Amsterdam Eighty-Five: My Own Private Idaho

Being a guide? I woke up the next morning thinking about it. I made scrambled eggs and toast and as I did so I threw out the idea of being a typical tour guide. A shroom guide, maybe, but I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. Well, I could, but I wondered if that would be too limiting. I made decent reads on most people; I could tell what they liked and what they didn’t often enough. Doing so was easy with the Jersey guys and the young college girls I had taken to a coffeeshop. Americans were ridiculously predictable and I generally didn’t like doing the things they liked to do except on rare occasions. If I was going to be a guide I would rather show a person, a couple, or a small group a more refined experience or a more unusual adventure. I could be an “experience guide,” I supposed, one who helps create experiences worth living even more than remembering. No photos of buildings, no canal boat rides, no walking people through museums, no more trips to the Red Light District. The night before had taught me that. I liked entertaining Sal simply because of his enthusiasm, but there was nothing about the night that was interesting in itself.

Being an experience guide was the only thing to be, a person who creates moods through adventures in subtlety: movements through neighborhoods, visits to the right cafes and bars, conversation, possibly shrooms, maybe sex. I could tailor each experience according to the personalities and sensibilities of those I guided. That would mean getting to know them while they got to know me—to some extent, at least. But how?

I took a shower after breakfast, shaved, and dressed, thinking all the while how personal a one-on-one guide experience would be. I went to the living room to have a cigarette and grabbed my day bag on the way. I pulled out the legal pad in there—it was somewhat mashed. I scribbled a note that said simply “experience guide” and put it down on the coffee table. I would know what the words meant and I would think more about it later. I had a flash and bent over to scribble another word: “Guidebook.” Maybe if I could write an experience-based guidebook to Amsterdam and use it as an advertisement for individuals interested in intimate, consciousness-expanding experiences in Amsterdam. Why not? I was actively constructing my own philosophy of travel and living so why not share it with others as I continued developing it? I put down the pen, picked up the pack of cigarettes, took one out, and lit up. I opened the window. The sun was shining through thin and hazy clouds. It was cool, but not especially cold.

I looked at the plants to see how they were holding up. No dead leaves, a good sign. I couldn’t remember when I watered them last so I gave each of them a drink. I turned on my laptop and indexed the rest of the morning, stopping for a homemade lunch. I was too bored to keep going in the afternoon. I could have finished, perhaps, but it wasn’t due for another week and I had no more lined up so I simply sat and stared ahead, thinking of nothing. I walked to the couch and lit up another cigarette, picking up the legal pad. I saw what I had written, but there were also other notes, including the stand-alone word, “painting.” I recalled the sketch books I had worked on throughout the trip and scoffed at the idea of continuing that. For at least a month, maybe more, I had been prodding myself to take up painting only to forget about it later.

I went back to my MacBook and typed in “art supplies Amsterdam” on a search engine. A list came up and I clicked on the first link. I went to a website for a place that had photos of the interior. It looked enormous and well-stocked. The store was on Rozengracht. I got ready to go out and figured I would walk since biking with a canvas and paints would likely be a bitch. I was tempted to try it, though, out of sheer moxie. If I had had one of those cycles with a giant basket in the front, maybe. My good sense got the better of me, though.

I went downstairs to grab Susan’s mail, took it upstairs, locked the apartment, and left the building, walking toward Vijzelstraat. I took a tram to Dam Square, hopped off and onto another, and disembarked on Rozengracht not far from the address for the art supplies store. Once I found it, I entered and began browsing. I had been thinking on the ride over and realized oils were no good because they took too long to dry. I had no interest in watercolors, either, because I had taken a class in college and completely sucked at it.

What I wanted were acrylics. They dried fast, which some consider a drawback, but in my case fit perfectly. I wanted fast drying and easy to clean at Susan’s apartment. After looking around for a bit—the store had everything an artist might want—I found the section I wanted. There were so many different brands! I had no idea which one to choose. What I wanted was the highest grade I could get. The professor who had failed to teach anything useful in my water colors course had suggested starting with student-grade paints because they were cheap. Well, using cheap paints creates shitty paintings. I became discouraged and gave up, wondering at the time if I really lacked talent, vision, and skill.

By this point in life, it seemed stupid to waste money on cheap paints; I wanted the best paints and I figured acquiring them would provide the motivation necessary to commit. I wanted to use the same paints that I would use if I became adept at painting, to learn with what I would be working with years into the future. I wasn’t interested in painting as a hobby and I didn’t think of myself as a cheap knockoff so I sure as fuck wasn’t going to use cheap paints. I was interested in expressing myself as authentically as possible by exploring the world of color and, in turn, transforming my perspectives on the world through discovery.

I saw a person working at the counter and asked him about the acrylics. He came around the counter and walked down the aisle with me. I told him I wanted the highest quality available. He said Golden was professional grade but that Old Amsterdam was the best. He asked if I was a painter and I said, “I will be later today.” He laughed and asked if there was anything else he could help me find. I told him I wanted a large, high quality canvas. He asked if I would be stretching my own. I felt a twinge of embarrassment, but I said no. I didn’t have the equipment and I didn’t know how. He led me to the back of the store and showed me “museum quality” canvases. The wood of the frame was thick compared to all the other pre-stretched canvases.

I realized then that I knew jack shit about painting. The water color class I’d had in college may as well have been a preschool finger painting exercise. I don’t think it was even that good; it sure as hell wasn’t as interesting. I had painted with shit paints on shit paper and learned no techniques, nothing. As the fellow kept talking, I looked at the sizes, thought of where I would paint—Susan’s kitchen, on the floor—and chose a 30x40 inch canvas and frame. He carried it to the counter and I told him I would be back with paints and brushes. Brushes, I had nearly forgotten about the brushes. Did I want to use brushes? I didn’t think so, but I looked them over, anyway. I didn’t know what I wanted and I knew I didn’t know how to hold them.

Then I saw what looked like putty knives and trowels. Yes, those I knew how to hold, how to use. My dad had installed floors when I was a kid and I remembered spreading glue across kitchen and bathroom floors using a trowel. I had watched him for years in early childhood before I started doing the same work myself. In a way, I had been an apprentice. I used to watch in awe as he would make wide sweeping arches while working his way over a floor, creating fascinating geometric designs across the floor in a matter of moments. He had such economy of movement and made sure, consistent strokes. He was a master craftsman. He didn’t apply glue for the aesthetics, I knew that, but his work was aesthetically pleasing to me nonetheless.

I selected four different sized and shaped putty knives and trowels then went to the paints. I grabbed a basket and started going through the colors. The names of the colors fascinated me and I grabbed a tube of nearly every color: titanium white, chartreuse, fuchsia, neon orange, lavender, raw sienna, burnt umber, yellow ochre, cadmium red, cadmium yellow, phthalo blue, and so on. The iridescent and interference paints intrigued me so I dumped a few of each into my bag as well. Then there were the various media used for mixing: glass beads, sands, glazes, and so on. I decided to hold off on those and get started with what I had. I was spending enough as it was. The Old Amsterdam and Golden tubes and bottles were expensive as hell. I took my bounty to the counter and a blank-eyed young woman rang up my purchase. Over 400 Euros. Ouch, but worth it … I hoped.

She placed my paints and putty knives in two heavy duty bags and I grabbed the canvas. Getting back to my apartment with the giant frame was going to take some work. I managed to get a grip on the canvas by grabbing the thick wood with one hand on either side and holding it in front of me. I had looped each bag of paints and putty knives onto my forearms and, all in all, I was fairly balanced. I could see over the top of the frame, but just barely. I had to take relatively short steps so I didn’t damage the canvas with a knee or a kick. Waiting at the stop for the tram felt like a reward in its own right. When the next tram came, I awkwardly stumbled inside and nearly knocked a woman off her feet. She peppered me with guttural bursts of sound as I sheepishly made my way to the ticket punch. I managed to slide my strip card into the machine then tried to balance myself as the tram rollicked through turns. At the Dam, I got off the tram without much trouble then waited again to transfer. When the tram with the number I wanted arrived, the same process repeated itself This time, though, I avoided bumping into anyone.

I took the tram to Vijzelstraat and got off at the Kerkstraat stop. I walked home from there, taking a welcome break for traffic at Utrechtsestraat. Once at my apartment, exhausted from taking so many tiny steps while lugging the frame in front of me and above my head (which turned out to be a little easier until my arms got tired), I unlocked the street door, walked up the stairs, and took my goodies inside. I leaned the canvas against Susan’s locked bedroom door and put the bags next to it. I closed the front door and went to the kitchen. I was famished. I made a quick sandwich and scarfed it down, guzzling lemonade before heading to the couch to have a cigarette.

It was after two. I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t ready to paint yet. I took a puff of Lemon and an idea formed: shrooms. Of course! I didn’t like the idea of heading back out again so soon, but I made myself. I cycled down Kerkstraat, purchased a dose of McKennaii and one of Hawaiian, and cycled back to the apartment. I was tempted to gobble them up then and there, but decided to wait. While I was convinced shrooms would provide inspiration, I realized I had access to the work of one of the greatest painters who had ever lived: Vincent Van Gogh. I looked up the museum hours and saw that it closed at six. I could bike over and still soak up a couple hours of the master. I wanted to dive into color, to bathe in it, and who knew color better than Van Gogh?

I put on my jacket and left in a huff. I rode furiously to the museum, breaking a sweat even though the temp had dropped. There was no line for tickets. I went inside and walked up and down stairs to different rooms, looking at paintings from different periods of his work. I wasn’t too keen on his early works, although The Potato Eaters was special. Still, I wanted color and his early works were dark. When I came upon his sunflower series, though, I was captivated. The colors spoke to me. I could hear Van Gogh saying through the yellows, the subtleties of the yellows, “I’ve arrived.” Most of them were smaller than I had imagined they would be, but I looked at them for an hour, checking them out at different angles to try to see what he had done, how he had done it.

I went to another room and saw a painting that was, for me, the painting: A wheat field with a dark purple sky and black crows flying above the fields and through the air. I first saw it from ten feet away and was amazed. I walked closer to read the placard. The name of the painting was pedestrian: Wheat Field with Crows. It was one of the last canvases he painted, in July of 1890, just weeks before he chose suicide. From my first glance at it, I felt it was the best work he had produced, better than The Starry Night, better than his self-portraits, more magnificent than any of his other paintings. The canvas was also large, 20x40.

After reading the placard, I stepped back and back, each foot back revealing greater clarity and coherency. When I was about twenty-five feet from it, I was nearly in tears. I thought, “My God, what would it look like if I could back up a hundred feet? How did he fucking do that?!” I walked up close again, wanting to measure the way it looked at various distances. Once I was within a couple feet from it, the painting became a jumbled mush, incoherent globs of color with no recognizable representational features. It looked ugly, like a mud-soaked child had rolled around wildly for half an hour. I went to the right of the canvas and put my head against the wall to look at it from the side. The paint was at least two inches thick in some places, exploding off the canvas. Looking at it from that angle was like looking at a sea in a violent storm, sharp rises and rounded waves with an occasional deep depression. The man was a genius. No questions.

How the hell was I going to use that much paint on a canvas? It would cost me thousands of Euros to purchase enough paint to run that thick on a similarly sized canvas. What he had done was insane! I wanted to drop to the ground and pray to the painting, to ask God to forgive me for not visiting the museum sooner to bask in Van Gogh’s greatness. I felt humbled. I was going to paint? After seeing this painting? I was an ant, maybe plankton, some miniscule creature dwarfed by a dead man’s art.

But I would paint. In fact, I had to paint. It was urgent and essential. It would be a travesty after seeing what the man did. How could I learn to see the world through my own eyes without doing so? He had shown the way. How could I go beyond seeing with my eyes without making the attempt? My body was burning with a desire for color, hungry to splash a canvas with a kaleidoscope of color. I wanted to kneel on the kitchen floor of my apartment smearing paint into the canvas with my hands, arms, feet, legs, and face. I wanted every color of the rainbow to tell the story of color with insistence on respect, hallowed be without name.

A security guard informed me that the museum was about to close. It was for the good as my head was spinning and I needed to gain some semblance of balance. I knew I would return, perhaps even renting a space in front of that painting to sit for months in order to become a farmer in the wheat field, to contemplate the harvest of crops, to hear the crows caw as they flew off into the distance (or perhaps toward me to circle my head in ominous wait for my eventual collapse). I wanted walls to be torn down so I could look at the painting from a hundred meters away, maybe a thousand, far enough to see the field through Van Gogh’s mind while he had painted.

I cycled home barely keeping touch with the world around me. I had never been so transformed by a work of art. I had such an abundance of creative energy within me that I couldn’t contain it; electricity shot through the crown of my skull until I parked my bike outside my apartment on Kerkstraat. I locked it in a hurry, unlocked the street door and flung it open, stormed up the stairs, fumbled with my keys, panting, and finally unlocked the front door. I raced inside, stopped, looked at the giant framed canvas, chest heaving, lungs sucking breath. I tore the plastic from it, rushed it through the living room to the kitchen, and placed it on the center of the floor. There was still enough space to kneel in front of it, to walk past it, to access the sink, to open the fridge. This would be home for that canvas. I took the bag of paints and putty knives and dumped them next to the canvas. I ripped apart an empty cereal box to use as a palette. My mind went blank and I took several deep breaths. I closed my eyes and became completely silent.

It wasn’t yet time. I could tell. The space was prepared, but I was too frantic. I rose and walked into the living room, collecting myself by removing my jacket, fishing out a cig, and lighting up. I opened the window and exhaled. I breathed in the outside air and felt a wave of relief, as if the ghost of Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields let go. It was nearly seven. I needed to eat and I needed to leave the apartment. I walked around the block, breathed in the cold air, noticed the movement and architecture around me, and calmed down.

Back at the apartment I paced the living room. I couldn’t decide. I smoked another cigarette. I looked at my pipe and looked away. No, not pot. I looked at the refrigerator from the living room. McKennaii and Hawaiian. Hmmm. I paced again. I couldn’t decide. I stopped and asked myself, “How do I make a decision like this?” I kept talking to myself. “Two doses. I could take one and see what happens. I could start painting without them. I can buy more canvases and paints. I can also buy more shrooms.” I paced again. I stopped. “But I have something electric within me tonight. Can I afford to waste it?”

I thought about it. Waste what? Was this electricity so rare that it was a commodity? Shit. If I could bottle it, but I couldn’t. I paced again until I said, “Fuck this shit. I ain’t putting this kind of pressure on myself. I’m shrooming and I’m going to paint.” Decision made. I didn’t have anything to lose but an electricity rapidly burning me out.

I took the McKennaii from the fridge and dumped half the shrooms in my mouth. They tasted horrible, but I was used to that. I drank them down with a glass of water and slowly ate the rest of the container. I threw it in the garbage when I finished. I knelt on the floor, all fours, looking at the large blank white canvas, and thought, “Now what?” I looked at my paints and my trowels and putty knives. I took a large tube of titanium white and squeezed more than half of it, waving it in curving lines across the canvas. I grabbed raw sienna and did the same, but only half as much as the white. I picked up a tube of yellow ochre then one of cadmium yellow and did the same thing with each. I had swirls of paint tube worms interlacing throughout the canvas. I grabbed a putty knife and … waited.

I didn’t know what to do yet so I went to the other room and had a cigarette. “What next?” I knew no theory about color or painting. That was good, though. I didn’t want the ideas of others fucking up my approach. I would learn by observing my own efforts. There could be no mistakes, only decisions, actions, and results. I turned on the radio to a cool jazz station and tried to relax. I could sense the importance painting was to have in my life. I called it an epiphany, though I wasn’t sure if that was correct.

To loosen up even more, I changed into sweat pants and an old t-shirt, leaving my feet bare. I walked back to the kitchen while feeling the first flicker of the shrooms. I picked up the same putty knife I had used earlier and I scraped it along the canvas, corner to corner. I sat back and looked at how the colors blended, how the canvas absorbed them. Where the paint had been spread thinnest, the canvas stuck out through the scraping. Most of the paint was blobbed at the end of the trail I had blazed. I started curling the paint around that area until it was light brown glob. The streak of paint on canvas, though, was white, brownish, earthy redness, and yellowish at different points along the line. There were short patches where the colors blended, creating unusual effects in some areas and ugly patches in others.

I took my putty knife and more attentively cupped a blob of white, put it on top of the raw sienna and “cut” into the colors in a jagged back and forth for about a foot and a half before the color ran out on the knife. I pulled yellow ochre in a swath down through the middle of the jagged lines. The canvas was nowhere to be seen except for the area where I had pulled the ochre through. I continued in this fashion, mixing up my movements, alternating hands, varying thicknesses, all while becoming increasingly attentive to spacing. I picked up a small trowel, dabbed some of the color on the canvas with my putty knife—I was wiping it off with paper towels now and then to clean it; I had a plastic garbage bag near me where I disposed of them—and placed it on the trowel. Then I dabbed a different color, and mixed the two in swirls on the trowel. I didn’t bother using my makeshift cereal box palette. With the trowel face up with the paint on top, I slowly swiped at an angle, watching the design I had created on the trowel spread into a long, arcing distortion of the swirl I had created while also creating different effects where it crossed with some of the snakes of paint I had applied straight from the tubes. I created more mixes on the trowel and then decided to mix colors directly on the canvas, carving swirls and streaks in some areas, carefully observing how the new designs mixed with the old and preserving the original areas I liked while painting over those I didn’t.

There were brownish-yellow and white-yellow smears while other areas had hard lines and geometric designs forming and spilling into other colors. I could feel the shrooms, but only to the extent that my attentiveness continued to sharpen and become more focused. I could see so much; it was as if a veil over the world had been lifted. As the colors became more vibrant and the swirls and shapes began moving on their own, I felt a surge of energy. My fascination with color had become an obsession. I wanted to open more paints, add more colors, but, as difficult as it was, I rejected the impulse. I still possessed restraint, control, and clarity of thought. The complexity created by adding more colors seemed beyond my current capabilities and I liked much of what existed. Besides, the canvas was almost completely covered and a symmetry of color was forming.

The paint I had squeezed out onto the canvas was nearly spent though I could easily smear areas where I had made lines, arcs, points, and swirls. I liked those, though, and I thought that I might work around them another time, painting over areas of the canvas that I still didn’t like. I saw the canvas as a countertop; I could layer acrylics as high as I wanted to create texture. I had a flash of Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields and shuddered. Not yet. Not on this canvas. I wanted parts of the canvas to be seen through the paint so I could gauge the effects created by various thicknesses. I also wanted time to observe, in different moods and at different times of day, what I thought of what I had painted.

I stood up and cleaned the paint off the putty knife and trowel. I tossed the garbage bag in a corner out of the way. As I washed my hands, I saw my shirt and sweats had a few smears of paint on them. That felt right. I reached in the fridge to grab a beer and the other dose of shrooms. I took a swig then opened the lid of the shrooms, chewing on the narrow stems of the Hawaiians and drinking them down. I went to the living room and loaded a fresh bud of Lemon. I took a couple hits then went to the window for a smoke, turning off the trance station.

I smoked in silence and looked out at the lights of the street. I had been going at it with such focused intensity that I had broken out into a sweat; it felt like I had been working out a gym for a couple hours. Exhaustion, exhilaration, and satisfaction. I had turned on the faucet of my soul and I was soaked. The air outside the window was cold. I wanted to suck the cold of the world into my body and feel it turn to warmth. I leaned out the open window and inhaled deeply.

A woman walked up the street toward my apartment, coming from the direction of Utrechtsestraat. As she neared my window, I shouted down from my apartment window, “Was tonight everything you wanted it to be?” She looked up, taken aback, and lowered her head again. “Don’t worry, beautiful one. Everything is as it should be.” She looked up again and this time didn’t look away. She stopped in the middle of the street directly in front of my window and looked up at me. I began to make out the features of her face. I thought that if Van Gogh had painted her it would have been the other way around: The further away she had been the easier it would have been to see her clearly.

She seemed to be in her late 30s, maybe early 40s. It was hard to tell in the street light. She had long blonde hair and what seemed to be black roots. She wore a white coat with either real or faux fur around the neck and on the ends of her sleeves, black tights, and white boots which also had fur around their tops. She asked me if I was an American, the sing-song rhythm of her voice suggesting she was Dutch. I said yes. “You live in a Dutch neighborhood?” I said, “Yeah. I’ve been expecting you.” She looked up and down the street, presumably for traffic or other people walking, but I didn’t know for sure. She turned out to be playfully inquisitive, though. “What would you do if I came up to your apartment right now?” Without thinking, I bellowed, “I would paint you!” She looked at me strangely, but laughed. “You would paint me?” I responded, “Of course,” then asked, “Would you rather I painted on your body or a likeness of you on a canvas?” She shook her head and said, “I don’t believe you would paint me either way.”

I held up a finger, went to the kitchen, and turned on a light. I looked out at her and then bent over to pick up the canvas. Parts of it were still wet, the areas where the paint was thickest. I held it up near the window and looked around the side at her. I couldn’t hear her from the kitchen, but she was clapping. I put the painting down and went back to the living room window. I leaned out again and said, “So, now you know.” She said, “Okay, you’re a painter, but that looked like an abstract—” I cut her off, wagging my finger. “Ah, ah, ah. There is nothing ‘abstract’ about that painting. The canvas and the paint on it actually exist!” As I said “exist” I felt a shroom bolt run down my spine. I was convinced that I was becoming liquid lightning, but I tried to remain present with the woman on the street.

I heard her laughing and it reminded me of what I had just said. I couldn’t remember how long ago I had said it. Was it a few seconds or fifteen minutes? She wouldn’t have stood there for fifteen minutes, would she? Who the hell was this woman, anyway, and why was she talking with me? It dawned on me that I had taken another dose and it was definitely pushing me out of my skin. I regained my focus to the extent that I could. “I will paint you, it’s inevitable now, and I will use titanium white for your hair. The only problem is I have no black paints so your leggings will be a problem. I love the light and shun the darkness. Maybe a dark purple mixed with burnt umber would do for your leggings. Or you could just change into something more colorful.” She responded quickly, “That’s funny. Guys usually want me to change into something more comfortable.” That tickled my spine. “I’ll leave that up to you.”

She folded her arms and paused. I was about to ask her to come upstairs, but she spoke before I could. “Are you going to paint me while I stand out here?” I said, “I’m going to paint you whether you stand there, come up here, or keep walking. No matter what you do, you will be painted.” She asked, “Which would you prefer? Do you want me to stand in the cold while you paint me, come up, or keep walking?” I said, “You know the answer to that question.” I paused and then said, “Oh, you want me to say it, don’t you?” She shrugged her shoulders. Daringly playful.

“Okay, I’ll say it. No, I’ll ask the question: will you come into my apartment and let me paint you?” I noticed a couple of young men walking from the Magere Brug toward the woman. They were just walkers, though, making their way, barely looking our way. The woman saw them as well and she walked over to the sidewalk right under my window. I was able to see her face much clearer now. She was attractive: straight nose, high cheekbones, smooth skin, and full lips. I couldn’t make out her eye color, though, except that she wore eye liner and they glistened in the street light. As she craned her neck upward she asked me, “Do you really expect me to come up to your apartment at,” she looked at her watch, “2:30 in the morning?”

I leaned out to look straight down at her and said, “I expect nothing. I extended the offer, that’s all. If you say no, you say no. I’ll just paint the image of your essence that has been seared into my brain.” My eyes were dancing all over her face. Her skin turned white, yellow, gold, silver, platinum. “Your face, I can paint your face silver, your torso chartreuse, your arms and legs a mixture of metallic bronze and yellow ochre, and the aura surrounding you golden sunshine speckled with aqua gumdrops.”

She opened her mouth without saying anything. I wondered if she wanted me to drop a Eucharist of LSD onto her tongue. “I can kiss you from here. In fact, whether you’re aware of it or not, I am.” My heart melted at my words. Was I falling for myself? Possibly. She was the recipient of the overflow. Maybe that’s why she stood there gawking, unused to watching a man fall for himself in front of her very eyes. She blinked a few times, looked straight ahead, and then back up at me. She finally spoke. “Well, I know where you live now.” I said, “So I’ll see you again?” She waited then said, “Are you doing anything tomorrow night?” I thought for a moment. The idea of tomorrow was incomprehensible. I thought again and exclaimed, “Well, of course I’ll be doing something tomorrow night! I’m alive after all. But if you’re asking if I want to see you again then the answer is yes.”

She backed away slowly, avoiding the bikes and the parked cars as if she had 360-degree radar. “I’ll be at Schuim tomorrow night.” She smiled invitingly. “If you find me then you can ask me to model for you.” She raised her eyebrows as she continued backing into the middle of the street. “Okay. I’ll try not to paint you before tomorrow. It’ll be difficult, but I’ll try.” I paused then asked what time I should show up. She clicked her tongue loud enough for me to hear it. “I don’t know. Eleven. Maybe.” I guffawed. “Just to let you know, the pleasure will be all yours. I may give you a chance to model. I don’t know. Maybe.” She pursed her lips, nodded, looked ahead, and then back up at me. “Yeah, we’ll see, painter.” She turned to walk toward the Magere Brug, waving a hand as she went. I sang, “Ciao,” and watched her slowly disappear out of sight.

I leaned back in the window and thought about the name of the place. She pronounced it “Showm,” but I knew the “ow” sound was spelled “ui.” I didn’t know the place so I was going to have to search online, maybe call Daniel to find out. I wrote down “Shuim” even though I wasn’t sure of the spelling. I also scribbled “woman with white coat.” The shrooms were still pulsing upward and outward, begging for movement, but I returned to the kitchen to look at the painting. I picked it up, moved it to the living room, propped it against the dining table, and rearranged the lamps in the room. It looked even better in the softer light. The fluorescent in the kitchen had been unforgiving.

I walked around the room to look at the painting from different angles, so stunned at times that I dropped to my knees entranced. I noticed each spot where I stood and even each height I adopted—I crouched down and even lied on the floor at times—dramatically changed what I saw. I finally sat on the couch on the opposite wall and stared at, my eyes unable to focus on any single area of the painting or the painting as a whole. My eyes kept moving around and around, following the color, the shapes, the blends, never finding a clear-cut ending except in areas that were just flat-out wrong. This, perhaps more than anything, fascinated me. Every time I returned to an area of the painting I had viewed previously, I saw something different, as much as anything because areas surrounding invaded my view in different ways because I couldn't keep my eyes still. It wasn’t the shrooms; it was the painting! I wondered if it would be possible to paint a canvas in a way that didn’t allow the eyes to ever rest, a painting that had no dominant focal point at all. I felt a wave of ecstasy at the thought. “My god, that would be heaven. To paint a painting that I could look at forever without seeing the same thing twice? I could handle solitary confinement indefinitely if I had a painting like that.”

I picked up the remote for the stereo and turned on my Phish CD. I listened to the music and watched colors dance the rest of the night. I couldn’t take my eyes off the painting except when I went for water, loaded a bowl, or smoked a cigarette. Was it possible I had created it? I went back and forth all night, not sure if I had or not. I wasn’t sure how much time passed, but dawn broke before I stopped looking and went to bed. It took some time to sleep because the colors kept playing in my head, my own private Idaho. 

Delusions Are Natural

The physiological and emotional rollercoaster for women who are menstruating is agonizing to witness. Anyone who has lived with a woman who goes through it month after month for years and decades, especially in the case of live-in lovers and spouses, knows this. It’s not just radical and unexpected mood shifts, either. It’s while changing together in the bedroom, perhaps to go out somewhere, and seeing, as the woman in your life removes her panties and sees, as you do, that they are marked in the crotch with a small dark, dried purple-red stain, the momentary surprise that gives way to a groaning resignation that an inconvenient, unpredictable, and demanding visitor has returned to dictate the pace and tenor of your lives for a week.

The days leading up to the visit are better known for some than others, with communications delivered through radical shifts in body temperature, bloating, and emotional volatility. In those cases, the anticipation of the visit are often worse than the visit itself. Bathroom occupancy becomes far less predictable in those times, both before and during the visits. Plans that had been made weeks in advance are suddenly scuttled for what, at first, appears to be no reason, but, in fact, once analyzed, becomes entirely reasonable. Everything in life, from clothing to dining to sleeping to sexuality, changes in ways that cannot be predicted even though the same radical behavior seems to occur each month.

But the changes don’t occur in exactly the same ways each month, with the same frequencies, the same problems associated. When the visitor has not been anticipated, sheets freshly washed and put onto the bed the night before suddenly need to be washed again. A seemingly minor inconvenience, yes, and if that were the only incident there would be little about daily life affected. But when it’s discovered, immediately after learning that the sheets need to be washed again, that the supply of feminine hygiene products had run out without being restocked, an early Sunday morning trip to the store becomes a necessity, ruining the lazy calm of waking slowly without getting dressed for hours, picking up a newspaper and lounging on the back porch in the morning sun to read about sports scores or weather reports or ridiculous opinions in the editorial pages, and dreamily drinking coffee while watching a lovely woman unknowingly purring while she sashays half naked toward you with creamer in hand.

There is an odd aftermath even in the days that follow the visitor’s departure, both for the woman who was visited and the partner who lived with the woman being visited. Life could resume just as it had been before the visitor’s arrival almost immediately or it could be several days later before life resembles anything that had existed previously. Even in the case of a radical shift, the partner may be thrown more into a state of bewildered shock than the woman visited simply because he or she hadn’t realized the visitor had left. It can be unnerving to witness the wild appearance of an exceedingly good mood after a week or ten days of varying states of dourness, frustration, impetuousness, and disgust. Even for the woman whose visitor has left who finds herself in an extraordinarily good mood, a partner who responds peculiarly can be confusing.

All of this combines to communicate something that, in various cultural mindsets, seems strange: we have only marginal control over our lives. We create grand narratives to tell an entirely different story of possible realities, but those narratives provide more confusion than clarity because what happens in life so rarely goes according to plan. Usually this happens in very subtle ways and so we barely notice that we’re almost constantly wrong, in ways significant and insignificant, about what will happen next. When things go awry, according to how we had expected things to be, we blame all manner of suspects for ruining the good life. First we blame other people, then we blame cultural phenomena, then we blame the economy, then we blame illegal immigrants, then we blame racism, then we blame radical Islam, then we blame our bosses or our employers, then we blame ... and we blame ... and we blame ... almost always ignoring the real cause: we are to blame for blaming things that are not to blame even though the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates the way things are over and over again, as often as not in practical matters such as menstruation as it effects not just the woman menstruating, but partners, friends, coworkers, and so on.

To explain discrepancies that arise between expectations and reality, grand, overarching metaphysical explanations for why this or that is happening are developed. Sometimes we develop the narratives ourselves, but more often we adopt metanarratives that have been developed by others, often over generations, centuries, and even millennia (especially in the case of religion). Depending on who we are and how we've developed our beliefs and values, we decry patriarchy, corporatism, religion, liberalism, atheism, the loss of traditional values, intolerance, and so on and so forth, but the problem, at root, is always nature even though the problems of nature are exacerbated by metanarratives about “how things are” and the implementation of “solutions” to the problems of nature: economics, politics, religion, education, industrialization, technological development, and various ideologies that are believed to be cure-alls in almost the same ways that people once believed that snake oil could cure fevers and smallpox and people still believe whatever is selling on an infomercial in the middle of the night might finally cure back pain once and for all.

The problem, again, is nature. Menstruation is but one example, something that exists no matter what political ideology is practiced at any given time in any given part of the world. Sexuality and reproduction, as a whole, create enormous difficulties in life. Sperm existing in one body, egg existing in another, emotions and hormones driving the two bodies to react in differing ways that, occasionally, line up symbiotically but often don’t, leading to one or the other person feeling disappointment, frustration, irritation, agitation, anger, resentment, worry, fear, terror. It’s the same, to a lesser degree in contemporary culture, with food, drink, shelter, comfort, all of which we need as natural beings, and yet we take that for granted so much that we lose sight of that basic reality as we develop and implement economic and political means to attempt to provide those entirely natural needs that all humans have.

We’re almost entirely delusional. However, that is not a sickness, as psychologists would have you believe. No, it’s by design, nature’s design. We have to be delusional in order to subvert awareness of our lack of control over our very nature and the absence of any coherent or identifiable meaning to life. If we were to admit that life is most basically about continuation and reproduction for the sake of continuation and reproduction we’d feel, at best, completely alienated from purpose and, thus, filled with a despairing nihilism. Our metaphysics and narratives are the delusions required to continue putting up with what is most of the time unsatisfactory moment-to-moment living. And, if not entirely unsatisfactory, barely enjoyable—and almost never fulfilling.

Religion, philosophy, morality, and psychology all tell stories of how fulfillment or peace or health—or whatever happens less often than everything else we experience in life—represent the best of life. A purpose is served here: to delude ourselves, in different ways, that life is worth living specifically for those pie-in-the-sky reasons, that some day, some how, the good stuff will be realized and life will be mostly good, certainly more than merely tolerable. Well, why should that be? Because without those stories we’re left face-to-face with reality: that nature rules and that our nature, in particular, is life and that life, without delusions, sucks. Perhaps that’s the reason civilization developed as it did, through the awareness that natural life sucks and that, maybe, we could escape from nature by manipulating it as much as possible to reshape it in a way that negated the power of nature over human life. But, of course, civilization is nature’s way of drawing humanity away from the awareness of the reality of nature’s dominance over life; civilization is the myth that prevents humanity from doing what may be the only sensible thing to do once aware of the totality of the trap of living: ending life.

It becomes evident, then, that myth, religion, philosophy, morality, ethics, politics, economics, culture, art, and every other form of story that exists are essentially elements of what we, in the modern culture, would call The Matrix. Any and all illusory matrices are necessary delusions to continue life and it is life itself that is slavery, slavery to the body, to emotion, to thought, to everything that goes along with being alive. The only thing that occurs when a person unplugs from the matrix of delusions is awareness and awareness is the unfiltered experience of living without any delusional defenses against the inconsequential futility of being alive.

All that I have written, too, is a story and, thus, a delusion, a subversion of awareness achieved through the acknowledgment of awareness. Nature has such a profound power over life that it can convince the living to continue living even when it’s become clear that there is no reason to live. We call it the “survival instinct,” but it may be better labeled the “submission instinct.” Only the rarest of us performs the most potent act of agency that exists: the decision to end life. It is remarkable how extraordinary an overlord nature is. We can know, with certainty, that life has no individual meaning beyond which we create and, yet, we continue to obey nature’s dictates. No one living is free; only in death could freedom exist and even then it isn’t likely since humanity made up the concept of freedom in a delusional, futile effort to escape from nature.

We’re trapped. Always have been, always will be.

Or ... maybe we’ve never been trapped and we just believe we have been. Maybe we created concepts like freedom to delude ourselves into believing that there was such a thing as not being free. We may have also deluded ourselves into believing that predators are superior to prey, that power is superior to powerlessness. After all, when natural conditions worsen, it is predator species that fall first, not prey species. Global warming and climate change isn’t all that scary if you’re a mouse, but it certainly is if you’re a cat. The cat will go extinct before the mouse does. And humans, if we are indeed atop the food chain, are in the most precarious position of all because we need so much more just to survive—let alone live what we call a “quality life.” Being atop the food chain is the worst place to be because only the very best natural conditions are conducive to surviving and thriving. The simpler the life form, the more adaptable to diverse conditions. Bacteria came before us and will live long after we’re gone.

Perhaps, then, our stories of greatness are delusions to make us believe there is something special about living—even for a moment—atop the food chain. Reverence for consciousness is the ultimate human religion: “we’re special because we have the capacity for awareness in ways that other species do not.” That’s a story we tell ourselves, one that tells us that even the worst human life is better than the best life of any other species. I think, though, that it looks much better being the family dog in a wealthy compound in Connecticut than a human being living in the squalor of a disease- and danger-riddled trash city in urban India. What life could be better than a dog living with an affectionate couple with tremendous access to resources on massive acreage near Jackson Hole, Wyoming? Veterinary care, gourmet foods, loving touch, room to roam in the wild with caretakers providing access to luxurious shelter and comfort in a rural mansion? That seems like a good life.

It’s arguable that domesticated breeds of dogs and cats have the best lives in the world, species-wide, than any other creatures including humans. They’re aristocrats. They don’t have to deal with politics, economics, hunting, gathering, providing health care, nothing. They just have to continue existing without pissing on the rug. There are horror stories about pets treated cruelly, but in terms of numbers and percentages, I’m guessing there are more humans abused in domesticated settings than cats or dogs. Furthermore, I would guess there have been more humans abandoned by economics and politics to lives of drudgery, squalor, pain, suffering, misery, torture, and inhumane conditions than domesticated breeds of dogs and cats worldwide. If a dog kills a human baby, the dog may be beaten and then put down, but it won’t likely have to spend decades in solitary confinement after going terrifyingly insane. Certain species of animals have clearly succeeded, at this point, in rising above humanity to lives of the greatest comfort and quality, begging the question about whether humanity really is “at the top of the food chain.”

Control, when it comes to humanity, is almost always delusional. The pet owner believes it is in control when, in fact, the “owner” lives in servitude while the animals live without a care. Western society frowns on pet owners who beat or abuse their pets—on this issue, that is neither here nor there. What is obvious in that case is that the owners are not servile. They clearly exercise power in their own favor rather than for the good of the animals instead of themselves. The pet owner that spends all of his or her life savings after working for decades in a job that has sapped almost all of the good of life is clearly sacrificing his or her life to continue the aristocratic life of the animal he or she serves and, perhaps, worships as a deity of sorts. Is there some hope that a benign eternal life after death will be granted by a cat or dog god for having so thoroughly devoted themselves to the well-being of a Golden Retriever or a Scottish Fold?

I don’t know, but from my vantage points almost everything humans do is ridiculous. Stories will be created to justify this act or that, to elevate this behavior or that, to explain this phenomena or that, but the stories only ever make sense under the narrowest of perspectives. The more viewpoints that are directed at any given story, the more absurd the stories seem. And yet, as I wrote earlier, there is little a human can do but commit to a variety of delusions in order to choose one way of living over all other possible ways to live and then, whenever those delusions are contested, defend them at nearly all costs, including violence, in order to maintain the belief that there is a meaning to life, that life is something other than a pointless trap of continuation and reproduction that may be part of some larger design that isn’t knowable to the individual, group, nation, or even an entire global generation. Of course, there may be no larger design that has any meaning or purpose. Either way, the individual human life has no purpose other than to continue living and, at best, reproduce, neither of which are satisfactory on any level without an accompanying narrative manufacturing a meaning that has nothing to do with reality.

This is why “believing in something greater than oneself” is so appealing, even if it is unlikely that anything that might be greater than oneself could really give a shit about whether you believe in it or not, presuming the design has an awareness or the capacity to care; it does not follow that something greater than oneself having a meaning or purpose translates to individual life having a purpose or meaning. Believing in something greater than oneself is just another delusion, something that has no discernible connection with reality.

The more one thinks in these ways, the more a person may be comforted by knowing that death is an absolute eventuality. Putting an end to one’s existence is one way to achieve that end, but allowing nature to snuff oneself in its own time is just as reasonable an option if a person can stand living with uncertainty long enough or, more commonly, believe ceaselessly in delusions until the last breath. It doesn’t likely matter either way, not if one rejects delusions. What is certain is that the trap of life for individuals will eventually end even as the epic continuation of life, through reproduction, carries on for whatever purpose it has or does not have. The important thing is that nature can’t force any individual of a species—or even each species—to live forever … unless those terrifying religious ideas about reincarnation and “afterlives” are true. If that’s the case, we’ve been in hell all along without realizing it.

What If ... Anti-Dada?

What if couch potatoes were drifters who became entranced by television shows?

What if pleasure and pain didn’t exist, but everyone wanted bananas?

What if intelligence was malleable from moment to moment and breathalyzers could determine your intelligence at any given time? What if you weren’t allowed to make decision unless you blew a 100 IQ or better? What if the intensity of emotions hindered IQ, whether the emotions ranged from elation to despair, and thus you could only make decisions when your emotions were within a certain equilibrium range? What if you had to just sit and stew until you calmed enough to make a reasonable decision? What if you could only sit in bliss until you calmed enough to be relatively at peace before making a decision? What if an electric shock was delivered to you whenever you tried to make a decision without blowing into a breathalyzer and even then when your IQ was below 100? Imagine taking a test at school, giving a presentation at work, or driving in a car while having to constantly blow into a breathalyzer whenever you wanted to make a decision? Even sitting at a bar you couldn’t make the decision to pick up you glass of beer unless you blew a 100 IQ or better? Do you think the world would be a better place if these things happened?

What if mangoes were made from French fries that had rotted in McDonald’s dumpsters?

What if I’ve created the greatest music of any kind that has ever existed, but I chose not to share it with anyone because I didn’t think anyone in the world besides myself was worthy of listening to it?

What if “handicapped parking” was considered so politically incorrect that no one ever parked in those spaces because everyone had free reign to slash the tires of any vehicles parked in them?

What if handicapped parking was placed as far from buildings as possible and disabled drivers were only allowed to park in handicapped spots?

What if loving another person only caused pain for the person loving and the person being loved?

What if everyone believed breathing was a sign of cowardice?

Would being law-abiding be considered legal or illegal if a law was passed outlawing adherence to laws?

What kind of person eats hamburgers only on Thursdays?

What if being born poor was the only way anyone could become rich? Would you become poor, assuming you weren’t, before your child was born, just give him or her a chance to become rich? Would a person born poor decide not to have children after becoming rich or allow a child born while rich to be doomed to poverty?

What if all women had vaginal openings half a meter wide and all men had penises no bigger than an infant’s big toe? What if the penis-toe could only ejaculate when a nearby woman sneezed and women could only sneeze when they were on ladders while the moon was full?

What if giant testicles ruled the earth?

What if flies held the secrets to immortality but could only communicate with humans in pairs while each rested in nostrils for thirty seconds? Would we ever know? Has it ever happened, two flies simultaneously resting for thirty seconds in a person’s nostrils? Ever? Throughout the history of homo sapiens sapiens?

What if black widow spiders were thirty feet long and had wings with wingspans of ninety feet and could fly at a thousand kilometers per hour but had six-foot-long stingers that inserted only feelings of joy whenever they stung any living thing? Would we all clamor to be stung? Would we worship them as gods? Would we make it illegal to kill them? What if they only stung persons who were masturbating? Would children begin masturbating before puberty? Would public, open-air masturbation become socially acceptable?

What if nothing has ever happened nor ever will and everyone who has ever existed has been entirely wrong about everything because they have believed that things have happened and will happen?

What if marshmallows were the only source of nutrition for humans?

What if fire was a hoax?

What if “gash” meant “hope”?

What if piousness was considered hedonism and walruses ate only underwear?

What if watching one hundred minor league baseball games was the only way to achieve enlightenment, but no one knew it until it happened and they weren’t allowed to tell the rest of us?

What if rugby was a religion instead of a sport?

What if the only true religion was determined each year through a Texas hold’em poker tournament?

What if “when,” as an adverb, conjunction, noun, or pronoun, was eliminated entirely? Would we still have clocks or say, “Meet me tomorrow morning at eight”?

What if wearing a robe of any kind, whether man, woman, or child, was the only way to determine whether a person was or wasn’t lying? Would pants and dresses cease to be made and worn?

What if only mothers and fathers could be a person’s girlfriend or boyfriend? Would the concept of “incest” disappear?

What if “Jones” was the only last name that existed … everywhere on the planet, even for animals, insects, and plants? What if it was also illegal to kill anyone or anything with the last name of “Jones”?

What if Santa Claus was a termite?

What if parrots had the sentience of humans and humans had the sentience of mice? Would there have been a Bronze Age?

What if Mohammad’s name had been Doofus?

What if Jesus was a hermaphrodite?

What if Alexander had been known as the Mediocre?

What if Larry Flynt was God?

What if Mao Zedong had been a poet instead of a dictator?

What if Karl Marx had invented Cheesism, the belief that cheese would free the proletariat from the evils of capitalism?

What if Adam Smith had written a cookbook instead of The Wealth of Nations?

What if Google searches always came up with a list of sites related to root beer floats?

What if massive quantities of bees were required to build computer microchips?

What if proximity to an anthill was the only place where humans could think?

What if acne was considered to be the only source of human beauty?

What if gerbils replaced dollars as U.S. currency?

What if Africa was transported to one of the moons of Jupiter and an earthlike atmosphere developed instantaneously when it did?

What if oceans and land masses switched places and the Pacific Ocean, for example, became a continent while North America, for example, became an ocean?

What if Japan was a verb?

What if evil was idyllic?

What if China developed Weapons of Mass Hilarity?

What if Mexico existed only as a watermark?

What if bee stings were the only source of pleasure?

What if giants are sleeping under glaciers on Greenland and will wake up as the snow and ice melts over the next century?

What if rabbits around the world grew to the size of Manhattan and became marble statues?

What if sexuality was reduced to eating apples?

What if virgins weren’t?

What if Senegal became a sea overnight?

What if Argentina had never provided amnesty to Nazis?

What if Israel was located in the Caribbean?

What if the Grateful Dead had been named the Grubby Frumpers?

What if music was something you could taste?

What if horses owned donkeys as slaves?

What if dogs had humans as pets?

What if no human had ever noticed the sun?

What if moonlight was a source of electricity?

What if cow manure was a girl’s best friend?

What if diamonds hardened into coal?

What if shit was something to be admired?

What if cats could only mate with mice?

What if watching horror movies was necessary for defecating?

What if hippos lived inside bellybuttons?

What if whales had four legs and lived in deserts eating cactus?

What if jaguars could communicate telepathically with sharks, but sharks didn’t have a way to respond?

What if human women only gave birth to adults?

What if the number six didn’t exist?

What if alphabetical letters were distinguished only by scent? What would be the version of braille for those without a sense of smell?

What if every person’s beliefs were untrue? What if the opposite of what every person believed was true? What if the truth was specific to each person and was always the opposite of what each person believed? What if a person believed that gravity existed and therefore it didn’t and if that person changed his or her mind to believe gravity existed then it didn’t? What if you believed you saw a tree but because you believed you did ... you didn’t ... and when you believed you didn’t see a tree that, therefore, you did? What if the exact opposite of everything you believed was the truth no matter what you believed at any time? What if you believed you were always wrong and, because of that, you were always right and, in which case, the only time you ever believed anything that was true was when you believed you were wrong? This, more than any other belief that anyone has ever believed, is dada and, thus, Anti-Dada.