another idea for a video clip...

There are certain moments you wish you had a video recording of.

For example, I always think of my friend Bryan, who's a lanky 6'8'', as he was chasing a rabbit around the lawn of our university campus.

Or my colleague Ian, who wanted to get from the café to the kitchen of our hostel without that tedious detour through the door, and jumped over the counter only to crash into the deep fryer (which was, fortunately, not on).

Or the time when I was talking on my cell phone while riding my bike and I wiped out and hit the pavement, but continued my conversation as if nothing had happened. I was too proud and tough to tell the guy on the other side "sorry, I just had a bike accident, let's talk later", but I can't reconstruct how my fall went, and even aside from that personal curiosity I'm sure that video footage of that spill would have great slapstick value.

Yesterday I saw something else that would have made a great video: a guy coming out of one of Amsterdam's coffeeshops, high as a kite, and quite sick. He spent about three hours in the bathroom across from our reception desk. I could see him through the glass door, on his knees over the sink, not moving at all except for the occasional vomiting convulsion.

I think it's quite rare for marijuana to make you really sick (or else it wouldn't be so popular), but I've seen it happen several times. Often it's because it was ingested as "space cake", the sort of brownie with that extra ingredient which throws your metabolism off balance more than if you smoke it. The worst part is that Amsterdam's ambulances and medics don't bother helping you out if this is your predicament. They just explain coolly that there's nothing they can do either, all we can do is wait it out and drink some sugary water.

I'm thinking what a great film this would be: 3 hours of someone slumped motionless over a bathroom sink. Every once in a while you see him throw up just a little bit, but for the most part he's just immobilized, literally too sick to move. Of course you could just take a picture and write "watch out for the space cake", but because the picture captures only a moment, it loses the zen quality and arthouse movie sensibility of a video showing the full three hours that someone spends in that wretched position "waiting it out".