Ozzy Pizza Deer Leg Tweet.

The following is a random assortment of drips and drabs. Enjoy.

--- There are snowflakes whirling around through the apple blossoms in the orchard across the street from my bedroom window. What the hell, Lord? Tell the sky to get with the seasonal program, man.

--- For the last 700 or so naps and sleeps that we have put Violet down for, she has drifted off to this CD of African Lullabies that a friend sent us when she was born. Whatever gorgeous language Ladysmith Black Mambazo sing in...my daughter is probably gonna grow up understanding it through twilight osmosis.

--- WAR AND PEACE. I am still reading this. One of the best novels I have known. When I'm done, I plan to read DON QUIXOTE. As I get older/more mature/fatter: I need to combine weight lifting with my reading time. So only big heavy classics hold any allure for me.

--- My wife and I had a conversation on our bed this past Sunday. It was afternoon and we were still both in our sleepwear (rare for me/unrare for her). The talk was on the use of restrictor plates on the engines of the stock cars at the bigger NASCAR tracks, the Super Speedways. The only thing I can come up with is that maybe she was trying to stall me as her lover slipped out the back window or something. Either way, it was nice.

--- We've been toying with idea of a small weekend getaway somewhere this summer. Nothing fancy, we say. Nothing expensive. I am leaning towards me, her, and Violet driving the Honda north towards different historical sites along the Oregon Trail in Wyoming and Idaho. You can move at your own pace, hit up some local luncheonettes, stay in motels with pioneer themes and stuff.

--- My guess is Monica would rather head to Vegas. There, she could allow herself to be sucked into the vortex of bad hands, tears, and financial ruin that she was met with the last time we went there. I was like a small elderly man, sipping his soft drink, and placing nickles in the small-time slots. When I approached my wife at a card table of some sort, no lie, she couldn't even look at me. Didn't see me or hear me. Just ignored me.

--- Either little getaway probably has one main thing in common, I guess. Here it is: In Sin City or on Wagon Train Row...Serge won't be getting laid.

--- My daughter started drinking from a Sippy Cup this past week. Then on Sunday I found her and her mama in the fozen food aisle at Wal-Mart and noticed there were some flower pattern Sippy Cups in the cart. My heart sank a little. I had been wanting to get these Dora The Explorer Sippy Cups I saw at the other grocery store. I didn't say anything though. Then, later in the evening, I had a conversation with myself in which I basically confronted me with: "What the fuck, man? Get a damn grip. Who cares about Sippy Cup aesthetics? You're losing all edge, dude. ALL FUCKING EDGE!"

--- A few weeks ago I decided that I would send a Twitter to Bill Cosby. I have always thought he was super intriguing and very funny. My Pop-Pop used to watch this one HBO Cosby stand-up special over and over again when we lived with him. He would laugh until tears rolled down his cheeks, until small snots bubbled at his nostrils. So, when I checked my Twitter the other day for the first time in a while...there was a return Tweet from the man himself. Bill Cosby had Tweeted me back. If you want to act all cool and think that ain't no big thing, well go right ahead. But in my world it was huge. Huge.

--- After Bill Cosby Tweeted me I took Violet and the dogs out for a hike in the hills because my heart was beating fast and I needed to think about Bill Cosby and Philly and Little Bill (the awesome cartoon based on Cosby's Philly youth) and whether or not there was actual validity in my feelings; could I justify my effervesence or was I just dancing around the same Flame of Loser Daddy that made me Sippy Cup crazy? Whatever. After a while my dog Milo came wandering back to me with a deer leg he'd found jutting from his mouth like a massive blunt. I construed that this was my award. From God. If you get sent a Tweet from a comedic legend: you get a deer leg. Seems about right. To me, at least. I was pretty much able to let the whole experience ride after that. I haven't brought it up at all. Well, til now, yeah.

--- California would be a cool getaway. I miss seeing it. Take Violet to the ocean for the first time and all. Ride the PCH in the Honda. Hell, maybe I Tweet Cosby...tell him we'll be in the area. But its a long drive, I reckon. I doubt the kid would wanna watch Peanuts on the mini DVD for twelve hours straight, huh? Damn.

--- I've calculated a thing. Between Monday morning and Friday night, I see my wife awake for a grand total of fifteen minutes. 3 minutes per afternoon, as we trade off cars and Violet. Usually in a parking lot somewhere.

--- If there is a way for someone to send me a real pizza from NYC or Philly, I'm down.

--- Every morning, on my way to work, I see the same three pheasants out in this field near the freeway on-ramp. For months now. How will that all end, I wonder? Will they just decide to move on someday? Will I have to change my route when construction closes the interchange? It's weird to me. That it has to end eventually, us seeing each other at every crack of dawn. You just have to enjoy it while it lasts, I guess.

--- I damn near bought an OZZY OSBOURNE t-shirt on ebay the other day. I never would have done that years ago. I didn't get Ozzy then. Didn't even try. But, the more I'm alive, the more days I survive: the more I understand him and like him and wanna wear his name across my chest. I should probably Tweet him.

--- I broke my fly fishing rod again the other day. So I sent it back to the company to fix it. Then, a friend was cool enough to loan me one of his so I could fish. On Saturday I fished with it for 5 or 6 hours and then I broke that rod too. In half. I sat there on the side of the river just staring at the dangling piece hanging off my line. Then I went home shit-out-of-luck.

--- The band I played in with my brother for many years is called Marah. They just finished a new record called LIFE IS A PROBLEM. I'm really happy for them, and for my brother. The music is wonderful. It really is.

--- No, I don't really miss playing in the band that much. I miss big parts of it, of course, but not the music business or the long constant touring or the endless hours in the studio. I mostly miss being drunk in gas station mini-markets at 3am, trying to decide if I wanna buy six Mozzarella string cheeses and Paprika Pringles or eight Mozzarella string cheeses and some Nibs.

--- I couldn't tour anymore. Since Violet was born, neither one of us has been away from her for even one night. That's 15 months of togetherness. Not so much like touring, I guess. More like one of those hillybilly theaters down in Branson, Missouri....where the same people play in the same place every night of the week. That's where I'm at now and I'm super cool with that.

The Little Napoleon Apple Tornado Blues.

Little Napoleon we called her. On account of her size, I reckon. And her temper. Oh merciful angels with trumpets, did she have a hair trigger nerve. Forged with the private irons from Satan's own fires, she was more agitated than a mama wasp. It was slow, a Wednesday if I recollect, when she wandered in off the western road covered in crusted flecks of God-knows-what (road mud? splattered wildcat? crap?) and ordered her drink by gouging me in the eye with her glare and screaming. She didn't scream words neither. 'Twas sounds. Awful sounds. Shrieks and cackles and the kind of squawks made by a man being slowly crushed under a dead fat horse. It scrambled my wits. Like eggs dancing across a skillet.

She enchanted me, I suppose. Titilated me with her hill country manners. I gave her the good stuff. The Apple Tornado. Tanglefoot.

She'd guzzle without breathing and stare beyond me when I tried to make words with her. Not beyond me. Through me. Her steamed hazel eyeballs blasted right through me just to settle upon the little Mexican girl who played piano in the corner. Dora. That was her name. Little Napoleon never took her eyes off that tiny Mexican lass . Hour after hour she'd just sit there at the bar and tilt an entire bottle of hooch back til it were just a totem pole/sun dial rising straight up out of her face gunning for the noontime sun. She'd draw the last beads of poison from the inside with a flick of her lady wrist. And then, as if she were born to do such a thing, she'd simply launch the bottle across the damn bar right past my head.

And it landed where it landed. That was the deal.

Of course I never said nothin' to her about the bottles she whipped by my face. She wouldn't of had the time to ponder my aches and just as sure as a buzzard likes hot guts, that lass would have hung lead on my bones without lifting her eyes from that Dora.

Sometimes I believe the drinking made her a bit crazy. She's been sitting there, quiet as a mouse, tilting back her jars when all of the sudden (with eyes on Dora!) she'd slam the bottle down upon the bar and start in to batting it about with both her fists as if it were something trying to eat her hair, like a vampire bat. She'd sit there watching the piano song with her eyes and set to smashing that bottle all over the bar beneath her chin until... just like that...it was all over, and she palm-rolled the bottle back around to her like a long lost friend.

Once, I asked Little Napoleon if she might like to try a hunk of some sharp cheddar I had lately procured. I laid some down on the bar there for her, curious to see if she might like it. A few long moments drug by. Then, with her eyes on Dora she walked her fingers toward the cheese. Slow spider steps. A Spider At The Gates of Cheese. With her thumb she rolled that cheese up into her caked hand and drug it slowly back across the bar before her, so that it sopped up all the Apple Tornado she'd spilt in her last outburst. After an eternal minute, she popped the whole thing into her serious heart-shaped mouth.

I stood there watching her watch the Mexican kid. I waited for a sign. A nod, maybe. Or even a glance and a grin.

The world stopped moving.

Then, she whizzed her empty bottle at my pesky fat face without looking.

Meet Me In Those Good Old Hills Of Home.

In the portrait, taken sometime in the Whimsical 90's, his eyes are a cool cowboy stare, his young gun eyeballs throwing a wad of hot lead into the putz taking the picture in some photography studio at Sears or JC Penny. Regal, poised, the very soul of swagger, his rugged good looks are chiseled into the frame for future generations bounding up and down the stairs in my mother-in-law's house to observe.

And to top it all off, when the picture making went down: he wore a blue bandanna.

Around his neck.

Not a kerchief. Not some silky city-slicker lady scarf that some men choose to wear. Oh no. This was a pure blue badass American bandanna. A biker rag.

Come to think of it, it was the 90's...hell, he might have even been a Crip. That's just how he rolled.

One thing is for sure, though. He was a hell of a dog.

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Legend has it that Spliff sired quite a few offspring in his time. Over the course of his 17 years (thats like 3000 dog years or something), I like to imagine certain scenes...

A man opens his blinds one early summer Sunday morning. He takes a sip of his apple juice and smiles the smile of the truly blessed. Today is the Lord's Day, he whispers to the songbirds twittering in the treetops. He smiles knowing that his family, his wonderful wife and his seven lovely children are down in the kitchen preparing the traditional Before-Church breakfast of Canadian Bacon and waffles shaped like angels. The sun shines its ever-loving light down upon his shaven cheek and he feels the presence of Jesus Christ the Son of God in the warm glow that bathes his chosen soul.

He looks down into his yard, his property. He thanks the Founding Fathers for their strict laws of Liberty that allow him to be able to keep this sacred plot of stone and sod sealed off from the world. It is his, safe from, well, safe from the Mexicans...there: he said it and he feels good about it too, by golly. His eyes circle his yard like prison yard lights. And then.

Dear Jesus.

A white dog, the size of a teenage racoon! And its fucking the shit out of the family Collie. Or Lab. Whatever.

"Stop!," he chokes,"NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

But its too late. Breakfast is friggin ruined. The whole holy fucking day is ruined. His blessed eyes are stung with the whipped dust of blatant balls-out Sunday morning dog sex.

His family is devastated. Not just by what has happened, but also by how Dad is handling it.

An hour later, 8 yards away...Spliffer is behind a poodle. The world keeps spinning, bro. Even on Sunday.

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I formed a club a few years ago, before Violet was born. Before we got Milo/Crazy Train/Frat Boy KegStand Labrador. The club was called The Wasatch Mountain Rangers and it had three members. Me, Max (our first lab), and Spliffer. That's it. At our first meeting we congregated around a road-kill the Highway Department dumped on our hill and took an oath to be forever loyal to our fellow members and to always chase deer if deer are around, no matter what.

I spent countless hours then watching up on the mountain side as, at first, a few brown swooshes would burst from some distant scrub bushes (deers). Then, The White Blur (Spliff), followed closely by The Black Smear (Max). I'd see them for maybe ten seconds and then they'd all disappear into another thicket. A minute later, the same scene would play out, except this time they were going back in the othere direction again! It was wonderful, just to stand there, a half mile below, and watch this ridiculous pagent go on and on and on.

Then, after an hour or so, I'd cut the deer some slack and whistle the whistle of The Wasatch Mountain Rangers and both fellas would come slamming down the hill to me, long strings of wild spit hanging from their snouts; their panting perfectly in time with the exploding of their crazy hearts; their eyes sparkling with life's fire.

Then we moved to New York City and I had to leave the club to Spliffer, by his lonesome, because he needed to stay behind in the West.

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Samuel Clemens once told a man that he was lucky Saint Peter didn't have to choose between the man and his dog at the Pearly Gates. If he did, Clemens told him, you wouldn't be getting in.

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He's old now and his eyes are grey and its time, blah blah blah. I hate the goodbye part. I knew this dog when he could run and fuck and eat and shit all at the same time. He would lay in the dark mines beneath the small bed my wife and I shared, for hours. I'd write songs up above, on the surface. And he'd mine dreams of deer down below. Then, at around 3pm, I'd give the whistle and he'd shoot out from under there like a hairy white bullet.

Then, we'd head for the hills. Us Rangers.

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People are gonna cry around here in the next few days. This is a house with a lot of life in it. A baby and two mamas and a daddy and two wack job labs and two Meerkat Manor pups. Someones always barking. Someone's always tracking dirt across the kitchen linoleum. But lately, it aint Spliff. He is tired. Monica brought him home some 17 years ago, a chipper wee lad with an eye for the ladies. And he brought this Butler family a lot of joy, a lot of laughs and smiles.

But, he's tired.

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Looking at the portrait in the stairwell, I have to laugh. With that blue bandanna around his neck and his ears shot up at full attention, he's so handsome and dapper.

He looks like Patrick Swayze. Seriously.

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Goodbye old friend. I hope you had fun chasing deer with me. I'll see you before long and we'll do it all over again.

Love,
Serge (aka: dude with treats)