Dinner with a friend ran three hours late. I imagined that I'd get home early and have a few hours to work. But the next thing I knew, the staff were giving us looks and the manager asked if we would surrender the table for a large party. She said it by offering us complimentary drinks in the lounge. Ahhh. We'd just lost track of time, and once it had been done there was no point in rushing home. Some people have the gift of gab; she is one. I just go along for the ride.

I left the restaurant at eleven and entered a barren nightscape populated with the walking wounded, who, to me, looked like the undead. People were constructing makeshift cribs from cardboard, carving out a small space for themselves. One or two in every doorway for blocks. It seems there are more than there were.

Every so often, a couple. A man holding a woman tight.

Near Nordstrom, the lights bright, near-zombies drifted along sidewalks, their clothes tattered, eyes blood red, and their cheeks sunken and sallow. So many. Several along each block—an astonishing number of people with nowhere to go, the concentration of their number evident by the lack of other kinds of people. One teary-eyed man approached me to ask for $13 and some change. He had an accent, which may have been affected. Said, among other things, that his mother was in a car on Madison and they didn't have gas to get home and the police stations were all closed. Could I help him? The story didn't add up (as if it would even if it were true, which is how crazy works). Even so. I said no. He said, Can you think of some way we might be able to get help? I told him that Capitol Hill police station was open and that he should try there.

Masagin on repeat. I walked fast and in half-time..

Soon I ascended the hill and the sidewalks were filled to impassable with the drunk and smoking. Suburbanites in buttoned down shirts and jeans, too-high skirts and too-high heels, stumbling, one vomiting. All smoking. In front of the Baltic Room, so many people stood outside smoking that I initially thought there was a fire in the building. Then I realized what was going on. The discussion about the smoking ban seemed to have missed the opportunity to consider how nighttime streetlife would change. Up and down Pike and Pine, drunk and smoking people now crowd sidewalks rain or shine. Why aren't there more food carts?

At Boom Noodle, I looked inside just as an old drunk man groped a young male server. I saw the server push away the man's hand like he was wiping off a big bug.