Friday I'm In Love / Hot Discount Chickens.

Here are some observations from today.

-- My dogs simply stopped liking me. Sick kid = no walks all week = lose 2 buddies.

-- I am reading WAR AND PEACE and I can't stop thinking about it. I love Russia.

-- The Snoopy sticker I bought off Amazon for the Honda somehow got half scraped off. This shouldn't really bother me, but it makes me super blue.

-- We got a Blu-Ray player a month ago. Number of Blu-Rays watched so far: 0.0

-- Took my daughter to the doctor this afternoon. Long drive. This time I took five Binkys though. It was sublime; she drops a Bink and starts to cry, I reach down at 70mph and grab a fresh one like I was digging pretzels from a bag, hand it back, feel her little fingers grab it. No more tears. A few mile later, we do the same duet. I am a Daddy Genius.

--Rotisserie chickens at the supermarket go from like 5 bucks to like 3 bucks right after the way-home-from-work-rush ends. I lurk around, keep passing their hot case until they get the sale sticker. What is fucking wrong with me?

--While watching Real Housewives of Orange County I am overcome with real emotion when a scene plays out between a couple fighting really nasty in their limo. I start to call my wife to tell her I never want us to roll that same evil way again. I keep stuffing Baked Lays in my pie-hole though and forget to dial her up.

--Around 6:30pm I pull Violet from her bath of plastic ships and rubber ducks and empty VO5 bottles filled with three fingers of old water and wrap her in her big blue beach towel. Then I sit all twenty pounds of her on my lap and point us at the mirror. We both smile at each others reflections for a good thirty or forty seconds. And no shit: I am as happy as I have ever been in this lifetime.

--All week I thought about my Friday night bottle of red. Through Violet's late night coughing fits and early rises, through shitty dinners of supermarket cheese microwave quesadillas, through hours at work sweeping up filthy garages and planting little pines in March mud: through it all I had this back row vision of a bottle of Steak House that I would finally uncork come Friday night. Then, after the doctor's, when we pulled up to the liquor store , Violet had drifted off to sleep in her car seat like an angel kid with a crusty booger nose and I just didn't have the heart to wake her up. So, no wine.

--We cashed in our coin jar at the supermarket when we moved. Got 48 bucks, They had the option to put it all on an Amazon gift card so I did. Today some books arrived that I ordered. ANNA KARENINA, TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES, EMMA, WUTHERING HEIGHTS, THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV, and MOBY DICK. I put 'em all in a stack. Time machine.

-- After I put Violet to sleep and was draining her bath from the tub I noticed she had stashed her little red plastic ship (her favorite) up on the corner edge of the tub behind the shower curtain. I don't know why but this blew my mind and really made me smile.

--I've been eating dried apricots a lot lately. I stalk discount cooked chickens and eat dried apricots. Oy vey.

--I've bought all the old albums by The Cure over the past couple months. I'm glad I waited all these years. They're perfect for me now.

--Now that I wanna watch this JERSEY SHORE show, its never fucking on.

--My father painted a portrait of my daughter. How cool is it to be able to write that? I never would have guessed I'd write that particular sentence in my lifetime. Its such a fabulous picture too, with so many damn stories mixed in with all its paints.

--After waking up this morning to another huge snow dump I have finally decided that snow is for people under age 35. That's that/don't argue it/you know its true. Snow is for Shaun White. And Violet.

--Every Friday night I lay on this bed with these dogs, all of us waiting to hear the front door thud open and Monica to finally come home. And once again: here I am. Here we are.

--Lastly: for those of you with similar outlooks/inlooks to mine: don't worry about me: I got a hold of a 12 pack of Corona: so I'm good.

The Pre-Dawn Battle Axe Blues.

I am laying there sleeping when I hear a battle axe being pounded into the side of the house over and over and over. I wake up. I open one eye and then the other, mortified. This is how it ends, huh? This is how I go. In my bed in a sleepy Mormon hamlet at the foot of a giant mountain, some meth demon with a weapon from a Dungeons and Dragons Fan Convention is going to fillet me, fillet us for a jelly jar of dimes or some shit.

Gack-gack-gack-gack-gackgackgackgackgackgackgackagckgack. God, he must be tweaking out of his mind, I think; he's slamming the axe home so hard and so fast. I figure within three minutes he'll have the support walls down and we'll all just spill out into the front yard, out onto the dog craps. Then he'll up and go to work on us.

F that, I say. I have to save the lady of my dreams. I have to protect the one I took vows to protect for life. I will not let anyone...especially some local zitty redneck punk with Superhuman Dope Powers...touch a hair on the head of the love of my life!

And besides that: Monica is here too, and she'll probably need saving as well.

Gackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgackgack!

The entire house is vibrating and I am almost paralyzed with a total and complete horror. PLEASE JESUS!, I scream, but nothing comes out of my strained open mouth. The fear has me hoarse. I manage to feel embarrassed no matter what the situation.

I manage to spin over to my bride.

GACKGACKGACKGACKGACKGACKGACKGACK! pelts my face-skin with hot mist. What the fuck.

Then more. And more. Battle axe hits peeling off the night air with the ferocity only a determined Ogre of Death could possibly muster.

I prepare. To die. In moonless battle.

It hits me then. Wait a second. That sound. That's not a damn axe! That's Monica! Coughing her face off! Splitting the heart of the oak of night open with a never-ending volley of tubercular hacks!

Here comes the ending.

After about fifteen minutes of this non-stop/no rest/no stopping for fucking breath cough-a-thon I finally conjure up the nerve to address the battle axe itself.

"Jesus Christ, go take some of your medicine." I offer this kind of quietly, so that I said what I needed to say, but won't catch a raft of hell for my icy tone. In other words: I am certain she doesn't here me.

I am wrong.

GACKGACKGACKGACKGACKGACKGACKGACK! is suddenly halted with miraculous precision. One second the forever fit is plowing up the peace, trenching the bewitching hour. And the next it stops in its tracks to reveal Monica's gagging voice.

"It's not that, I'm not sick anymore, that's over now."

Huh?

"I had dream. Someone was choking me with a rope and their hands and....oh its too hard to explain."

Am I fucking hearing this shit right? You are coughing up a lung because you were dreaming?

"Get some damn water," I mumble.

"Water won't help," she cackles, many frogs partying in her throat. " I was dreaming it."

I don't know what to say. I'm stunned. I'm woken up/I'm awake now/I'm stunned.

She says some more things, bobcat growls. She drops some more details in her gravely voice but I can't recall hearing any of it. There is only one thing for me to do.

I get up. I slip my Jagermeister shirt on over my head and stumble into the bathroom at 4ish in the morning for the second damn day in a row.

I hit the light, the fan. Blinded.

Choked in a freaking dream. How am I even suppose to pretend to know how to protect somebody from that type of thing.

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.