The Walkin' Talkin' Melted Dinosaur Shit Blues.

The door to the waiting room swings open.

"Owner of the Honda Pilot," says the guy in the uniform. I'd say he's 40/42. Reddish hair. Freckley.

"Yeah," I rise up out of my chair and follow him. We both end up standing in front of a computer.

"So how we doing today, sir?" he asks.

"Doing great," I lie. Its really never 'great' now is it?

"That's good. So we here for the Super Standard Sense of Change today?"

I am a little dazzled.

"Uhmmm, just uh...just, you know, the regular oil change. Whatever is cheapest, to be honest."

He is staring into the depths of his screen. I don't feel like he is registering me all that much.

"Ok, lets get started then: just a few points I'd like to run through with you. You can see here in our Comprehensive Oil Life Planner Guide that your car is going to require 5 quarts of oil today, sir. Now, The Magnificent-Cheapo-Does-Nothing-Service comes with up to 4 quarts of oil, so would you like me to go ahead and just charge you for the additional needed lubrication?", he stares at me. Actually, as he spiels this, he stares through me. He stares through me and into something Out There in the world, something fleeting and brittle. The wind maybe?

"Uhmmm..., yeah, I guess. I mean I want the oil changed. So, uh, yes, yeah."

What else would I say? No? No, I don't believe I want that fifth and final quart today, Buckaroo. No siree. You go ahead and put your four in there and in a few weeks time I'll just stare that highway engine fire right in the eyeball and be happy with that, ok?

"Right," he says and snaps a button on the computer with a swift finger shot. It clacks.

"Now, we check all fluids and lubrications as well as tire pressure and the sanctity of the soul of your vehicle. That's all included but let me ask you: do you drive up many hills, sir?"

Do I drive up many hills? Seriously?

"Well, yes, I suppose I drive up my share. Same as everyone else, I guess." I crack a little laugh to maybe show him I'm comfortable with the weirdness of his questions, even though I'm not.

"Well, the torque required to conquer inclines and declines day in and day out really ravages the specific totality of the cylinders. So we recommend a lite fragrant dusting of the ramrods with STP Liquid Life once every three oil changes. I can see here on your file that you haven't had that yet, so go ahead and do that for you and your vehicle today, sir?" He raises an eyebrow in question and shifts his focus to my face.

"Hmph. Ummm, how much is that?" I ask.

"That's an additional $22 today, sir."

I answer fast. Lightning flashing from my teeth. "No, that's ok." He is unsurprised, I notice, as he clacks his finger to the keyboard.

I remember I have a coupon. I have this coupon, I say.

"Ok, great. We'll tally that in at the end," he replies without looking at the crumpled shard I've fished out of my back pocket.

"Ok," I say. The end? The end of what? What exactly are we working towards here?

"Now, sir, Bay Agent McMichaels has discovered a noticeable amount of static electricity built up in your car's carpets and that in turn can really hack away at the overall performance of your vehicle's ability to fly. So what we usually recommend is our One-Time-Only-Invisible-Wings Treatment, and what that does is it penetrates deep into your vehicles subconscious and convinces it that it is a massive iron bird GO AHEAD AND PERFORM THAT SERVICE FOR YOU AND YOUR BELOVED VEHICLE TODAY, SIR?"

Here I notice that my friend is now not just staring through me and out into the streets beyond, but that he is actually mentally climbing the mountains off in the sparkly distance. His mind is very far away from here. Yet he speaks clearly, pitching me things, foolish things. Snake oil. Parking lot rocks spray-painted cheesy gold.

"How much is that service then?," I ask. Out of politeness. Out of sheer awe.

"That's $47.50, sir." He clacks the board before I even answer. I think he is ahead of me here.

"I"ll pass on that one today, thanks."

For a moment he reads/pretends to read something on the screen. I just stare at him now, this red-headed master of ceremonies, this Valvoline Witch. I secretly think he is kind of badass.

"Ok." He finger-pops the keyboard. Looks intense. "Ok." Again, same thing. He's reading/pretending to read important facts about my car. MY car. Information is gushing into his data port and its critical and its pivotal.

"Ok, sir, now: do you use the gas pedal more than three hours a month?"

Holy fucking hell.

"Do I use the GAS pedal? In a month? Yeah, I guess so. Is that a lot? Three hours...is that too much?"

"Well, we like to recommend that for pedals used over three hours we service them with our patented Black-Magic-BayBoy-Shooter. And what that does is it connects directly into your exhaust pipe and uses over 55,000 PSI to propel one of our Uniformed Bay Agents into the very guts of your cherished family vehicle. Once inside, provided he survives the brutal body morphing and squeezing, he is then able to use a beeswax'd candy sledge hammer to bash away at all the cancerous sludge and corrosion that builds up on your motorized blood-brother's drive shaft. Plus it really negates nearly all the pinging within your vehicles psyche."

I stand stunned. My face is blank. We eyeball one another. He arches a red brow.

"We highly recommend this service to all our customers who ever drive in rain or on bridges or past fields full of hungry deer."

I barely eek it out of me. "How much?"

"346 million dollars. That includes up to four cups of transmission fluid and a dollop of Butter Sauce."

We both hurl through space. Together. Him: not here really. Me: drunk on his baffling babble.

"I have this coupon," I say and hold it up for him.

He stares into that screen of his. Both of us are exhausted.

He clacks the keys with the quickness.

He rings me up.

Penny Candy.

Here are some Swedish Fish I will share with you today:

- I have been lying on the bathroom floor reading for the last hour. While Violet sleeps. I have the baby monitor resting on the john. I let the shower run cause I like running water/peace/can't hear phone. Yes, there could be invisible dried piss on the floor but if there is it's probably mine. No prob.

- This happened between the afternoon hours of 3 and 4pm. So yeah, while real men work at computers and in mines and under hoods in garages all over town...I lay in my own dried piss. Whatever.

- My favorite thing to do lately is to think about exercising again. I think about exercising so much without exercising that I think maybe the thinking about it is actually turning into exercise.

- I made my eggplant parm on Sunday. Orgasmic.

- I am sick of eggplant parm after six or seven servings over three days. If you want the rest...swing by.

- Violet received her Welcome To The World card from The White House yesterday. I tried smearing the Obamas signatures to convince myself they were real. No dice. If they had been real ink...I think, in retrospect, that I would have totally fucked them up trying to make sure.

- I am now on Twitter though I don't know why. Or for how long. I seriously have nothing much to say. Politics bore the hell out of me. I don't know how to make tiny URLs. Most of my days are horrifically boring. But, still, that hasn't stopped 34 trillion others, so why should it give me a second's pause. Don't follow me though... it isn't worth it.

- Me and my daughter played in outside dirt for the first time together in this life. That was Sunday afternoon, after I buried her in potato chip leaves. We scraped in the rich black soil until we both had Earth beneath our nails. She'll never remember it, but I'll never forget.

- That show SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE. Fuck that show; it's on too much. What is it six nights a week? Jesus. Dancing is cool and all, but, c'mon. No, on second thought: dancing is not that cool. It's impractical. Take that shit off the air. Or let Gordon Ramsey replace that whack-job Rosie O'Donnell-clone-mistake judge.

- I bought a used two-disc set of Peanuts 1970's specials for Violet/for Serge. Has six of the magic specials. Also, now I can stop hearing The Great Pumpkin in my sleep.

"If you try and hold my hand, Charlie Brown, I'm gonna sock you!"

- We've also started watching EMMETT OTTER'S JUG-BAND CHRISTMAS. So far, 678,000 viewings. My nostalgic affection for the show is...molding.

- Billy Joel and Elton John are coming here to Salt Lake on their COCAINE AND FURNITURE POLISH TOUR 2004-2015. I wonder if they actually stay here. In this city. After the show do they go to a hotel downtown and have a salad with Elton's special lump crab meat flown in from South Africa? Does Billy Joel settle back on a hotel bed not far from my house, in his Mets pj's, pick up the hot phone and order a room service Artisanal Cheese Plate and a Brownie Divinity Sundae?

Or do they just hop off the stage, limo to the airport, and jet to LAX and homes in the hills before the arena parking lot is even half empty?

They go, huh?

I knew it.

The Rambling Maple Street Witch Chase Blues.

If you had taken out your Magic Broom that night years ago, and gone out for a whoosh through the cool Conshy night, you might have spotted us down there stumbling over pushed-up sidewalk bricks, in and out of lamplight. Beside high hedges of colorless picker bush, we moved slowly down the avenues, our voices muffled behind the plastic face of Aqua Man, behind the thick dyed wool of Black Beard's mustache. In front of the two of us you would have seen a third, too; a taller one, more graceful in her movements: if graceful is what you might call a Witch who doesn't trip over her cape every hundred steps .

Crossing from one side of Maple Street to the other, you might have seen our bags of loot and noticed the way we held them close, with endearment. With pride.

Inside the bag The Candy Bar Ball was being waged in the crowded darkness of the place they call The Trick-Or-Treat-Sack. Mallows and Reese's boogied directly through the path of regal Special Darks while Candy Corns-- drunk on their own inimitable numbers-- pestered the Peanut M&M's who were desperately hobnobbing with the Gummi Bears (who speak no English). And over there, emerging from beneath the bleachers, the Miniature Snickers and Miniature Milky Ways look sheepishly around as they tighten their belts and try and melt back into the crowd. It is a sensational party and a magical time and it all goes down inside the bags in our fists as we three make our way down the street.

So, had you been circling above us in a holding pattern, sweeping wide slothy circles around a track of sky above our decorated heads, you might have seen the bandit. You might have seen the bandit round the corner on 7th Avenue following us following our Mother Witch. Up Maple Street he walked and must've heard our voices as we spoke in muffled excitable tones. Candy this and candy that. I got this/I'll trade you for that.

"Serge, you're not eating everything tonight, hon. Remember last year?", my Mom chimed in.

I remembered. Of course I did. You don't forget that feast too fast. Your mind doesn't just slink away from that stuff when you're a chunky ten year old dressed like a Storm Trooper from the neck down (all masks can go to hell when we get home with the loot!). Indeed, young huskys like me...we didn't turn away from showdowns in at the kitchen table; face-offs with dozens of Chunky bars and Almond Joys and red Nibs and homemade popcorn handballs and Tootsie Rolls and Bubblicious and even wispy black plastic Spider Rings if they got in the goddamn way of our eating.

And later, like the men we would one day become, we didn't shy away from the first pangs of ache. Or the dancing gases in our guts. We embraced them instead. We allowed them to enter our bodies like Evil Spirits and to reach their trillion year old ghost claws into our gullets and stir/mix/blend with hellacious speed and motion. We accepted the beads of salty sweat that bubbled to the surface of our now clammy skin, the little cricks of overloaded sugar rain gushing down through the first sprouts of hair there on our pitching arms. And, God knows, we did not beg for mercy or relief when all of the world came bursting from our mouths: insane wild rivers of swishing caramel coated lava bashing away at sprawling metropolises of nougat and raisins and peanut slivers. Rainbows and black holes and tiny deer and children crying and national forests of pulverized Sweet Tarts raging from your throat and across the tracks of my teeth and into the tunnel of my lips and then out into this world of pain just inches below my bulging kid eyeballs: the memory doesn't fade. Ever. I still taste it damn near every day.

So yeah. This villain, this thief in the night, moving up on us as my Mom told me to take it easy on the PigOut, my brother The Silent Pirate, moving alongside me, passing me, getting passed. It's like a shark attack in ways. The way the thing emerges from the darkness seen only maybe by the Eyes of God, but not by any Earthly eyes. The way it closes in with malicious stealth, it's eyes focused through all that heavy gauze of speed and metabolism and commitment and the pure and simple predator grease that slicks the rails it moves toward you on.

I don't remember making a sound. I just remember listening to my Mom and then the sound of her voice shooting away down some unseen tunnel as my arm twisted back with the heavy pull of something wrong. I felt a body push into me. I felt the jaws of a neighborhood shark tear into me. The world was silent. Some dipshit had stolen my treasure/candy. I inhaled my mask into my face. It stuck there, plastered with a breath I couldn't let out.

And so here you on your broom up there, well you would have been delighted to see what happened next. As the thief darted away with my Trick Or Treat Bag and I watched helplessly from my soft knees on the cold hard bricks. My Mom, in full Witch regalia had swiftly made out what had happened and with a shrill howl gave chase. Here we can all watch as my sweet dear mother of maybe 35 at the time ran like lightning toward a fleeing punk who had probably not counted on this. In her hand, my Mom held my last year's Christmas present. The Master Blaster. Styled after the handguns of galaxies far from Texas or Mexico or other gunfighter haunts, the Master Blaster featured a five inch wide barrel and a lifted spring-drive. One crank was all you needed and with a touch of the trigger you sent a wad of air bursting into someone's face enough to make their hair float a second. The sensation made you laugh. It didn't hurt.

But, were you a local pothead from an iffy home with a Witch on your tail and stolen candy in your hand, the Air Blaster might just make the difference. It might become the almighty equalizer. I had wondered aloud at the beginning of the night...Mom, why would a Witch have a Master Blaster? It's dumb.

But now it all made sense as I watched the slow motion drama spin up Maple Street, heard the roars from my Mom, the ruffling of the plastic bag, the sprinters fading out there in the darkness.My heart raced. I was genuinely terrified. Maybe the most frightened I had ever been. My brother watched beside me. We watched together. Our Mother. Streets full of ghouls. Her distant yelps.

The BOOOOF of the Master Blaster going off a block away.

Then nothing.

And then after an interminable, our mother's wonderful voice rising from the pitch black.

"You Little Asshole. Go to hell. Go ahead: run. RUN AWAY YOU LITTLE SHIT-ASS!"

She emerged from the shadows, like a hero in some western, moving slowly through streetlight moons. In her one hand was the Master Blaster, uncocked; its duty done for the night. In her other hand, my bag. Torn but whole. She made sure we were ok. I still recall my unstoppable trembling. She rubbed my head. She kissed me with a sigh. She comforted us and cursed the daring bandit. She assured us he was gone forever, a coward on the run. A shit-ass in the night.

And if you were still watching from your patch of sky, you would have watched as she composed herself the best she could, and then led her two boys, her Aqua Man and her Pirate, up Maple Street and into the night.

Mother and sons: looking for lit up porch lights and small pieces of free candy.