Rise And Shine Masterpiece Killer Blues.

Sometimes I stand there in the bathroom looking in the mirror and pretend there are cops on the other side of the glass. Detectives. Feds. They watch me with fascinated eyes. They are riveted by the man, by the beast. I stare hard into the reflection I make and blow steamy breath onto places where I know they are watching, their cop noses only inches away.

"He can see us, can't he?" the short fatso asks. His voice is jittery.

"Not technically." answers the leggy FBI girl. Her green eyes peel my shirt off.

"He can see us, I know it." Fatso.

An older man with a half moon of molten silver hair sizes me up with squinty doctor eyes.

"Good afternoon oh dangerous one," he whispers. The fatso stops looking at me and turns to glance at the doc. He's hoping for a sign of joking but there isn't any.

Don Johnson comes in their room. Crockett. He's smoking a cig. The FBI chick ignores his arrival and he is irked by that.

I take my toothbrush and slowy creep it across the glass, past one face and then another, ever so gently leaving a small blur of water. My face is amused enchantment. Crazy eyes and a smirk. Fava beans and a nice Chianti.

When I'm almost across the whole mirror I simply stop and hold the brush still in one spot. Like a Ouija Board. The bristles point directly into the eyes of the little fat lawman.

"Dear God," he says weakly.

"Dear Mary Mother Of Christ on the Cross," says Crockett.

"Its him," says gams.

There is the grenade, soaring beautifully, like a a dove of death high above the summer field.

"He is him," says the Doctor.

There is a moment then. That swinging hung outlaw of a moment when winds reverse themselves and every ounce of atmosphere is just frozen hunks of sky tied to the clouds with thick bird veins.

"No," says Fatso.

But its too late. My arm flexes, tightens, and and just like that: all of Hell pushes my hand through the parallel dimension and the glass just shatters with the weight of castles on eggs. My fingers are instantaneously deep into the sockets of Fatso's eyes; rasberry sauce drips down his cheeks as he remains standing, pinned to the pitchfork of my claw.

The room is flooded with glass and horror. Here and there: the flopping fish of imminent disaster. The toothpaste slams into my central nervous system and my head is rushing and my blood is on fire and Dear God I feel so alive and free. And then this.

"Ahhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnn."

What the fuck...

"Ning Ning Ning Ning NingNing Ning...."

Oh man. Holy shit. It's Violet.

"Ning ning ning!"

She's squawking from the baby monitor on the counter-top underneath the unbroke mirror.

It takes me a second to clock whats up.

I put my toothbrush back in the metal thing and spit out my minty splatter.

I wipe my mouth on a crusty hand towel and cut the light.

Violet is standing up in her crib in her nearly dark chambers and she's talking her ishkibibble.

"Ning ning ning ning ning,' she says to me as I arrive crib-side.

"Hey there Hot Buttered Chicken Butt," I whisper to her. (Our affections are our original works of art in this often artless world. I take my greetings and salutations pretty seriously.)

We are joined at the chest after I lift her up. Two dreamers, freshly fallen off the Dream Wagon.

"Dadadadadadadadadadadadad," she says.

My heart beats so fast. I pull my fingers out of Fatso's eyeballs; say I'm sorry.

Monday morning and we're off to the races.

Breaking Camp.

So, we're getting ready to move away from this house. Its the house Violet first came home to in this world; where she took her first bite of applesauce; where she first smiled up at my goofy grins. Its the house where we first brought home our youngest dog, Milo. And its the house where I became a stay-at-home Dad who thought it would be ok to eat peanut butter and cheese and spoonfuls of sweet crunchy sugar and then turned around a year later to find that I have long greasy hair and a pot-belly and I look like a dude sat down and shoveling fried rice out of a styrofoam container behind a case of rookies at a baseball card convention. Whatever.

Now, we move on. And with that comes new life/new ideas/less room/a mountain across the street. At my Mother-in-law's house we will save money; hopefully lots of it. We will save money and I will walk the foothills with my daughter on my back and my dogs running deer. Out there, in the scrub brush and sage, I will lead a Curious Regiment up and down old familiar trails, past waterfalls and silent leering wild cats, stepping over rusted discarded 20-gauge shells, and I will sweat away the pounds with the vigor and vim of an outdoorsy man in his late thirties.

There will be times, I know, when I get short of breath. There are steep unforgiving inclines down that way. But I will persevere. I will eat the pain, revel in the bizarre sensation of butterscotch syrup flooding into my chest cavity that comes when men like me stroll back into the town of Fitness after a year in the wilderness/in the snacks. There will be no stumbling at the precipice, no blurred vision spinning then thumping down into the dust jaw first. There will be no two black dogs circling their master, trying to revive him with pleading whines and tongue touches. And there will be no young little girl named Violet strapped helplessly to the back of her beached gasping Orca/Daddy. No, no, no. no, no.

No. Instead there will be me, rumbling back into my old self after nearly a year of marshmallows dipped in fudge laced with lard and fried in twice-baked butter. Me and Violet and Max and Milo and a busload of ghosts: Mountain Men and Fur Traders and Pioneers and Indians, all of us busting our ass to climb the climbs up to where the views are. Then peering down at the valley spilling out below us...the lake and the football stadium and the highway; the distant mountains to the west, imagining the mountain lions over there looking at our hills like we're looking at theirs.

Summer sweat dripping from my new shorter haircut. Violet saying a word or two. Maybe the dogs jumping some quail from their little hideaway in the slender shade. I'll look over at the mouth of the canyon a few miles down, and tell V about all the beautiful big trout that live in the river back up in there. I'll imagine myself, come Saturday, taking off early in the morning to chase them. We'll watch the setting sun while Mom is at work.

I'll think of pizza slices back in Brooklyn or South Philly somewhere.

Later, I'll make a Greek salad, after I put the kid to bed.

You find ways: to move through this world, through the unexpected moments/months of battered pride, so that you can come out the other end stronger and better, or at least convinced that you are. Life is a series of missteps rewarded with random far-flung glories here and there. I can convince myself of anything in this world.

And that's why I'm still walking around.

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.