4.01 - Amsterdam

For most of the day I just wandered around the city. I'd finished the book I was reading (Mother Night, which I forgot to tell you that I borrowed from you Taylor) last night, so I stopped at a used book market in one of the open squares, and finally found something that looked interesting, and English, Paul Auster's Timbuktu.


At night, with low wooden tables surrounded by large seating cushions, I found myself upstairs in what seemed like an opium-den (though it was only a smoke shope). Not too confident in my joint rolling, one of the two guys from Austria - another is from Toronto - with whom I'm sharing a room at the hostel, rolled one. And then another. We invented a smaller game of snooker, flicking discs with our fingers into one of a small chess-sized board's four corners. By the end I'd gotten the hang of it and won the last two games. They went back to the hostel, as one of the Austrians quite incapacitated from his smoking too much, and I wandered off to get a slice of pizza.

I don't know the age it becomes comfortable to think of yourself as a man. I don't know when that will become comfortable.