So after my honeymoon in Barcelona with FiFi La Rue, I took an aeroplane to the great city of Amsterdam in the Netherlands. It’s pretty much the bomb diggity, even though it rains alot there. It actually rained for most of my time there. I would say there were definitely a plethora of rainy days while I was in Amsterdam. But damn, is it beautiful there when the sun comes out. Hence the glitter on the water you get when Mariah Carey parks her little bitty boat by the sidewalk.

Almost as good as the movie, eh? She should have won a Grammy for “Fantasy.” Did she win a Grammy for “Fantasy?”

It’s a pretty great place and all; they have good street art and they’re way into directions.

Moreover, if you’re a dude/girlyman like me, it’s kind of the best place ever, for instance because you can go skate all day and then have a refreshing beverage (Grote or Klein) RIGHT AFTERWARDS IN THE SKATEPARK SERVED BY THE SKATEPARK STAFF BECAUSE THE SKATEPARK SERVES PRISTINE ICE-COLD BEER!!!!!!!!

But the main reason why it’s the best place ever is because I met the coolest group of dudes on the ferry there, and they let me be part of the crew every day until the end of my Dutch szechuan. We bro’d down hard. They are the homies, if you need further explanation. This is what a typical day with them started out like, after numerous hours of pre-up chilling. We rode bikes everywhere, and I always made them miss the ferries they planned on taking, because I was overeating Stroopwaffels and Sate Schnitzels and it really weighed a man down.

Three is chaos! SOLID! The crew from left to right is Michiel, (pronounced by combining the sound of switch heelflip with the racial epithet for lowly potato-eaters like me), Dick, and Mike.

This was the spot every night. And I mean every night. Supposedly they went to this one popular nightclub called Bittersweet sometime when I went home early, but for my fifteen days in Amsterdam, I don’t think I saw the inside of any other establishment besides this gem. It’s an old punk rock bar called “Cafe The Minds,” located near some well-known squats and anarchist hang-outs. We all took turns buying rounds of beer, and watching grown women fight over Mike.

Besides being such a looker and na-na-na-na gettin’ techie with it skater, Dick is a champion chef and a newly-engaged dude. He’s going to marry a rad girl named Marge. I didn’t get to sit down to high tea with her and find out about her entire life and psychological condition, but she was really nice when I ran into her, and I will tell you this my friend, she is quite a schatje lekker–Dick’s girl is a cutie for real.

And now you see why she wants to marry the guy.

But aesthetics aside, his personality is the best. More often than not, he is a very serious dude, so you get that much more mileage out of getting him to laugh, because you feel like you’ve overcome a challenge by making that dude crack a smile.

If it was any hour before 5, we were usually “shilling” hard at Mike’s house, because it was oh-so-chill, and his apartment was located very close to the center of the city. It had really good afternoon light; so good that it was actually counter-productive if you want to get out of the house and do something during the daylight hours, because it was so nice and tranquil to max and relax with the windows open and the breeze blowing in, and the nightshop right around the corner with veggie burgers and croquets calling your name.

I found this in Mike’s bathroom. It’s the lyrics from that cream song, “White Room.” He said him and his friends became obsessed with it and they couldn’t stop listening to it or talking about it for three days, so he decided it needed to be placed somewhere prominent, and over the years the condensation from innumerable showers has made it look a bit like a deep sea scroll.

Mick-heel is from the small town of Kampen in the Dutch countryside. He felt claustrophobic in Kampen, and couldn’t wait to move to Amsterdam. Once he moved to the big city, he made a bunch of skater friends and started going to carpentry school to learn how to build traditional custom-made sail boats. He’s lived in some oddball places, anti-squats they are called, large empty office spaces that business park landlords can’t rent. They draw up these pseudo-rental agreements with anti-squatters to protect against real squatters setting up shop on their property, because squatters in some ways have more tenancy rights than your regular joe-blow tenant who pays his rent in the Netherlands, and once they start a squat, it’s very hard for landlords to kick them out.

His mom comes into the city from time to time to take him shopping and make sure he’s eating, typical mom stuff. He’s a really good guy, I instantly admired him, because his energy is genuine and welcoming; let’s say he’s got a nice aura. He was refreshing to talk with and observe in conversation with others because he’s a very steady, rational thinker, he has quite progressive politics, and he’s never afraid to voice his opinion, despite the peer pressure of those around him or facing the repercussions of thinking differently from the group. The easiest example that comes to mind was when we discussed the gay parade that had taken place on the canals in the center city one day. There had been some negative backlash against the parade by Amsterdam’s immigrant Arab, Turkish, and Magrebhi communities, and then a counter-counter backlash against them by the city’s ethnically Dutch and gay citizens, with a xenophobic bent to it: something to the effect of “who the fuck are you to deride them for being gay and telling them to get out of Amsterdam when you’re not even from here?” and stressing that Dutch society holds tolerance as an important central value, so a requisite for living in the Netherlands is having a tolerant attitude for the other members of the populace. Skaters in group situations can be a bit brutish and bro-ish sometimes, a bit “O’Doyle Rules!” if you will, and some of the other dudes at the bar with us were bad-mouthing all the city’s gays and lesbians for prancing around showing everyone how cool it was that they were gay, standard hetero-posturing, and then Mick-heel spoke up without any hesitation, and eloquently said that it was their thing and they should be able to be themselves in Dutch society, and that everyone should be able to hold onto their identity in the country without interference, including the immigrant Muslim communities, and that the only thing he didn’t advocate was different groups pushing their beliefs or agendas onto everyone else, for example if the city’s Turks think there’s something wrong with homosexuality, it’s fine for them to feel that way, but don’t push it in everyone elses’ face, and vice-versa for the other segments of Dutch society; but as far as he was concerned, a parade down the canal wasn’t an imposing or threatening gesture.

Mike had this devilish grin on his face that he just couldn’t shake the first couple of times I met him. I asked Dick and Mick-heel about the look, and Mitch (Mick-heel) told me that he had had that look glued onto his mug for the last two or three weeks ever since he had his first threesome. When I asked Mike about the sexual rendevous later on, the first thing he told me about it was: “it was awesome!” I should have expected that response. Besides being really pretty, he’s probably the most chill dude out of the three, if not the most chill dude ever. His uncle paints a new portrait of Mike on an old skateboard every year for Mike’s birthday, and the one from two years ago says “Michael Bontekoe: lazy sunday afternoon.” That says it all about Mike as far as I’m concerned.

But it’s kind of crazy how handsome the guy is. He’s definitely not the kind of guy that you would want to leave your girlfriend alone with, not because he would actively try to swoop on her, but because the whole shebang is out of his control; It’s not his fault! Women find him so attractive, your girl would be overcome and attack him right there on the spot. I was serious when I said grown women would get in fights over him at the bar; it verged on physical altercations, catfights, you know, and it was kind of creepy how into him girls would be. Kind of Golem-ish from Lord of the Rings, “ah, my precioussssssss….”

I stayed in the Casa de Krienen, and if I was pressed to describe it with one singular adjective: I would have to call it palatial.

If it was dry, this is what the view from the backyard looked like when the sun went down. It was very peaceful, with these big guys swaying back and forth all night long.

The Casa de Krienen has some of the prettiest flowers. I may be color-blind, but I can still recognize BOO-DOW! when I see BOO-DOW! right in front of me.

However, the most memorable part of staying at the Casa de Krienen wasn’t my plush surroundings; rather, it was the next door neighbor, “Nail,” I don’t know how you spell it in Dutch, because she insisted on greeting me everyday by saying, “yoo-hooooooo?!?!?” in the highest attainable octave. Never a “hi” or “goedmorgen!” always with the “yoo-hooooooo?!?!?”, that one. Don’t get me wrong, though, she was very nice, and she believed me when I told her that I was not responsible for destroying the twine supporting one of her cherished flower boxes, despite my bad attitude, uncouth American ways and odd sleeping schedule.

This is a fancy-schmancy waterfront development that looks like a gigantic lego building. Mick-heel and I decided with supreme finality that if we ever end up on the cover of Fortune Five Double O, we will purchase this building and have “pool parties” where you can jump into the river from one of the top stories. I know what you’re thinking, and my response is as follows: “Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhh!!!!”

On what I thought was my last day in Amsterdam, my homies took me to this summer music festival called Applesap, or “Apple-juice.” It fulfilled all of the requisites for a festival. It was quite festive. The highlight of the event was this little Dutch pikey child. I don’t know what his name is, but Mitch and Dick told me he is a somewhat well-known eleven year old prodigy in the Netherlands. If you can’t tell what he is doing to that microphone, he is in fact rapping into it. I asked Mitch and Dick what an eleven year old raps about? I think that is actually a rhetorical question, kind of like, “what is the sound of one hand clapping,” or “if a tree falls in the middle of the forest, does anyone hear it?” or the time-honored classic, “who cuts the barber’s hair?”

If the Pikeydingobaby rapping about second grade wasn’t enough to get you going, take a look at this sweet pond in the middle of the park where the festival took place. Dutch people have it going on. They know how to do things right, you know?

This was a bit creepy, but at the same time quite beautiful. I think we can call it a tie and title it mysterious, to be sure. It was a nude portrait of Bo Derek from the Seventies wheat-pasted to a wall in the warehouse surrounding the skatepark.

Dick has the buttery KCK hardflip late back 180.

I thought this was the coolest diamond in the urban rough, but Dick, Mike, and Mitch thought I was a kook because I took so many pictures of it. It’s a community of smurfs, thumpers and garden gnomes nestled in a rock garden in front of one of the apartment buildings by the nightshop closest to Mike’s apartment. Speaking of nightshops, let me impart to you, the humorous nature of the concepts of proximity and effort in the psyche of a resident of Amsterdam. Amsterdam is condensed, and almost every corner of the city can be reached by bike, tram, or ferry easily within less than an hour. The city is also very comfortable, pretty cozy and hedonistic, resulting in a circumstance where my three amigos would argue for 10-15 minutes about which nightshop was closer and would be the right pick for a late night snack (before finally venturing out), when all of the nightshops under discussion were within 5-10 minutes walking distance. But to them, it mattered; it was serious business, because one wrong move could result in an extra 2-3 minutes of unnecessary walking, causing a serious diminution of chilling time.

I took this photo on a short day trip to the suburb of Zandam. Alot of the families living outside of the city are lucky enough to have their backyards face onto quaint little canals like this. Not bad, for the burbs, huh?

The big canals aren’t too shabby out there, either.

This dude was rad. He was a local professional partier and skatepark barnie who frequented The Minds long before Mike, Dick, and Mitch ever stepped inside the joint, but they still didn’t know his name. After regaling us with stories about a summer festival that takes place in the north of Holland at a 70′s skatepark with a killer snakerun, he proudly declared: “Ja, fuck all this stupid street and park skating, I’m gonna be a snakerunner!” so we called him snakerunner from there on out.

I took these pictures from one of the red tinted windows of the Stedelijk modern art museum in the city’s old post office building. Their exhibits are pretty out there, very engrossing; I highly recommend going there if you ever visit Amsterdam.

Mike from The Streets says “No one’s really there fighting for you in the last garison. No one except yourself that is; no-one except you. You are the one who’s got your back ’til the last deed is done. Scott can’t have my back til the absolute end, cuz hes got to look out for what’s over his horizon. He’s gotta to make sure he’s not lonely, not broke. It’s enough to worry about keeping his own head above” and he may be right. Friendship may be ephemeral and fair-weather, we might only have ourselves, atomized and all alone at sea when the curtain falls and the fat lady tumbles out of the cieling as the small cookie in her hand is crumbling and someone has shit on the coats and incidentally started to throw pieces of it at the cieling fan freshly removed from by the ballena’s exit, but man isn’t it nice when you have friends? You can’t be completely sure where they will be in one year, ten years, or if they will be there for you until the end, or if they will stab you in the back with a sharp knife and then take it out and present it to you and say, “I believe this is yours,” but here and now, HERE AND NOW, wherever you are, isn’t it nice to have friends? Isn’t it nice to be a friend? Friendship is like ice cream. It’s just good, on all counts. I mean, seriously, who doesn’t like ice cream?

Surprise! Me and Brian worked really hard and we did it. You know, people were always skeptical, every single step of the way, but we pulled through with MAX effort and we became totally insane dudes. I hope you like that midriff tease, that’s my barely legal pose, because it’s barely legal in some places, namely civilized society. If you want to see more from where that came from, go to www.amishporn.com and go wild, B-A-B-Y!

This is what my sister looks like when she can’t make up her mind as to which beer she prefers to drink on a saturday night. The long and the short is that she drank both. Speaking of drinking, next time you are at a bar, I suggest getting a straight ginger ale, VIRGIN, Baby! They are usually quite syrupy and delicious.

One of the pre-requisites for being a totally insane dude is that you can take fingerboarding to a whole new level. Brian gets all Tollhouse and goes chocolate chips for the Crookie Monster.

Then we put on the Gloria Estefan and he used his hips for this back smith. Basically all we want to do is dance, if you know what I am saying. If you have a sister, tell her that we (I) just want to dance.

We got so crazy ludicrous in L.A. that we took a walking tour of the city’s doorways. We liked this one the best because it is attached to the porch that is attached to the infamous Casa de Krimper. You may have heard of it, it’s a real famous renaissance sight.

Meaning that people from the world over visit to take a photographic record of this renaissance man and his miniature cereal-box-nano.

Yo, L.A. is so crazy that two totally insane dudes can go and get some sweet snacks very late at night at a diner constructed of large-size neon lightsticks and see a mellow guy wearing medieval chainmail and smoking a cigarette as they breeze in the door.

Likewise, LA is so crazy that the real Big Liebowski will entertain you with his sweat and musical talents (including covers of favorites such as “Play That Funky Music, White Boy”) while operating within a portable igloo.

If you are not already aware, totally insane dudes wear totally insane faces at all hours of the day and relax at their ease in the most totally insane poses.

Afterall, when one has become a totally insane dude, a totally insane face is simply a way of channeling all of the totally insane stimulus of the day, including but not limited to imitating Jesus when there is no water present and you are positioned four feet above the ground…in the air.

Appendix A.

Appendix B.

Appendix C.

But I have to admit, sometimes Brian and I just had to chill out, browse around the local thrift stores for used romance novels, and drink barley tea. Because, to be honest with you, it takes a lot out of you to be totally insane all the time, and sometimes there’s a little voice inside you that says, “my little pony, my little pony, my little pony” over and over again, and you slowly realize that in fact it is YOUR LITTLE PONY, and you have to release him into the wild. You have to let him run free. It’s the only way to continue this chaotic lifestyle without a horrible life-threatening accident or impulse buy.

Jackson understands this dynamic perfectly, hence the piece of tanned tiger skin he wore on top of his body for warmth.

But for real, if you want to find your little pony, you have to look for them in places of business after closing time, when they consort with the neighborhood garden gnomes, who are notorious gamblers.

Look closely if you can at the far right hand corner of this picture…What do you see?

Correct you are, wise wonder of the universe! It’s Dylan the gnome transporting his newly acquired winnings to the closest safety deposit box/ gatorade vendor.

When we weren’t looking for our favorite gnomies, Brian Boru and I got to put on our fencing suits and attend totally insane parties in the Hollywood Hills with none other than the illustrious Alex Klein, licensed chai tea maker.

Unfortunately, he spent most of his time on the phone with his agent and his Trader Joe’s account manager, so we couldn’t corner him and ask him questions about his childhood and his thoughts on the issue of jalapenos in contemporary cuisine.

So, to effectively utilize our time at the party, we took a totally insane tour of the house! It was Ya-Ya’s house. She’s the cutie on the right. If you or someone you know is interested in purchasing an awesome chic party dress, you can check out her website at www.yaya.nl or you can browse for slected items at Saks Fifth Avenue, if you have time to go shopping and go back and forth between the dressing room and the full mirror before the Danceaholics Anonymous meeting (call either The Brian or The Cameron for details and locations).

She had good taste in books and art. I liked her Tahitian Babes.

Given that Ya-Ya’s company makes totally insane clothing for gorgeous people and uber-celebrities, Brian Boramha and I decided it was fitting for us to get down to business in Ya-Ya’s creativity chamber and come up with some totally insane new ideas about life!?!?

Honestly, we didn’t get that far in terms of coming up with totally insane ideas of the groundbreaking sort. But we tried really hard.

However, we were able to hammer out this solid declaration: If for some reason, Brian and I have some influence in determining who will be World-President in the case that we all have to leave Earth in a spaceship and find a new planet like on Thundercats, we will vote for none other than Zoe Yuzna, (unless of course we are drugged by fembots in scintillating Olympic downhill skiing costumes and/ or bribed with an unlimited supply of candy, waffles, and French Toast).

When reached for comment on her hypothetical election, Zoe smiled and gave us both telepathic high-fives. She did not, unfortunately or fortunately depending on how you see it, produce a gang of fembots or heavily sugared bribe material.

Another thing that happens when you are being totally insane in L.A. is that you see beautiful things. I saw beautiful things all the time. Like the Taylor Goldsmith Hyperconductivity Project: beautiful.

If you want to hear how beautiful the TGHP is, you can visit his band’s website at www.simondawes.com and trip out while you gaze at this photo of the Grapevine and enjoy your lack of colorblindness.

I’m so good at being colorblind that I missed a slim margin of the words involved in the message conveyed by this sign.

I don’t know much about Phytoplankton, but I love Zooxanthelle. She’s pretty much okay at giving high fives.

So much so that I would have to say my bud Zo Yuzna is totally insane. Enough to be World-President. The song remains the same, sailors. It’s a longstanding profession, and the language is now.

Our man turned twenty-one. His California License featuring none other than Dirty Sanchez and his Band of Moustaches is now legally licensed to thrill. We are very happy that he graces us daily with his presence and friendship, and everyone on the flannel scene is anxiously holding their respective breaths for the unveiling of Mr. Meinke’s highly anticipated entrepreneurial venture, Chez Jonny.

As Mr. Meinke is known for his thorough appreciation of “tough-guy music,” the restaurant’s first 1 customer(s) will receive a complimentary Maroon 5 cd courtesy of the owner, his two younger sisters, and their bathroom cd player (also known in the non-contiguous United States as a boombox or sound-zipper).

Although it probably cannot compete with Mr. Meinke’s previous hand-modeling and frantic pony-gymnastics hair experimentation, Chez Jonny is expected to impress critics nationwide with its candid appreciation of what the barbeque means to every man and woman’s inner cave-animal.

Summarizing his existence from under a Virgin Airlines “sweet dreams” sleeping mask on the linoleum floor of Barcelona Prat Airport, Mr. Meinke once said, “it’s all good!” From all of us here at headquarters, we would like to wish Mr. Meinke another amazing twenty-one and then an exponential amount of twenty-ones after that until he gets tired of making everyone around him have a good time and decides that it is time to chill with cherubic angels.

Fifty Cent, born Fenna Marie Krienen on July 6, 1975 in South Jamaica Queens, is an East Coast rapper/ Screamo-Christian Rocker/ Red Yarn Orderer at Chinese Food Restaurants commonly known for her explosive tourettes-like diatribes over chamber organ synth-fusion, featured in elevators and alarm clock soundings the world over. Commonly compared to the wildly imaginative brother-sister duo Naive Melody, she rose to fame following the success of her 2005 album Get Rich or Die Tryin’ and its successor, The Prefrontal Cortex Massacre, with hits such as “I am Dutch!” and “In da Neuroscience Lab.” Fifty Cent achieved multi-platinum success with both albums, selling around 20 million albums worldwide, mostly to blind gardeners and miserly elevator operators looking for solace in digitally mastered musical expression. She is known for her “gangsta” image, precise linen-blonde bangs, and for having been shot nine times and surviving after being mistaken for assisting in the disposal of an important Dixie Cup belonging to a Serbian crane/ sweater-master.

Fifty Cent currently resides in Farmington, Connecticut. The rapper purchased the former mansion of boxing star Mike Tyson, which now houses the ears of both prizefighter Evander Holyfield and Ms. Cent’s great-great-great grandneighbor Vincent Van Gogh. When reached for comment about her success in the rap game thus far, Fifty Cent had this to say: “Goedemorgen. Hallo, hoe gaat het, Dolfijn? Alles goed, mens, ja? Hoeveel broers en zusters heb je? De dolfijnen hebben broers en geen zusters? Dat is te slecht. Minstens kunnen zij Bingo en andere spelen nog spelen, in tegenstelling tot slechte Rudolph” (pauses to shake her head), “En wat over me? Goed, ik houd van dranken Whiskey Sour die met Gatorade blauw worden gemaakt, omdat ik altijd heel wat deodorant gebruik en ik van gezellig dingen zoals kruidenierswinkel het winkelen en Amish-stijlaerobics houd. Ik zal altijd gangster en sassy blijven.”

So the other day, I escaped the urban jungle to the magical land of Fairfield 45 minutes away, where things are not different at all. We went to the skatepark, I bought some corn from the dude hustling on the side of the soccer field, and everything was rather chill, but the sky was oppressively grey, which I did not appreciate. While we were skating, Bob started shooting the shit with this twenty-something BMXer dude. He was country. I want to call him Henry. Let’s call him Henry. Henry was wearing some JNCOs, a black sweatshirt with flames on it, a ballcap sunk low over his eyes, black biking gloves, and muddy skate shoes. Henry had a kid, who looked alot like a pikey child from the UK, with a dark blue long sleeved shirt stuck into track pants and a shaved head on top of his shindig. During the course of their conversation, Bob probably alluded to the quality of the skatepark, something along the lines of, “yeah, this place is pretty tight.” I believe Henry was in agreement, but added the caveat that he is often irritated by the Fairfield Skatepark, because he has been arrested there before. Bob laughed and said, “you’ve been arrested here before? Wow, man, that must be embarrassing.” “Hell yeah, it’s embarrassing!” Henry replied. After this interchange, Bob continued to skate in his flannel, I continued to daydream, and Julian continued to do his full-time job of observing his surroundings while simultaneously re-learning his picture perfect treflips. He’s a big observer, Julian. Then suddenly, maybe twenty minutes later, a Fairfield cop screeched up to a halt in front of the skatepark and ran out onto it’s promontory barking something at Henry. Henry dropped his bike and turned away from the cop, slowly bringing his hands behind his head. The cop approached Henry and pulled out his gun. He barked some more at Henry, and Henry dropped to his knees. The cop then approached Henry, and getting closer and closer, he eventually stopped short, planted his feet wide and aimed his people-killer right at the back of Henry’s head. Everyone became very quiet and all eyes were on the people-killer leveled dead center on Henry’s dome. The cop then pulled out his radio with his other hand and started a convo with the dispatcher, but kept his eyes fixed on Henry. Julian said it looked like an execution.

Within minutes, a second cop arrived and they put Henry in the squad car. Henry’s pikey child stood close by and asked aloud to no-one in particular, “why are they arresting my dad?” Soon we all found out why Henry had been graced with this tease of an afternoon execution, Fairfield style. Apparently, he shot this local kid in the ass with an airsoft gun (handheld, pistol edition, dude) an hour previously. We were not informed why Henry shot the guy, possibly just to keep it real? The kid told his mom about the incident when she came to pick him up, and she called the police. He was maybe the most epic part of our day in Fairfield. The kid was an exact replica of the actor who plays Joe Dirt as a child when he gets abandoned by his family in the Grand Canyon. Homeboy had a massive mane of curly glam-mullet and an Amish pseudo-moustache reminiscent of Pubert from the Addams Family. The cops kept Henry for a while, and then let him go, (maybe because he had to take his pikey child home, and they couldn’t just leave him on his own at the skatepark? or perhaps because it was his lucky day and he didn’t have any pressing warrants?) afterwhich they had a long Doctor Phil discussion with the young Joe Dirt and his parents. Yes, I said it, parents; plural. Not long after Henry’s confinement in the cop car, Joe Dirt’s dad arrived to the scene. He was a body builder with spiked hair. As the fracas wound down, a kid in Dickies gave Bob, Julian, and I his two cents on Henry. “That guy lives on my street. He’s always getting arrested. The cops are at his house like every week, sometimes like every day.” I hope things for Henry quiet down. I hope he quits living la vida loca. I hope that someday soon he can ride his BMX bike in peace. Finally, I hope that his pikey child gets lots of love and attention and stops wearing track pants. However, if his pikey child continues to wear track pants, I hope he enjoys the swishy sound. Sometimes that’s really comforting, that sound.

Who needs 1 girlfriend named Magyar when I have 2 boyfriends like these? For the record, both of these dudes tried to play dirty tricks on me involving temporality and location yesterday. When Brian was outside the taqueria, he said “I’ll be there in half an hour” and then walked in to eat nachos two minutes later. When Chris was cruising up to the front door of JB Killa’s party he told me in all seriousness, “We just chillin’, bludd. I’m staying in tonight with my cats and the new book that Oprah recommended” and then opened the sliding door to the porch in order to turn my frown upside down. If you meet a pretty girl today, tell her about some arts and crafts project you are working on for your aunt, and she will pretend to act interested, but at least she knows you are deep and complex.

In 850 AD a Taoist alchemist in China attempted to create an elixir that would give the gift of immortality, a fountain of youth potion if you will. What he ended up with was the world’s first light explosive.

I slept with a bevvy of middle-aged married women while I was in Barcelona. FiFi here was the first, but definitely not the last. You think I’m jealous of your luck with the BALLENA, Jonny? Forget about it!

I met my friend Stef by way of staring. I stared at the dude because I kept seeing him everywhere. Then his board went into the fountain at Sants and when he walked by me trying to dry it with his t-shirt I made a joke about how long he figured it would take to dry in Spanish. He answered in a sort of congenial broken Spanish and then I elaborated on what I had just said in English. Once he responded, I could tell by his accent that he was French, so we switched languages again and I started speaking to him in French. We chatted about girls (in particular how much he misses his girlfriend back in France) and skating and how great Barcelona is, and then pretty soon, the dude and I were straight-up pals. I was very lucky to meet Stef. He’s golden, I don’t think he has bad bones in his body; very down to earth guy with a winning smile and an always sunny demeanor except for those few occasions that he gets pitched when he’s trying a trick or if anyone mentions the Catalan language, which he finds excessive and essentially valueless because it’s so specialized to fit the population of such a relatively small part of the world (we disagree on this, but I find it humorous). I didn’t get to meet up with him as much as I would have liked while I was there, but we put in some good time, mostly skating, and I think we enjoyed having conversations with each other most. He’s still in Barcelona now, but if he leaves any time soon, he’ll probably go back to being a math teacher in his hometown, a beautiful but cold place nestled up in the mountains near the Swiss border.

My mom is a work of art after all.

If you aren’t already aware, since returning from Europe, I have become a never-nude. This is a picture of my new eternal outfit right before I bought it on the Passeig de Gracia. I haven’t taken it off since I left Spain. I think it looks good on me, but it’s a bit tight, to tell you the truth. It’s hard to do epic dance moves like “The Sweeper” in it, but this is the price we all have to pay for high fashion.

No offense to anyone else’s moms, but my mom is the best mom ever. She went on a run one morning and brought me home this box as a surprise.

This is what was inside.

It’s called Crema Catalana.

And it’s so good.

Like kill your neighbor and/ or sell your soul for it good.

You know when people are describing something they really like, and they say “oh my god, it’s like better than sex, yadda, yadda, yadda”? I would have to say that I disagree with these kinds of statements across the board, (come on, it’s sex, dude) but if I had to make one exception, this pastry would probably be at the top of the list, right next to “I’m on a beach, I’m on an ATV.”

On the right here is Sagrada Familia and on the left is this phallic bullet building that you can see poking up into the sky from pretty much anywhere in the city. This building was a popular conversation topic with most of the people I saw in Barcelona, because it is impossible to figure out what it is, why anyone built it, and why the municipal authorities allowed such a blight to descend upon their city. The only affinity I have for the bullet is that it was a recognizable landmark for remembering where I would meet Paul and Zoe at the beach (down the way in front of the Macky D’s).

This piece is on a huge wall below the skate spot Fondo. I thought it was bad-ass and it reminded me of this one cover of the magazine that comes with the Sunday Chronicle (Parade or something?) featuring this kid with stunners on and the American flag reflected in them: very tribal. I ran and I sweated so that I could go back to Fondo on my last day and hop the fence to take this photo. Even though it caused some extra anxiety to pack it in, it was very pleasant because the penultimate time I went to skate Fondo a few days before, this chunky kid on a mountain bike wouldn’t leave me alone as he wanted me to find him friends his age, ten to fourteen if you’re interested, to go on weekend mountain biking expeditions with him. He was very distressed that every adolescent with a bicycle is into BMX these days and has left the soul glow of mountain biking behind in the dustbin of history. He kept starting every sentence with “mira, …” (look) to show me how much of an idiot I am and how absurdly inexhaustible my idiocy is. I don’t know how you feel about this expression in English, but I always feel like it’s kind of rude, an equivalent of “listen buddy,” or “honey,…” I should have told him that this isn’t my first rodeo and then maybe he would have left me in peace.

My mom wanted me to drop all of my hard-scrabble romances so she took me to the Bel Luna (beautiful moon) Jazz Club so that I could meet an upstanding, sophisticated lady twenty years my senior. One Caparinho and one Mojito later, Martha from Bloomfield Hills, MI looked like Barbara Streishand at her best, and I had a new special friend with a well-founded fear of cellulite. This was her first trip out of the states and she quickly explained to me that I was to be her chirpa. Needless to say, my mom had to walk home alone and I woke up in the morning with a feeling one could most easily describe as shame. Everything I just wrote was complete bullshit, but the drinks were good and I learned something!?!?! I learned that I will take my future wife (future wife, this is addressed to you) to places where you have to sit down in the dark and listen to music and clap at designated intervals without being able to get up and dance only a small percentage of the time in the avenir. Mostly we will get it crunk, and if you, future wife, are not in agreement about this, the tribe has spoken and I will relocate to a leper colony by myself because those people understand ME, they like ME for ME, and they bring new meaning to Andre 3000′s insistence that you shake it like a polaroid picture.

Because the Catalans are such lovely people, they know who the best gang in the entire world is, and they rep hard for the 2-2. Actually, despite my wildest fantasies, the ubiquity of signs like these are due to the fact that bomber/bombero is their word for fireman, and the signs point out water outlets and fire escapes for the rescue services in the case of a sudden attack of flying volcano vultures.

If you see these people any time soon, please report them to headquarters because they just party and kill trees.

This is what A. Gaudi looked like as a young man.

I thought the dude pictured here bore a striking resemblance to Andre “The Giant” Genovese, the Paulinho with the massive switch flip.

This is my friend Boody. Like Stein, his real name is Haldan Michael Blecher, but he will always be Boody to me. I don’t think Boody wore anything else but sweat pants and full sweat suits until he was at least fourteen years old. He would sweat alot during the summer and my mom would try and get him to change into lighter clothes because he looked uncomfortable, but he always said that he was fine and that he liked sweat pants better than anything else out on the market. When we were in Fifth Grade, Boody had me come visit him at his mom’s family’s summer house near Copenhagen. His mom, Lone, is the bomb, by the way. I love that lady. I love the whole family. Especially Boody’s big sister Lilly. She’s always been a cutie, except she smelled pretty bad when she was into riding freight trains cross country. Lilly’s now in Natural Medicine School in Oregon, and I think she knows alot about cracking backs. Anyways, Lone is a Dane and his dad, George, is an American Jew, and I think they met shortly after Lone moved to New York from Denmark. Lovely people, both. If you wanted to type them, she’s an artist and a schoolteacher, and he’s a writer and a playwright. They speak a lot of languages, both of them are translators I guess too. They are divorced now, Lone’s got a new hubby we like alot, and I imagine she will soon spend a lot of time painting and working with charcoal once she retires at the end of this year. I don’t know exactly what George is up to, I imagine he works alot, and I KNOW he wears a black leather jacket every day. He’s always looked good in a black leather jacket. Back to this trip to Denmark. When I arrived in Scandanvia with my righteous overbite, shorts and socks, and an ill-fated rat-tail attempt at a badass haircut, Boody and Lone rocked my world. It was like one of those poignant summers in dramatic movies, except no one died or got hit by a train at the end of it, and I don’t think Boody and I went fishing at all during our tenure there together. Hollywood summers always involve barefoot fishing, and we were wearing shoes for the greater part of said summer. Boody and I stayed up late and went to Legoland and got lost in fields, almost never came home while it was still light out, watched his older cousins get drunk and fight with their parents and relatives about familial skeletons in closets, ate frikadellas and ham and cheese sandwiches from the waffle iron, drank this weird soda you make from a machine in the kitchen using seltzer water and Lillebro blackcurrent juice, and took a trip to see his grandparents at their seaside retirement home in Vejle, a very pretty little joint in Jutland where the beaches are all made of pebbles the size of a quarter and beautiful topless Valkyries with breasts bigger than watermelons (and for that matter bigger than me, at the time, don’t worry I’m dealing with the Napoleon Complex) play volleyball and soccer right next to you like it’s no big deal that you are a mere mortal staring into the antechamber of Valhalla in disbelief. Sometimes they would even ask us to get the ball if it rolled too far away from them. Can you believe that? All non-chalant-like, as if we lived in the same magical world as them, not in the pleasant grey mire between heaven and earth. Since I’ve been in California, Boody’s been up to a bunch of different things like spending this or that New Years with Chloe Sevigny. I guess they used to carpool together because she lived across the street from his old apartment and he’s one of the friends she made in elementary school that she’d like to keep forevs. Now he makes rap music and dates girls he meets on trains. I went to see him in New York two winters ago and he didn’t wear sweatpants once the whole time.

“This Must be the Place (Naive Melody)”
Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues
Warner Bros., 1990

Home is where I want to be

Pick me up and turn me round

I feel numb – born with a weak heart

(So I) guess I must be having fun

The less we say about it the better

Make it up as we go along

Feet on the ground

Head in the sky

It’s ok I know nothing’s wrong . . nothing

Hi yo I got plenty of time

Hi yo you got light in your eyes

And you’re standing here beside me

I love the passing of time

Never for money

Always for love

Cover up + say goodnight . . . say goodnight

Home – is where I want to be

But I guess I’m already there

I come home – -she lifted up her wings

Guess that this must be the place

I can’t tell one from another

Did I find you, or you find me?

There was a time before we were born

If someone asks, this where I’ll be . . . where I’ll be

Hi yo We drift in and out

Hi yo sing into my mouth

Out of all those kinds of people

You got a face with a view

I’m just an animal looking for a home

Share the same space for a minute or two

And you love me till my heart stops

Love me till I’m dead

Eyes that light up, eyes look through you

Cover up the blank spots

Hit me on the head Ah ooh