Laughing At The Battlefield.

Saturday evening we had thunder but then just spits of rain. Monica was helping me unroll sod in our yard which was nice and different since we rarely do any home projects together. Unless you consider gallons of red wine and four seasons of WEEDS a project. I don't. And the fact that we had gone to our very first marriage counseling session that morning sort of swirled a bit of hopefulness into the 7 o'clock atmosphere. Violet was over in her car seat, on the bricks. The dogs were rubbing their bodies in the cool new grass. Up til then the yard has been dust and stubby clumps of weeds.

The therapy thing had gone well if you're waiting to hear about that. We liked the lady enough. She wasn't old or uppity; she didn't seem to mind cursing. That's a huge one for The Bielanko clan: we're big swearers. After the thing was over and we were driving back down the mountain, Monica and I talked a little about it, but not really a lot. Inside, I believe we were both excited about the prospects. On the surface though, well, we aren't able to be that forthright yet. To get all giddy about an expensive counseling session would be very foreign to us. We're way too ghetto. We agreed to try to keep it going if we can swing the cost.

So, that evening out in the yard we unravel soft green . The whole idea is to have a place where we can watch Violet take her first steps some day in the not so distant future. A little place where she won't trip over a wad of dog crap and land on an old arrowhead. And maybe a place where we can all cook some pork chops and corn on the grill. Relax some.

At one point during our labors our daughter is grinning at her Mama's silly antics and just bursts into full-on laughter. High giggles and deeper amused gasps stop me across the yard. Violet is laughing out loud for the first time in her young life. True obvious laughter. I head over there and now we both tickle her feet with our manure'd fingertips. There's no time to wash...gotta keep this sensational chuckle alive. For awhile we do and it's one of the coolest moments of my life. Then Violet tires of the whole scene. Still. I hope it is the first in about a hundred years of constant laughter for her. I'd drain all my blood into a washtub this sec if I knew it would promise her that.

We finish up the yard. I go get some burritos. Then, the long day done, we watch some DEXTER and drink some wine: satisfied enough with our real Saturday projects to enjoy a spin on the couch for what it is. Tomorrow morning we will wake up and have another damn fight about whose getting up in the night to change and feed and whose working full-time and whose a c@#t and who isn't.

The whole new grass/new us/new dawning metaphor crossed my mind here. But we're not that graceful, me and her. We need the counseling AND the baby laughing. The wine on Saturday night AND the early rising on Sunday morning. We'll find our way, I figure.

At least we got a yard now, you know...in case it just all comes down to a flat-out wrestling match.

Saturday Morning Ted Bundy Sightseeing Tour.

Tomorrow morning me and Monica have to get up early to go up into the mountains. Early morning hikes in alpine mist are our salvation. Virgin dews. Elk calves in dark pine. We become one with nature, with God. With one another. Naked in a spring fed creek...we are married to the hawk and the wind.

Psyche.

No, we ARE going up into the mountains, but it's just because we have our first marriage counseling thingy and that's where it is. At 7:30am on a Saturday morning. I'm guessing that out of the three of us sitting in our little triangle at least one of us is bound to still be drunk from Friday night.

On the way up to the place we pass one of the places where Ted Bundy once dumped one of his bodies. See?...ride around with me and you learn shit. Interesting shit. I plan on laying that one on Monica just as we're passing it; I suspect it will throw her off her game a little and give me a slight advantage in those first few critical moments when the therapist is chit-chattingly sizing us up, figuring which one of us she'd rather have sex with, and which one of us is wrong about everything.

I should wear cologne, huh? Throw off the therapist too. Start the serious morning with a bang. Cologne fucks shit up BigTime...especially if you only wear it once, a lot of it. And with that there isn't a university bonded professional shrink in the world who won't immediately forget all of that intense studying in favor of the very simple yet elegant human reaction that this guy is wearing so much Wrangler Windfarm that he is without a doubt: fucking scary nuts.

Anyway. I'm just kidding. I kid. Truth is, I'm happy we're going. I'm not embarrassed or ashamed. Just like I'm not metro-sexually effervescent or high on some dangerous intellectual smugness. The damn thing is simple...we could use an ear, maybe some advice. Hopefully not discussion exercises that she hands out on a piece of lime green heavy duty paper; I feel ripped off when I get handed your dumb-ass exercise sheets. It's unoriginal and very 1970's.

Let us talk. Let me and Monica do what we do best but haven't been doing all that great lately. Let us rant and rave...we are magnificent at it. Dare I say, the best you'll ever have? Once we begin, with that A train of Maxwell House tearing through our individual tunnels, there is nothing that remains impossible. We could break through some previously unknown therapeutic wall...crashing through in an explosive blast of confessional rubble and dust! We could end up the SuperHeros of Marital Bliss, the ones who figured it out one historical Saturday morning by out-gabbing each other with passionate intensity! We could be famous. We could be rich.

Or we could end up being Violet's cool Mom and Dad, still in love after all these years. God, it would be so cool if we could knock all that out in one session. Not to mention the cost thing. Maybe two sessions, if you wanna be all "these things take time/stick with it" and shit.

I cannot wait to pop off that Ted Bundy thing.

A Fly In The House Of Love.

I go out in the yard to pick up Milo's shits with a plastic grocery bag for a glove. Eighteen, nineteen. A lot. They are scattered petrified grenades atop dried cherry blossoms; poor burnt miners in red velvet caskets. Violet watches me closely from her car seat on the bricks. Every third or fourth turd I stop and look over at her and toss a madman grin her way. It takes a second to lob but then it smacks into her and her baby stare erupts in smile.

"Beep-Boop!", I say to her.

Her eyes leave mine shyly. Its her little flirty look away. She holds her happy smile but tucks her sparkling eyeballs into a bush or one of the dogs and she knows I'm still looking and loves that she knows that I know what she's up to. Goddamn they start that shit young, boys.

I pick up a few more gold nuggets while watching my daughter watch a fly. For all I can tell: its the first fly she has ever really noticed. This hits me with 300 volt Jesus powered electricity. How exhilarating. What a tiny magnificence to watch your own baby watch her very first housefly in this life. I get moved hard. There is something sublime in it somehow. Something spiritual. It's not all that easy to put to words.

A gazillion flies from now, when Violet has lived so very much; when she has long since tasted the lips of various lovers/held big-bill money in her hands if only for a fleeting moment, the socket holes of my skull will lay within the Earth somewhere still seeing her that afternoon long ago when she first saw that buzzing bug inches from her teensy nose. It's a thing.

Max and Milo laze in the hunks of grass that manage to grow in our sunless yard. They're on either side of Violet's seat like a couple national bank gargoyles. Milo seems embarrassed at all his dumps. He won't look at me. I talk to him a little to let him know I'm cool with it. I don't know that it helps him. Max just looks bored; he refuses to shit in the yard where Milo shits. Some sort of genetic clean wolf thing, I guess. Still, I've seen him eat other dog's craps off a Brooklyn basketball court so I don't really see where he gets his airs to be honest.

Before long, I'm done. The yard is safe to walk through. I ease over to Violet as she's staring up at disappointed birds flitting around the empty bird feeder on a branch. One of the birds is a red-winged blackbird.

Another first for her eyes, I say to myself. Man-o-man.

How can so much awesomeness simply up and happen to one man in like twenty-six minutes? And on a hot and silent Wednesday afternoon in the most unwatched twenty feet of the world when all I was trying to do was collect a bag of dog dirt.