065: Desperation? Revenge? Or?

Sharon Hogan; Elizabeth Hardwick vs Robert Lowell; Ernest Hemingway; Muriel Spark; and ex-husbands + a tweet from Lucy Fishwife & a photo from Amsterdam

I got lost last night on the way home from an island in Amsterdam and not the fun, sight-seeing way kind of lost.

I had gone across the wrong bridge and ended up in a half-finished office park/condo development that in the burnt-amber glow of streetlights reflecting off low-hanging-clouds felt like the scene just before the murder-rape in the Netherlands version of a Norwegian crime drama. There were no other people around, except a lone security guard, assiduously looking at his phone, as seen through the floor-to-ceiling windows in one of the more finished buildings. It was late. I may or may not have had a few Dutch beers with higher-than-American alcohol content. It was all very sketch.

And the worst of it is that I did actually have enough battery to pull up the map, but to do that I would have had to put on my reading glasses.

Which brings me to the “writing at 51” part of today’s dispatch: though I have made a fun game about how I like being lost in a city, the underlying truth …