When the traffic of the city fails to find its echo in the current of the Bächle, the residents of Freiburg—to make up for its lapse—increase their pace, coming as close as they ever will to hurrying. For some, it’s the sign to pick up and leave, on excursions to real cities, perhaps, or simply to the outskirts. An hour outside of town, in the heart of the Black Forest, the houses the people of the Schauinsland live in have rooms attached for curing every kind of meat, roofs that touch the ground, and ceilings built for little people, whose complexions are like ashtrays, their smiles the size and shape of bratwurst.

I loathe the leader of the hike, an awful Bavarian Hausfrau, bitter before her time; I jump every time I find myself next to her; at one point, I knock what looks like a medieval torture device from the wall. It may just have been a really grim scythe. You can’t spend too much time in a smokehouse, they say, or you’ll go blind. And look like a sausage, apparently. The bull with a bell around its neck runs to and fro, destined to be thought of by the rest of the herd as the asshole of the cows, I think, the ruckus it makes only perpetuating itself.

The fog comes quickly, arriving in clouds, engulfing the hikers, and moves faster, so that it gets mistaken for wind, and it always seems to be followed by hail, sleet, and snow, which sting the face, freeze the hands, and yet melt upon touching the ground, flowing down the road in streams that seem to mock the dormant Bächle.

All the photos I take won't amount to anything, I think, as I keep snapping, because you can’t photograph what you can’t see, and I haven’t had time to see the place; all I see are attributes of landscapes that are familiar to me in a place that, on the other hand, is not; where, it seems, the people could only exist in paintings by Grosz; cows moo differently; wind is visible; and blizzards might, depending on their mood, result not in the possibility of skiing but in floods.

I'm reading a great book: Moby Dick. It's awesome. I bought a stereo today. It cost 100 euros. We're going to the Black Forest tomorrow for the weekend. Looks like the weather will be grim. I miss foliage, apple cider, New England.

There are lots of reasons not to stick chewing gum behind your ear—such as, why would you want to in the first place?—but the best one of all is painfully obvious: don't put chewing gum behind your ear, because it will get caught in your hair, which, if you don't own scissors, you will then have to cut with a pair of pruning shears, and while the long handle might provide plenty of leverage, the distance between the blades was designed with arborvitae and not human hair in mind, meaning that you may have to use a forward and back motion with one isolated blade, and by that point, you may as well have used a knife.

Up and down streets without beginning or end, the people who travel them differ depending upon what forms of punctuation they use. On Castor St., where the only forms they know are the hyphen and the slash, everyone wears a cast, even the animals, and when it’s time for dogs to answer nature’s call, their owners help them by lifting up their legs. Everyone holds two jobs, in wildly differing professions, and sexuality knows no bounds. The consequence of all this shifting of forms is that they look forward to difference; since they’re always dividing, the dissonance between expectations and the reality that follows change never translates to disappointment. If you were to ask them how they like living on Castor, this is how they would answer: we love/hate/are indifferent to this great/dreadful/so-so street/avenue/boulevard that we live/reside/are forever strolling in/on/down. Every last one of them is a walking thesaurus. Sentenced for eternity to expressing their thoughts as compounds, fractions, or variations on and/or, they view the people they meet as parts of themselves to which they haven’t yet been joined, for on Castor St., opposites always merge.

The visitor to Friedrichstraße, a street where the people live amongst dashes and ellipses, will soon find out that to have the last word means nothing there, and no two thoughts, let alone conversations, ever seem to demonstrate the least connection to one another. People lose their train of thought like they lose their way; they digress, interrupt themselves—how they love a non sequitur on Friedrichstraße, endless Friedrichstraße, where every painter is a Maholy-Nagy, every writer a Celine.

The people of Clementine Ave. know every form of punctuation under the sun but not a single alphabet. In the face of this, their sense of humor, as demonstrated through their writing, is impressive; they insert carets where letters should be, so that “Hi! How are you?” might read like this: “^^! ^^^ ^^^ ^^^?” Whether or not they have a spoken language is hotly debated: their mouths are always moving, outlining forms of words, but all even the most linguistically gifted lip-readers can decipher are the pauses between forms; commas, semicolons, periods. In spite of their mastery of punctuation, they still make grammatical errors, oral typos, so to speak. On the corner of Clementine and Crossett, for instance, the denizens of Crossett St., whose only forms of punctuation are brackets, braces, and parentheses, sometimes try to draw their neighbors into conversation, and it breaks their hearts to think they notice, in amongst the unintelligible speech-not-speech of the residents of Clementine, a single orphaned parenthesis, which the people of Crossett, forever editorializing, quickly bracket with a sic.

I would love to talk about Chickering Row, but this vague intimation of a drive, where everyone, big or small, punctuates each and every paragraph with nothing more than a tilde, is hardly more than an abstraction, albeit one where the inhabitants know how and when to nasalize their pronunciation. How to even speak of a place where they can’t give you a figure without saying around, approximately, about, without resorting to an endless muttering of kind of, sort of, rather, somewhat? Better just to note the manner in which they sign each letter:

~ so-and-so,
Chickering Row

Of all the streets that I could name, Cloudbright Rd. is by far the twee-est, but also the most joycore. There, under constant precipitation that comes down in the form of tears as often as it does rain, they follow every sentence with an exclamation point; sometimes, to show how much they “heart” someone, they use two and three, and once in awhile, just to be flip, they’ll turn one upside down. Too sarcastic for their own good, they would speak in all caps if given the chance. When, on occasion, some need for sincerity in their speech calls for an exclamation point to be used in earnest, the world ignores it like it had been uttered by the boy who cried wolf. At the junction between their busy thoroughfare and Clementine, the residents of Cloudbright seem to know every form of punctuation, not just exclamation points, but you wouldn’t know this by talking to them: all they use the others for is to make emoticons.

Besides these, there are too many streets to name, many of which seem nightmarish to visitors just passing through. There’s Cassandra Place, where people punctuate every sentence with a question mark, where the only way to tell an answer from a question is to twig which one’s rhetorical; Carmichael Ave., where information is embedded within so many subordinating conjunctions, buried beneath so many dependant clauses, that one would like to do away with commas entirely; and, worst of all, Crittendon Drive, site of endless period abuse, where residents speak as if they were pouring cement, caterpillars never turn into butterflies, and stories always end.

Home, so to speak.

Yo, Amsterdam, says B.: don’t shit where you eat.

Or pee where you walk, I add.

Nothing happens on night trains to the Netherlands, but people who ride them say they can’t help but see themselves—if only for the moment before sleep—as actors in a film. Children don’t scream, women don’t faint, and if a chase were to happen on top of the cars, the passengers—lacking scripts of any kind—would never know. The train stops every hour or so, and each time, one or two people—businessmen, mostly—get on or off. The movement of the train makes the passengers drowsy; they sleep better when it’s moving than when it’s not. The next morning, jolted from sleep thirty minutes from their destination, a country landscape transforms itself into an urban capital while they rub the sleepies from their eyes.

Two days later, the squawks of seagulls outside one passenger’s window pull him from dreams of rubber duckies, which the gulls themselves must have caused. On evenings and weekends, up and down side streets and boulevards, the city is chalk full of people being loud as an activity, so one can hardly blame the seagulls, of all things, for waking him. Without his contacts, the steady stream of tourists walking down Damrak deceives him: he thinks it’s a parade.

Across the harbor from Damrak, at the edge of the Red Light District, the hotel at which he’s staying stands on Warmoestraat, where two hundred years ago, the wealthiest merchants in Europe lived. Pulp Fiction was written a couple of blocks from there. In a place where the borders avenues provide miraculously contain a filth that overwhelms them, certain streets—hiding behind alleyways, disguising themselves with neon lights—take on the role of a receptacle, as crowds of men and women watch their step in order to avoid pools of urine, making the refuse that litters these streets their nocturnal carpet. If the city were a bathroom, Warmoestraat would be its toilet. In the week the passenger—now squatter, now tourist—spends there, the clouds never lift, because of Warmoestraat, he assumes. Every morning, you see, says the passenger, rain flushes away the smell of the night before.

Here in Amsterdam, a city surrounded by windmills, where the greatest debaucheries are committed with the least apprehension, there is a constant breeze, which empties the hands of the solicitors passing out flyers on the streets and gives a glossy finish to the cobblestones of the city’s largest square, creating a patchwork of gray, yellow, and blue out of ads for comedy shows and burlesques, almost seeming to act as unspoken approval of a man in the crowd who throws up at hardly a quarter past noon.

Across the Ij—a once great harbor, pronounced eye—just outside the city limits, in the Eastern Docklands, fishermen are addicted to coke. They work so hard that they have to do lines to stay awake. Here, our running joke that “ecstasy, cocaine” and a tap on the shoulder is the way you say hello in Amsterdam isn’t quite so funny. The one-legged man who gives B. a ride home from the pub drinks a beer while driving what one must presume to be an automatic. A week isn’t long enough to discover my Amsterdam, but I have a feeling I would find it out here, in the flatlands beyond the docks, where from here to the horizon, sheep and cattle, unchecked by hills, trees, or bushes, graze beside windmills, alongside canals, underneath power lines. With a perverse resistance to the way a metropolis is improvised into being over untold spans of years and years, the mind would like to create its own out of nothing but ideas, and I struggle to define Amsterdam—city of the flat and narrow—in terms of space, but the residents, broad-minded and unpredictable, contradict my hypothesis. In trying to invent a city out of reality, the visitor to Amsterdam only adds to what is already there, but such are the beginnings of his or her Amsterdam.

Accounts of cities and the cities themselves diverge, as one city does such a good job of containing the imagination that the imagination believes it is containing the city.