every time I go, I have never been able to get beyond the first circles of hell: the magnetic density of sex and drugs play their impeccable boundaries at every turn, always limiting me to the centrifugal center...no smiley wind mills or gushing tulips for me l guesws...
At night you can’t miss them: hundreds of ultraviolet female flowers fire up the central canals into a tropical hothouse…neon colored lingerie set- ablaze the circular arteries of the dammed city…framed within imperial windows they remain on their stools looking divinely cute....A female shaped hell of captured beauties...a female Zoo?..
With their lit up figures, these courtesans of the electric night seem to glow beyond all profane life, haloed in a whiter shade of purity. But appearances can be deceiving; they all look so soft tanned, child-like and chiseled from the outside, but on the inside, often, is quite different…
The transfiguration of ultraviolet light plays wonders, especially where there is nothing underneath to be transfigured. As Schopenhauer would say, life cannot be both a wonder and a willful reality all at once, something has to give....and invariably it does, mostly in the wrong direction, or if you are lucky, nowhere at all. Strange that life needs so many illusions to spur it on, you would think that hunger and lust would be enough...one of the very few blind-spots of “the will” that Schopenhauer does not, or is unable, to explain away...
Like the porn industry, and elsewhere in Europe, Amsterdam has received a capital influx of flesh from the East; which means that all previous criteria has/ been raised to the tenfold: beauty levels flowing to higher tones than one could possibly imagine. A brand of wild beauty is overflowing the known aesthetic spectrum, all known beauty gradients are transgressed one by one. Some of the girls are so beautiful it hurts; it pains to repay them so cheaply...Beauty is cheap, sex divine, love impossible...
Anywhere else, you get what is all around, but not here in Amsterdam, where things are turned upside down, for a while... And here I am as so many nights before: drunk, coked up, ecstasy downed, engorged with lust…ready to embrace a cheap darkness...into the streets one heads into the artificial covered night…cruising the main canals where girls “clothes” and make-up are made to flower under artificial suns, growing curvaceously tropical flesh in carnivorous designs…galvanized by artificial light, luscious reptiles bathe by florescent moonlight...
Lights sparkling her translucent baby-doll dress, legs lush and shiny, eyebrows puckered…a slight smile on her face as she eats nuts and sprouts, her only dinner for the night...the bottle of vodka flows...you find that she is from an industrial town in the Russian lands, where kids wear gas masks to school amidst fumes of chemical pollution...Siberia, Volgograd, Vladivostok, Kazakhstan, and all those other evocative high cheek bone names…they sound as cruel as they sound...
Some grueling anticlimaxes…the level of THC being so high, that one is, sometimes, even too high to come...they don’t just grow herbs here, they engineer them...
And then, the happy go lucky smiley ones, of the coffee-shops, mostly Dutch clubbing girls, just for week-end or night hookers: earning some cash for their wardrobe, synthetic drugs, and organic food. Here the line between cash and attraction gets blurred...It is amazing what girls will do, and not do, for cash, professional advancement or anything else that take[s their youthful fancies....
Down a side canal, she takes you somewhere against some damp wall, or walks you down into a basement of some building or “boat”…at other times they step warily out of hidden enclaves, and shatter you with their dazzling eyes that are reflected off by iced up waters...still spurred by the possibility that you might run across, somewhere among the many, the one, the one you have been looking for without aim, idea or goal... a fresh face from the underside appears, her first time, her feet a little sore from high heels, her first day at “work”....
...“The most beautiful women are on the street”, he roughly claims, street?, oblivious to the fact that there are no streets here, we are in Amsterdam, not NYC, I angrily argue, as if to make an ontological distinction of the uttermost importance; as if all reality depended on such babulations...does THC make you ontological, or just paranoid? ontology as applied paranoia?....“You just have to find them.” It’s On the “streets”...”It’s On the “pavements” he pimply continues...”where women come to earn hard currency; in hordes they descend, from all around the world; from all the impoverished cities and villages of the world, trading on their looks”, hoping to make enough to return one day, in glorious sunlight, after the fall, I boringly add...the oratory continues to flow right into depths of the frozen night...too far to care...
…A few are sunken and sullen, who drawn away as you kiss them....but with those sensuous lips and warm oval deep eyes, she could have graced covers, who could resist...I gently reach across and caress her face, and we kissed, a soft kiss on the luscious lips, on her tropically wild lips, a lover’s kiss? No way....
....In end, we wake up to Polaroid cheap-shots of ourselves, amidst stars of scarlet and white. Pale faces sinking in the background, either way there is no way out...dammed in Amsterdam…as a cheesy pop song used to go: Plastic eyes looking milky white…
