Diary of an unborn writer #18

"La Scarpetta", Herenstraat.

Heady, rich, red wine fumes cloaking and dispersing thoughts of the week. I've ordered generous hunks of Gran Padano cheese, rustling on a bed of rocket and with the wine, consumed with bread and olive oil.

I'm alone and it's filling up for Thursday.

We continue. Somehow we continue when the pointlessness of an unrejoindered cup sinks heavy on the belly on the walk home. But now the atmosphere is lifting and heady sweet.

There's a half-black President over the sea and the world falls kneeward at his pristinely stated morals, suits and answers to questions nobody thought to ask.

The brain, when so bombarded with positivity, reduces in critical capacity. The man's said nothing and yet won over the free world on vacuity.

Though it's not vacuous - he's drawn around him the stinkiest heavyweights of Washington and above. Campaigns financed by bankers whose loans, otherwise faltering, require political interest. The people will find him lost but stay amused enough to remember him as a Kennedy (and not the Bobby kind). Obama's connections are just as vile and his reign will be one of ever tightening control in the name of expedience and necessity.

His chief of staff has written books espousing the near doubling of specal forces troops worldwide.

His Chief Economic advisor advocated carbon trading on the basis that Africa could dirty its air at our expense because life expectancy there makes it unlikely lung cancer would develop in time to choke dark lungs. (And therein the narrowness and failure of economic thinking - the catastrophe of mechanical mind).

So we're mightily uplifted in La Scarpetta as banks and job losses go the way of Vesuvius and we realise we never cared about money anyway - just been pretending, see?

As ever it's the little man that eats the dirt and Aficans coughing from their factories are told that even they won't pay their wages any more.

"Yes WE CAN!" keep up this pretense and smile that it's getting better, global warming hearts and extended balances raining misery on poor too defenceless against bribes they've heretofore been offered and now cruelly snatched away.

The Tao proclaims its out of balance when speculators and bankers hold sway. But OK everything's fine, go back to your laundry and back of cereal packets - the Operation will tell you what to do should anything untoward happen. You can trust them on that.

We're mightily happy as lies and narrowness keep us in the dark about which way to go. Good news is the future's become so dusky we're getting kicks while we can.

"La Scarpetta" refuses me a fifth glass of wine. They need the table for a demure couple in to settle for a happy time.

Amsterdam is again cold as steps ring on flagstones and lamps hover moth-like in mist. This is a museum on week nights. The west of town when the centre, debauched and far away, is hardly heard. Out west we keep sedantry society - engaged with pleasantries - and the wine swirls.

20 minutes and I'm home.