The Diaper Champs.

Sometimes I try and just eat the pain. I waltz up to Life's Buffet and take a few chilled shrimp, a couple dipping carrots, some onion rings. I pile on fried mushrooms if they have them. I take soup ladles full of olives, dump them down on my dish. Then I come up to the Hurt. The Pain. Big salad bowls full of coppery bullets for shooting yourself in the foot. I scoop some out. M-80's with nipped fuses for blowing up in your face. A couple of those. Then I move on, I guess. Over to the taco bar or wherever.

Still, its the self-inflicted explosions where I tend to make my mark.

Sitting on the couch the other night, I'm sipping on a glass of wine, letting the buzz roll uphill into my head, when I decide that now is a good time to let Monica know that I went ahead and created one of those baby registries on Amazon. You know: for free shit in the name of the unborn. I pop open the computer all smooth and cool and find the little list I made and then ease it on over to her lap. I'm feeling good about what I've done. I'm feeling confident that this is somehow a charming piece of husbandry I've accomplished, planning ahead for the birth of our boy by sitting on my ass and selecting material goods that we don't really need or even want. Still, I get dazzled by my own notions sometimes. I get to thinking that, Hey...this is what people do...and so here I am doing it...so we must be just regular people afterall, huh?

That's when I fuck things up, it seems.

Monica looked down at my creation for a second. This was during a commercial for one of her true crime murder shows, mind ya. I don't try and just introduce my notions when she's in the middle of watching some story about someone's swollen bloated grey body being discovered in the upstairs bedroom after the neighbors called the cops to complain of something ripe drifting down the damn street from the house with nine rubber-banded morning newspapers stacking up on the porch. No sir. I time this stuff, or at least I fancy myself timing this stuff, with impeccable precision. The truth is, though, that I don't know what the hell I'm even up to.

Anyway the detectives spewing all their bullshit gves way to a commercial and Monica is looking intently at the items I've decide we need in order to properly welcome a boy to Earth.

"Why do you have another Diaper Champ on here?" she asks me, without looking up.

We already have one of these things, where you can hoard dirty diapers until you can't even lift the damn thing anymore it's so weighted down with your laziness. I figure, hey: Two Kids=Two Outhouses.

"Well, I thought we probably want one in each room, right?," I tell her. See, there I am thinking ahead again. What a guy. What a beautiful thoughtful guy.

"No," she announces bluntly. "We have one already. Why would we get another one? One is enough for both kids."

This throws me off a little. I mean, yeah, of course one is enough. But I had the notion, you see, that two would be better than one. Three would be overkill, naturally, but two, in my mind, seemed perfectly rationale. A nice seventy dollar item someone could buy us so we could store up twice as many kid shits inside of our house.

"And why are you getting the pink model for a boy?", she says.

Ugh.

"They didn't have any other colors. I figured we give the pink one to Violet and the old one to the new kid."

"We don't need two," she says again, putting the kibosh on it.

I let her comments slide off me. I'm a little bruised, but we're hiking down into the list now. And there's other stuff.

That's just when she comes at me with :" We don't need another changing table, Serge. We HAVE one already. That's ridiculous to get another one!"

That's it.

Now, I'm bleeding all over the place, all over the fucking Micro-Fibre. Wounded. Rattled. Cornered.

I scramble for words.

"Yeah, well don't you think we should have one for each of their rooms, you know, in case one of 'em's napping and we have to change the other one?"

I throw this out there, feebly, I guess. Everything in our house is loud. Taking a coffe mug out of the cabinet sounds like carpet bombing going down. Sneaking into the room with the changing table probably wouldn't be any real disaster/any louder than anything else, but I don't need to fess up to that this minute. I'm insulted. She's questioning my whimsical list.

"No," she gurgles. "That's completely dumb."

Inside of my head: I rise from the couch in slo-mo and rip my flannel open/buttons flying and make an Incredible Hulk noise as she notices the thirty pounds of explosives I have taped to my torso on a wintery Saturday night; her eyes bug out of her face and KA-BOOYA! I jihad the rest of the night due to her sound reasoning (aka in my world: Bad Rudeness).

I bite my tongue but I'm warm from the wine and my simple-minded attempts at great things have proven my downfall. I'm embarrassed and ashamed; although, in truth, each of those emotions seems a bit of a stretch for this particular situation. But that's me. When cool and dapper might bring me the world, I get out the Flame Throwers.  In the ephemeral moments, when a man made of strong stuff would assess these offhanded comments from his wife and maybe parlay them into some sort of reckless animal sex with her, on the coffee table or up against the front door, I instead invite all of my demons down from the Heavens, to come and hang out with us, The Bielankos.

I don't remember what I say. I'm a grenade launcher. I'm launching grenades.

Monica's trying to make amends as her murder show comes back on. I hear her through the lapping flames, through the collapsing timbers and beams.

"This crib bumper is cute, we could use that," she offers, her voice barely cutting through the roaring inferno.

And she's right. It is fucking cute.

It's way fucking cute: airplanes and ships and trucks and cars. But it's too late for me. I leave a trail of oathes. I march over the burning carpets. Gobs of smoke get in my eyes. And bursts of fire too. I storm off into the nether regions of the house, into small caves up in the hills: a broken man.

No, actually, a broken fat sack of cheap wine, but whatever.

Dear Son, you are going to have to share a Diaper Champ with your big sister. Deal with it.

I love you and so does Mommy.

Hurry up.

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.