Awoke in a tiny, white hotel room just down from the flea market district - white sheets, no windows, no furniture but a bed, and not a window on any of the walls, just a door kittycorner to the foot of the bed. Tiny room, shaped like a trapezoid, so small that I could have almost reached my hand out and touched the wall across from the bed, and I was naked and alone, except for the two beautiful women sitting on the bed getting chatty with me about the caprices of the day, and the need to do some shopping, and other small talk that was certain to shortly lead to a sexual encounter between two of us at the very least. I was nonchalantly rubbing myself as if by accident against the exposed skin of the smiling brunette's lower back when I noticed that through the small window at the foot of the bed, I could just see across to the window of a neighboring building, and a person seated at a table at the window eating breakfast or having coffee. This would not do, for I required privacy for my plans, and so I stood to close the shade, and thought I had better go outside the door, just to check and see if the young man I had seen walking by with the beautiful red and white antique tricycle had made his find at my favorite flea market stall, and if there were anymore like it, and if I should seek them out, which I might as well do, since I was alone and in my pajamas standing on the streetcar tracks while the busy throng of the day-crowd passed my stationary figure in the harsh sunlight outside of the awnings. It occured to me that the crowd was composed of many persons with whom I was aquainted in some slight way, and I wondered if I shouldn't buttonhole one of them and speak to them in a casual manner, when I saw my former boss walk past in her typical stick-up-her-ass, iron-butted stride. I knew that the last thing I wanted to do was encounter her and her friends and have to make small talk right when I had a chance to go back to my hotel room and either have sex or get dressed for the day, if I was ever going to get to the flea market to haggle over some item of my great desire which was in no way for sale or able to be purchased at all. I had plenty of money though, and some drugs, I think, in case I needed them. But I had to close the damn windows, one way or another.
So I entered the room from the street, and realised I had better close the blinds on the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the road before anything interesting could happen at all. Unfortunately, they were an odd sort of thick horizontal type, motivated by the jiggering about of a number of separate but vitally important strings which were somewhat tangled, and of almost no use at all for the task. I turned to you and showed you the increasingly knotty mess of strings, which were now played out to a length of six or eight yards away from the blinds, and accompanied by a frightfully complex bunch of other cords and turnable sticks, the purposes of which was impossible to understand or to even guess at towards the ultimate goal of closing the blinds on the forty-odd windows in the expansive single-room, multilevel, street-view bookstore I was living in. But since we were all enjoying conversing and drinking espresso on the platform on the mezzanine, and surrounded by such wonderful old books on so many long low shelves and cases, and with such good company, I thought it didn't really matter if the blinds ever got closed, and you giggled and gave me that twinkling look that said "of course not, silly", and the coffee smelled great so I poured us all a cup and sat down at your elbow.
You turned to me and stage-whispered that a message had come from my mother and that my niece was having a public showing of a test portion of her thesis on the development of some sort of vaccine dealing with the health of the fish again, so I suggested we all go straightaway over to the levee and see what interesting thing she was up to. We crossed the field, and arrived on the levee bank, only to find an enormous crowd of people walking, and taking in the day by the riverside, and pointing down into the canal and shouting, and as I looked over the bank down to the water below, I was stunned to see the river filled - crowded - with thousands of the most enormous and slow-moving fish of every shape and every size but small: gigantic spotted green and yellow and dark green catfish with long flowing whiskers, black and silver sharks swimming luxuriously and seemingly without need or hunger next to outrageous eel-like serpents which swayed and threaded through the narrow spaces between the other fishes making up the schools of leviathans which lolled lazily in the water. It was a lovely sight. Over there on the left was my niece, a small dot on the surface, doing some process while leaning over the side of a small boat, dwarfed by the fish around her. And just as I was complementing my Uncle Joe on how fine and young he looked with his hair dyed black, I glimpsed a turtle the size of a small bus followed by another half that size skipping like stones across the water heading downstream to my right, right above the heads of the giants swimming below. Entranced by the wicked quickness of their movement towards the distant riverbend, I had to follow their path, and as I did I wondered aloud at the extent of the bustling new construction on the busy riverbanks in the city, in proud awe of the thousands of whirring cranes and huge building scaffoldings towering on and on, over and above the distant landscape as the sun set behind them. I felt my eyes open wide as I turned and looked for you, and I could tell it really was going to be a nice day.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe