Author Archives: Dennis

Home
So, I’m home. Well, I’m home-ish. Home doesn’t really feel like home anymore, I have to admit. Where I once looked upon the house I live in as a spacious, slightly Spartan but comfortable home, now I just see an old house, with a garden I don’t care about in a neighbourhood that I don’t understand. The only thing it has going for it is that it has a driveway, it’s close to the trainstation, and close to where my mother lives.

I have an option on an apartment in the old western part of Amsterdam the deal on which I’ll most likely be closing this Thursday. I’ve talked about it before in this journal, so those of you that read it (semi-)regularly should know all about it by now. It’s far closer to work, closer to some of my friends and, well, it’s something new. It’s not better than the house I have now, because it comes with its own problems, like not having a place to park my car, it being smaller, and it being rather far removed from Kung Fu, but it’s going to be a change, which is welcome.

An Angry Friend
In other news, I managed to severely piss of Sam yesterday when I called her after not speaking to her in nearly three weeks. We had a falling out due to miscommunication before I left for New York, and about ten minutes into the phoneconversation yesterday it became really aparent that we weren’t quite done being angry at eachother. It sucks severely.

In case you’re interested in my side of the story, which most likely differs quite a bit from her side of the story, our falling out was due to some miscommunication the blame of which she puts squarly on my shoulders alone, telling me that “[I] just need to interpret [her] properly,” which, I think, is a little too one-sided in a case of miscommunication.

Well, she’s made a list of demands that I need to meet before things can be resolved. I really don’t know what to do with them as some of them are, well, hard as all hell to meet, and all of them put together is, once again, rather one-sided penance.

She’s always made a point to tell me that she felt like I was like family to her, and in her list of demands she made it very clear that she doesn’t consider me like that any longer. Very clearly she stated “I am not your family,” which, to me, sounds like a rather significant statement.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding her again.

*ring*ring*
Eva: “Hello?”
Dennis: “Moet ik je effe lekker in elkaar trappen?”

So, Moulsari had friday’s off, so we decided to go uptown and do some shopping. It was our intention to find her some clothes, but we ended up finding me some sneakers and a nice dress shirt. The sneakers are white…oh, so very white. Reeboks. I decided to wear them right there and then and trash my trusty old shell-toe’d Adidas. They’re very comfortable. And very, very white. A couple of days of walking around in this grimy city should take care of that.

Speaking of Adidas, Mouls and I found an Adidas Superstore on Broadway. It’s interior design was very sleek and minimalistic, utilising the triple-stripe in almost everything. Surprisingly, the sleek design, with a lot of black background and white and chrome finishings, was actually quite overwhelming and in-your-face.

We also found a dress shirt for me. It’s a black pin-stripe shirt, really very nice. We also found some nice, open shoes for Moulsari.

We saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith (read my review here), which was a tremendous amount of fun. The cast was great, the plot, though simple, was exellently executed, the choreography was sleek and the humour was spot-on for the film. Two thumbs way up.

One thing about this city that I really like are the disproportioned amount of thunderstorms. One thing that I dislike about this city are the disproportioned amount of people with teeth missing.

On Friday night we went to a really good burger place, which was so good I forgot the name. Right next door was a bar where Mouls knew some people, so we decided to have a couple of drinks there. One of the bartenders recently broke up with her boyfriend, and it was quite obvious she was out on the pull. She was dressed rather provocatively and the dancing she did while making cocktails was nothing short of filthy. It was very cool to see all the guys drooling over her, and in turn to watch her drool over all the guys. She was tending the bar with another girl, Victoria, who was one of Mouls’ acquaintances. The three of us couldn’t help but laugh.

After that we hopped in a cab and went uptown again to go to the W hotel where we were supposed to meet a friend of Mouls. We figured he’d be in the hotel’s club, but it had a $20 cover charge, so we said “Fuck that” and went to look for him in the lounge. We couldn’t find him but we did find an Australian boy and girl of roughly our age, two impressionable fourty-year-old women from Nebraska, two guys from Madrid, and three thirty-something women who were in town for a convention. And of course the Danish guy from Kobenhavn who was so drunk he insisted on buying all the drinks. We had a lot of fun. Then the lounge closed and the club decided to drop their cover charge. We found Mouls’ friend and did some dancing until it was time for us to sneak away and grab a cab home.

The following day, Saturday, was spent in bed. All day long. Yummy.

On Sunday we spent the entire afternoon walking around Soho, looking at little gallerias and drinking overpriced Mojitos at pretentious little cafe’s. All in all I had a really good time. We tried to get some cheap tickets to go and see Glengary Glen Ross, but sadly there were no Rush tickets available, and normal tickets cost about $95, each. Good, but not that good. We decided to go out to eat at this really groovy Vietnamese place on the corner of 28th and 3rd. We had beef sate and a surprisingly good fried rice while we drank cocktails. Like I said; groovy place. We had some dessert at another place, closer to home, on the corner of 34th and 3rd, and watched the people walk by. Great evening.

Anyway, I just walked Mouls to work. It’s 10:45 and it’s already hotter than a motherfucker out there. I’m staying indoors, with the AC on, keeping myself from evaporating.

I’m in New York City right now, and the predominant thought I have on the city in the summer is; hot. And not hot “cool-hot”, but just fucking, bleeding hot. Like, 30 Celcius at nine in the morning-hot. The rubber on the soles of your shoes sticking to the pavement-hot.

And…the weird thing is, that the flight over was freezing. After getting grilled at the airport by the airline’s (Continental) security people – something that normally only happens at immigration on the other side of the pond – I was let on a flight that was; delayed, long, turbulent as fuck and freezing.

Double-wodka. No dinner.

Reuniting with Moulsari was fabulous. It took us no time at all to be comfortable with one another, talking about this and that, as we waited for the shuttle service from Liberty to Grand Central. We had lunch/dinner as soon as we got off the bus in a nice little quasi-Italian place that served a mean burger and a lovely salad. They even accomodated us with a wine-cooler for a bottle of cold water. The price was steep and I was reminded once again that I was in Manhattan. I finally got to see her new apartment, that she’ll be leaving soon again. It’s been over a year since I’ve been here, and a lot has happened for Moulsari in that time. It took me a while to catch up and realise that all the thing she’s been telling me about have happened in actuality. Her apartment is nice, a multi-leveled and rather spacious apartment, on 34th, between 1st and 2nd, near the entrance to the Midtown tunnel, that she shares with her 40 year old roommate Mike, a bit of a macho-man short guy of Italian descent with a heart of gold. She would later also show me her new apartment that she’ll be moving into soon with two of her friends. That’s on the 29th floor of a high rise apartment block on 2nd ave, overlooking all of downtown Manhattan. It’s really got a beautiful view.

*Jealousy*

So far we’ve had a lot of fun, saw Sin City – which is a film I really need to have some more time to think on before I can say anything useful about it – and we saw a stage-show starring Ethan Hawke; Hurlyburly. Really quite good. Elizabeth Berkley was in it. I thought that after Showgirls she was persona non-grata in the entertainment industry. It was cool.

I’ve been walking around the city a lot, sitting at Washington Square Park, talking to one of the dealers there, named Jay Jay. He was quite nice once he found out I wasn’t looking to buy blow and that I was from Amsterdam. It’s funny how certain things, customs and gestures, are pretty much universal wherever you go. For instance, Jay Jay was walking around a vending cart for a while, talking to the fat Puerto Rican that was its proprietor and he’d been eyeballing me. After about twenty minutes, in which I was burning up in the lovely sun (I swear, the Dutch are like the Irish; we don’t tan, we just burn), he nodded almost imperceptibly in my direction, indicating if he could help me with something. I shook my head almost as imperceptibly as he had nodded at me. I know the way it is done, I know that a law enforcer might be looking on, and I don’t want to give him away, so I don’t. It works the same with in Amsterdam. The same kind of people, the same gestures, the same type of handovers.

You have to wonder if there’s some deeper interconnectedness among people – a hivemind, if you will – that determines our progress. How often hasn’t it happened in history that the culmination of different sciences lead to spontaneous and entirely disconnected revelations and inventions of concepts and things that were similar in nature, or had a similar function, but were thought up by men and women that didn’t know eachother and didn’t have the same background? I swear, if my memory wasn’t so shit, and if I could come up with an example, of which I know there are many, my case would be a lot strong.

Skeptics, who needs ’em.

In the Grammecy area, particularly around Grammecy Park, there’s a lot of construction going on. Construction in New York City means unions. Unions mean Mafia. So the Grammecy Park Hotel is being renovated after it was closed. I spent some time looking at the construction site. It’s interesting to see how construction workers work in an area that is as dense and traffic heavy as Manhattan. They come up with really nifty, space-conscious ways of working, that’s reminiscent of back home. Again with the inter-connectedness. Anyway, the union officials that need to be on the site to make sure that health-code regulations and all that good stuff are followed, are in this case, two middle-aged men with a significant girth. They also look “tough” and “not to be messed with” in their Mochino and Armani shirts. Their leather shoes and gold bracelets contrast nicely with the hard-hats they have to wear.

Anyway, it’s hotter than fuck out here, and I’m not leaving Mouls’ airconditioned apartment until the sun is spent. I’m going to indulge myself with World of Warcraft, cool glasses of Coca Cola, to which I’m sure I’m getting heavily addicted, and Comedy Central.

La’ers.

Since I discovered Shadowrun back in 1992 I’ve been in love with it. I never really got the chance to play it until much later, but in the meantime I tried to read up on as much of it as I could, though I never bought any of the books until I actually started playing. Before that happened however, I knew I wanted to play it, but I had to wait until the time was right, and I had to make do with the SNES and Sega console games that were available at the time. So we start playing, and I’ve always been the GM for the game. I’ve got an excellent gaming group, who all enjoy Shadowrun, so things were good. Sadly, since about a 18 months now I’ve suffered a severe bug in my system and I just couldn’t really offer it the time and attention it needed to maintain a consistent campaign, so I shelved it. With it went the development of the Shadowrun section of this website, much to the dismay of many of the regular visitors to wRx. But slowly the desire to start playing and developing is returning. I felt it today as I read a Shadowrun 4 game review and cruised by the Official Shadowrun Website. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new edition. Until that time, however, I’ll be playing D&D and World of Warcraft, and developing the back-end of this section so that I may use it for the new incarnation fo the Shadowrun section, once I start playing again. What? You didn’t think I would let a new version of Shadowrun pass without updating my website, did you? :)