Who's your date today? Pacific Agony by Bruce Benderson.

Where'd you go? M.O.D. Super-Fast Pizza on 6th Ave downtown.

What'd you eat? I had the Maddox (red sauce, mozzarella, pepperoni, mild Italian sausage and crumbled meatballs) and I added gorgonzola cheese because I love me some stinky cheese ($5.88) and a soda ($1.65).

How was the food? It was really good, especially for the price (no charge for any extra toppings is a huge bonus, too). It's fast, wood-fired thin crust, and it had enough spice (and it was just greasy enough) to make the pizza a really satisfying meal. I hope this place earns enough off the copious downtown lunch crowd it seems to be drawing, so that they'll expand to other locations. This is really good, cheap food.

What does your date say about itself? "Depressed, cynical, and subversive, East Coaster Reginald Fortiphton has been brought to Seattle by a West Coast publishing company that wants him to write a guide to the American Northwest. His job is to travel, on their dime, from Eugene, Oregon, to Vancouver, shining an admiring light on the region—which the publishers feel has been neglected by the New York publishing monopoly....To ensure that the project goes as planned, the very respectable Narcissa Whitman Applegate...is asked to annotate the manuscript. Her notes at the bottom of the page become progressively more outraged as the alienated Reginald's mock travel narrative skewers the region with merciless political observations—while he spirals into a depressive mania."

Is there a representative quote? "I gazed out my window on the sea of dark clouds as my shaking seat jiggled the image into double vision; and I pictured the flat, geometrically divided western landscapes below, wondering why anyone still bothered to travel in this cookie-cutter country. What was the use of visiting identical reproductions of the same Wal-Mart or adding new encounters of equally streamlined mentality to the roster?"

Will you two end up in bed together? Oh, yes. Benderson is brutally funny about the Pacific Northwest—both his cynical east coast narrator and his chirpy, politically correct annotater peg Seattle and the northwest coast perfectly. Benderson will read at the Sorrento Hotel this coming Thursday night, and I can't wait to hear him read some of these dreary, hilarious passages in his own voice.