Poisoned by the Red Tide

I got sick eating at a seafood restaurant on Pier 39.

For those not in the know, Pier 39 is a tourist concentration camp on the Northeast corner of San Francisco where your welcoming attitude to foreigners goes to die. It gets trampled under the boots of a million camera-clicking French, Filipino and Japanese people who want nothing more than to get in your way.

It's because of places like this that all the small-towners who visit big cities like New York, Paris and SF leave with the impression that cities are packed shoulder to shoulder with seething masses of loud and quite possibly homosexual people. In reality, the problem is the out-of-towners themselves who feed the tourist trap with their money and turn it into an inescapable hell-hole of tacky businesses and shady restaurants.

The restaurant I went to was called Fisherman's Grotto, a nice-looking if huge restaurant packed behind a fake fish market and next to some falling-apart docks. It may be because I ordered 2 pints of beer within the first 10 minutes of my stay, but the food didn't seem bad. The only thing memorable about it was the price, which was enormous and unwarrented. Such is the way of Pier 39.

The first symptom I had was a night-long bout of physics-defying gassiness. My intestines, sensing the parasitic corruption, attempted to convert all the solids of my meal into gaseous form so that I might release them harmlessly into the atmosphere. Unfortunately the poisons were able to re-enter my system through my nose and lungs and allowed them to infect my brain more easily.

I was unable to sleep until 4 AM despite going to bed at about 11 PM. My nervous system jacked itself up to keep me from slipping into a fatal coma so I could do nothing but writhe around and vent deadly vapors while feeling my intestines deflate and re-inflate.

This morning I woke up with the feeling that my brain was lifting off from the inside of my skull to parts unknown. I felt ambivalent towards everything, including my vision blurring and my ears ringing at random intervals.

After my bowel decided to jettison everything in a last-ditch attempt to keep me alive, I decided to go jogging to sweat out the remaining toxins. While I was running I had the interesting sensation that I couldn't feel anything but my face. I had to clap my hands together to prove they still existed.

All in all, totally worth it. A little Red Tide is nothing to be afraid of when you're hungry for bottom-feeders. Next time I'm trying the crab.