A food court in Seattle-Tacoma International Airport: Burger King(TM), Cinnabon(TM), and an anonymous corporate bar. The thought of food is appalling. The Japanese coworkers and I ate at a dim sum place called Noble Court(TM) yesterday. I munched on oil-covered noodles, drank oil-laden soup, and took a massive bite of a chicken leg that was still frozen in the center.
Last night was tough. I woke up at two a.m. swaddled in Seattle Westin’s(TM) so-called Heavenly Bed(TM), lucidly dreaming of skiing at warp speed down a mountain covered with red snow. Freezing, I stumbled out of bed to the thermostat and the temperature of the room instantly rocketed up past four hundred degrees. The walls of the room ceased to be foursquare, and the bed slowly turned on an axis somewhere deep within the guts of the building. As I lay there in bed, awash in alternate waves of heat and cold, my mind began to dissociate from my body, and thus my skin started to separate from my muscles, tearing into loose sheets and folds. It peeled from my body like the skin on an overripe banana. Things became interesting.
I decided that the correct choice of action was to make coffee. In retrospect, I acknowledge that perhaps making coffee was not the optimal course of action, but we are simply documenting the facts here. I got out of bed, hauled my miserable ass to the coffeemaker, filled the carafe with water. I installed it in the coffee maker, put the ground coffee in the filter basket, and waited. Nothing happened. I stood, my legs failing underneath me, for about eight weeks before realizing that I had failed to actually pour the water into the coffee maker.
A delayed flight later, I’m home, sweating under a down comforter. Aspirin and steady love from my wife has my bug under control.
