I'm still here in an eastern city that smells like piss in the night, and sometimes I forget that this moment turns the wheels of the stars invisible above us. There are no mountains here, but you knew that, only the dull marble of these monuments you might extend a hand to and touch the names of those our country lost. And they are all here. Washington, D.C. in the insufferable summer with its slaughtering mist hanging low over the might Potomac, revealing it for what it has become: just a little stream shadowing under its bridges. And tonight I might make my way down to the Black Cat, wait for Johnny the Boy to show up and watch the hip kids lean across the bar picking lint from dollar bills as they order micro brews and mixed drinks. But sometimes I get so sick of myself for sitting there listening to the same crappy Social Distortion songs churn from the jukebox. Outside 14th Street answers with the silent lights and accelerating engine of a detective's unmarked car as it disembarks from a nearby convenience store for the yellow glare of the crime scene tape. Or, I'll ignore my heart when it says, Let's take a ride, a very, very long ride, and never return again to this humidity. We know the streets out there. That sad roulette of iron railings and trashed row houses. Faces illuminated in the green windows of buses passing by like traitors through a sleep that isn't theirs. And the pink marble of the empty Municipal Center that aches like something at the bottom of an arctic sea while clouds turn in from the suburbs, to awaken the evening in all of us.

Or I remember Seattle: those trains that run back and forth between the Boeing plant and the waterfront, flat cars stacked with containers and airplane wings and I couldn't even say exactly what, but I have watched that power roll through the empty midnight industrial district below Interstate 5. Six huge engines and all that freight. I watched that once when I was fucked up at some artist's party held in a warehouse out there in a neighborhood where nobody lived at all. I remember I went outside alone and watched the streetlights change over the desolate intersections and the slatted fences and the pieces of glass that seemed strewn about with such faith in themselves-- and there I was waiting for my identity to walk out of the disguise of the world! every now and then a tow truck hissing through the mist behind me, and always that slight rain that you forget about.

But it's like what my friend, Dee, says about racing bicycles, about that point in every race when you are hurting so bad that you have to dig deep inside yourself, not just looking to how much pasta you ate for dinner the night before or anything so simple, it's about reaching further and longer and harder than maybe you ever have before. I listen to him talking, and I understand what he is saying. Points in my life have felt like that. I look back when it feels bad and I see journeys I have taken and enjoyed that seem now like I was reaching for something I maybe never wanted to find. Then, suddenly, it was touching against me, it was all around me, sharing its warmth as if it were an animal or a lover. It was the world. I see myself standing over steaming pine needles, pissing beside a logging road in the Cascades at night, close to winter. With Jana playing pinball in a tavern in Olympia, Washington. In her apartment there-- the blue curtains blowing in over us as we make love listening to an old Rolling Stones tape. The powerlines we look at from her window, that follow one edge of the equipment yards at the bottom of the Puget Sound, the powerlines that she made a painting of. I see its reds and yellows now, and the black car in it too. For awhile those seemed like the only moments, but I should know they continue to arrive especially when I am too preoccupied to care. Like last Sunday, watching the bike races downtown, Dee and I were yelling "Move up, Zach!" to our friend who was racing. "Move up, Zach!" every time the peloton turned the corner already going fast as shit, whirrring past us right there by the Securities and Exchange Commission where we deliver packages every working day, as we drank beer in its shade and laughed during this, the final race of the afternoon. Dee and me shouting "Move up, Zach!" and laughing in the shade.