The Rambling Bambling Tired-Ass Me First Blues.

Let me ramble. Lemme flow awhile here. Think of this as jazz. Discordant stacks of hot buttered Silver Dollar Wordcakes. Let me cook awhile, y'all...

Whatever diaries my wife left laying around in the beginning, I've read them. Journals. Letters from old boyfriends that seem heartfelt and sincere but also a bit twee. I wrote letters like that to her once. I haven't unearthed those yet. She might've chucked them. Hmph.

I remember writing my very first letter to her about two weeks after I'd met her. We were still out on the same tour with the band. I penned it to her while I was sat out on the pool deck of a Comfort Inn or a Shiloh Inn or some such fucking Inn in Little Rock, Arkansas. I wrote to her that they were building the Bill Clinton Library next door, because they were. I think I wrote other things too, poetic attempts. I recall something about a little bird. Maybe a bird had just landed on the iron rail nearby and I saw it as some sort of LoveSign? What a dipshit I can be.

Anyways, I remember smoking my cigs and wondering if I wrote to her honestly, with warty truth and colorful twists of language, whether that would somehow help make this lovely girl understand me more. Or contemplate me more. Or wanna visit me and spend a long dreamy weekend in bed rolling around in the take-out cartons and the dried sweat reefs and the movie listings.

Then, time rolls on.

Love is so merciless. The heart is the ultimate vessel but it gets banged up/pummeled by grenades/Carpet Bombed By Drunken Asshole Pilots Born Without Souls. Relentless barrages of nails and fangs and antlers and iron spikes are driven into your chest by the Sweet Fierce Fighters we call Love/Hope/Forever. And oh the silly heart, the tender optimist. Charred beyond recognition, still standing in the middle of the nuked out street still gripping tight to thirty melted chocolates in a box shaped like. You guessed it. A heart.

At least for a lot of us, that's how it is sometimes. The heart is the thing. Fuck the lungs. You could buy Hundred Year-Old Lungs manufactured by Marlboro Red and they could never be half as burnt up as so many trillion hearts have been at one time or another.

Even today, I wonder: how the Christ did we find each other?

How the fuck did I end up with another person? And her with me? On occasion I will see pictures of other people, couples. And I will look at them and wonder why in hell they ended up together. By that I mean, how did they find each other out in the world? And what was their first meeting like? And their courtship, if they had one?

Hey, some people are just too tired of courting after so many years in the ring.

So yeah...how does it all just happen? How does love smash into us so hard one day and not even drive off at all? Some people just meet and laugh and speak with deep gut sighs and eye flutters. They pass the pepper across the tall cafe table to the other one and that says it all. Let's move in together. They move in together.

Me and Monica sort of played it that way. But we both talk too much to even notice that someone's handing them the pepper shaker with love. We could talk birds out of the blue yonder. We could rattle our tongues until God himself rolled slow up in his pimped out Baby Blue '66 Chevelle SS and looked at us and said:

"Yo. It's all over."

We probably wouldn't stop talking. We probably wouldn't shut up when the flashes began either. Or the nuclear warheads slammed into the mountains off in the distance. Mushroom clouds, we'd chatter on, about this and that, about bullshit. Prophecy Lizards the size of Photo-Mats come tear-assin' out of hunks of street they just pushed up and crawled from: we'd yap away. Rock bands, novels, tacos, dogs, positions, conservative joy drainers, race, economy, the space program, the electric in your blood when you kiss a stranger when you're lightly buzzed.

She gets life. I saw that early on. At least, she gets it like I try and get it. And that's all I ever dreamed of finding, really.

So, we talked a lot about everything. Monica is a fabulous listener. The best I've ever encountered. I had never really had anyone listen to me before. I come from a long brash line of French and Irish screamers. We scream. We hoot our words out with oval gushes of air, like night owls. We talk over one another without even really listening to what the fuck the other person is even saying. We're somewhat rude and self-absorbed. We're a little too coked up on our own vignettes. Monica is not like that at all. She listens. Hawk ears. Hawk Lady Full Of Wine.

I don't think I have been listening as good lately. I'm tired. She's tired. It exhausting, this kid thing. Violet was cut from The Original Dew Drop. She is the freshest alive-est most explosively inimitable wonder that ever did land in our laps/emerge from our lap, but she requires vast prairies of day and night. By the time you get across one and she's asleep, there isn't much real talking/listening going on. We cross paths on the couch, clink wine glasses to the bottle but never to each other. Toasts are for a job well done and not a job that never ends.

We'll watch an episode of BLACK BOOKS and I'll be all pissing my pants with big laughter while she curls up in her area down couch. She might make popcorn and gob it with nuked Country Crock and bring it in in the big silver bowl. I will dig at it like a Neanderthal, spilling kernals and unpopped seeds down onto Milo's head under my propped up legs. She might yell at me, she might not.

Then, before long we'll cork the bottle. We'll head to bed, obliterated from another long long day. I set my phone for 6am. It comes so motherfucking fast.

I'm not too worried though. One of these evenings the whole thing will pop and I will be able to sit down with Hawk Lady Full Of Wine and tell her that I'm still into her, and her amazing mind. And her fine ass body: her galactic #!$+* and that historical $#! and those utterly magnificent $#!@. And she will listen.

Then, I will shut my trap for the first time in my life. And listen to her too.

My lady/my lass. Lemme listen to you, baby.

Wuzonyermindgurl?

She'll start talking.

A trout will swim through my eyeball. Christ. Get out, man. Seriously.

I'm trying things over here. Love Things. Adult shit.

At least let me try.

I Will Pick You Up At Eleven/ I Never Even Left.

Gone are the toothless gums. And she sits up now on her own. She sits up and grabs at her bottle and leans back and guzzles her drink without any help from me, from us. In her room, you wander into the dusk back there and find her standing up/leaning against the slats, like she's leaning up against a pole on some lower Manhattan corner, looking out for her friends on a Friday night.

There is a baby's brand of Cheetos: she eats them as if she was born to eat them. Sometimes I wonder if I put a bottle of beer down there in front of the snacks, if she might not just pull out a Bic, pop off the cap, and enjoy a cold one right there in front of me. She's sagacious. Special, right? My kid eats Cheetos, love's 'em. That's a thing, no?

Leaning up against a comforter at her vacation house (living room crib), she watches DVDs and laughs aloud. Something exciting happens: Hopkins, the cartoon frog appears on the screen, she kicks her feet up and guffaws. She's like a little Roseanne Barr, full of good salty chuckles. She's seen this frog appear out of nowhere at least sixty times now, but still it gets her so good. After that it's a couple slugs on the plastic bottle. The morning plays on: she'll put that drink down and pop in her binky.

My roles are diminishing fast. I was the Binky Lifter. It was easy and satisfying. I like a spelled-out task. So now what?

Lay her down on the floor and walk away a little. And watch. She flips over onto her knees and raises her chin and smiles easy at the world. Look at all this, she seems to be saying. Look at everything we've got here! Then she's off. At first, it's a few rev ups as her stubby pink legs dig their best into the hardwood. Then, she waddles her arms and runs her tiny fingers across the shiny boards in front of her. She giggles her practical joker giggle. She fires her milky engines.

And she's off. Across the floor to grab a fist full of black lab/jingle some dog tags. She gets sloppy kisses back from the fellows and always looks both delighted and surprised as hell. I stare at all this sort of thing with my mouth open. Saucer eyes. I don't know quite what I'm seeing. That's my kid down there. She's creeping around and hobnobbing with big dogs. Jesus.

Saturday night they had a free bluegrass concert downtown and we took Violet up there. She sat up on her butt on the lush green grass, sipping her grape juice and chomping on her Cheetos. She watched the people play and banged her foot on the ground whenever the music sped up and got her excited. I laid there looking at her and tried to imagine her out at some concert with her girlfriends, seeing American Idols or Britney Spears or Iced Earth or whatever she's into. I sipped my Bud Light and tried to picture how I'm going to work that.

Here's probably how.

I'm gonna drop 'em off at the gate and tell her and the gang to have a real fun time. I'm gonna tell them all to be careful. I'll give out the lowdown on tie-dye wearing acid gremlins and whiskey-fucked-up construction dudes in Allman Brothers shirts. Stay away from older women who spin in circles, I'll warn.

I will then give her a twenty for sodas and fries. Or maybe that'll just get her one soda by then.

Then, some more wisdom. Avoid beery-eyed ruddy Parrot-Heads. Don't go to the bathrooms alone. And when you do go to the bathrooms, if you see any preppy short haired young men curled up in a stall/ moaning, then get out of there fast. He's an Upper-Middle Class Summer Shed Parking Lot Party ghost left over from Bob Weir's latest conglomeration and his lips are all chapped with ancient bong yak.

I'll slide her another tenner... to buy a t-shirt. Even though t-shirts cost 55 dollars. She won't know I know that.

I'll avoid asking her for a kiss, so I don't mortify her in front of all The Pink Ladies. Then, I'll watch them file in. Then, I'll go park the car and get out my Post-It with their ticket info/seats on it, along with my own ticket that I bought about a half hour after she bought hers. On-line. Months ago.

There's me, Pops: trying to blend. I'll be trying to blend, but I dunno. I can totally see me not blending.

I'll try and spot her/them, from afar. With sharp binoculars I will scan through a dense marsh of brats and hoodlums. It'll take time, but before too long I'll see her in her seat, laughing at her best friend's jokes. I'll watch her close, make sure that it's soda she's sipping.

The lights will go down. The chilling roar will rise. Fifteen thousand giddy screams will light up a summer evening. I'll watch her clapping her hands wildly above her pretty head. The songs will start. The good music.

After about an hour, people around me will look at me: the guy with the binoculars. He never points them at the stage. He never points them at the band or the dancers or the robots or the DJ or the big screens or the fist fights up on the lawn behind us. He points them at some place in the crowd. Probably stalking his ex, they'll holler over the guitars.

And what's with the bag of Cheetos? He even gonna open that shit?

I Love Robbing Banks/ I Always Tell The Teller Thanks.

The wind jabs, dances, jabs some more, and then just cuts all hell loose. Dark clouds hustle toward us, eager to dump on someone/anyone out here where people are scarce. I suppose the sky gets bored too. Tired of hammering the ground to dust with hard pellets of summer rain. Even pelting antelope and coyotes would get dull after like eight thousand years. You'd want to soak some big guns now and then. Some damn human people. Sneak up on them if you can, while they're out in a wide open field mending a fence or looking for rattlesnakes; set upon them with wicked wrath. Drench their thin clothes. Fire lightning bolts at their scared asses. Good times if you're bad weather, but few and far between out here in No Man's Land.

A few drops slip down through the streaky sunbeams and plop onto my arms, but that's about it. Sometimes the wind tells the rain to fuck off, sometimes it doesn't. We luck out, I guess. Through the locomotive gusts I hear my daughter wake up back in the Honda. Her crying leaks out of the backseat and probably dies upon some cross-wind for a few minutes before it manages to hitch a ride on the back of something headed past the car towards my face. So, I hear her crying out: probably wondering where the hell her folks might have gotten to. I stroll back over there and untie her from her seat.

Then we head back into Butch Cassidy's place.

Inside, there is no wind. It slams up on the cabin walls like seawall waves, but there is newish mortar in the old cracks and it would take a tornado to get in. Violet looks around with her sleepy eyes and begins to percolate. Her little head swivels up over my shoulder to watch Mama on the other side of the one room in here. She gum-grins at her and then at the stormy sun coming through the broken panes in the windows.

Butch Cassidy spent his younger years here. A Mormon kid in a land of flash-fur jack rabbits bolting for holes. They say it was here, in the land around this cabin, that he first learned to ride horses and shoot pistols. I believe it too. What the hell else would you do? I whisper to Violet a little about Butch; I don't know all that much. I tell her he wasn't as cold-blooded as Jesse James or Billy The Kid. She stares at the log walls with babbling coos. Max and Milo putz around out in the waving grasses and she fixes her eyes upon them while I speak. I tell her that Butch and Sundance and their gang robbed and stuff but tried not to kill too much.

I slip in that her Papa rode with that infamous Hole-In-The-Wall Gang for many years. That I was a favorite of Butch. I slip in bullshit here and there: for me. She doesn't blink a doubtful eye and I like that. I need it.

Monica takes our picture. I make her take maybe a thousand. I'll probably be having beers with Prince Charles on his chicken farm before I'm back here again. Part of me wants to shoot a six-shooter into a stump or something. Monica reads some lore to us out of a book I have. I try and listen close, so it might help me suck up the vibe even more, but it's not much use. I'm just too excited to have my daughter here to really concentrate.

The mean Utah wind blows through Violet's corn-silk hair when we move back through the low door from the cabin. I try and imagine a young freckled kid moving out through the same door a long time ago. I look at my little one. I think about young Butch, a kid long before the legend. I see him wandering out into the wild wind, just like we're doing this morning. I see him squinting into the long day, maybe looking for Indians.

Monica comes around the side of the cabin.

"Squaw," I whisper to Violet.

Each passing generation has their hardscrabble legends. And no daddy who ever held one of them in his arms ever dreamed that things would turn out the way they did, for better or for worse.

We all head back to the Honda. Two good dogs, two Un-Legends, and an adorable blank slate.

Me an Monica will probably never be legends. We'll likely never walk on Mars or sail around any capes in a dinghy. We probably won't star in any great film classics or discover any medical miracles this time around. And probably, we won't be hopping up on any teller's desk and firing a few rounds into the rough ceiling plaster just before we get handed the heavy sacks of glorious loot.

I strap the kid into her seat. She's so young, so small that the damn thing still faces the backseat. She lets go of a high pitch squeal as I strap her in. I smile at her. I push her button nose. Damn, anything's possible for you, I think to myself.

Then, I ponder it. The wild and wonderful trail ahead of her.

Take me with you, I whisper, all selfish and all.