The Department Of Her Heart.

My wife, Monica, has been involved in a really intriguing debate over the past couple of days. It involves God, journalism, the sanctity of independent thought, the Civil Rights Movement, The LDS Church, speeches, Gay Marriage, Twittering, blogging, media embargoes, politics, fevered opinion, and a specific moment in Idaho when someone said something revealing in the afternoon.

Sheesh.

Me, I've just sat back here on the couch eating the whole time. I dip chocolate bars into Diet Coke, walk to the porch for a smoke, return to my perch.

But, I'll say this much. I love my wife a little more this week than last week. Here's why.

Monica doesn't care about skin color. She is one of the few people I have ever met who just doesn't see black or white or tan or whatever. And she doesn't care if men fall in love with other men, or women with women. It doesn't scare her. It doesn't repulse her. It simply doesn't register a complaint with The Department Of Her Heart. Illegal immigrants don't bother her. She is not worried about her right to have a .357 on her nightstand. And she isn't worried about spending an eternity in Hell whenever she makes up her own mind about things based on her experiences here on Earth, in this life that she is living as we speak.

Hate, and fear, and not paying a penny towards someone else's welfare, and archaic and questionable books/men/slave owners/documents/beliefs don't grab her mind each morning and drag it far away fast from her beating heart. In fact, its just the opposite.

And this thrills me beyond most of the words I can really come up with.

Should our daughter, our beautiful and wonderful gift from God/nature/outer space, ever decide that she loves a man of another shade, or a woman...I am comforted beyond the realm of any Earthly dictation...that it will be so very ok for me and her Momma to keep on loving her and her life and her choices and her magical experience.

It makes me sad/it makes me motherfucking livid sad to know that there are so many parents out there who would put themselves first, before the love they have for their own kids. It sounds insane and it is.

But Constitutions and Churches and Bibles and Grandpa's Prejudices and Thomas Fucking Jefferson don't mean shit at the end of the day, people. Not when it gets in the way of love in the here-and-now. Monica's God doesn't dress in old robes and hurl bolts of mental madness at those who don't fit into Old Testament Mad Libs. No, no, no. Monica's God...and mine too...she puts down her Virginia Slim to flick over to the baseball from The Pill Poppin' Wives of Beverly Hills (her little secret!) and scribbles down names in her Book Of Goin' To Hell...names often pinned to people who were so very sure they had Heaven all locked up. After all, they did everything they were told. They believed exactly what they were told to believe.

Sucks for them.

Luckily for me: I get to learn from a master. My wife.

Plus she's hotter than hell.

Plus, I get to eat like Bridget Jones on a Cherry Garcia Bender while she teaches with her heart.

Love.

Lately I have been going to bed at night and staring at the ceiling fan as if it were a StarShip hovering down to zip me away. Where will they take me, I get to wondering. To a planet, maybe. Or maybe they just wanna ass-rape me and fill me with caramel filling and serve me at the buffet in one of the ship's six eateries. Either way, I lay there thinking about stuff: about how exciting it is to be moments away from heading out to space, to be seconds away from conversations with clay-colored Lobster Boys with laser eyeballs. Its enthralling. It's fucking ace, is what it is.

Then it punches me on my heart.

Violet. My butter bean.

I can't go to space tonight. I have Violet here in the other room crashed out on her elbows and knees, her tiny butt propped up in the air, aimed at the stars beyond the rafters and shingles above her dreaming head. I can't get on this ship or even the next one. She is over there working up ways to be needing me even in her wildest dreams. And I aim to please.

I give the finger to the fan. I tell it to go get someone else who doesn't have all these Earthly responsibilities like I do. The fan erupts in lights and roars, smoke that smells of fried honeysuckle fills the bedroom; Christ: this is gonna wake her up, I scream into the deafening hot wind.

Then.

Boosh.

It's gone. The StarShip. It simply vanishes in a puff of dust that settles down around me on my left side of the Serta PerfectPosturePimp, like a misty bird pee.

I get choked up. This part is super true. I lay there thinking about what almost just happened/how close I was to walking into the unknown, alone. And it makes me almost cry as I realize that I can't live anymore without my kid. She holds chains she don't know a damn thing about. Chains looped and knotted up and around my liver, my kidneys. Chains gathered all over my left lung. And my right one. New hard chains spun all through my ribs, like bikes locked safe outside a library. Chains to my eyelids. Chains to my teeth. Chains to my still kicking heart.

The feeling has been lingering all around rooms and streets with me lately. All gussied up in afternoon sunbeams smashing into golden leaves, this weird massive entity has been swirling in and out of my consciousness for the last couple of weeks. I get so blue sometimes. I deal with it, run with it. Try to rub it in my eyes and see the world as some sort of sad beautiful ball of dirt/bones/lust/fish. But these past days have found me just overcome with all kinds of newer pangs.

I fall into some dark ass well and a nine month old pulls me out. She heaves me up over the colonial bricks and sneezes in my face. She holds out a pinky like an offer.
Stay here with me, she says. We'll be ok.

It's all too much sometimes. It's me staring hard at her and her shitting like a buffalo while she watches Charlie Brown in a pumpkin patch.

Its a shotgun shell loaded with dimes.

I aim it at the fan/UFO/blues.

I squeeze the trigger with loving tears on my eyeballs. Then I sleep the sleep of the dead.

Tonight We Dine Under The Plastic Crab.

Five years ago today me and Monica stood on a Q-tip of grass at the edge of the city. We were jittery. Getting hitched eight weeks after you first laid eyes on someone: it rattles the guts. Still, there we were, caddicorner to 7-11 and across the street from Starbucks and Subway. In the middle of America, in sight of the western Rockies AND every single thing I need to survive in this world (cigs, 12 inch hoagies, coffee, beer, Diet Coke, magazines, The NY Times, Payday bars, lighters with pictures of Pheasants or strippers on them, Ben and Jerry, toilet paper, and paper towels, and gasoline), I spit into the whimsical wind. We spit. Together.

We got married at a judge's house. I guess even judges like to pocket a spare chunk of change when its easy and fast. We didn't have a witness. The judge's wife got a neighbor to come over and watch the deed go down. Monica was adorably nervous. She gripped my hand so hard. Death grip/Life Grip. I haven't felt that particular grip again since. Even pushing out the baby didn't bring the emergency squeeze.

There is a picture of us standing on the judge's McMansion steps. There we are: smiling in a stranger's arched doorway, vines crawling up the walls around us. Monica is wrapped around me tight. I am wearing a pair of fancy pants that I paid too much for on The King's Road in London long ago. And a button up shirt that was too small. You can see my gut/my skin actually spilling out.

I like that. I like that our wedding photo album consists of maybe six pics tops. And that in the main one, the Just-Married-Newlyweds/Ain't-Love-Grand one, I show a bit of belly. Out of the billions of wedding photos on Earth, there can't be many in that category, huh?

After we were married we went to Red Lobster with a gift card I'd had burning a hole in my wallet long before I met Monica. I was waiting for the right moment, I guess. The right dinner date. The right Red Lobster.

Everything converged that evening.

And five years later: we're still converging. Still a little jittery. Still stood on a tiny island at the curb, ready to take wild leaps into the vast unknown.

Still loving really hard with these fierce and loyal hearts up in our chests.