I sit and eat a Sole Meuniere and sip a Leffe Blonde, it is the chosen meal and I have had four in three days. The flat fish is dragged through milk and flour then sautéed in butter. The result swims in a browned sauce. Boiled potatoes suck at it all. Two, three Leffes? The waiter said something in French which amounts to:
“You’ve had two, you might as well have three.” It’s a saying apparently but I have to get him to explain it, my French being babyish.
I watch people cross the cobblestones outside Gallerie De La Reine, inside there is Theatre du Vaudeville that’s not used as a theater anymore. I know because I was there for a party the night before. I think about the friends from the party and everything is one thing for many sips of Leffe.
Feet tread the cobblestones. Tourist, tourists, Koreans I think, they are tall. A car stops and reverses. Americans pass. Here come two very old men, they are immaculately dressed and carry umbrellas. They walk arm in arm, for the cobblestones? For friendship I think and I feel sentimental.
In a horse drawn carriage light skinned Indians hold up Iphones. In fact, there are phones being held up everywhere, doing slow pans as if it is somehow religious. In the hour I have sat eating fish I would have appeared in fifty pans. Over the few days a thousand me’s have been created and now live in tourists smart phones, are they other worlds that have been created? God like tourists creating universes with smart phones. This is a deep thought, weird, and I wonder what it will be like in Amsterdam.
