It's the eve of Queen's Day, and even at noon there is electricity in the air. The day is lovely, and the weather forecast is for lovelier and lovelier thru Sunday, when record high temperatures are anticipated. The really good news about the warm weather is that I will be able to run around in my bright orange tee shirts, this afternoon the one emblazoned "San Francisco, California" and tomorrow the other one sporting a cable car.

I hit The Internet Cafe and send my first couple of emails and then walk west to the Moroccan shop on Haarlemmerdijk where, owing to my having taken a few deep, calming breaths before entrance, I am able to firmly establish with the proprietor's young assistant that, owing to the near nonexistence of my Nederlands, we will be conducting my business in Français, but that it is going to be clear, slow French unless he wants to do it in writing.

It works. You have to be firm with these people, or they'll just mow you down. Everything goes swimmingly, at least with the shopkeepers although I do hear one of my fellow shoppers behind me, after I had described the bread Rina wanted as "Turkse," helpfully noting with quite adequate volume that the bread is "niet Turkse, maar Marokkaanse." Alright, you bastard, you got me on two counts. It's my yoghurt drink that's Turkish, and even then since I was speaking French it should have been "à la Turk" or something like that. Grrrrr.

But while I'm reacting, I gotta say something about the San Francisco Chronicle articles on the anniversary of Thom Gunn's death, most particularly the second part, which ran on Tuesday the 27th. The way the article read, it sounded like Thom was the only person in the whole damn house who ever touched a recreational drug...the Whore of Babylon attended by vestal virgins who were shocked, shocked! as they watched Thom's drug use from the sidelines for over thirty years.

Oh, please. Thom liked his drugs, but he was hardly alone in his enjoyment of them. I went to parties in that house in the seventies and early eighties at which pretty much everyone was twisted on something. More importantly, Thom gave us a fine corpus of first-rate poetry, decades of good teaching, and some incisive literary criticism...and he worked until he was nearly seventy. I'd call that being a productive member of society, and to get downright blunt about it, a thousand times more productive than any of his housemates. To the best of my knowledge, not a one of 'em has published a single book of any kind, nor has there been the appearance in the majority of cases of a full time job. So let's cut Thom some slack.

Besides, he introduced Allen and me. He'd had us both (hey, this was the early seventies) and he knew we'd be the perfect couple.

But I digress. An air of gearing up for the coming festivities hung over the entire area this afternoon as I walked back home via the Volendammer Vishandel, where I picked up a smoked mackerel and 200 grams of those decadent sprat fillets. Then I took the Prinsengracht toward home and passed by a produce shop that had absolutely gorgeous-looking marble-size spruitjes for €1,99 per kilo. Good grief, that's about a buck a pound even with the current weak dollar. Hmmm. I betcha I could pickle some of them and surprise a few folks. It's time I took my pickled Brussels sprouts bi-continental.

In the late afternoon I bicycle with Hans and Rina over to the Stedelijk Museum, where I am passed off as the husband of a nice lady we met in the elevator in order to get me in. See, the invitations are for two persons only, and Rina has only one. However, she is superb at arranging these things. The exhibition is also superb.

I can't even begin to describe it fully, but I have to note that it sure did cover every conceivable type of artistic presentation...from performance pieces like this guy sitting at a table moving strange things around in bizarre ways while he whistled an accompaniment, to video presentations of various types, to some stunning sculpture including delightful ceramics. Etc. etc.

My neck is beginning to kill me, though, so I'm happy when we start back home. Alas, I'm distracted by another problem: see, today is the first time I've been on a bicycle since 1974. I can still ride one, of course, if a bit wobblily. The problem is that bicycling requires certain muscles that lay fallow from '74 to '01, atrophied under lack of blood supply from '01 to '04, and then remained unexercised after my stents were installed last September. So the pain in my legs from trying to keep up with Hans and Rina takes my mind off my aching neck. By the time we get back home, I'm a basket case.

The bicyclist before the return ride:

But tonight is the 25th anniversary of Beatrix's inauguration, and an enormous, elaborate stage has been set up in the Dam square in front of the palace for a ceremony. So after an hour's rest I set out. The Dam is thronged, and I watch parts of the ceremony on the giant screens that are displaying it. Perhaps more interesting is the crowd, most especially its interaction with the Dutch cops.

I mean, here we've got all these well-muscled, jump-booted, club-carrying troops who are getting sassed by teenage punks of both sexes whose level of citizenship as best I can tell would be greatly improved by a quick swat...or in some of the cases two... and yet the cops are just totally laid back. I do love this place.

I come drifting back home through the milling crowds before the ceremony is over since I can't really understand much of what's going on, at least partly because not being a TV watcher, I don't recognize any of the players except for the Queen. I notice on the return that even while there must be a hundred thousand people jammed around the Dam, the bars are full and spilling into the streets.

Tomorrow is Koningindag. Queen's Day. Since it's my first one, I plan to spend as much time as possible in the thick of it.

The whole city is decorated with sprays of orange balloons, and even last night the canals were full of boats flashing psychedelic lights and blasting wild music, to which folks who I sensed were high on more than just life were dancing. If I were just a decade younger I'd pick up a little refreshment from the legal recreational drug store on the corner. Something psychedelic to provide a little extra *sparkle* for my day. This is just pathetic. Here I am in the drug capital of the world and somehow can't spare time for it. Hell, at least I should buy a spliff to toke on periodically.