A Lovecraftian excuse to party?

Today at 0445, I awoke; which, considering the time of day, was in itself nothing short of miraculous. However, my arousal on this occassion (as is so frequently the case in pubescence, and yet so rarely so in adulthood) was with purpose and vigour; I was to travel to that Dutch city of renown: Amsterdam.

Amsterdam, as a former occupancy of mine, holds a certain frisson, an electric thrill awakened by memory, and nurtured by a nostalgia that I rather suspect will persist to my termination. Even on days such as this, when the stated function of my travel is work, I am at the mercy of this City's playful ministrations. As my plane descended from cloudy skies, my portal revealed a yawning vista that lacked even the mildest of pimples, moated by a legion of canals, eliciting a tremor of excitement from those lepidopteran that reside in my gut. My somewhat obvious state of agitation at a return to my former home prompted a train of thought on memory, which, apart from being a sideline from my narrative, might have a more generalised value.

Often memory and the reality that it entombs are at such great variance that to call one the capture of the other is to entirely miss the purpose of both. Memory is a hit of heroin; it is the cotton wool padding of a smack induced euphoria. Memory protects us from reality, it enables us to take the breathtaking and make it commonplace. Yet the perversity of memory must be its uncommon ability to take the habitual and inflate its place in our consciousness to that of the superlative. As I sit here, writing this, I wonder if my mind is not playing tricks on me; if Amsterdam might not be all that I remember, if it is not actually a lighthouse guiding us away from the rocks of European drudgery: In short, is Amsterdam just another city?

Before I type another letter, or carve another rune, I am going to go out and taste this city, compare its flavours with those in my head, and thus objectively decide: "Is Amsterdam fun?"