The bushes outside the restaurant make a map of intriguing little cul-de-sacs on the panels below the windows. For a moment I give the designers too much credit, imagine that they've cleverly pasted an appliqué of a foliage pattern on the outside of the panel. But no, it's just the traffic on Division on a Monday night, just the glare of big, bad life intruding on our interior; just the dreary reality of a Portland Monday night punctuating our consumption of pasta in identical white bowls. I've learned to lean forward into this rain of blows, learned a stance that will protect me from the worst of the bruising checks and bone-crunching blows against the half boards. I mean, what the fuck? What do I expect? I am technically adult, supposedly and on paper able to deal with these little frissons.

Why then am I sore? Why am I still not quite numb? What the fuck? The real purpose of a stocked bar: it's there when you need it.

We stop in at Apex Brewing. There's a granny smith-green tandem bike hanging from the ceiling with a block-printed tag hanging on: "Double Douche". The walls are covered with bicycles and motorcycles, code for the faithful. I ignore it all and enjoy my beer. Live and let live. Just drink, drink and forget. Or no, not forget, no, no, not forget. Reset. Reboot. A human who's learned to mimic his technology. Ingest the right chemical and reboot, magically regress to a specific moment, defined by not so much a hope of an outcome, but an ignorance of one, a willingness to entertain the best possible. Does that make sense? No matter. I am insulated by a sovereign tonic: ginger ale and rye whiskey. Honestly, it takes out pretty much everything.

Listen to this while you read the rest of my bullshit.

While I sit there listening to the loud and not too annoying music and the sounds of the pinball machine in the next room, a group of twenty- or thirty-somethings walk in, one of them on crutches, but all clean-cut and obviously in some bracket significantly higher than mine... They walk in and sit at another high table, glad but not joyous, happy but not over-happy, sexual but not unhealthily so, just glad to be there and enjoy some brews and be clean and well-adjusted. I instantly hate them, with an unreasoning, totally unjustified, contemptible hatred. Just another pudgy Portland hater eating his liver over a cool brew. But I plug in, I pitch in my dollar a drink, I get service, I get a smile. It's all part of the deal. After all, I am an aging freeloader, an improbably lucky man whose luck is the wrong flavor and who resents the fact. Where's the pathos in that?

On the other hand, the beer is pretty good. Those Germans, you have to hand it to them if only for their beer alone. Even the inexpensive stuff is pretty good, not like the head-pounding, bilious piss that the big American brewers dump into the public trough. I think this while I hoist a great glass stein of Warsteiner Dunkel, drink a silent toast to any unknown German forbears that may have been brewers. Then I think of Germans on Our Side: Günter Grass, Werner Herzog, Jörg Buttgereit. All they want is to tell the truth as they see it. See that place. See only that place. Don't look back, don't look back, just see that.

The little Iron Monger figurine waits in his coffin at the center of the board for a steelie to hurtle along and jar him into life. What would happen were no one to put in their fifty cents? He would just sit there, waiting, patiently, for someone to drop their quarter. Perhaps he would wait a long time. And when they did he would have to act as if he had been paid the courtesy just recently, just a while ago, when in fact he had waited through millenia, through endless golden and silver arcs of day and night, endless dusty hours... And who am I, who are we at any given moment? Are we the player or the figurine? Ah well, fuck it.