Departures: Seattle: Live: We Shall Cleanse the World

Soon we were at Ron's house. He showed me the basement. The pool table was still disassembled. There had been some kind of sewage flood in the basement toilet which had necessitated the evacuation of the pool room, a tragedy.

Still, I spent some happy minutes looking at the computer museum. Ron had a boarder, Ray Stricklin, sysadmin for the Geoworks Seattle office. He collected old computers. Old Ataris, Apples, a TRS-80. In the laundry room, there was an old teletype.

Old computers, teletype, documentation

Then something terrible happened. I went to the bathroom (the upstairs bathroom, not the still-in-need-of-repair basement bathroom). I used the toilet, went to the bathroom sink. There was no soap.

I looked around, my eyeballs rolling in their sockets. Plasmids danced in my vision. Filth abounded. I had to be careful; bacteria were everywhere. I shook my head, cleared my vision, got ahold of myself (while being care not to actually touch myself with my hands). I'd been in situations like this before. It's not like I'd come down with penicillin-resistant staph each time. This was no big deal. I didn't want to start worrying over stuff like this. Howard Hughes had gone down that road, and it had done him no good. I took a deep breath, kept my act together until I could wash my hands in the kitchen.

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