Spinoza slept here.

 Back in August 2011, I went to Europe. I'd never been to Europe, of course. Prior to a weekend trip to Montreal the year before, I'd never been out of the country. For this reason and that, I've rarely done much traveling. I regret that, even though often as not the reasons were valid, because I really do like traveling. I like going places I haven't been and I usually find a way to enjoy the journey. Just looking out the window, watching the world roll by is worth all the headache of travel.

 Earlier that year, my brother said he and his fiancée were going to Europe to go to her brother's wedding. (Got that?) Did I want to go? Sure, why not. A few years back, I decided to follow my whims more, which lead me to New Orleans, and since I had a decent amount of money saved up, I decided to go. After much to-ing and fro-ing, I found myself on a nine-hour flight to the Honky Motherland. I went to a couple significant places, not near enough, and saw a lot of neat things. That's for some other time. Now, I want to talk about Amsterdam.

Me reading Spinoza on a canal in Amsterdam. I did that on purpose.

 When I tell people I've visited Amsterdam, them that know I'm an unrepentant stoner get quite a knowing chuckle. Them that don't assumed I liked the town so much because of all the philosophy and art and probably the Red Light District. But, no, though most of it is the legal weed, I really enjoyed my time in Amsterdam.

 It is a damn confusing town. The layout makes no sense to me, and reminds me of a older college campus with its weird piling of new right next to, sometimes on top of the old. Plus, the roadsigns hurt my head. The Dutch language is difficult for me as opposed to, say, the Latin-based languages or even German. Dutch looks like dream writing, maybe it's just me. Anyhow, the combined effect made the town very weird to my own personal logic and I liked it.

Whitburn Codex #1 - Little David Wilkins, "Whoever Turned You On (Forgot To Turn You Off)"

 During a Facebook back-and-forth concerned a totally different country singer on Whitburn, my brother mentioned this cat's name as someone he'd been digging on lately. I hadn't heard him, otherwise I'd have been all over a dude named "Little David". Perhaps I thought he was from the pre-honky tonk batch. In any event, I decided to give it a listen and this was the first tune I clicked on once iTunes got itself properly warmed up.

 The title was too tempting, as a song called "Whoever Turned You On (Forgot To Turn You Off)" is either going to be a fairly awesome slice of sleazy honky tonk or it's going to be an embarrassing mess. Either way, I've got a good insight to what lies ahead in Little David's oeuvre via my own particular scanner dark. There's remarkably little fat on the Codex, most of it coming from the folks I'm most familiar with (like Willie Nelson or George Jones) or didn't care for in the first place (Eddy Arnold). These more obscure hopefuls are pretty easy to suss out after a listen or two. I don't know if that's due to my finely tuned honky-tonk bullshit detector or an immutable fact of the universe. I might also be talking nonsense, so take that into consideration.

 Regardless, Little David did not disappoint. This is a pretty nifty little honky-tonk two-stepper, with an awesome hook and an extremely dirty mind. Thematically, it's from the same school George Strait's early hit "The Fireman"; to wit, a good ol' boy finds himself dealing with a woman that another man left in an excited state of sexual agitation. However, where Strait makes a practice of dealing with this problem as it springs up all over his geographical area, while Little David is concerned with only one woman.