The Pirates Of Pleasant Grove.

God, its deep in the night. Deep down, buried under the layers of dream strata and nightmare fossils, is where I end up awake. Three AM maybe. I come awake as I'm actually standing beside my daughter's crib and not as I'm walking in there or anything. I don't remember being in my bed thinking I've gotta get up and go see why she's crying. I don't recall opening my eyes and having rational thought. I just end up over there by her side as she's weeping and hacking her little precious cough and peering up at me with her sad tiny eyes; a lovable short stack asking me why she has to have this stupid cold. Asking me what I'm gonna do about it. Maybe asking me for apple juice cut with tap water.

I am that chick in Paranormal Activity. Anchored and bobbing: possessed and catatonic off the coast of a loved ones bed.

Then, I notice I'm not alone. It comes off the Ham radio of my brain shooting signals out into the dark of my mind like an echo from a rifle two mountains away.

Wife.

She's here too. Hmph.

I prepare a sleepy greeting. Maybe a deep night ass pinch.

I get cut off by the echo coming into sonic focus.

'.....and I need to get some fucking sleep! I had her too for like 7 hours this morning!"

Shit.

"....You NEVER get up in the night!"

Ugh.

I try and close my eyes and concentrate myself into an exploding burst of bloody dust but no dice. I open them again and my wife is gone. To the kitchen, maybe. Juice. Its just me and my sick daughter in there now and she is moaning the moans of a lost baby possum. It breaks your heart, really. And its true what they say: that you'd give anything to just reach down and pop out that little sick chip from their chest and stick into your own system, so they could be rid of it and happy and smiling again.

So, deep in the night I try and come up with a plan on how to heal the kid and rest the wife and still find the time to make myself a pot of coffee. But as I'm just standing there combing my knotty fingers over Violet's warm scalp, Monica is doing magic dances with baby bottles and fresh diapers and CDs of South African lullabies and before you know it I am running my gross tired thumb through the artificial fur of a Baby Gap teddy bear still thinking its my child while my wife has already swept the kid up and is rocking her in the chair in the corner and whispering old Lakota health coos in her small ear.

I flick my finger and ping the dumbass bear in its plastic eye.

I wander downstairs, stand on the linoleum in the kitchen and wonder what I'm doing. Oh yeah, I tell myself, coffee. I manage to fling enough shit around that soon enough there is coffee brewing.

The tv goes on. Did I turn it on? I dunno. I must've.

CNN. Pirates take a new ship off Somalia. Surprise. Then: my first clear-ish thought of the day.

Those fucking pirates. Those little sneaky bastards just pointing well-oiled machine guns at each other with huge gleaming smiles whenever they're bored. Drinking sweaty bottles of Heineken around a junky formica table in the hideout, counting the ransom cash, the big bills in tight fat wads between the heaving ashtrays and some half-empty cans of hot Coke. Those pricks. From land to sea to land, like salty crabbers , if they happen to come back: they come back to their houses or huts or castles (who the hell knows?) a few blocks from the docks, their bones aching from a long couple days of Pirate Shit, their tattered fake leather day bags filled with what? Toothbrushes? Floss? Portable DVD players? Season Two of Entourage? Limping back up early morning streets towards sleeping kids, pointing themselves towards rooms where women lie awake and stare at the shadows on the bedroom ceiling.

My first clear thought of the day is: Pirate...what a goddamn good life.

You know you're stressed out when you think those thoughts, huh?

Clearish, I said. Not clear.

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.