In a day I went from this...

...to this.

Coincidences are strange things, and here’s the damnedest one: Yesterday when Naoko was going through my iPod, she saw the Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra tracks. “Oh, I went to their concert in New York last month,” she’d said.

“Get the fuck out of here!” I’d said. “I was at that same show!”

I remember this as I’m listening to “Utsukushii Moeru Mori” and the train is pulling into Seattle. What are the odds.

All of my travel friends are gone, so I’ve got no one to say goodbye to when I hit the platform at 10:30 in the morning. I give John Cube a pound and I’m off.

The cliché “It’s about the journey, not the destination” has never been truer than in my trip from NYC to Seattle. I had an interesting time on the train for 3+ days, and I’ll be spending only a few hours in Seattle. Gotta hop the 3:15pm Clipper to Vancouver by way of Victoria.

So I guess I could say “It’s about the journey and the post-destination destination, not the original destination” but that won’t fit on a bumpersticker. Unless you’ve got a really wide car or a bumper that runs along the side.

King Street Station in Seattle is nothing like Union Station in Chicago. It’s small and utilitarian. At a payphone I look through the Yellow Pages to locate a Verizon store, and scribble the address in my notepad. Then I call the Clipper terminal to get directions.

“The taxi driver will know where it is,” says the Clipper woman.

“I’m on foot,” I say.

“Oh, you can’t walk here!” says the woman. “It’s much too far.”

I’m thinking that means it’s too far for her to walk. “Are you north of King Street Station?” I ask.

“I think so, yes,” she says.

I figure I’ll walk west until I hit the water, then walk north ‘til I hit the Clipper dock. The woman actually spends a couple more sentences trying to convince me not to walk.

I grabbed a map from the Information counter, then went outside the station. On the sidewalk I checked the position of the sun to determine west, then double-checked the map to make sure Seattle wasn’t in some weird bay where the water would be on the east.

Okay so this is kind of embarassing. The breakfast I’d eaten on the train wasn’t quite sitting right, and I kind of had some, you know, well I wanted to go outside where it was windy and release some, er, tension. So in front of the station I walked a considerate distance away from the taxi drivers and silently let loose while I was checking out the map.

All of a sudden this middle-aged woman comes out of nowhere and stands right next to me, peering at the map. “Do you need some directions?” she asks.

I felt really bad, because I’m sure this woman had no idea what she was walking into; she was standing close enough that if I was wearing cologne she could’ve smelled it. But cologne is not what was in the air immediately around me. I hoped the wind would suddenly pick up, but you could’ve dropped a blade of grass and it would’ve fell straight down.

“No I’m fine, thank you very much though,” I said, hurriedly reaching for cigarettes and a match. I tried not to look her in the eye.

I’m walking a little weird, all shifting to the side. Three days on the train has given me “train legs.” I hope I don’t get mugged, or I’ll try to kick the guy and totally kick the wall three feet away from him. Or I’ll run after him and veer sideways and fall down a stairway.

The walk to the Clipper docks was nothing! Under forty minutes and I was towing a Pullman. I swear, do people not walk outside of New York? The woman made it sound like it was the fucking voyages of Magellan.

I left my carry-on with the Clipper countergirl, then checked the map and set out for the Verizon store. It seemed a little far but after three days on the train, I was dying to perambulate. In fact I’m convinced Lewis & Clark were cooped up on a train for a week, and just decided to stretch their legs, and one thing led to another.

On the way to the Verizon store I stopped at some place called Top Pot Donuts. I stopped there because I liked the name, it sounded like something from the 1940s. “Top Pot.” “Hey Dottie, I’ll meet you at Top Pot. I’m off to Top Pot for a spot of coffee.”

The interior was nice, decorated like some kind of modernist library, but the donuts were sub-par. Oh well. In a matter of hours I’d be in the country that had what I consider one of the best donut shops in the world, Tim Horton’s. So psyched! I fucking love that place. They don’t have them in the ‘States (that I’ve seen, anyway).

At the Verizon store I picked up a travel charger for 20 bucks. I hate making mistakes, particularly twenty-dollar mistakes. But afterwards I was free to roam the city.

The area I was in seemed like a central shopping district, so I wasn’t able to find much of interest, just a bunch of brand names. I went into Niketown to use the bathroom. It’s nothing like the Niketowns I’ve been in, it’s more like a Nikehut. Anyways I didn’t really have the time to explore the city properly (which is a shame--must come back) so I just kind of wandered.

Eventually I found myself at something called the Public Market Center, which was an indoor market bustling with food stands, fish markets, and clueless tourists like me.

Inside I saw a sandwich stand that looked pretty good, so I took a seat at the counter and ordered a salmon sandwich. Started scribbling in my notebook.

The early-30s neo-grunge counterguy seems pretty charming. He’s currently charming a charmable blond businesswoman while prepping orders.

I pretended to be studying my notebook while they flirted. The woman was laughing at something he’d said. “Boston,” she said. “Are you from here?”

“I was born a mile north of here,” said the sandwich guy, doing something in the sink. “Now I’ve got a condo a mile south of here. In thirty-two years I’ve gone nowhere.”

The woman laughed again, while I wrote Goddamn, you can buy a condo here by working at a sandwich counter? What can you get flipping burgers, a fucking townhouse?

Tourists flowed past me in a steady stream while I waited for my sandwich. Boston Woman’s order was ready first; she’d ordered earlier.

“Enjoy the conference,” said Sandwich Guy, handing her a bag. “How long are you in town for?”

“Until Thursday,” she said. (Today was Tuesday.)

“Oh, then I’ll see you tomorrow,” said Sandwich Guy, and I think he might’ve winked. I wasn’t quite sure. (Maybe it would’ve been funny if I’d interrupted like “Hey, did you just wink?” and then scribbled something down in my notebook.)

The woman laughed, but not the kind of laugh that ruled it out. “I’ll try,” she said.

“I’ll see you tomorrow!” he insisted, in a friendly way.

I’m pretty sure she’s gonna show up tomorrow.

As I scarfed my sandwich, Sandwich Guy got into another conversation, this time with a guy customer. They were talking about girlfriends. “How did you meet your girlfriend?” asked the patron.

“I met her right here,” said Sandwich Guy. “She was having lunch, talking about going to Spain. I jokingly asked her to bring me. Next week she showed up with two tickets and said ‘Hey, you want to go to Spain?’”

“No kidding!” said the other guy.

“Yeah. So we went to Spain, and hit it off. The next month I returned the favor and took her to Paris. We’ve been dating ever since.”

I almost spit my sandwich out. So let me get this straight. If I move here and get a job at a sandwich counter and wear old T-shirts and a backwards baseball cap I can buy a condo, pick up chicks and take them to Paris. I gotta get in the Seattle sandwich business.

If I was working at say, Gray’s Papaya back in New York, I could make enough to rent a shithole in the Bronx, meet girls that had jailhouse tattoos and maybe take her to Coney Island with an all-day Metrocard. Things really are different outside the city.

On the way back to the Clipper docks, I passed a building with the letters “AI” on it. A bunch of kids with interesting fashion choices were hanging out in front.

I walked inside, thinking they worked on either Artificial Intelligence or Adobe Illustrator stuff in here. Instead it was some kind of art school.

The security guy didn’t stop me, so I continued inside and up the steps, where there was some kind of printmaking exhibit. Pretty interesting stuff. Kids are so crazy these days.

I wandered down this hallway and that, passing a variety of classrooms filled with kids with lots of metal in their face. One room had all these desks that had some type of round computer screen atop the surface.

My cell phone went off, surprising me. First time I’d heard it in four days. “Hello?”

“Hi Rain, my name is [so-and-so],” said a businesslike voice. “I got your number from [vaguely-familiar-name.]”

To make a long story short, it was a PR guy who got my number from another PR guy I’d had contact with some years ago. Basically I was freelancing for this teenage boys magazine (yeah, yeah...get off my back) and the PR guy would feed me products to feed them blurbs about. Like he’d call me up and be like “Hey man, Nike’s got these new Shox sneakers, you gotta come try ‘em out” so I’d go up to Niketown and bounce around in the shoes and write about it.

It sounds fun but it paid like shit.

Anyways this new PR guy is doing something with Guinness (the beer, not the book of stupid records). He says they’re going to take a shitload of writers on an all-expenses-paid trip to Ireland for a week in August. Business-class flight, five-star hotel, tour of Dublin and Kilkenny, tour of the Guinness facilities, tickets to the Irish National Hurling Championships and presumably, all the Guinness you can drink.

“What’s the catch?” I asked.

“You just have to get an article about the trip into a major magazine,” he says, “and some positive coverage of Guinness has to factor into the article.” Aha. It’s sneaky, underhanded advertising.

Well, I’m a whore, I can be bought. So I told the guy I’d make some phone calls, see what I could do.

“Great!” he said.

“Great!” I said.

Later I’d get back to the city and the deal would fall through, but I had no way of knowing that at the time. And it sure was exciting to be in Seattle and get a call like that from New York.

At the Clipper docks I made some ultimately doomed magazine phone calls back to New York, and then it was time to board.

The Clipper was a big boat, much bigger than I’d thought. I mean it wasn’t a cruise liner--if Under Siege took place on this boat, it’d be over in about thirty minutes--but it was sizable.

It was also a catamaran, meaning it fucking cruised. I stood on the little tiny deck out back and stared at the jets churning the water up. The sun was blinding. Seattle began to recede in the background. Oh Seattle, I hardly knew ye. I felt a little bad, like I’d fooled around with some girl at a bar and not even gotten her name or contact info.

I was now getting to feel something I couldn’t on a sealed train for three days: Fresh air. The breeze off the water was fantastic, like natural A/C. Sunlight glinted off the water ahead, and in the distance I could see somebody parasailing.

I half-expected to see Sandwich Guy cruise past in a powerboat, wearing a smoking jacket and backwards baseball cap, holding a martini and flanked by chicks in bikinis. That was one tasty-sandwich-making pimp motherfucker.

That white wake you see
is actually flatulence.

You’ve heard of the itch you can’t scratch?
Well I’m the bitch with no kinda scratch.