Twenty days until we get on the plane. Twenty-one until we touch down in the city we've been missing for nine years. Three weeks. 504 hours. But who's counting?

Amsterdam has always represented various types of freedom to me. I first traveled there in 1994, after attending a horror festival in the suburbs of London. Yes, I admit it freely, I went for the pot, and I smoked great sticky green delicious gobs of it ... but I also found a city in which I felt more comfortable than any other besides New Orleans, and that had a lot to offer besides good, (sort of) legal drugs. I can't really tick off a list -- "art, music, flea markets" -- though it has all those things and more. It's the feeling a city either gives you or doesn't, the ability to live in a place for a little while instead of hovering tentatively on its fringes. To use the word the Dutch use, it's gezellig, a word I've seen variously translated as cozy, comfortable, laid-back, easygoing. Amsterdam is all those things, or at least it was just shy of a decade ago. One of my strongest memories of that first trip in '94 isn't of the girls sitting in windows in the Red Light District or the first legal pot I smoked. It's of sitting in my favorite coffeeshop (Goa, on Kloveniersburgval) at the golden hour that sometimes lingers in Amsterdam between winter daylight and full dusk, realizing I was free to be here simply because I wanted to be; I had come here to this city entirely under my own power, earning the trip with my own work and money, and had found a place I loved. (This was also the first time I had traveled on my own, something I urge everyone to do at least once in their lives. It helps you realize what you're capable of.)

I tried to visit at least once a year between 1994 and 2000, sometimes alone, sometimes with Chris. Then money got tight, and my work went in a direction that didn't inspire European publishers who'd previously marketed me as a bleeding-edge horror queen to fly me over on press junkets* anymore. What with one thing and another, nine years passed. And now it's our twentieth anniversary, and we realized there was really nowhere else we could go, nowhere we'd been happier together or laughed more or had purer fun.

Over the last few days, as I started to get excited about the trip (terrified too, but never mind), I realized Amsterdam now represents another kind of freedom to me, seemingly small but very significant when you have chronic pain: the freedom to go anywhere in the city and do anything I like, for as long as I like, without having to worry that pain will drive me back to the hotel. When the pain comes (and it will, as we like to do a lot of walking), all I have to do is duck into one of the coffeeshops that are on every other corner and partake of one of the world's safest, tastiest painkillers.** As long as you avoid big fratty/chavvy tourist joints like The Bulldog, most of the coffeeshops are relaxing places (if not always quiet ones -- though the exposure to young people's music of today will be educational, I guess). It's impossible to overstate how happy this makes me. For once, we won't have to curtail our fun because I'm tired and hurting. I get so sick of that shit. Most of the time, when I try to "go out" and "do something," I can't enjoy myself as much as I want to, and I feel like a killjoy even though Chris would never treat me like one. Long before I'm ready, I stop having fun and start thinking about my everfucking spine and sciatic nerves. That won't have to happen on this trip.

My dear, sweet, honest-to-a-fault mother does not understand our Amsterdam trips. "All you do is sit around and smoke marijuana! You could do that at home!" Yeah, but doing it here can make it hard to do anything else. Also, the difference between even the best available here and the varieties available there is like the difference between your corner-store beer cooler and the world's finest purveyor of liquors and liqueurs, in terms of both variety and potency. In Amsterdam I can (I hope) have something resembling an able-bodied person's vacation. We will walk and look and laugh and eat and go to museums, and I will not have to hurt much or think much about hurting.



*Except my French publisher, Au Diable Vauvert, who has supported the Liquor books wholeheartedly and only wishes I would return to Paris to help promote them. I'm sorry, ADV! Maybe this trip will help me get over my terror of traveling to places I can't immediately get home from.

**In my essay "Nobody's Fault But Mine" (2000), I stated that, as much as I liked pot, it had few or no painkilling properties for me. This, of course, was the result of my being hooked on Vicodin at the time.