It's a quiet afternoon here at Bad Habits, with little traffic on the adjacent street and thus little background noise. This enables me to be somewhat entertained by the never-ending song of rats with wings. That's what we tend to call the seagulls of Leiden, who have a tendency to rip open plastic garbage bags left out on the sidewalk before they can be picked up by the sanitation crews, scattering whatever contents they don't eat all over the sidewalks.
Many inhabitants of Leiden have learned the esoteric secret of keeping this from happening, and thus of preventing their garbage from becoming litter, and forcing them to clean it up later themselves, because the sanitation crews won't. It's very simple, actually, and any idiot walking down the streets on garbage day would "get" it immediately, but it's amazing to me how many don't. You just buy a certain brand of bright yellow garbage bags, double-strength, sold alongside the cheaper bags at all stores. For some reason known only to them, the seagulls (rats with wings) don't like the color yellow, and avoid those bags completely, reserving their foraging for the green bags that the cheapskates use, and thus forcing said cheapskates to spend every garbage day picking up the scattered remnants of their garbage, repackaging it into yet another green bag, saving it until the next garbage day, and then doing the same thing all over again. There are probably green garbage bags in this city that still contain garbage originally thrown away months ago, and then re-scattered and re-bagged every garbage day since. Some people never learn. But it's not a garbage day today, and the rats with wings are contenting themselves with sitting on rooftops and serenading the angels walking by below them. The angels are, of course, the children of Leiden. I don't know whether it's the Dutch genes, or the Dutch diet, or a combination of the two, but Dutch kids tend to be really gorgeous. Their faces -- all smooth-skinned, rosy-cheeked, and radiant -- light up the city more effectively than the sun does on an overcast day like today. I've never really understood the fascination that "spiritual" and "New Age" people have with mythical angels. But then I don't understand their fascination with dead people who were supposedly "holier" or "more evolved" than other people, either. I've got a friend who bases his entire *life* on going around talking about "saints" and "sidhas" and other such "superior" or "holier" people, and finding audiences so fascinated by this subject that they're actually willing to pay for his life so that he doesn't have to work. Go figure. I honestly don't get the fascination. Me, I find the ordinary, everyday people walking by me in the street FAR more fascinating and FAR more interesting than any of the "superior" people my friend gives lectures about, to choruses of oooohs and aaaahs from his audiences. Especially the ordinary, everyday angels, by which I mean the kids. Most of them walking by today are just so radiant and innocent and inspiring that I simply cannot fathom anyone having to focus on supposed saints or mythical angels to find those qualities. All that time and energy spent focusing on dead people or on beings that in all likelihood do not even exist, searching for inspiration in stories about them, when inspiration is walking past them every day on the street, laughing and inviting them to laugh along. Some people never learn.
