The Future Of Falling On Our Ass.

Me and Monica watch our daughter slump down on her little ass. Monica giggles with awe. I can't make any sounds or anything. We were just parked here doing nothing for awhile and now this. The hardest thing I might have ever had to watch.

Violet leans hard into the mesh sides of her living room crib. Her Michelin Man legs wobble and shiver. In her face, even from across the room, we can both see the determination seeping off of her. Her pink fingers ease up the crib wall, her back straightens. She lets out a yelp of joy.

She's up. Leaning on the top rail: saucer eyes peeping over the baby blue plastic. Yelp. Look at me.

I am standing up. She is standing up. Well, leaning. But still.

I am sort of throwing up inside myself.

Watching your kid pull her little bones/her sweet tiny heart/her country-plum of a brain up to vertical is probably not much different than lunch at The Hard Rock with God. There is so damn much to look at, to take in. And whenever you're ready, when you're done with all the Flying V's and the spray-painted records and the autographed posters from that Live Aid of yesterday: well, you can just sip from your big cold glass of ice and look into the eyes of The Messiah. Take your time.

We do.

We watch as our baby teeters above her familiar territory. She soars above the bottom of that damn crib. Her vantage vastly improved, she squawks big excitement. Her top lip slowly curves over the rounded edge of the vessel.

She sways.

She buckles/her knees jiggle; she catches her shiny new balance. There is a moment of Drunkard's Freedom as she levitates on a tidal wave.

She goes down. Crash.

She tumbles into the bunch of pillows for the fifth time in five minutes. And again, she rolls around down there until she finds her bearings and shimmies her knees enough to get her sitting up. There is no looking over at us couch sitters. There is no cry for help. Important work must be done. Alone, it seems.

After maybe seven or eight free falls from new heights, I catch Monica staring at me, not Violet.

"You look like you just watched a buddy get shot in the eye." That's what she says to me.

I watch. We watch. We watch together, as our whole world keeps landing on her ass again and again. Violet goes down, gets swallowed by the body pillow I stuck in there. She dis-mangles her little body from the soft cave. She must feel something. But I don't think it's pain.

In my head I shoot back years, decades. To tumbling. Pile-driven by my own leap off a shot mattress, I can taste the metallic energy pinging around my mouth when I slam into the pillows on my bedroom floor. Under 1970's greasy over-golden bulb light, I can taste the lightly fragrant generic cotton of my pillow case. It presses into my lips, into my mouth with the force of my landing. There is a wonderful thud too, when I hit. It stirs something in me. Something primal hidden deep in the cellar of my guts. There is the brush-burn on my knee, from two jumps ago: its middling burning just feeds my fire. I eat it. I eat the prickly bolts of little fire that zip all through that joint. I hear my Mom thumping through the downstairs rooms. She's going to holler up the stairs at me. My rough thud upon landing shakes the entire house. I hear the glass in the archaic window frames as they rattle so nervously. The perfect pounce could probably shatter them all. Oh the majesty of these simple evening after dinner leaps. Oh the sheer fucking joy.

Me and Monica watch; my wife probably jumping/falling/leaping off some ledge or edge too. Just like me, next to her on The Here And Now Couch, she's probably tasting the adrenaline jets as they begin to shoot her off some long gone broken box-spring into some long ago evening.

Our pasts make out all up and down this MicroFibre. Our presents accept and ultimately blow warm sighs of relief over into the ear of this small unfolding miracle over there in that crib.

And our futures sit out on the stoop, smoking cigs, unseen by any of us three. They sit there in the Sunday afternoon sunshine, ready to move when its time. Ready to slip out of some moment still unborn.

Some falling on our ass we've yet to feel.

I Like The Taste Of Sweet Fern Dirt.

I tried to keep her from shoveling the dirt in her mouth, but no. It went in her mouth. Plant dirt, from the big boy in the floor pot. I holler out NO like in the movies, slow motion sound/drawn out for effect. Its useless.

The way she does it though is as pure as anything I have witnessed in some time. I'm on my back relaxing on the floorboards. She glides across the waxed wood in her new long pants. Effortless it seems. A lily in the current. I chuck a couple of squishy building blocks her way as a deterrent when I notice she's headed toward the Ikea Palm. She shucks and jives through the carpet bombing, maintains speed/course/mission. I figure that the worst won't happen. Shit, it can't. She won't eat dirt. No way no how.

Will she?

Her little body trucks across the floor through the hail of fun rain. She pays no mind and about halfway through her boogie I start using my voice as a weapon. Stern Daddy. I say stuff like:

"Violet, look at me!" She does not look, of course.

I throw in a, " Violet, Nooooooooooooo." I use firm loving tones. They mean nothing to her. She gets closer and closer.

"Violet! Come Doll-butt! Come here to Papa!" A soft red square pounces off her back. She crawls faster at the plants.

I feel a little pissy because it is looking as if I might need to actually move from my repose, to stop her. To save my little baby. I flip over, a Manatee on the house floor. I chuck a stuffed bowling pin that looks like a cow at her. It swipes her feet but the stubby arms keep reaching out for floor and finding it and so now she's at the plants.

I scootch up. Violet rises to her knees with easy grace. Her smile is a billion suns and they're all turned on, to high. Her right arm arches from her body, unfolds, and places her cupped pink palm into the rich dark dirt. She is a little bulldozer, I think. Dozing away, that's what my kid is up to. A little scooper. A little soil shifter.

I begin to release a hideous squeal. There is concern in its layers of panicked audio, but also a mildly feminine hodgepodge of surprise/repulsion/early afternoon emergency. As I make my sound I stand, launch my self at her. But on that perfect Technicolor Plasma 51 incher that is real life, I watch my tender nubile Violet take a mini-handful of potted dirt from the brim to her lips without missing a beat. There is no hesitation at my screech. No pause to ponder or deliberate. This is as pure and poetic as weekdays ever seem to get.

The kid goes for the dirt, gets it, and eats in one stunningly fluid movement. And it doesn't end there. No taste testing here. She is a Bielanko, for God's sake. Swallow whatever it is you just shoved in your piehole quick before someone tries to take it away from you. By the time I fly down from the sky and land next to my baby-in-need and shake out the dust from my superhero cape: she's already gulping, she's already looking up at me and grinning my way with her blackish lips. I catch sight of a fleck of cruddy dirt on one of her two teeth. A speck of tiny dirt on her little nugget of a tooth.

Its the whiskey-drunk pistol-swinging Devil himself: dancing at the Pearly Gates.

I sweep her up and rush around unsure of what to do. I run into the kitchen and turn on the sink, turn it off again. Finally, I grab a mostly empty baby bottle off the coffee table in the living room and slam it into her jaws. I am a paramedic. I am a creator of life. And a sustainer of it too. She guzzles the lukewarm formula in the bottle and lays back in my arms and looks up at me like:

What?

Freaking kids. She'll be the damn death of me, you know.

Eating dirt from plant pots while I'm trying to whack her in the noodle with Nerf bricks. Munching on fistfuls of crumbly fern craps and fly wings and dog hairs and, Oh God...what else? How long have we had that freaking plant? There could be pot seeds in that soil. Hell, there could be old blow dust in there for all I freakin' know.

Ugh. Love is so goddamn tricky. I don't wanna give a rat's ass if someone mainlines straight Miracle Grow. I really truly don't wanna care. It never would have phased me before. Eat scorpions dipped in deer blood. Whatever. I was free to not worry about anyone at all.

But its just too late for all that now isn't it?

Carry Me Down Afternoon Alleys.

Late afternoon. It's the last day of her first summer and me and Violet and the dogs are in the big front window looking out. The sun has that new/old autumn angle, light slashing in from across treetops and skimming off roofs instead of plopping straight down. There is a cool breeze today. The swamp tree in the front yard is twisting up in the movement. We all watch the branches dance.

Most people are at work at this time of day. Maybe having their last cup of coffee for the day. The Three O'Clock Lightning. Bolts of eleventh hour zip to get 'em through to the finish line.

I used to get mine in truck-stops on interstates. Pull the van off the exit and watch the band in the back stir to life after two-hundred miles of wandering off down into some lonesome canyon of old novels and Discmans and USA Todays. Coffee would bring us back up. Pure wonderful bitter highway coffee would bring us together. It would tickle our hearts with a nine-foot neon feather and bitch-slap our weary blue reserves.

We'd piss out the morning brew and pass each other by the bright lit sinks and then head out with hope in our hearts, to dump in new hot joe.

And by the time we'd wandered back out through the salted cashews and No-Doze and the XXL sweatshirts with an Old Apache Chief instead of a moon in the night sky above two howling white wolves, well, we were all fast friends again. Musicians feeling the music. The caffeinated tunes of late afternoons. We'd laugh and joke and smoke for the next hundred miles, til we crashed and crumbled upon our exhaustion yet again. Modern America was built that way. Truck-stop to truck-stop, cup to cup. It's there if you want it.

These days I am in the window though. Unmoving really, except for slight shifts here and there to keep my daughter from smashing through the pane. Flanked by bored dogs the two of us sit and tap the glass. We watch occasional cars pass. She likes seeing them, smiles a little. I do this new thing where I turn my head towards the outside then back to look at her over and over again til I think I might puke. She watches this with vigilant eyes. And like clockwork, thirty seconds in, she gets the joke and giggles right into me.

I melt like cake in the sun.

It feels odd. To be sitting on the couch looking out the window, when the world is all hopped up on office brew, or garage brew. Break-room brew. Hell, I don't even remember to drink the shit in the afternoon anymore. I don't get that Tilted Sun Phantom whispering reminders in my ear. I don't see the buildings sizzling miles away in the distance. The houses of relief set upon the hard-packed highway.

I reach into a ten gallon Ziploc and pull off a hunk of Monica's cornbread. I stick some crumbs up on Violet's lip. I swig the Diet Coke (it ain't the same/don't tell me caffeine stats). We walk to the window but then say Fuck That.

We undo leashes, lasso newly awakened beasts, and decide to just head out into the late and golden afternoon.

Maybe we ain't moving eighty miles-per-hour, sure.

But, By God, we are moving people. Into the late afternoon sunshine. Out the ass-end of one season, and straight into the dripping jaws of the next.