For whatever reason I was remembering the last time I was in Amsterdam. It was 1996 and I took a canal-boat tour with a Dutch girl I was seeing. On the boat were a lot of Polish businessmen and their wives. As we passed through the city’s famous Red Light District one burly fellow, his shirt open to expose a very hairy chest and a thick gold chain, yelled to the prostitutes above us as he pounded his chest, “GIVE IT TO MEEEE! GIVE IT TO MEEEE!”

On another note, it was very foggy and hazy on the drive to work this morning. With just a little imagination, and if you looked away from the concrete of Route 28, you could imagine yourself somewhere in a misty moor in Scotland or Wales, or perhaps in some medieval Norse woodland. The trees alongside the road were staggered in ranks, each cloaked in a progressively lighter shade of grey as they receded from the eye. At one point the sun backlit a building, illuminating the fog and creating a glowing halo around the structure. It could have been Hamlet’s Elsinore, with mists creeping and swirling outside its walls as intrigues swirled within. But then I saw that it wasn’t a Danish castle at all but instead a Hampton Inn & Suites and the spell was broken.

Then I decapitated a banana and ate breakfast. (In all my years as an eater of bananas I have never cleanly snapped off the entire top end of a banana when peeling it. The whole top just sheared off in my hand, in a neat clean line, with the fruit of the banana inside the skin, which it wore like a yellow hat. It was the weirdest thing.)