From A Couch In The Sky.

Me and Violet are on the couch. She's milkdrunk, slobber glazed all down her little cheeks, and we just now got done watching some Georgia cops chase a tractor trailer cab down the highway. Live. Usually all we get is some crappy soap, but today the tide turned. Sometimes God works in mysterious ways. And to make our afternoon more super-charged there happened to be a living breathing guy on the back of the truck holding on for keeps out in the fast air.

I worked the daddy angle and explained to my bean blossom that she shouldn't ever do that shit. You don't just stand out on the back end of a big rig and ride around. She slurped at some fallen drops on her forearm and peered up at me with baby sparrow eyeballs.

I explained to her that its bonkers out there and that when she gets older she's going to have to make a lot of decisions every few minutes. Many of those can result in trouble, I told her. Kids do things that are silly sometimes, I said. Expect the unexpected. I felt a bit like an ass but I was all shot up with FatherHood. What the hell am I even saying, I wondered to myself. I pointed at the TV: look at this guy, I told her, you think he woke up a few hours ago and had his Captain Crunch guessing he was gonna be on CNN this afternoon getting truck-jacked and driven around like a hound dog on a summer back road?

She blew a spittle bubble and melted my heart. I was getting through. The guy on the back of the truck pulled his ghost colored t-shirt up over his head. The CNN guy pointed this out.

Honey Bunny, I said, you know Mom and Pop love you more than five-hundred heavens and all but you have to understand that out there...out in the streets, out in the crazy world there are manhole covers that blow up out of the sidewalk for no reason and stingrays and black ice. And killer bees. Acid throwers. And Facebook. I was getting all riled up. I get overcome with emotion about Violet and feel so damn helpless.

Violet began to get fidgety; she seemed distracted...as if she had more critical things to do. The state troopers were pulling up in front of the racing rig which was now sporting two exploded tires. Things on the screen began to wind down. I smelled poo. Even here thousands of miles away you could almost feel the cops getting mega-pumped for the uncertain ending. I leaned down toward DiaperTown and caught the whiff from her diaper. Yep.

Down on to the highway the guy on the back of the truck jumped. It was a safe speed now but dude still hit the concrete, spun, and fell on his ass on live TV. He limped to the roadside, cop cars racing by him like he was just some deer. What a day he was having.

Violet started crying a little. You want Poppa to change that diap?, I asked?

Her long eyelashes blinked. Her interest in our TV time had waned. The state troopers and sheriffs surrounded the stopped truck in the middle of the highway and began banging on the doors and the hood with balled fists and nightsticks. The truck-jacker was hiding in the cab, scared as hell, I guess. I lifted Violet up into my paint-splattered arms and kissed her nose just as a swarm of law finally pulled the guy down from the rig and wrestled him to the grass. And with that, we headed back towards my peanut's room and all the diapers and the Winnie the Poohs and stuff.

Dog Park.

At the top of the trail, me and Danger Violet stare down into the blooming canyon for signs of banditos or grizzlies or Indians. A bright sun in the sky pings off the high snowy peaks above us. The creek in the valley is raging drunk on runoff snow. Even up here we can hear the gushing rapids. Danger Violet lets out a high-pitched sigh and reaches out to grip my finger with her small pink fist.

I know, I say. We gotta go down there, hell or high water.

She squeezes tight then lets up a little. We'll be alright, Mountain Daddy,...she says without words.

A crow flies straight into a picker bush.

We'd better get movin', Danger, I tell her. I can't let on that I am jittery. Fear has no place in this land. With a snap crack of the reigns the two beasts whose purpose in this world is pulling us begin to move hard; black fur ripples over their awoken muscles like a horrific sea heaving charred and drowned sailors at a midnight sky. They are a team -- related maybe, probably in-bred-- from over in Labrador, a small mining outpost way back in the Siskadee Valley where beasts and peoples mix in bad ways and the outcome can be as perverse, as hellacious as these two in front of us. Half man? Half oxen? Wolf, whale? No one knows. No one wants to know. Each of their living moments is nothing but a curse to them. They reek of Satan's innards. One is called Max and one is called Milo and it wouldn't surprise me if either one of 'em turned around any second and put high holes in my gizzard, them being so protective of my green young partner and all. Danger Violet is the only one they recognize. The rest of us are just biding our time in their filthy company.

We descend on loose rock. I try and take things ginger but the beasts pull us in their desperate way. Beasts out-know any darn fool man that this is mean country and its best to pass down and through swiftly and silent. My burden is made more cumbersome: Danger Violet is strapped to my chest in a sacred elk belly Indian pouch. As things have panned out Danger Violet ain't too fond of walking and I'll be livershot if I'm the man to argue with her. So she moves across the wilderness bolted to my chest like a Lakota arrow come home to roost in my rotted heart. Our ways are our ways.

In the river bottoms I cut the black devils loose. In an instant they are gone. They need water and will do us more good if they are way out in front. Should a wildcat get stealthy, they'll wind it and tear it to bits or perish in the pursuit. And should Indians appear in the ways of a summer mist, well, their bullet ridden beast bodies will make good places for Danger Violet and I to hide behind, or under should it come to that.

We are alone here now, Mountain Daddy and Danger Violet. And we still have so damn far to travel. The late afternoon sun collapses down upon the tender green shoots and buds of early spring. Without each other we might not make it out of here. Our bleached white bones crinkle cut with a thousand coyote's teeth and laid out in these lush grasses for some half-drunk trapper to stumble on some other season long from now. Yet, we are not alone. We are together. And together by God we are determined to climb up out of this godforsaken canyon someday soon. Soiled but unbroken. Then, by the grace of so many unseen angels, we'll wander many many miles back to the homes we left long ago for reasons we can no longer even recall.

On Saturday We Rocked.

Its 7am on a Saturday and I am not hung over in a hotel bed. And I wonder what that means. For so long, my life was double-stapled to a few sure things, things that defined the road I'd taken. Bleary eyed early mornings in far flung places was my thing. With last night's sweat caked to my skin like a fried trout, I'd bounce out of a bed I'd never sleep in again and prepare to travel hundreds of miles away from that place fast. Playing in a rock'n'roll band meant moving, always. Stopping, pausing was suicide. What love and money had been available to you a few hours ago were completely gone now. To survive, you had to go.

But here I am this morning writing on a laptop by a muted TV. I am not still drunk from last night. I didn't drink at all. There is no mysterious hot woman here looking for her other Chuck Taylor. There is a woman who remains a mystery to me and she's sexy as fuck and all, but she is sleeping like a stone in the bedroom, there's an empty wine bottle by the trashcan in the kitchen, and if she's dreaming at all right now: it ain't about me. And there's my peanut here too; Violet...passed out in her electric swing. Milk drunk. And the whole little vignette has got me positively confused this morning as to whether or not all my youth is dead.

Its the stuff of so many novels and memoirs, I know. The whole searching your heart for the truer meaning of life. Family is everything. Strength and Honor. But its all so exhausting too. At what point did I actually make the decision that seems to have somehow been made here? At what precise moment, at what exact second, did my mind and my heart and my gut all limp over to the same beater convertible, climb in with resignation faces, and head off over the proverbial distant hills dipping below a sunset horizon and pointed at the fairytale cities of FinallyGrownUp and BitterFucker...uncertain which one they'd eventually settle on. And where the heck was I when this was going down? How come I keep missing these somewhat monumental decision-making Pow-Wows that decide, like, everything.

I don't know what I really want and that pisses me off. I am probably supposed to have it somewhat figured out by now. I don't. In my adult life I delivered auto parts and then played guitar. For years. So, I wasn't exactly your Mr Career Path. Don't get me wrong either, I had a blast. A sensational blast. And what's to come...it will be a blast too. Maybe even more of a blast, but different. I know this. It's just...oh forget it.

What I don't know for certain is what I'm supposed to do today. It's going to be a rainy Saturday and I am in a city I never dreamed I'd live in with a wife and a baby I'd never dreamed would know me and actually love me with serious dependent love and we can't just go around killing time walking around the damn mall or whatever now can we?

Dude, dude, dude. Of course you can.