Dam_Obsessed....I have copied below axxxtw's original post.
Re: I think I'm going crazy...
Posted: 7/3/2007, 01:36
axxxtw Founder
Posts: 910
I'll tell a personal story, parts of it I've told once or twice.
While attending school in Paris, I made my first trip to Amsterdam. At age 18. We did the find-the-cheapest-place-to-stay knocking on doors thing, watched people skate on canals, saw Golden Earring perform live, was invited to stay with some Dutch guys sister who we'd met in a student restaurant, who showed us around. We had a fabulous time. It seems like yesterday, when in fact it was over 20 years ago. I made one more visit after that about one year later. My next visit came several years later, after finishing school, when several years at that young age seems an eternity. I was still relatively poor, and staying in some cheap hotel with my girlfriend of the time. She had to return earlier than I, and on her last night in town, she lost her wallet and cash. She still had to purchase her return ticket to Canada. This was before the automatic teller machines, so cash was hard to find. I gave her all my cash but 40 guilders or so, which I kept. Neither one of us had credit cards. She promised to send me the money back once she got home and settled.
So being broke for the foreseeable future, I holed up in the hotel room. I decided to buy a small bag of grass to pass the time, because it usually makes me go straight to sleep, but on my way back to the hotel room, I passed a comic book shop. I went in and browsed. I discovered a reprint of an old comic I'd heard of in art school. It was something Picasso and others of that calibre read and enjoyed, or so we were taught. I bought it, just to see what it was.
The old comic reprint was called Krazy Kat and Ignatz Mouse. It was not an easy strip to get into, with the strange language and very vague, poetic, sometimes metaphysical stories and lot's of very creaky gags. But that weekend as I smoked, slept and read, I became hooked.
I still have that comic book. This very day I pulled it out. It's very tattered now, very tattered. In a few instances over the 30 year run of the comic Krazy Kat refers to his/her nemesis/love Ignatz Mouse in the weird ungrammatical language he/she spoke as 'Ignatz Mice'. That really tickled me for some reason. I found that line in the comic book again, and it still tickles me. Okay, you'd have to understand the context or something:-) But never mind.
After returning home myself, I adopted my first kitten. I named him Ignatzmice (1986-2003).
In time I found myself, surprisingly, becoming financially solvent, perhaps even comfortable (for a sodding artist). I was then able to start enjoying twice yearly extended trips to Amsterdam. (Eventually 6 months of the year visits---which I have maintained for 10 yrs).
Finally years later the WWW arrived. I had the little idea of publishing the first version of this here website thing. I published some of the first photos of the red light district available online, and wrote a little text. It grew from that. No one else was doing this city at that time. Now there are countless Amsterdam sites, and it's like a little cottage industry.
When it came time for selecting a domain name as the thing became successful after a year or two, I selected the name of my cat, who was named after the comic mouse who I discovered in Amsterdam during a poverty stricken week in Amsterdam. It made some sort of sense.
That was back in 1995, so it's been a very long while.
I guess the whole point of this, if there is any, is that one can just get completely, crazily tangled up in the city. I did.
And there's no end in sight.
Warm regards!
Last edited by axxxtw on 20/7/2008, 01:38, edited 1 time in total.
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I spent a lot of money on birds,booze and fast cars.The rest I just squandered.....George Best.
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