Mark Me. Past Girls. Re-Run. Long Long Way from Home. A Tenth of a List. A Series of Fortunate Sperms. Scotch. Dive. Nemesis. I Came the Stars.

…I like a girl who will mark me.
I know that’s tacky.

I like other tacky things in a women. Panty lines, for example.

…The problem with getting around a girl I like is that it brings into glaring focus other girls that I like that are gone and they get into my dreams and everything gets goofed because they stand there, those past girls, with their past faces, but wearing, for example, the hair of the new girl, or maybe her blouse; or maybe they speak in her voice; there is in any case some mismatched cut-and- paste version of Woman; and she is always telling you how everything can be mended, whatever was wrecked between you, whatever is wrong in you; she’s saying it in a voice that belongs to past and future from a face and figure likewise mixed; and that might not sound like a nightmare to you; but if it’s not why do I wake up with a start?

Not just afraid.
Not just alone.

Is there something beyond fear?Is there something beyond alone?

…Northbound again, back to that town that is a monument to a history you’d like to forget.

One drink leads to another and for whatever reasons all these drinks on all these night take you back to that town.

Eyes forward, hands on the wheel. Up between what they call mountains here and on the ramp and down the road into the Christmas lights of a place you knew two Christmases ago.

…When your were younger you could romanticize the lyrics of almost any song.

Dylan telling you:
You may find yourself tomorrow
Drinking in some bar to hide your sorrow…

And you thought: yes, let that be me.

Give me some war or heist to die in.
Give some woman that will miss me as I go riding off.
Give me a short life of long trails and lonesome tales.

And though you did not grow up, you grew enough to think about it differently.

Now you pray into the void:
Protect me and those I love from evil and mere chaos, for I am not large enough to hold it off.
And break my heart only so that a woman can crawl inside whether I think I want to allow it or not.

You think: don’t let yourself become the person you used to want to be in any of those songs; gather a life unworthy of song; build a life unworthy of storytelling, so full of calm and peace and ease and love.

…And you think about all the odds that must be overcome for a good match.
The laws of probability hard against it.
That she will find you in an unsheltered moment.
That you will find her between men that she calls shelter.
That you will not right away see her in certain lights.
That she will not right away recognize your age or desperation.
That she will live close to you or you to her.
That neither of you has been too recently burned or too far removed from burning.
That the first time you kiss is the justrighttime.
That you had the energy to rise.
That she had the courage to touch.
That your middle name didn’t offend her.
That the tattoo on her ass didn’t turn you off.
That she’s got three of the same kinks.
That you’re mind is open to her slowly opening history.
That you are not too enamored of your control.
That she is not too skeptical of your weakness.
That when cheat she will not know or will forgive.
Vice versa
That you’ll both remain unfocused on the part of the other you cannot see.
That you’ll both remain unfocused on the idea that the other is missing part of you
That she’ll not soon get cancer and die.
That you’ll not soon get brave and put yourself in the place of accident.
That neither sports nor beauty products will destroy you.
That lack of flowers nor overabundance of thorns will not destroy you.
That your dick properly fits her.
That her face climbs properly into your hand.
That other people find you beautiful together.
That she will forgive you for not being the way she wants to believe her father was.
That you will forgive her for being the way you hate to think your mother was.
Etc to near-infinity.


(Not just any match, remember, but the perfect match).

All these accidents of chaos that must line up to form the near-same magnitude of coincidence the like of which resulted in your birth; that one sperm from amongst the millions; and the whole world, it might have been different or not born; you might have been different or not born; and think about it:

All the generations of people that can before you whose blood and thoughts course through you, all the little deaths they avoided, all the near sudden changes of life they missed, so they could be in the right place at the right time to make inthatinstant one who would make one who would make one who would make one like you.

You’re not just the sperm who won the race. You a thousand generations, maybe more , of particular ones, going into particular eggs at particular times, this woman instead of that, and on Monday and not Tuesday, and not just dripping down her leg but deep inside, oh it is boggling--and you should not be, not at all.

None of us.

And now you want to leap a similar fence and find yourself matched for love?

…In truth, it is more likely that first the bullet will find the brain; the steering column the chest; the hard asphalt the soft spot of your skull; the clog the artery; the cancer your lungs.

…One drink leads to another. And the night unwinds.

That’s you, kneeling in the parking lot, a fit of coughing, not even drunk, though you look a drunk, ragged eyes, your clothing not properly tucked, not even pride enough to keep yourself on your feet.

…It’s Christmas in this bar and there is the smell of dead shrimp and you cannot help but be made nostalgic by it, the smell of all your Christmas Eves as a child, it could be human flesh frying and for the love of your innocence and your youth you would still not be able to help widening your nostrils to it and drinking quietly out of respect for who you used to be, and how near beautiful that, and his sad death.

And your hair is too long and your eyes are so puffy as to make you not just neutral but ugly, and for one of the few times in you life you celebrate this ugliness, feel the strength of it.

…The woman you talk to, her eyes are the color of root beer barrels.
You tell her your awful stories, the terrible things about yourself.
She nods. She likes these stories.
She tells you here stories, too.
You wonder how she sees them, what she thinks she is giving of herself in them.
You wonder how any of us, anytime, know what stories to tell; how do we decided what to put before people and what are our motives.

You realize you don’t like scotch.

…There’s another bar, you’ve been to it only once, a sort of a dive, halfway between the town of that old home and the town of your new home.

You know the owner, he’s inside, there’s a woman draped on him. You know his girlfriend, a twenty one year old barmaid, but she’s not working tonight.

She’ll be by, he says. I better behave.

He’s 40. He’s drunk and social, telling you the band is good and the bar is good and the people in the bar are good. He’s been here three years but Chicago is still in his voice and you wonder how it is a man comes to own bar in a place that can’t even be called a town.

This is a place where the girls always dance with girls, and mostly they are not club girls, save perhaps three, but rougher sewn sorts, and hungry eyed middle aged men sit around drinking their beers and still believing the lies of their youths as they watch the girls dance and imagine it has anything to do with them beyond the sullied value of their attention.

And there are the college students, one you’ve had in class a year ago, a big kid, a good kid. The woman who was draped all over the owner, S, she starts working on the big kid, holding his hands and dirty dancing herself low, then shaking her head in front of his lap so that her hair hits it.

He is not sure what to do. He wants to look like he thinks it’s fun but this isn’t his gig. And so he lets his head fall back and waits for her to rise and she will not rise and now her face is in his lap and he holds her hands loosely out to the sides and together they look like some malformed scene of crucifixion in which it is hard, impossible, to tell the crucified from the cross.

…You and S have a shot and another and you sit together at the edge of the small dance floor.

The crowd is varied. There’s a cowboy trying to dance with two girls who are trying not to dance.

A smoky bar, a throwback, with a machine that suddenly spurts out that rotten cherry smelling smoke and then later there are bubbles and the woman who was all over S and then your ex-student, she’s working on a bald man now.

Every woman in this bar is an amateur stripper.

S tells good stories and you imagine the lie of how nice this life must be, a bar owner, a place where you have regulars, where you are in charge of the life blood of the party, where it is your job to stand smiling, shaking hands, where you are the greatest celebrity of that world.

His girlfriend shows up with other friends, drunk and young girls.

And you know your job, you know your role, but you don’t fulfill it.
You’re tired and you want to sleep alone.

…Driving home, that half rage that comes without good reason behind a slow car in the fast lane; and you wonder, who is it that you slam past, that you jerk in front of, flip off in the headlights, who is that hiding in the dark of the cab of that car?

That could be anybody, an off duty cop, your next wife, an epileptic.

That could be your nemesis, the way the Greeks meant it, not your lifelong enemy but a creation by the gods to punish your hubris and who will do so quickly.

…You ask yourself in the dark black do you offer fidelity to one who is removed?

It was a week ago, something like that, and how the clock ticks, and how your fear over this and other things builds, and you how cough, and in your coughing you know the deaths of your ancestors and of your seed.

And finally, you remember, a part of a night, a moment of rest, on a blow up mattress in the bed of a pickup moving through the desert of Arizona, the blanket whipping around you, the friends far away but audible, their voices coming through the window in the back of the cab of the pickup, but of a different world entirely; and it was warm, the air, and there was the smell of dust and something green, and the stars were above, and something made you masturbate; and when you came, in that glorious seven seconds that is all coming, that casts the world in gold, that makes you believe in everything, even yourself, that as it empties you equates to the most addictive goodgoodgood there is , in that seven seconds, the stars themselves were like your seed, were, in fact, your seed, you were so large, so full of the world.