I'm sitting on the sofa buried in cats, preparing to unearth myself so I can go make a cat chart for our cat/house sitters. Do you see a pattern here?

While exploring this tantalizing site, I learned that the Netherlands' current, conservative government apparently wants to make it illegal for the coffeeshops to sell cannabis to foreigners. There's a stereotype of the typical pot tourist: they're usually young males from the UK or another European country; they come for the weekend, stay in a cheap hostel, get wasted on beer and cannabis, maybe have sex with a prostitute, and go home without having spent significant amounts of money (though it must add up). I wonder. Surely there are others like me and Chris, older travelers who appreciate the wonderful weed but also love other things about the city, who spend money on restaurants, museums, and shopping as well as high-end (pun intended) cannabis, who know how to behave ourselves reasonably well, who don't fall in the canals or get arrested or have to have ambulances called for us because the weed was too strong. If you're such a traveler, this might be a good time to plan a trip to Amsterdam. Maybe we can make a showing. Codgers On Cannabis (COC), dammit!

On a lighter note, I was amused on that same site to see people (at least facetiously) betting on who could smoke the most weed. Uh, that would be me, and if there really is serious betting anywhere, I might have a new career on my hands. I have been occasionally matched but never surpassed.

About half of me is already in Amsterdam and I find it hard to concentrate on anything that doesn't have to do with the trip. Which is probably just as well, since I have at least two weeks' worth of stuff to do to get ready for it. A tendril of depression tried to creep in yesterday -- maybe you won't have as much fun as you think you're going to, you never know, it could happen -- and I booted it right back out, then went and bought some plants to keep myself cheery. Purple petunias, mint, curry, and cauliflower. Planted all of them today, and am feeling it badly in my legs and back now, so I will end this and return to my heating pad.

(ETA: Reading Rembrandt's Portrait by Charles L. Mee, Jr., an excellent biography that also paints a vivid picture of the seventeenth-century Amsterdam art world. Recommended.)

I've spent most of the evening drooling over my new Amsterdam guidebook (new coffeeshops! New restaurants! Much more!). Also got Frommer's 21 Great Walks in Amsterdam, even though we usually have a good time just wandering aimlessly. And I just ordered our tickets for Museumnacht, a wonderful event we've been wanting to return to since we happened across the first one in 2000. I can't wait to find out if the ancient cycads in the Hortus Botanicus are still having sex. They had been doing it for three years when we last saw them.

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.

If I didn't know faustfatale and I were destined to be BFF before, I realized it when I found out we had both enthusiastically bought and read the wonderful book Washed Up: The Curious History of Flotsam and Jetsam by Skye Moody, though others scoffed at our "goofy" reading. But right now I use the phrase because I have many little skritty bits of subjects to write about, nothing worth a full entry. Chris and I have booked our 20th anniversary trip to Amsterdam, our second-favorite city in the world, which makes me very happy. We'll be there for our actual anniversary (November 5, Guy Fawkes' Day) and for Museumnacht, a wonderful event we stumbled across on our last trip in 2000.

Gardening goes well; as you know if you read me on Facebook (hey, don't be shy; I'll friend anybody except ex-stalkers), the milkweed I planted attracted a monarch butterfly, the first I've ever seen in my garden! Actually, I made a whole little butterfly garden with purple and white coneflowers, black-eyed Susans, and Queen Anne's lace as well as lots of milkweed, a Golden Trumpet esperanza, & three kinds of salvia nearby. I also have a big passionflower vine for the Gulf fritillaries and plenty of parsley and fennel for the black swallowtails. I found a caterpillar on each one, and I'm betting our black swallowtails from this spring came back and laid their eggs here. We got grandworms!

Later this week I must return to my doctor and discuss whether the Vilify Abilify is actually, er, abilifying me any. I have kept a log of possible side effects which I present to you here:

Overall -- increased use of -pams; intermittent twitch in eyelids (though this is something I've had off and on for years)

6/21 -- bug crawling sensations (I did spend a lot of time in the garden that day and once there really was a bug on me)

6/22 -- a weird euphoria in the AM but it went away

6/25 -- could not concentrate on reading; jumped from one book to another unable to settle on one (this virtually never happens to me -- I finally gave up and read some Carson McCullers, as it's almost impossible not to become absorbed in "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe")

6/26 -- major mood crash; feeling of utter futility & hopelessness -- lasted about 12 hours

6/27 -- still no appetite; price of meds is actually raising my stress level

6/27 (11:30 pm) -- sudden dizziness & extreme nausea -- lasted 20-30 minutes (?), then headache

And that is my flotsam and jetsam for today.