Bad sushi

An old man with a huge dollop of drool hanging from his mouth is hovering above my table. He has a look on his pale, crinkled face like death is staring back at him, at the clouds in his watery blue eyes. The woman with the metal and plastic leg limps along behind him.
"Sold, sold, sold, all these are sold." She says, pointing to the pastel hued watercolors on the wall behind me.
I am drinking a cappuccino, praying that they will move on before a rivulet of his gooey spittle connects to the keyboard of my laptop.

Seattle has so many cute little coffee houses connected to the planetary hub that they have begun to advertise "wi-fi free" zones instead of "free wi-fi" for those sick of being encircled by a cadre of users staring into their monitors. The cafes are cozy. The tattooed hippie-chic baristas genuinely friendly. It is a wonder that Bush ever received a single vote here.

The bad sushi put me in a black mood. The weather was not helping. It is the principle cause of Raina's unhappiness Seattle. She ran over her various plots for escape. I nodded and tried to make comforting sounds. I try to remind her that misery will hover over you like a dark cloud if you let it.You have to wake yourself up. When I was dirt poor and sleeping on pee stained mattress in Brookline somehow I was never happier. I have learned that happiness is a state of mind not a state of being. But nobody wants to hear this..

We had spent the day visiting a series of scenic but heavily polluted lakes. Raina says that the duck crap is so bad that if you don't shower immediately after entering the water you end up with "swimmers itch." We found some sun and stretched out on an brocaded sheet with a heavy basket weave. Raina's lament went on.
I couldn't help thinking if a good humping might do her some good. If only she could let one of these bekerchifed Seattle guys with silver studs in their ears and snappy little beards into her life. But her standards. Way too high.

Raina lives just a stone throws from the corporate headquarters of Amazon.com. They are situated on a hill overlooking the city in a 1950s yellow-brick gothic hospital building. One expects to see a giant bronze statue of Dr. Kildare in the lobby. Everything is lush in Seattle. Everything is rotting. The rain is endless. The grey, impenetrable.

Raina sent me emails of yoga studios and art events weeks before I came. She cleaned like crazy. she organized a slot in her bathroom arsenal of beauty products for me to slide my tooth brush into. She made a special shade for my sleeping room before I came. As you draw it up it folds into generous pleats revealing a picture window, her overgrown lawn and a house she refers to as "The Amityville Horror."
"Crack whores are always passing out there." she says with evil glee.
She created my sleep chamber out of her sewing room. The bed is on top of a "cutting table" four feet off of the ground. It is draped in luxurious white fabrics, left over from one of her jobs I presume. It feels like I am sleeping on an altar but with no supplicants.

I went to bed with a stomach ache. Rice and squid battling each other in my lower intestine. I lay on my back breathing deeply trying to release my upper spine. Somehow I slipped off into a dream that I had forgotten to feed my cats. I had forgotten for days. I took the subway downtown from Seattle to New York City. When I got home one of the green plaster walls in the bathroom was caving in. It was filthy and a guest had taken a decorative hand weave from Bali and employed it as a bath mat. I had grabbed a fistful of her frizzy golden locks and was screaming at her when I heard a crash in the lobby. They were preparing a theater piece down there. The director, a Spaniard, was orchestrating dangerous stunts for his cast that involved cable's drilled into my ceiling. We argued and I awoke on the cutting table, with no idea of where I was.