Every Day I Pause You And You Pause Me Back.

Yesterday, me and Violet were laying on the floor in her room.

That in itself is kind of cool because it isn't lost on me that in a few more years there will be no more of that horse shit allowed. Don't get me wrong: I'll try; when V's girls are all over after school and they're all jammed into her bedroom giggling and squelching, patting each others cheeks with strip mall rouge under posters of bands/unicorns/vampire romeos, I know I'll do one of those KNOCK-KNOCKs where you actually knock while you say "KNOCK-KNOCK" but in reality you were already inside the room with darting radar shooting out of your entire face long before the first vocal "Knock" was anywhere near complete. Then, I'll try and be the "cool" dad and sit down on the floor with the gang and start laughing at whatever it is they're laughing at already, even if I know deep down that, well, they're actually laughing at me...the TryHard in an XL Monsterface t-shirt.

(For those of you who just can't manage to see the future of music before it happens: in 2022 the music world is taken slightly by surprise when the batshit crazy delinquent and one-time teen idol flash-in-the-pan, Justin Bieber, joins forces with the re-re-re-resurrected singer dude from Stone Temple Pilots to form Monsterface, a band whose debut album, DIRTY UNCLES, features a kind of Chris Whitley-ish bluesy undercurrent along with piping hot Les Paul crunch and two lead vocalists singing out the conceptual parts of a filthy detestable uncle (STP) and his choirboy-gone-mad nephew (Bieber). And sometimes there's a dobro and no one anywhere in any facet of culture or the business of culture has any fucking clue what to do with it. I end up wearing the shirt, I reckon. Don't ask me why: it sounds abysmal.)

Anyway.

Violet's eyes will no doubt become weapons at that point, with poison darts emerging from her eyeballs at the rate of a billion per second when I plop down in her room. I will try not to notice. I'll try and be cool, reserved. No hokey stories of my "days in the band". Or my "years on the road". Or the "things I've seen". Nope. Instead, I'll try and just be chill and sip from my bottle of SmartWater (healthy-cool).

It won't work though, I know that. No self-respecting 12 or 13 year olds want to chillax with their fat dad when their friends are all over. Or even when they ain't. So after a few incredibly awkward moments of nervous eye darts and post-nuclear disaster silence, I'll get up and waddle out.

On my way out, I'll ask if anyone wants to see my new Target Bobby Flay gas/charcoal grill. No one will respond or even look at me.

When I close the door behind me, there will be a moment of pause...like in the seconds after a church bell chimes down the alleys of Florence on a spring Sunday morning...and then squeals of appalling laughter will be fired at me from behind the walls of a sacred castle in which I have no place. The sting will be the sting. There is nothing you can do, really.

So, it was with genuine delight yesterday afternoon when I popped down with 14 month old Violet on the mauve carpet in her pink and green room and put on YOU'RE A GOOD MAN CHARLIE BROWN on the DVD. We watched together for a while, her resting her head on my chest now and then (melting my cold steel guts!), and sometimes wandering over to pick up the metal triangle or the lummy stick in the corner before coming back for more cartoon. Then, at one point,almost unconsciously, I happened to push the little round PAUSE button on the DVD while my daughter was holding onto my hand.

Her eyes got big. Something sparked.

She squeezed my finger hard. Then again. She moved my finger away from the button.

Then, quickly, she pushed it back to the DVD. I hit the PAUSE. Charlie Brown continued his talk. She couldn't believe it. I was magic.

She moved my finger. I paused the film.

Her face grew more intense. She moved my finger again, as if she were leading an elephant across the lane.

I unpaused and the action kicked in. She did it, two/three/fourty times . Faster now, repeating the motion of pulling my finger to and from that one button over and over and over again with desperate rapidity, each time staring at the screen with bugged-out eyes, trying to fathom that it was all true indeed! That her daddy was controlling the universe in which one Snoopy existed! I was mesmerized too. I was witnessing my baby's brain at work. Even if she had a glass-bottom head, it couldn't have been any cooler, any sweeter.

Then, after fifteen minutes or so of the discovery being tested and re-tested, I started to think that I must be close to breaking the DVD player. There was no way it was meant to be fucked with like that, at that magnitude or at that speed. I ended the game with a series of Martian type tongue rolls that I do. It creates a clicky GodAwful sound that never fails to ruin all fun at any given moment. It worked of course, and the moment straddled a sunbeam and rode off into the late afternoon sun.

Then we went down to the kitchen to eat some cheese chunks and maybe some toast and maybe some juice.

The Death Of God.

God got off the Greyhound on a sweltering July afternoon and was immediately scraped by a tumbleweed. What the... he thought. Did I create that? What was I thinking? He drug his heavy Tree-Bark duffel bag into the sun-baked wooden shack, a couple bells jingling as the door slid closed behind him.

God squinted, the shade of the inside messing with his eyeballs.

Kenny Chesney played low on a radio.

"Did I create that?" He mumbled.

"Did you create who-what now?" A man's voice fired back. Caught God off guard.

There was an old man staring at the Savior over a pair of Buddy Holly glasses, though that wasn't why he had that style, to be honest. God dropped his bag and wiped his brow with a green bandanna with big cartoon dollar signs as a pattern. Then, God spoke.

"Oh excuse me. Didn't see you setting there, bud. I was just wondering aloud about that song is all...Anyways I'm a little early for the 3:38 PM to Los Angeles and to be honest, man, I could eat a walrus tied to a hippo. Where can a dude get a bite to eat around here?"

He tucked his bandanna back in the back pocket of his dirty jeans as the old man behind the linoleum counter eyed him suspiciously.

"The 3:38 to LA is delayed." The old man laid that out there, matter-of-factly, with a hint of bemusement, like a little challenge; a little checkers game of wits out here in the middle of Hell On Earth when the long boring day had blown a hippie through the screen door. He sucked on a straw poking out of a can of Country Time.

"That bus is late. Late late. Might be here tonight 'fore midnight."

THAT sentence just hung up in the thick dry air with all the speed of a penny in Jell-O: clothes-lined to the atmosphere, fat words in belly shirts resting on a hot afternoon.

"Might not." A crash of words.

God sighed and glanced over at the dog asleep on a burlap bag in the corner. A mutt. Part beagle, maybe. Some kind of hound in there.

"Nice dog," he said.

The old man slurped his straw and stared God in the eye.

"How about some place to eat then?" asked the Messiah.

"'Course. Just belly on up there to the buffet there, boy. Help yourself." The old man nodded towards behind The Lord, where there was nothing but a church pew riddled with skin cancer. A trillion pen knives come and gone. So many greasy bus rider skins that a new varnish had replaced the old.

"I'll put some more plates out so you can have a clean one every time ya' hit her!" And with that he broke out laughing, the mucousy snot down in his lungs whipping and flapping like sheet metal.

The joke took a second to hit God, the sort of rawness of the wound coming into focus only after a little time in which he'd actually believed he might just be drip-dripping some Thousand Island down on some chilled iceberg wads any minute now. He'd even tasted the stale-ish croutons collapsing beneath his teeth. The garlicky crunch decorating his tongue with flavored paint. A semi-frozen sliver of pink tomato rolled across his tired mind. A cold cucumber coin.

He smiled a little. Forced it.

"This ain't no resort, boy." The old man stuck a toothpick in his ear and probed a little. Then he pulled it out and looked down at the tip.

"There's a vending machine out back," he added with disappointment.

God went and bought a small can of Pringles and came back in to sit on the pew. A country song came on that tried to rhyme Wal-Mart and Dale Earnhardt. God rolled his eyes, grinned. All rhymes were his creations.

He looked at the old man looking at him, smiled a little. Awkward, he thought.

"This whole country is gone to seven kinds of Hell," the old man started talking just as God bit his first Pringle. "Immigrants taking all the jobs. Mexicans and Gooks and Eskimo people. Terrorists everywhere. Hard-working man can't even take his family out into town 'cause there's always the chance of some half-cocked ass dimple blowin' himself up at the MacDonalds and taking everyone else with him in the name of what? Some false God? Some animalistic belief system?"

He paused as his thoughts made their way through the air over towards The Almighty Creator and also towards the beagle/hound, who didn't bat a lash and just kept on snoozing.

God snapped three Pringles with one chomp.

The old guy sighed. "And now this."

"What?," said God.

"Socialism." The old man picked at his ear with the toothpick some more, his mouth opening under his twitchy nose.

God stopped chewing, his own deafening crunching just unplugged within his skull. He swallowed the half chewed chips. Coughed.

"The health care thing?" he said.

The old man bolted up fast out of his seat and slammed the radio off just as an interesting/promising(?) ad about CASH FOR GOLD was babbling.

"Yeah the goddamn heath care thing!" he raged. "All of these stinkass liberal Liberaces are gonna pop a Band-Aid onto every outlaw illegal bleeding heart that comes down the pike and drive our taxes through the fucking ceiling and honest hard-working people with jobs are gonna lose their homes because all of Medicaid is gonna be cut back to pay for abortions for freakin' Girls Gone Wild and queer lesbians are gonna get married to each other and drink fucking Zambooka shots out of their dirty lover's belly buttons on table-tops under paintings of the Founding Fathers in friggin' VFW halls that are forced to rent their spaces out to Satanic freaks who are trying to force us to become faggots too so they have us all butt-fucking instead of regular fucking so they can end the whole human race!!!!!"

When he was done he was out of breath and standing next to a tattered map of America over by the dog, who'd been dreaming of little hunks of steak dangling from a long rope tied to the crescent moon, but was now, of course, awake.

God was stunned. For a moment he couldn't really process anything. The old man's words or his anger. Or his meaning.

The old man sighed like an exhausted air conditioner. "I am a Christian man," he cooed. God did not react. He simply stared at the voice. "But these people are trying to make these sneaky back room deals so that they can take over our towns and bus in millions of Mexicans. And Guatamayans." The dog moved his neck so some of the burlap went into his mouth.

"It's all Socialism. And Darwinism." And with that, his tone announced he was done.

God bit a Pringle and it was loud.

"Well...," he finally said. "Phew."

The old man stared at him kind of weird. Like he'd maybe shit himself.

God continued. "You don't recognize me, huh?" The old man just stood there.

"Oh, Chester, you sad sumbitch."

"Howdyouknowmyname?!" Chester fired.

"I dunno. I know a lot of stuff, Chester. I know you like beets," offered the Lord.

"HowdyyouknowIlikebeets?!" Chester exploded. "Whothehellareyoumister?! Whosentyouhere?!"

"Chester, Chester, calm down buddy," God said. "Let me just tell you some stuff. It isn't really your money anyway. It's mine, man. Please, just let me explain..."

But it was all too much, you see. Too many wires had gotten all crossed up.

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The 3:38PM to LA was parked outside the small shack in the dark with its big bus blinkers on alongside a bunch of sheriff SUVs and some assorted state trooper cars, all their bubble-tops hurling light laps: onto the beat-up siding of the building/across the logos on the vehicle doors/out into the blackness of the endless desert where coyotes bowed their heads and refused to howl for the first night in ten trillion years.

They carried the bodies out separately. Only one of them under a white sheet though, because someone on the ambulance crew had forgot to re-stock. The first stiff was Chester, they all knew him. His trigger finger was still squeezing its twisted curl, even in death. The other body, the hippie, they covered with a cheap Korean Dora The Explorer quilt, a sweat-shop job they fished out of the mostly empty lost and found box.

They loaded the bodies into some van. A tumbleweed smacked up against it in the black wind.

The bus groaned, killed its blinkers and slowly pulled out for Los Angeles, The City Of Angels, hours behind schedule.

Fishing With Dad.