Biblioklept fave Wells Tower details his temp job working in an Amsterdam weed bar in his new GQ article, “My Kushy New Job.” A few quotes from the essay–
At quarter of nine on a Wednesday morning, I report for my first shift. I’ll be working at de Dampkring on the Handboogstraat, a cheery alley just off the Damstraat, a heavily touristed promenade connecting the Flower Market to Dam Square. The Handboogstraat shop, a cozy enclave that can comfortably seat thirty or so, is a study in Art Nouveau psychedelia. Lava-lamp swirls predominate. The coffee bar is nearly overwhelmed by a biomorphic plaster mass aglow with party bulbs. The shop is pleasant and trippy in a somehow classic fashion. It’s like being inside the lovely bowels of Toulouse-Lautrec.
And later–
By midafternoon, my hands are sufficiently caramelized with THC resin to merit ejection from a major league pitcher’s mound. Rubbing my thumb against my forefingers rouses little rat turds of hashish. There’s probably enough intoxicating filth that gnawing my fingertips would affect my mood, but I don’t nibble them, taking seriously the house prohibition against dealers getting high on the job. Though other employees gripe about the policy, I hardly need a hit of anything. Simply working here makes me feel, in the worst possible way, as if I’m stoned to the limits of my capacity. The mere act of weighing the product, which must be done with ticklish exactitude, to the hundredth of a gram, while the customer rails at you—”Big buds! What’s with all the shake? I’m not paying for that stem!”—is an occasion for nervousness and paranoia of the first order. A third or so of the customers buy hash, most of it cheap stuff, which is hard as a boot sole and requires a kitchen knife to apportion. If you don’t nail a perfect gram on the first chop, you have to make the weight by laboriously shaving brown flour into the scale pan while the customer volubly wonders who let this fumbling idiot behind the bar.
The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, Helen Grant’s debut novel, negotiates the razor’s edge between childhood’s rich fantasy world and the grim reality of adult life. When young girls start disappearing in her small German village, eleven year old protagonist Pia sets out to investigate, armed with her powers of imagination–an imagination fueled by the Grimmish tales spun by her elderly friend Herr Schiller for the pleasure of Pia and her only friend, StinkStefan. Like poor Stefan, Pia is ostracized by the town after her grandmother spontaneously combusts on Christmas. She takes to playing detective, but as she investigates the girls’ disappearances, the illusions of her fantasy life cannot protect her. As the story builds to its sinister climax, it reminds us that most of the folktales we grew up with are far darker than we tend to remember.
Biblioklept 