Lying there with all the light in your hair

Artificial drama makes me impatient, but I try to keep that impatience tamped down because I'm often a little drama factory myself. At least, I am in my head - I try to not let it slip out my teeth or typing fingers. Also, I understand it's people's way to deal - in the same way that they'd rather look like a bastard than a patsy, even when the risk of being a patsy is small, they'll prefer to see themselves as some sort of wronged romantic heroine when the truth is that there was a big emotion that had nowhere to go.



Another thing that makes me impatient is a lack of imagination, and yet I have no imagination when it comes to other people's emotional existence. It can take me years to arrive at some sort of useful juncture when I'm trying to understand the people I love, or who I loved, and sometimes my subconscious needs to help, like it did last night in a 'Bluebeard' dream.

I was in the courtyard of La Pedrera, which had been moved to Paris, and he was there as well, bright-blue-eyed, happy, and rather scrawny as he had been when we first met, before I’d cooked and biked the heroin-chic modeling years out of him. He was acting in his sweet way, with the sweetness that made me want to stay with him long after it was evident I had to go.

‘It’s damp here,’ he observed.

‘Yes,’ I said, pointing to a half-basement apartment behind us. ‘We used to live there and I don’t think it was good for our lungs.’

And then his new girl was there. She looked slightly like me, but much better – that sort of stupendous, mid-size dark blonde you get in a stretch here from Denmark down to northern Italy, through Holland, Alsace, Luxembourg. I liked her instantly, and their rapport was adorable. They started frolicking around the courtyard, and as he scooped up a handful of rainwater to splash her she grabbed my arms and hid behind me. ‘Don’t let him get me!’ she cried, and they both fell about laughing.

Wondering if I’d be pressed into a ménage à trois I’d have to politely refuse, I consented to go to their apartment to pick up some stuff I’d left there. As soon as we entered they both went down for a nap. I gathered up some of the more important and portable things and made to leave.

On my way out, he woke and rolled over to face me, naked as a jaybird. ‘Don’t be a stranger,’ he said, and I told him I’d arrange to come back and pick up the other things later. I kissed him on the forehead and tucked him in next to her, where he fell back asleep almost immediately, a happy little smile on his face.

When I woke up I knew that boy can’t be my bogeyman anymore. I remember too much that I shouldn't forget. His sweetness was just as much a part of him as the batshit craziness. And although that brand of batshit craziness is unacceptable to me, I've been coming to realize for years it’s not really deviant in Central Europe, where their genocides are in living memory and those damnable Italian fuckwits are gearing up for another with their gypsy-hating and sheer fucking pig ignorance. All that fury, all that anger, those words and that way of acting - no wonder it confused him so much when I was revolted by it. It's normal here.

And after having gone through what he went through with me - being rejected because I couldn't accept that fury - how could I expect anything except that he'd get more conscious of it, and go into his next relationship with a greater desire to show more of his sweetness and less of his batshit craziness? Why would I choose to believe he could be some sort of lurking monster when - with his wealth, extreme good looks, generally sweet character and a level of fucking insanity which is merely typical by continental standards - some perfectly reasonable European woman would snap him up and perfectly reasonably love the shit out of him, and that woman - and the man himself - would probably benefit from what he learned through our relationship?

In short, how could I focus so hard on the 2% chance he's the revenge-obsessed monster he acted like when he realized I wasn't just play-acting breaking up with him, and the 98% chance he's happy with someone much better suited to him now? Sure, the 2% chance exists. But the other 98% chance is much, much bigger and rather more pleasant to dwell on . . . so much so, and so obviously, that I wonder if - no, I know I've been choosing to believe that getting over Mistress La Spliffe is impossible. Throwing a mean-spirited sop to my ego whilst throwing prime rib to my pride, my paranoid fear. Harming my mental health, my pleasant memories of the good times we'd shared, and some of the lessons I should've learnt through our relationship.

Because, of course, as my analyst was always at such pains to point out: everybody in the dream is you. As was that girl, his new girl, who was as pretty and happy as I felt myself to be when we first got together all those years ago; a girl who didn't utterly fuck things up, but who did what she felt was right at the time, and who had some joy with that man that made some unpleasantness worth it for a long time. And in the dream, he was me too; the 'big bogeyman' part of me, who is almost statistically certain to have hurt Mistress La Spliffe more than the man himself ever even wanted too. Happy now, playful, reasonable, and put to bed.

God created the world, but the Dutch created Holland

Amsterdam is the thinking grownup's Disneyland. We started our vacationing there because I had a conference to attend, so work paid for my transport and the first couple of nights in our lovely B&B on a houseboat. Yes. You read that right. Fuckin' houseboat. What's more, because this fuckin' houseboat was just outside the city limits on a lake next to the huge and beautiful Amsterdamse Bos, where trees race up to the soggy gentle sky, a kind man rents you lovely bikes at great daily rates, and Schilpol's aeroplanes fly so low in anticipation of landing that their cocks are in danger of hanging out (fun because you can race them along the bike paths), it was cheaper than that revolting partitioned boiler room we slept in last September.

If you're considering a trip to Amsterdam, email me by clicking through on my profile, and I'll send you the owner's contact information - I'd post it here but I don't want to give them that much publicity, or else it will always be booked when I want to stay there, which will be often. The owners are in situ and were kind, chatty, interested without prying. I think ever so slightly disappointed that we were Canadian and Australian and not American. They had a real love for the States I've noticed in a lot of Dutch people - not only an appreciation for the personal, hospitable warmth of the typical American which otherwise isn't common in Europe, but also a love of the notion that you can do whatever you want there, make all the money you want, don't have to fight against any regulations. But then in the next breath they'll tell you how great their Dutch regulations are. And Dutch regulations are great. God, I wish the Dutch ran the world.

The conference was frightful and professionally useless; the focus was much more on marketing and it was like a flashback to my days in advertising. I skipped out on some of the more obviously useless portions of it and at one point struck up a very long and interesting conversation with the lovely woman who runs the business centre at the Hotel Okura. During the course of it she explained why Dutch organization and regulation tends to be so successful, though also frustrating to Dutch people themselves: the Polder Model. She explained it rather more concisely than Wikipedia by saying it meant that all parties concerned in a debate accepted the fact at the outset that they wouldn't be able to get everything they wanted. Imagine that . . .

The Hotel Okura was otherwise uninspiring, besides the doorman and his cat. The hotel has its own cat, a black and white tom who sprawls on the ground close to where the doorman stands, lazily watching him haul people's bags around, lazily inspecting the rich and the businesslike who go through the doors. It's a five-star hotel, but I would not call the tom a five-star cat, although he was great. I'm quite sure he still had his balls; he was a huge monster of a thing - more than twice the size of my Lexie, and less of it fat. And while his comfort with people means he's well-loved, none of that lovin' has been done with a wire brush or a pair of scissors; his healthy coat had some wild-looking clumps in it. Obviously he was the most charming thing I saw at the conference.

Another great thing about the conference was that it gave me a chance to be an Amsterdam commuter, as I rode my rented bike from the Bos to the hotel. I could have wept with the pleasure of it, as hundreds of bikes rode silently around during 'rush hour' and the number of cars on the road hardly changed. Not a helmet in sight - not on the grown-ups, not on the buckets of children in front-mounted baskets that their mums or dads were biking to daycare. The wind, for once, in my hair - wind largely untainted by the mufflerless effluent of shitboxes which so plagues my lungs in Brussels. Oh, it was lovely. How jealous I was of the people who get to live and work in a place where commuting is like that.

No complaints about riding our bikes around for fun, either, on the succeeding two days, except shockingly there still seems to be a certain class of tourist who does not understand the concept of bike paths. What a great, fun city. In terms of our touristy things, we went to the Rijksmuseum, again for hours and hours and hours . . . I don't get museum exhaustion in Amsterdam, it seems. And no, it's not the reefer. I usually get stoned before going to galleries and museums no matter where I am in the world. I don't know what it is. Great museum - my favourite bit, though, was a painting currently mounted close to the entrance showing the Dutch and Spanish signing a treaty concluding the Dutch revolt, which seemed to show the Dutch participants solemnly delivering the two-finger salute to their former overlords. Classy.

Also touristy: we went walking around Java Island, where there have been beautiful modern residential architectural things installed over the past 30 years - pictures and exclamations to follow.

God. Dutch people. The F-word pointed out to me that they had to be that good about organizing their space - making it that livable and that congenial - because if not they'd have all eaten each other by now, what with that little land being so crowded and the weather being so shitty. All the same though. How have we not ripped some serious pages out of their books yet?

Further notes on my vacation

Despite Paris making me feel like a revolting little cockroach, obviously my feelings about it are mixed as you can tell by past posts. Our brief stay there Sunday/Monday, at Carmen's sans Carmen again, who was working nights, was unpleasant; I was riding the dragon, exhausted, sad to have left Barcelona, pissed off that I'd purchased the wrong Thalys ticket to get back to Brussels, and oh yes, experiencing constant false sightings of Bluebeard. That does not seem to have slowed down with age. The strength of the nervous paranoia inspired by the idea of him greatly exceeds any pain the man himself is likely to inflict on me, especially considering that we contrived to be something like civil in our last communiqués.

It seems I've managed to compress and squeeze a lot of my neuroses and guilt issues - because there is some me-guilt involved, and not just that ridiculous, conceited guilt of the Heartbreaker ('how oh how dared I be so very lovable!') - into the physical boundaries of the city that saw the worst years of my life to date. Is that a reasonable strategy to use to deal? Probably not. And certainly not, when I spend bits of my vacation there.

Luckily, however, it seems that the neuroses and the guilt issues are centre-ville-ers, and when we spent a few days with Mlle Pariyorker in her new digs in the swanky western suburbs in between time in Amsterdam and time in Barcelona, they did not get on the RER and follow me out. Mlle Pariyorker has stumbled onto a good pasture. Her new place is about four times the size of her abandoned marital apartment and half the price, for one; her professional prospects are singin' along, for two; she has her own substantial garden and barbeque now, for three; and her new man is a fucking brilliant cook, for four. And the important thing is that she seems much, much happier.

Do I think she dealt with her former situation with all the wisdom in the world? If I consider her actions, they were fine, even her only choice in the circumstances - it was her explanations that made me angry, and I don't know if she was being completely honest with herself in those explanations. Sometimes people'd rather look like a bastard than look like a patsy, and will take steps to do so even if the risk of looking like a patsy isn't that high. Oh, Pride, you naughty naughty Mortal Sin. Our capacity for it probably has some evolutionary advantages, but all the same I think the world would be a vastly better place if we chose just one day a year - say, Kwanzaa - when we strove to be humble. Or we could all take turns.

Anyhoo. We mostly stayed in the far west suburbs having a great time, and touristically we visited not only the Chateau's gardens and my absolute favourite thing, the Hameau de la Reine (god, that poor idiot Marie Antoinette - how women were the slaves of their circumstances back then, no matter what class they belonged to!), but also the vegetable garden of the King, which I think went up under Louis XIV. It's close to the Chateau and well worth a visit, as is the attached shop where the sell produce from said garden.

As far as agricultural techniques go, it's not anachronistic, or rather it is extremely anachronistic, in the sense that it looks like Louis XIV's garden but is pumped up like crazy on the modern plant 'roids. But it's very beautiful, particularly the clever way they get the pears and apples to grow on trellises, which the F-word and I resolved we'd try out when we become property owners. I liked the look of them but I think the F-word was more enchanted by how much easier it would be to pick the fruit than it had been in his early youth, when he had to scale ladders and reach under the heat of the southern Australia sun. Pictures to follow - though not of the F-word under the hot Australian sun - that's strictly for my fantasy file.

She's back, and this time, she's rested

It would be a big lie to say I'm happy to be back, but we had the good fortune to spend a night in Paris on the way home, so at least I'm happy to be in Brussels, which for all its imperfections is not and never will be Paris. Thank god. I'm not necessarily opposed to big cities, but I suppose because of my history there Paris makes me feel like a cockroach struggling through a pile of cockroaches. If we had gone straight from Barcelona to Brussels, it would have been torture. Like 90% of the adult population that's visited, I fell deeply in love with it - swallowed every one of its clichés hook, line and sinker and was hungry for more.

There were a lot of things I loved about it, but especially I fell in love with Gaudi, that beautiful batshit crazy man. Up at the Park Güell, I had a little cry as we gazed over the magic-mushroom-and-crucifix-ornamented houses to the city beyond. I think I was upset that the whole world couldn't live in Barcelona, or maybe that every city in the world didn't have an architect like Gaudi in it who could make such lovely spaces with such commonplace materials. There's just something so friendly about what he built - so welcoming and so sympathetic - that I couldn't believe it. Really called to mind that other batshit crazy man who I love, Hundertwasser. Though I suppose Hundertwasser didn't have Gaudi's sense of structure, and Gaudi didn't have Hundertwasser's sense of nonsense.

I know there's a cost factor involved, but it made me hate most modern designers and architects for their apparent inability to build things the people who use them find pleasant. Catalan modernists had an aesthetic humanity, or humility - they didn't seem to want to seem clever so much as massage your tired eyeballs, and cater to your need for something beautiful to look at. Domenech too - we couldn't believe our happy eyes when we saw the Saint Pau hospital. And as Robert Hughes wrote, unlike Sagrada Familia, that was finished in the architect's lifetime, and has done and will do far more good for the people of Barcelona than Sagrada Familia is ever likely to. Sagrada Familia is a can't miss, though . . . it's fascinating to see the work being carried out before you, and a real bafflement to try to figure out how the fuck it has been permitted to install some of the things that have been installed since Gaudi's death.

By the way, I sincerely recommend the Robert Hughes book I was going on about before I left, whether you intend to go to Barcelona or not - it's a great read. But if you do intend to go to Barcelona it's indispensable - like having a clever, sarcastic, enthusiastic friend whispering in your ear as you go from place to place. And he goes on about Gaudi better than I could. But there was one thing I wanted to mention that Gaudi did, to help him get those strange angles that make his arches and elements look weirdly alive - catenary string models. He would hang weighted arcs of string, appropriately connected to each other, photograph the intricate result and turn the photo upside down to get an approximation of what he could do to a roof that would allow it to bear its own weight. Fucking - fucking - genius. Pictures to follow.