Talladega Parmigiana.

Here are some things.

-- We were supposed to get a blizzard here in Utah. Instead we got three inches of snow. Still, that was fine with me because it topped off the few inches we got on Sunday and I was able to finally build my slightly off-scale replica of Talladega Superspeedway out of snow in our yard. High banks. Infield with plenty of camping space. Some snow RVs (no, they are not flying Confederate flags). And best of all, real slicked down stretches, front and back, where I whip my daughter down past the frozen grandstands at 198mph/199mph; her grin threating to just swallow her whole noggin, me huffing and puffing into Turn one and out of Turn 2 like I'm three laps down and running on fumes.

Sometimes our driver falls out of  the car/orange saucer, and we pretend she's one of those old school drivers who'd show up at the track on Sunday half-lit, straight from some wild moonshiner honkey tonk out in the woods. Those fellows back then could have damn well fallen out of their cars too. I'll bet a few did. Anyway, I go back there and scoop her out of the snow, her little laughing panting body just laying there on the white asphalt in her hot pink fire-suit/snowsuit; i lift her up and put her back down in her frog position and we take off again.

Down the back stretch! WHITE FLAG!

One lap to go!

Here comes Violet Bielanko in the Dora the Explorer Ford alongside Handsome Harry Gant! She passes Harry and she's got her sights on Earnhardt and Wallace!

THREE WIDE INTO TURN THREE! OH MY, THEY TOUCH!!!!! WALLACE SPINS! EARNHARDT DOWN IN THE GRASS! WALLACE IS AIRBORNE UPSIDE DOWN AND CRASHES INTO THE FRONT STRETCH FENCE! RUSTY'S ON FIRE! EARNHARDT IS ON FIRE! HERE COMES VIOLET BIELANKO HERE COMES VIOLET BIELANKO HERE COMES VIOLET BIELANKO! CHECKERED FLAG! VIOLET BIELANKO WIIIIIINNNNNNNNNNNS THE RED MAN 600! VIOLET BIELANKO WINS IN ONE OF THE MOST DRAMATIC UNBELIEVABLE FINISHES IN STOCK CAR HISTORY!

This is the kind of stuff I bellow between gasps for life as we circle the yard on our frozen Talladega. I know my neighbors can hear me now that the leaves are all gone and sound bounces down the street untouched. And I'm glad of that. I want them to know that there is a guy, a renter, over there, who is building a superspeedway in his yard for his two-year old daughter. I have always admired that guy, wanted to be him from afar. Now: I am.

--Tomorrow is Thanksgiving and me and Monica decided that we didn't even care if we had turkey this year. After 38 years of turkey, I'm over it for a year. So then I suggested, with Hope Spears shooting out of my eyeballs into Monica's face, I suggested that I could make my specialty: Eggplant Parm. Imagine my super-nova of joy when she looked at me, with no expression, and said:

"Yeah, I don't care."

Now, that might not sound like a real vote for South Philly Italian for Thanksgiving dinner, but it was goddamn good enough for me! I hooted and did my little jig, did a couple Moonwalks across the kitchen vinyl.

I'm super happy. I can get out there in the kitchen, have a little juice glass of wine, and fill the house with that heavy oily smoke that comes from frying slabs of Purple Turkey/Eggplant. Plus I'm making meatballs too, so people are gonna be going apeshit around here. People walking into their Grandma's house three and four doors down are gonna catch a whiff of the magic garlic cloud hovering over my place and glance longingly at the soft warm Sicilian glow emanating from our steamed-up front windows. They'll hear the mandolins, the lusty laughter rattling the late afternoon, the rustic wood spoon tap-tapping  the side of the deep Marinara pot.

They'll say to themselves:

"My God.

That Serge guy.

He sure knows how to live."

Or not. Either way, we're having eggplants over here tomorrow.

-- Tonight, I'm probably gonna wait til Monica gets home from work and make her watch Elf with me.

-- So far, for Christmas, I have three Dr. Seuss books for Violet. And six plastic dinosaurs from Walmart. A buck apiece. For Violet.

--I'll be watching the Thanksgiving Day parade from NYC at 7 tomorrow morning. I love it and someday before long I hope somehow I can get my kids to Manhattan to see it in person. I always dreamed my kids would wait and wait and wait out in the cold windy New York Streets, waiting for their Daddy, who would appear, high atop the DAYS OF OUR LIVES float, waving down at the plebians and the frozen peasants. I would smile and my ultra shiny choppers would reflect the sliver of unthawed sun cutting down into the canyon, and the light bouncing off of my choppers would warm everyone down there under my float. I was gonna be the soap star who saved Thanksgiving.

But no dice.

Now they'll just have to stand next to Dad, as he sips his bodega coffee and holds them up on his shoulders so they can get a glimpse of Santa when he finally passes by. And Regis when he does too.

-- This year I am thankful for my sweet gentle wife, Monica,  and my wonderful daughter, Violet, and my unborn boy, Han Solo Bielanko, and my dogs, Max and Milo even though they make me fuckin' crazy some times, and red wine and War and Peace and all the trout I slipped back into the rushing river and my Zolofts, and my family all scattered around, and my friends, all three of 'em...who I never see anymore all scattered around, and my stack of books for next year, and for the small miracles that blow up my driveway like packs of wild leaves from time to time/usually when I could really use one.

--Yesterday I said something I never in this lifetime thought I would ever say. I was changing my kid's diaper and I looked down and saw something that made me smile; little smooth nuggets, like pretzel nubs. And without an ounce of pre-thought, I swear, I whispered to her:

"You know, you've got the cutest little poopies."

We just stared at each other for a long second. The only sound: her binky popping softly in her mouth. I understood the look she gave me. I was allowed to say what I said just that once. But never again.

That's probably for the best, I guess.

Bands In The Night.

Halfway through my twenties I joined a rock band and we hit the road.

I remember pulling out of Philly for the first time, rolling down the highway like a balloon someone had just let go. I was out there, in the wind, heading God knows where. I remember sleeping in a Mississippi motel room with at least twenty other people. Boxsprings were drug off the bed and some people slept off their drink, wedged in sardine-style between a lot of other bodies. In the morning we all posed in the parking lot for a group shot before we headed for the next place.

In Washington DC, we kicked off a long tour as an opening act. After that first show, in some seedy room somewhere within a few miles of where the President of The United States was lying in his bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking about things/heavy shit: I used the top of a door to try and open a Corona bottle. The only thing I ended up opening was my wrist though. Still, I didn't really care. I made a tourniquet out of toilet paper and got my brother to open the beer for me with his lighter. We raged on.

Once, after we played, I met a librarian in Green Bay. We drank our beers from plastic cups and talked and laughed and swirled around dancing a bit in an empty room above the stage. No one even knew we were there. No one even knew the room was there. It was weird, like we'd been vaccumed up into a UFO that only wanted to just hover there above the bar. I never saw or heard from her again after those few hours. The whole touring life was like that. One minute you were in some strange place, with some stranger, connecting through book talk or food talk or whatever, and then: two hours later, you were gone from them for good. There was no way to ever really track them down again. And what if you did? Maybe they didn't want to hear from you, ya know? I didn't need that embarrassment. So I let it all just disappear in the mirror.

Once, on a roof in Wales, I could see the ducks on the little pond, floating in their sleep, I guess. They looked like hunks of moonbeam fallen from the chilled November sky, just sitting there. I was drunk on cider and mad at the world back then. I just wanted someone to want me for real but nobody did. Shit, why would they? I was cider drunk on a night roof in Wales. That ain't exactly boyfriend material. Anyway, I hollered some shit at the stars. maybe at my brother, who was drunk on cider on the ground. Then I took my British cellphone and threw it at the pond in a desperate attempt to be noticed by even some fucking sleeping waterfowls.

Then I wiggled down and shuffled off to my room back behind the recording studio we were living at. I read some Harry Potter, the same three or four sentences over and over again, through Cider Eyes. The next morning my face was still in the book, still stuck down in there with the wizard; with Hagrid and all.

I rolled off of the bed and ate some cookies. I looked for my phone to see if anyone had called me.

I remembered the roof.

Down at the pond, all the ducks were awake and alive. I found my phone about thirty feet shy of the mud rim of the pond. I hadn't even been close.

So many things I whizzed by on my way across the land. So many deer eating corn cobs on the woodlot edge. So many rivers we roared across, so many fish down below us for just an instant and never again. So many clouds I watched over Omaha and Manhattan and Portland. Clouds shaped like buffalos and Pee Wee Herman. Shit I saw through the windshield for a second, lit a cig, looked back up at the sky and it was gone. I was gone. So many girls I looked at across barrooms, after we'd played, when my courage was a skyscraper I drug out into the middle of the dark smoky room. So many girls ignoring me in my sweat stage get-up. So many times I had to smile at myself, at my fucking supreme dorkness.

So many truckstop pisses I could have sailed a battleship. So many mornings staring at my face in the fogging up mirror of some motel I would walk out of and never see again. So many laughs. So many really good solid laughs. So many girls shooting me down with their tender eyes gone steel. And so many good solid laughs.

I talk in muted tones of never kissing the past. Never letting it in if I can help it. Shutting down the memories, of laying up on green hill on a warm summer afternoon, and picking off each yesterday as it comes bobbling up over the far horizon like a fat groundhog moving through his lazy world.

But I fucking lie, dude.

Everything I've ever known, every moment of every lonely hour, every lonesome day: all of it: all of it has been like a sweet wild dream, really. I'm always arguing with it, with the past. But, still, I end up swirling her around. I end up standing in my kitchen while it's still dark outside, putting the filter in the coffee pot, my reflection watching me from behind the black glass of the window over the sink; something comes and blindsides me and slams into my chest and my heart kicks in fast and wild, like some young kids sipping beers/dancing across a Green Bay cloud.

You can't just forget shit on purpose.

Through the smoke, across the bar, the eyes are always there. Even if they aren't ever gonna be glaring back at you again.

The Rambling Candy Apple Red Bubba Blues.

I got this forty buck red tricycle at Walmart a couple of weeks ago; for my kid. It was a payday, so I got a little nuts and went ahead and bought one of those clown honker horns to tie to the handlebars. I knew it was the right one to get because as soon as I fired off a few shots by Violet's ears there in the store, she became fixated on the thing and wouldn't stop popping it off. People in Walmart don't care if loud clown horns are rippling over from the next aisle. Its part of the deal. It's why they don't have tents set up back in Sporting Goods; some people would just crawl in there with some bread and peanut butter and just start camping out until they got the boot. Its a wilderness.

Anyways, we walked around for awhile, horns a-wailing, when I came across this little display of fake plastic Utah license plates. We stopped. They were pretty picked over; there were a couple Kody's/a couple Hunter's. There weren't any Violet's, which pissed me off pretty good. There wasn't even a place for Violet. Whatever.

We picked through some and I'd hand her one here and there. Ask her if she wanted to be a Micha? Or a Chase? She'd just stick the corner of the thing in teeth for a secd and then fling it on to the ground to watch it slide. And to watch Pops pick each one up and hang it back on the rack. Finally, I moved a couple Kami's to the side, on a hunch. And there it was. Sweet Motherlode. The Hidden Treasure of Boxstore Forest.

A plastic Utah license plate that read:

BUBBA.

I threw it in the cart, wheeled that shit fast to the Express lanes in the front, and bought the bike and the horn and the plate before Violet could even manage to clock that we were splitting. I wanted to get out of there as fast I could. There's no way that if someone saw that I had found the last one with BUBBA on it, there's just no way that wasn't gonna lead to trouble. Hell, I probably passed three or four Bubbas just on my way out the electric doors. Chances are: the Exit Greeter, an old lady, maybe 80 years old, chances are: her name is Bubba. Or, if not, then you can be goddamn certain that one of her grandkids is called Bubba. And that she would have jeopordized her job/her dignity to try and get that little piece of junk off of me any way she possible could had she knew what I had in my bag upon my leaving.

Luckily, she didn't get up to ogle my receipt. Luckily, we didn't have to open a pounder can of Whoop-Ass on each other righ there at the exit, by the eight hundred people in line at the Redbox.

===========================

When I get Violet on the bike, I make Harley sounds because that's what you do. You rev the plastic grips of the handlebars, so that the red and white streamers hanging there look like they're blowing in a bum-rush of desert wind. I rev it up hot and loud like a Warlock at a stoplight. The kid loves it. She looks back at me with her Question Mark Eyes, smiling halfway, seeing if its ok to smile. I smile big at her and blow hot air from my mouth down through her curls, like pipe exhaust/like motorcycle gusts, and then she opens her mouth wide and grins so wide that I can see every little white nub in her mouth for a beautiful moment or two.

Honk your horn, I tell her.

I guide her hand a little and then she pulls it away from me and lays out a bunch of rapid squawks all on her own.

You ready?, I say.

Put your feet up!, I tell her. Then I rev it with all I got: VRRRRRROOOOOM! VRRRRRRRROOOOM!

And we're off. I push the thing because her feet barely reach the pedals now. I push it slow at first, making sure she doesn't get her tiny toes stuck between the mud guard and the tire. We cruise into the kitchen, across the linoleum, the bike making a little bump when we pass off of the carpet onto the hard surface. She bends her neck and turns to look around and up at me, always smiling, making sure that I'm smiling back. Making sure that all this riding around is not just some late afternoon nap dream; checking out that it's real, that the fun is true.

Hold on tight, I shout between chopper grunts and shovelhead spits. Honk your horn!

She honks it. We do the sharp turn in the hall and I take her fast down the straightaway back into the living room and she giggles and bucks up in her seat, the hot sauce of excited blood bubbling through her little heart.

Then the dogs come in and we raise hard hell to 'em. I zero in on Milo and he tries to jimmy himself just a step out of the way but its too late, we're too zoned in to his ass and the next thing you know: we're trailing him super tight and he keeps trying to make these weird circles as if his tail is in flames or something. We follow him close though, around and around, honking our horn at him, fucking with his confused dog mind, around and around the same six foot lap maybe fifteen times before he does a crafty side maneuver and flicks himself out of the vortex.

We honk him a goodbye honk and tear off back into the kitchen, passing Microwave Mountain at 99mph, the afternoon beams of sunlight laser-beaming off the sweet Candy Apple Red of the frame that moves two Easy Riders through 3 o'clock's high fields of shit-eating grin.

Violet and Bubba.

We gone.