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  • Good morning Hank; it's Friday.

  • I woke up last Sunday in Bruges.

  • Uughh.

  • Hmm. I wonder what happened the night before.

  • What starts with L and rhymes with mistake? ...Let's have another beer... take.

  • Got up anyway, took a shower, brushed my teeth, got dressed- wait, why aren't you brushing

  • your teeth?

  • Cause I left my toothbrush in Amsterdam.

  • Right, so I headed out into Bruges with a burning need to disregard currency and acquire

  • one, a toothbrush, and two, some of that fancy Belgian chocolate I'd heard so much about.

  • Fortunately, Bruges has a lot of stores; unfortunately most of them are closed on Sunday mornings,

  • and I was starting to worry that I was going to have to do the non-ideal pre-modern thing

  • of brushing one's teeth with one's finger when ah look! Chocolate! The woman wrapped

  • up my chocolate for me in a fancy box as if I was not going to eat it right away.

  • Did you know Hank, that the ancient Belgians used chocolate as a way of staving off bad

  • breath... is a fact I just made up?

  • I found a lot of places that didn't sell toothbrushes like the french fry museum and a fancy shoe

  • store and a book store with John Green books and the Concept Store which presumably only

  • sells concepts; I wanted to buy utilitarianism, but it was closed.

  • I kept walking until at last I found Sam & Co, uw buurtwinkel. Hank, I know from my extensive

  • knowledge of Dutch that "winkel" means "store"; I could only hope that "buurt" meant "toothbrush"...

  • and it did. It did occur to me that I paid two euros for something that if you gave me

  • one hundred years, I could not build from scratch.

  • Hank, I realize this is stating the obvious, but everything in Bruges is really fracking

  • old. This is a school. And this is a Domino's. Parts of Bruges's famous belfry date back

  • to 1240 meaning that this building is four hundred years older than the idea of gravity.

  • I heard a lot of people call Bruges "quaint" but while it did feel like an open-air history

  • museum to me, there's nothing quaint about living amid history, grappling with the gifts

  • and insufficiencies of your ancestors.

  • To live in Bruges is to be reminded every day that there were people before you were

  • a person, which of course also reminds you that there will be people after. I think we

  • owe both the dead and the not-yet-living precisely the same thing-- the daily awareness that

  • human life is ours only in trust.

  • It's worth remembering that seven hundred years later we don't remember the individuals

  • who built the belfry or dug the canals; we don't remember their political affiliations

  • or even their nationalistic identities; we remember them as a collective, just as we

  • ourselves will be remembered as a collective for what we did and failed to do together.

  • Late I found myself in a park with Nerdfighters from all over Belgium, grateful to be part

  • of a community that builds friendships while trying to make the world suck less.

  • In short, Hank, I felt grateful to the 13th century, but lucky to be alive in 2011, living

  • in a world where with a series of ones and zeros, we can build our own relationships

  • and our own monuments. Plus, toothbrushes are crazy cheap!

  • Hank, I'll see you on Monday.

Good morning Hank; it's Friday.

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