A Year In The Life.

We hold our hands up and snap eager fingers and call her name fifty/sixty times in a minute.

Its Violet's sweet attention we're after. Her careless gaze landing on us is the wafting opium on the breeze. And we are junkies/chasers of the rain and the stars, reaching out and trying to grab on to the old shirt-tails of jittery ghosts as they flit from room to room, forever turning corners just ahead of us. If the Devil himself waltzed on into this room, scattered cinders leaking smoke from his matted nest of hair, Hell Contracts crumbled in his resin-stained fingers(HASHISH!), a Bucca DiBeppo pen clenched in his teeth/grill: we would each sign without even looking...as we call the kid's name with one hand, scribble it all away with the other one.

Perfect point-and-shoot pictures of children and their cakes get taken from time to time and that possibility is enough for each of us.

Pretty soon the Birthday Girl is brought her cake. The dining room lights get cut and I carry the slab of wet cement in on the aluminum foil covered tray. Its a cake I baked myself, from a box, and that makes me a little proud but mostly I realize that Duncan Hines designed these things so that even prisoners deep in bad jails could cook a cake with just a cup of his own pee and a streak of weak sunshine. Either way, I made it for my daughter and that'll stand forever.

Monica encourages our daughter to blow out the candles. Then she encourages her to use her little hands to dig into my masterpiece, with gusto. Violet is a little hesitant at first as the elegance/class she gets from her Daddy hold her down in the face of the strong improper winds of Mom. But my ways/dreams/influence are simply not enough. I lose her to the hurricane blowing through the room. Before three minutes are up: a newer cake-ier Violet is born. Around five minutes in, the difference between the kid and the cake is minimal at best.

Flashes go off with popping corn speed.

"Violet, over here! Look at Momma!"

"Over here Sweetie! Look here! Look at me snapping!"

"LOOK AT ME SNAPPING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"Violet! Look at Grammy!"

"VIOLETLOOKATMEFORCHRISSAKESANDSTOPBEINGSOSELFISHWITHYOURJOYANDYOUREXCITEMENT!!!!!" (Unspoken thoughts of a 12.1 Megapixel wielding Grandmother.)

"Over here, Pumpkin!"

"Put more cake in your ear, I missed it before!"

Through it all, one dog circles the small crowd, stoned on the action. The other dog stands twenty feet away, in the back of the Honda. He'd lost his poor mind in the midst of it all. Got crazy. Got sent to Siberia.

The First Birthday Party. We all see/feel/eat it in our own little ways. Its cake and pictures and Motown playing low on the portable DVD. Its cake crumbs down in the folds of the high-chair. Grandmothers angling for the shot. Dogs driven mad by the chanting of a single name, without pause or break, forever.

Its Mom and Dad, a year later, with hearts just fucking exploding in their chest cavities.

And its the kid herself, a year in, looking at the tiny stacks of icing on her fingertips; tickling it across her uncertain lips; tasting the massive sweetness for the first time ever. The Birthday Girl just feeling the rush of sugar bolt through her streams and sensing strange cool life sweeping her up in its imminent rush to take her picture a trillion times before the long day fades beyond the hills above town.

Morning People.

In the morning, in the dark, I walk back to Violet's room and I find her standing up, leaning on the rail with highly advanced coolness: like Mick Jagger in the video for Waiting On A friend. We can barely make each others grins out without any light, but we see enough. I raise her up to me, pull her to my chest, and put her nose or her ear in my mouth and buzz her good morning with my flappy lips. She smiles at that and sometimes she laughs.

Out in the living room, we hang out on the couch together. She squirms and tries to roll out of my arms. She doesn't think about where or why. She just wants to bust free. Let me go, she says without saying it. Let me fall on my head this morning. Let me get that out of the way already, this falling on my head stuff.

I keep putting her up on my knees though. With my feet up on the coffee table, I plop her up on my knees and blow a bit of air right into her eyes and her hair. That fascinates her every time. Little puffs of wind coming out of Daddy's face...you can see the puzzled look in her eyes as she tries to make sense of that. Later on, in a few years, she'll figure out that I do a lot of stuff purely for entertainment purposes. Dances. Songs. Robot beeps and shit. I hope she likes that kind of stuff when she gets a bit older. If not, I'm in trouble because I have already started doing things like that a lot. It would be pretty tough for me to just cut it all out all of the sudden. Even if I wanted to I can't say that I could.

After a while, I'll put V in her high chair and peel some banana for her. I squeeze the mega-ripe tree turd and small sections of it just break off the mother fruit. Then I use my fingers to pick apart even smaller bits, arranging them in a short round field down on the tray in front of my daughter. By the time I have a dozen or so set out, she is already three pieces in, with banana gunk mushed into strands of her hair, banana pulp damming up at the corners of her lips.

I make a squawk or a coyote growl sound just so she doesn't get all into the food and forget about me, my efforts over here.

She looks at me/takes me in/nothing has changed/she looks away.

I get the jug of apple juice out of the fridge and sing a caffeinated line or two about me doing that. This too, will only get me a swift moment of eyes fixing my way; little radars sweeping the kitchen, the world, they don't need to settle too long on the dude in the Jagermeister T-shirt and Jack Daniels morning pants to know that his falsetto attempts at attention aren't worth the effort, really.

Still, I sing.

Then, when I get one of the smaller bottles filled up with juice, the top screwed on tight even though I know its still gonna leak all over my kid's chest, I set it down on the counter and we do our little joke that we do.

I shake the big jug and the juice sloshes all over inside. Then Violet looks up from the three pounds of banana on her eyebrows and in her nostrils. She grins big, knowing its time.

I tilt the giant jug (lid still on) for her to drink from. And she clicks her possum teeth onto the plastic and pretends to drink away, right down to even swallowing invisible juice.

After a few seconds, I see her looking up at me like, "Can we be done now?"

And with that: I laugh out loud, a real Falstaff chortle, and let the jug down with one hand and with the other one I hand her her real bottle of juice so that she can have a sip already and just get on with the rest of her breakfast for Chrissakes.

The Moonshots.

I remember picking up a pizza box off the bed and feeling the discarded crusts inside scurry with the tilt like mice feet on the attic floor. And I remember stopping halfway to the trashcan and everybody shushing each other as the motel TV finally landed on the highlight we wanted. Seven guys or eight guys, all buzzed on beer, squinting through the stagnant cigarette smoke, watching hours-old tape of a summer evening seven hundred miles away.

And when the ball finally landed, three or four rows up in the upper deck, the room exploded with curses of awe, with masculine admiration. We were all dipped in magic for a few seconds again and it was a beautiful thing.

The Summer of 1998 was a good one for me. I spent it hurdling through farm fields and forests and ghettos and over legendary rivers. In the van, we moved across America, stopping only to piss/to get burgers until we hit the next stage, drank our free beers and played our hearts out as loudly as the local sound guy could stand it. For good hunks of the summer, we toured with The Bottle Rockets: one of the best bands I ever saw take a stage anywhere in my life. They were really good guys too, St. Louis guys. Each night they'd do this fantastic stunt where they all hit a note at the same time, repeatedly, until they landed on the number of home runs that their hometown Cardinals hero, Mark McGwire had launched up until that moment.

It was sensational. And if you took to counting their beats, as I did in my lager haze, you'd know that they were never off, ever. And by July or August of that season, the number was up there in the fifties at least. People in the crowd loved it. People love home runs and loud tight band hits and so if you found a way to combine the two, like those boys did that summer, well...then you were the best rock band on this planet that evening.

So, it didn't take long for our two bands to collide on certain nights when we ended up in the same Motel 6 out by the airport in Cleveland or Oklahoma City or wherever we were. And I still remember standing there, with a congealed slice of Domino's in my one hand and a cold one in the other, all of us laughing and chattering way louder than you're supposed to at 2:30 or 3 in the morning, until the ESPN highlights would land on McGwire, or The Cubs' Sammy Sosa...and the sudden hush would fall upon us until the moonshot fell back to Earth far far away from the wooden bat that had sent it into space.

That was my first summer ever touring in a rock'n'roll band and although I was a grown man by then, when you tour around in a van you're still pretty much just a heavier version of yourself at about thirteen. You're just a slightly confused excitable mish-mash of cheap junkfood and useless cum and longshot dreams balled up and baked up on Middle America's toaster oven stages. A gazillion miles from any real cares or problems, its no wonder that every single home run in a record-setting home run race made us feel as if we'd slammed it towards the far off evening horizon and into the distant bleachers ourselves.

Our excitement was so real, you see. Our thrills were genuine, every single one of them...stretched out for weeks, through a scattered forest of identical motel rooms on the similar outskirts of completely different towns. The beers were all very real. And the big dumb smiles. The pepperoni on the pizza, that was real.

I was there. I tasted it, savored it.

Our cigarettes were real and so were our salty tongues.

Our conversations, marinated in warm Bud Lite , they were all real as well.

And the Motel 6 bedspreads of the Summer of 1998: their blues and pinks and blacks all swooshed together like some baby's wild dream, upon which half a band of American man-childs spread out their weary bodies while another batch stood bedside, all of us staring wide-eyed as numbers 59 and then 60 and then 61 soared through the floodlit sky with all the animated grace of every shooting star that ever got skipped across the upside down river called Night...that shit was as real as anything ever was or will be again, in this world or the next.

And so now, years later, it is with older tireder hands, that I am here to step up and claim what is rightfully mine. Ours. The home runs. All of 'em.

No longer do they lie on the proverbial mantle-piece of the man who may have sent them into the hands of the commons in the stands. No more, I declare. For in the wake of their jolting by the hot cruel winds of time: them balls roll, one by one, down into the cupped palms of me and my brother and my band mates and my friends, and you and yours.

They were our memories too, you poor bastard.

And they're our home runs now.