The Pig And Turkey Assholes Of Outer Space.

In outer space, you get to floating through your days and grabbing shit as it floats by. A granola bar here, some string cheese there. Glasses of water. Glasses of wine, sweaty bottles of beer. Some magazines. A little ass, maybe: if you're lucky. You take stuff you need and you end up letting go of other stuff, so it can float off down the proverbial astral lane out towards the next sucker floating behind you a little; moving through his day. The process is slow too. Slower than you think. Time is just a messy slog through Peanut Butter Pie when you're living the outer space life. You start rolling up on things from a good two/three miles out, your eyes trying to pick apart tiny colors in the distance. You see things coming down the pike. You anticipate. You guess and gamble.

Whats that? Pasta salad? Hmph. Yeah, I'll have a scoop.

What's that? What the fuuuuuuck? An old friend? Ugh. (AWK-WARD!) Pass.

What's this coming up here then? A Wal-Mart? Hell yes, sir. We will have a peek in that!

What's this next thing? A long talk with an old neighbor about the value of hard work and family (that takes place over a chilled Grimace glass from '78 filled with Country Time from powder)?

Hmph.

Maybe.

I have to decide right away?

Oh.

Ok.

Pass.

Whats this next thing floating my way? A little baby human? Ok. Yeah, cool, I'll take one of those.

Whats this thing coming up? A twisted ankle? What the? Pass.

Whats this? A McRib? Fuck yeah, boy! Take it !

Huh?

Really?

That was still the twisted ankle?

So, I have to take that now? Seriously?

Shit. I have a twisted ankle.

And a McRib.

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I've taken so many things, I've long lost count. I took pickles out of white buckets in a real Italian deli before. Ate it right there and stared down at the brine, at the rabbit poops (peppercorns) floating around down in there. I took cake. A lot of it. At birthdays at roller skating rinks, when everyone else was finished and back out on the boards, I'd wait until the kid's Mom would ask me if I wanted another slice. And I'd get one and eat it with a plastic fork; pushing spongy hunks through the soft marsh of melting Neapolitan on my Herbie The Love Bug paper plate. The tines of my fork would carve temporary lines in the ice cream stream, and it was then that I'd see the face of Don Knotts for a sec, his goofy Adam's Apple Head hanging out the side of Herbie. Then, like that, he was gone. Pulled back under a cocoa river.

I've taken love. I've taken it and held it to my heart. I've held it in my shaking hands and watched it light up like a Glo-Worm. I've taken so much love that they oughta really stop dishing it out to me. The love comes from them. The Good Hearts. A select few who dig me no matter how hard I try to get undug. People seem to line up early in the morning to give love to me. No lie. And I take it, some of it, graciously. Some of it I take and carry it with me back behind some apartment building I'm working in, back to where old Big Gulp cups lie half buried in weeds and leaves, like some murder victim dumped down a Forest Service road...I take some of the love people give me back there and I just plop it down there in the leaves, next to an empty Pringles can, and I just piss hot piss down on it. No reason, either. Too much love maybe. Maybe I just can't handle it all every damn day.

I try and give some shit back. Some love. As much as I can find in my Gut Rooms. And I try and leave some cheese in the fridge for my wife. So, you know: she can have a quesadilla or two when she gets home from work late at night and she's peckish. I consider that giving: the cheese thing. And I let trout go after I catch them. That has to be giving right? They gotta appreciate that, I'd say. Or who knows? Maybe not. Probably they don't give two shits.

I give my dogs rubs at night in front of the fan on high. Their hairs come off in clumps and spin up into the air and stick to my arm skin and creep into my nose. They moan as I do it. Like I'm doing the dirty to 'em. But I ain't. I'm just digging in, rubbing their backs and thighs, helping them release the live-long day pretty much the only ways dogs know how. A little love. A little rub. Maybe a fart.

I take so much from my daughter, I can't even go there. In return, what....I change her diapers? Christ. Selfish prick. I can't measure up really, I'm afraid. I just take take take from the kid. Even in the highchair: she leaves a piece of turkey lunchmeat laying there too long, I swoop in. Eat it.

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Each day here in outer space I grab onto cans of Diet Coke and Marlboro Lights. I let go of the empties, the butts. I see opportunities tumbling towards me from some distant horizons and I move to avoid them. I shift lanes. Moments go by. Words I could say. To my wife, maybe. To a lot of people. I let them slip away more often than not. It seems like this whole floating in space thing is so fucked up sometimes. Most of the time.

Dvds of CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM? Oooooh yeah! Yeah I want those. (where the hell do I even put them though, ya know?)

Chocolate rice cakes? Oh yes. OH YES! Gotta have those, buddy. Gimme them.

Chance to say you're sorry, that you love them more than anything in the world?

Hmph.

Ummmmmmm.

Or: here comes a Slim Jim Pepperoni flavored stick of pig and turkey assholes and lips....so what'll it be, Mac?

(Crickets chirp. Space crickets.)

Love. Eternal love and the courage to embrace it amidst a galaxy of floating horseshit.

Or a meat straw?

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You know what I picked, jackass.

Judge yourself.

The Hot Western Summertime Tree Trunk Blues.

The other day I was squatting behind a shade tree in the park down the street; peeking around every now and then to look over by the swings. There wasn't much in the way of bushes or high fences or anything around so I was pretty much out in the open. And one has to guess that if the old lady who lives next to the park had made a little sideways V with her fingers and inched her Venetians apart to look out on the sweltering boring afternoon she would have been calling these small town cops in no time.

" A man, yes!"
"Behind a tree!"
"Staring at a little child!"
"A white t-shirt! Black work boots! Dark mysterious sunglasses! "
"Staring at the child!"
"Yes!"
"HURRY! COME AND SHOOT HIM!"

Ugh.

Luckily, no one saw me.

So there I sat. About three-quarters of a football field away from my daughter. Dear old dad, hiding behind a tree trying to teach the apple of his eye a hard ragged lesson; to listen to what he goddamn says when he tells her to follow him up the trail towards some shit we can tap/clink with small pebbles IN THE SHADE. But, none of it is working and instead, after like twenty minutes, Violet is still standing down there in the blistering sun, by the piping hot sun-baked Jungle Gym, with a nickle-sized piece of old concrete in her fist...tap-tap-tapping on some hollow metal poles underneath the purple plastic sliding board.

I have been waiting for her to cry. To freak out. To look out for her Pop and not see him and panic. But: nothing, really. Once, she walked a few steps away from the Fortress of Ping, only to pheasant-walk herself into a slow 180, pivoting on the wood chips, and wandering back over to the painted pipes, to tap some more.

I'm not gonna lie here: I wanted to see her spazz out. I wanted her to want me, to need me. I wanted her to think she'd lost me only to find out that she hadn't and to vow to her own tender little soul that she would never ever doubt me or stray from me again in this lifetime or the next. I wanted this to happen, desperately. And I wanted it to happen on a Thursday afternoon, around 2pm MST, and be over and done with in, say, thirty minutes tops. I told her to follow me. She ignored me. I tried to gently guide her, with special 21st Century Afternoon Daddy Techniques. My daughter aimed her tiny self towards some other galaxy across the park from where I was headed and set sail.

I attempted to take her small buttery hand in mine.

She bit the fatback on my hand. With malice.

I let her go.

And in the final meeting of our related eyes, as she looked back at me once to see if I had suddenly/hopefully turned into Dora The Explorer holding a wheel of delicious cheddar cheese and a tall stack of syrupy pancakes and waving a jug of apple juice like a Pirate waves sweet rum, I could tell shit was muffed up.

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Fast-forward twenty minutes later and we're back at the man behind the tree and all. I bite my tongue because the urge to make some primal squeak or squeal is strong. I wanna use a noise to pop me back into her mind. I wanna quack or moo and watch her gentle eyes burst with remembrance and recognition. C'mon kid. C'mon! I wanna see it happen; like the fountains on the strip in Vegas: I wanna see the fucking show go off, on schedule, without any hitches.

But it doesn't happen. Whatever.

Violet plays with her pebbles. She finds a little boy's pair of leathery sandals in the wood chips over by the fake rock steps and she starts to talk to them in Siberian or whatever language she talks and the whole thing is like some weird Bible scene with a lost kid and sandals and pebbles in the desert. I resist the longing to pop out and do one of my dances and I think maybe it's because I'm scared. Those dances work good in the kitchen, on the linoleum, when she's strapped into her highchair behind a small pile of Pizza Goldfish. She smiles at my dumbass spins and Travolta Points then. But here, out in the day, with the full sun shellacking our skins, I get scared she ain't gonna give two shits if I pop out from behind some distant tree. I'll be just another heat mirage shimmering into the ether while she's giddy and stoned on this independence that has settled down upon her teensy park life.

Then something happens. She moves. The kid moves from the slide and the poles. She babbles to her self and stops to kneel her little chub legs and pick at some weed flowers whose lot in this cruel world is to try, night and day, to poke up through deep-fried bulk-buy cedar chips and bark shavings so they can bake in the light above. She talks to the flowers, befriends them, I guess.

The man behind the tree, his heart melts a little.

She finds her feet again, her small thrift-store Sketchers thumping down into the unsteady bark. She wobbles. She Weebles. She don't fall down.

She looks around. And this is no shit here, people: she sighs. Long and lovely. She sighs as if all the weight in the world were the very sunbeams we're under splattering down on her wee pale neck. She squints. She has no recollection which way I was headed when we last parted ways. She puts her eyes to the ground and trudges up a small hill, the woodchips giving way to summer's green grass. At the peak of the rise she pauses.

I can't anymore.

I whistle. Say her name, slow and drawn out.

Her eyes dart towards my shade and her face erupts in gap-toothed grin. I slink around the big trunk, my hand feeling the rough bark as I orbit the big plant and emerge from its darkness. I get seen. Remembered. Welcomed. I am ecstatic. We reunite by a pine over between the Jungle Gym and my tree and we're all hugs and smiles.

What a big fat fucking baby I have become.

The Wild Ramblin' Afternoon Martian Thai Blues.

Four wild turkeys explode out of a thicket of twisty weed and I watch them soar downhill with the lake as their backdrop, and all the towns below. My older dog Max emerges from over there smiling at me like a massive dork.

You see that Boss?!!!? His eyes ask the question with glint.

Milo The Terrible emerges from some other scrub brush. He didn't see no turkeys. He didn't see shit. He's got deer hair on his back, matted and mixed in with his jet blackness, and I can tell by that and the putrid scent he carries with him like a Blackberry: that he's been dry-humping a dead deer off in the woods again.

The turkeys are gone. Evaporated into the ether.

I bounce the backpack a little bit and feel my daughter's tiny sneakers tap my rib-sides.

"Hey Violet," I say. "What would you rather be when you grow up: a bottle of soda or a hundred pound clam?"

She unleashes a babble of immensity. "Beepbab beel billap eeeeeeeeeeeeee suba suba suba."

"Uh-huh," I say. "So you'd rather be a big clam, huh?....Interesting"

I spot Max disappear into a thicket a quarter mile out. Milo stands ten feet in front of me watching Max. I sense his bummed-out-ness. He wants action, animals to chase and all, but why the hell does it have to be so much work? His legs quiver like he is about to just let loose: take off and join his bro down in the ravine of birds. But he never does. He never can find the inspiration, I guess. He has a huge fat heart. Maybe he really doesn't wanna chase birds. Maybe he doesn't like to scare stuff. Maybe quails and pheasants scare him; who knows.

Violet continues to talk Martian Thai. Its a cartoon language with roller-coaster dips and side creeks and hills that your tongue can somersault down; down through tufts of nonsensical crabgrass. Every sentence sounds like a little question a field mouse might ask the stars in the sky some clear evening. Every word is a lispy treat.

"Mama, when you grow up would you rather be an eighteen-wheeler truck running the highways or a steak burrito?"

"Peeees a beb sepa sepa seees a sepa eeeeeeeeeeeeee bessa bessa!"

"Seriously? You'd rather be a burrito?!" I let a few seconds go by, thinking about that. "Ok. Cool," I say.

We wander through the spring grass, along the gnarled toes of the giant mountain. I keep one eye out for fat rattlers that look like old sticks. Max and Milo meet up somewheres up ahead of us. I see them doubled back on the trail, waiting to spot me. Making sure I haven't snuck off and abandoned their asses to a certain death by some peckish buzzard. Or some pissed-off raccoon.

"Violet."

"Beebathabatha beeee metha metha batha!?"

"When you grow up what would you rather be: a major league baseball or a baby dragon?"

Silence. Wind blows warm dust made of Indian bones and dead apples.

No answer. Hmph.

I take out the little sassy hand mirror I keep in the pocket of the filthy Carhartts I wear every single day of my life; like Inman walking home from the war, past the fields and the farms, in just the pants on his ass. I arrange the thing out in front of me, turning it....ever so slightly....THERE!: there she is. She's smiling big, her tiny white teeth all spread out in her sweet pink gums. Her eyes are glowing. She feels me looking. She isn't answering the question. Just smiling. She knows Daddy's eyes have found her back there. She knows she's in his mirror, right now, right here, on this big old hill.

I smile and move the small mirror around so maybe she can catch a glimpse of me grinning, but I doubt it.

"I'll venture a wild guess, Little Mama. You wanna be a baby dragon, huh?"

She kicks at my ribs. I giddyup toward the trail down the steep hill. The trail home.

"Violet," I say as we begin our descent. "When you grow up would you rather be Patrick Star from SpongeBob or a piece of fresh peach pie?"

And so it goes.