I. I feel my phone number floating around me in this town. Unpinned to keypads, it flies free to breed and infest, and the offspring light on me like moths, calmly flexing and probing with their feathery digits, as i walk the leaf-littered streets. On particularly warm, moist days, the city has to send out snowplows to clear the mangled 0's and 5's off the highways. Look -- here's the one i gave to that beautiful italian woman i rear-ended (so to speak); there's the one i handed that over-eager record store clerk; this one, to the woman whose choking subaru i pushed to the side of the road -- "Just call this if you can't find anybody else." ("Oh, i can find somebody else," she thinks.) They've been delivered into the hands of pizza gals, splattered conspicuously on checks when unsolicited, and cocooned in answering machine coils to be released at the touch of a button, metamorphosed into a timorous, garbled sequence containing a few nines for some reason. All deserving, tender women, the receivers unswervingly mistake my offering for a catch-and-release program.

See, i'm relying on what my friend Russ calls 'reasonable probability' -- that your chances have to improve the longer you sit at the table. It's all about betting against consecutive unluckiness instead of on the chance that any roll of the dice will end up in your favor. The heavy in the old films noir puts his money on reasonable probability as he leans against the stoop and flips his quarter. He knows that the longer he flips, the more likely the next one'll be a heads-up (or a bit of that tail, if that's what he's missing).

Ineffectiveness: (in'e fek'tiv nis) n. At work, rusty arms stretch out from my ring stand and thrust their clamps at me like young children offering the most recent common item to fascinate them. "Femomedah!" "Ewectwode!" "Vacoom twap!" "Sep. cywinduh!"

"Shut up you fuckin' retards," i tell them. I feel the nervous glance of the woman one fume hood over. She's spaghetti-haired and bone-thin like so many grade-school crushes, in constant danger of her beauty slipping a shade deeper across her face and claiming her.

A love song

Jumpshot the Kremlin
Toll roving dogs,
Twin-pinned Harley-kins
Yodel along.

Proud Mary's whining in the brig,
The moonshine's foul upon this night
Donkey wings on teth'ring strings
Flit, acrid with delight.

Back racked in jelly gristle,
Grown long in vermouth,
Til the turkey legs its keister eggs,
I'll lie here with you.

"Give a guy the time of day, and he'll take all week," she said (or something like that). But you smile at me on the street and i've already stolen a decade. Australian aborigines have one word for fire, women and extraordinary birds, and it's on my tongue every morning when i start awake ten minutes before work, though i can never remember how to pronounce it afterward. It's a beautiful word, one that makes everyone a phoenix.

A muddying clarification (this one goes out to the ladies):

A man will wake up each morning with an erection and the intense need to urinate, the former receding as the latter is satisfied. As a boy, it caused me no small amount of personal embarrassment, and i would shame myself for not knowing the difference between desire and the need to pee. The same idea led to the english idiom, "piss proud" -- that is, attributing an erection to manliness instead of a full bladder, or by extension, empty boasting. Thus, to "take the piss out of someone" is to reveal the groundlessness of his pomp, to take away his false erection and reveal him emasculate.

I had always guessed that the morning erection (A.K.A., morningwood) was sort of a natural safeguard against bed-wetting, as it engages the coveted third bladder sphincter found in men. However, the erection is more closely correlated with a man's gradual return to consciousness than the fullness of his bladder during sleep. So it may be that the pride is not all in the piss. Rather, the desire to fuck may simply precede consciousness every morning, the arousal of the cock heralding the arousal of thought. A worthwhile thing to keep in mind, if true.

"Women or ideas are what beckon men out into existence. Naturally there is the great difference that for the thousands who run after a skirt there is not always one who is moved by ideas," said Kierkegaard.

Blueberry's Train Song

My friend Blueberry once woke up by the tracks in a grove of sumac and hawthorn, his beard soaked in dew and a slug on his cheek, to the 7:15 shiver of the approaching Sante Fe. He said he held low and covered his face from all that din and sputtering gravel, and when he again looked up, there were two sneakers before him, tied at the laces and extolling the virtues of a young man named Jared in bubble letters all around the soles.

(He swore to the end that he found a pair of women's pants in a dumpster four years later with the same handwriting and the name 'Danny' in purple ballpoint. He was enchanted by the woman who ferreted her love in the threads of her clothes and could shed both wardrobe and love instantly (and in the most unlikely places). Personally, i think it's simply the no-less-enchanting mystery of bubble-lettering -- that there's a font for longing. But it does make you wonder if she's got tattoos.)

II. After weeks, months, years of paying bills and cooking meals and mopping, sweeping, dusting, the pride of living well fades. More joy comes from the failure of decency, from open rebellion against the grocer, the laundromat, the mailbox, from an affirmation of sleeping and eating in a thin layer of one's own discarded, aggregated skin. The distaste for all things vital easily invades fantasy, steers the longing toward something weaker, more delicate, with cheeks flushed and breaths quick. His own vibrancy gone, the dissenter turns sycophant, vampire. He knows the myths of killers who absorb, who take life and somehow harness it. But when he actually faces a vibrant person, the sycophant finds himself unexpectedly weakened. He finds that in his fantasy, he lived vicariously through the Other and fed with each imagined sodomy, rape, murder and domination only on himself.

In such a state, you come to rely on the impersonal -- on idle conversation, bartenders and barristas, exchanges mummified in money and entrenched in those pen scratches on the 'tip' line. The barfolk serve up their dry manhattan world of cherries and bitters, and those few dollars are your ticket in and your atmosphere suit. It's the tips, not you, that make your waitress flick her hips as she turns from the table and smiles -- oh that smile, like a burlesque of teeth ("We've got the most beautiful lips in colorado, and they're only wearing a smile. Come on in from the cold -- don't be shy, son!"). Her teeth are white as a bar tab, and your own itch in their stains -- yellow, like a dog's -- and thank god that its all contained in the padding of that little book at the end of the night. If it weren't, maybe that mouth, that waist would depressurize the room, and your soul would grow so thin that your hopes would fall back, gasping, to the gritty loam of your parched eyes.

These cheap pleasures, they become reassuring. It becomes reassuring that there are women who will swing their polyethylene platform heels over your neck and, for small bills and a seven-dollar cover, sway a pussy worthy of Gustave Courbet inches from your nose, or find you in a corner of the bar and taunt you -- putz, farmboy, dickless -- in leopard-print spandex. In the Asshole of the Turkey, they'll play melodicas with that worldly origin and pull out strings of razor blades or firecrackers, yanking each party popper as it emerges -- Big Bang! Big Bang! Big Bang! And watching the aging greaser a few seats away kissing the topless girl in his lap and kneading her breasts so hard she winces through smiles, my fingertips blush, and my lips wonder how their kisses are different. After all, have they ever really sought any vera icona Veronica? More than one woman i've known has been named Blindness, a blindness that i clung to like a sessile leaf. To know the person with whom you've slept.... To "know someone biblically" is a cruel euphemism; the knowledge of another's body seems destined to preclude understanding them, a point made ridiculously clear in the bible itself. It is said that in the lonely hills of Zoar, Lot's daughters knew their father at night without his knowledge (though his licentiousness toward his virgin daughters in Sodom would suggest Lot not only a knowing collaborator, but instigator). On his wedding night, Jacob knew dead-eyed Leah, mistaking her for his love, Rachel, until the next morning, and thus begot Reuben.

(Reuben means, "See, a son." In portland this season, they never see sun; Fall is a twilight time, a time of slaughter. A time when many cows fall to season our sandwiches in this season of reubens, reuben of seasons, season of Seeasons, Reuben of reubens. For every thing there is a reuben, and a side with every purchase over $7.)

"No one knows the knowing," said Kerouac.

"'I know where I am feeling pain,' 'I know that I feel it here,' is as wrong as 'I know that I am in pain.' But 'I know where you touched my arm,' is right," said the more articulate and rigorous Wittgenstein.

Cogito ergo nihil. Based only on their own hollow tenets, 'cogitation' and logic lead to nothing. The truths or knowledge they harness lie only within their own methods, and they are as powerless to affirm anything as they are to deny themselves. But some of my thoughts are just primary colors, or a trapezoid with pleats, or taut buttocks partially concealed by a bedsheet, or biting into an apple, or a rusted subway car deep underwater. These thoughts i trust, not to prove that i am, but that they are. "Animals are just goo," il Postino's boss (Potsmaster General, i presume?) once told him. Animals are just goo, and i am, too, in my better moments, when there's only room for red, or cleavage, or farm equipment. Then i am goo, and the goo does the world's knowing. It knows by its longing, spelled out in rounded, bulbous imitations, and there really is no difference between a woman and a pier and a kiwi and a worm and a fork, that's all i'm trying to say.

Yanni and Yanno (a sad one)

Yanni and Yanno
the two greek brothers
liked to go fishing
and sit by the waters

But they were too greasy
and couldn't catch no otters
So they just caught you
and took you from me.

III. Forty bucks and a few pitchers in the hole, i wander the streets, sidewalks curling like a burning photograph, past a grizzled maestro in felt boots pulling broken strains from his dinted harmonica, past the $20-plate vegan café that wafts a jazz album recorded in van Gelder's tiny living room in Jersey. Wet kisses beside Escalades peal out like packing tape ripped from anonymous care packages, and a creamy co-ed leads her parents and grandparents down the strip, smiles and points to an ice cream parlor lit by a street lamp that she, one week earlier, had slumped against with a stranger, four sheets to the wind, half-naked and chewing on his earlobe. And Megan wants to paint through keyholes and cracks in the shade. "Things are getting too big," she says, but no -- Everything bigger! All things big! I'm a giant walking among giants in a titanic world, and every move destroys an artifact, every word shatters someone's glasses, and everyone just gets clumsier by the second, and bigger, much bigger, and she's not one to talk. Our vision is the only thing tiny, so throw open the doors and wide the curtains. Show me. Either unleash the floods, the dogs and the willful angels, or just let this dervish whirl on home, as loose mufflers rattle out the booty-house beats that drive my feet down Folsom, up the stairs, key in the lock, and to bed with a prayer, less Onan than van Gogh (but strike me down all the same). The only true prayer of a Joseph, spelled out in canine-yellow pearls: He takes away; may he add.