Sweet Potato Closet Pie.

As I dip the pink plastic-coated baby spoon into the liquidish sweet potatoes, scoop up the last little bit, and help Violet spread them around her face...I am both nostalgic and sad. Gone are the days forever when Violet's little body was nourished solely on formula that we/her parents mixed for her. Healthy stuff we shook up with our own clenched fists.

This afternoon, with my daughter actually sitting in a highchair, I help smear the last of the containers contents up and down her mug; starting at her lips and then icing her tiny chin and her cheeks. A cherry for her sundae nose! A sweet potato earring! This is cutesy television commercial shit, a dad and daughter giggling through a messy little lunch. Except the daughter here is really my own...not a mini-actress racking up first credits toward her Screen Actor's Guild card. And me: I have no idea how to act the part required. I stare at times, fascinated. Then in a moment, I am saying things like:

"Sweeeeeeeeeeeet Potatooooooooooo! Sweeeeeeet Potatooooooo Piiiiiiie!"

Or:

"Here it comes, here's comes Daddy with the spoon, and ....No,honey...don't use your fingers! Ugh. Shit. SHIT!"

A couple seconds of sober clarity get squashed up hard against a long half-minute of sloshed-on-beauty. I see things for what they are: Violet is eating some so-called 'solid' food. I see things for what they aren't necessarily: Violet is slowly sipping this mesmerizing new taste from a dribbled creek on the side of my finger and the experience is being etched into the first pages of The Book Of Her Life with enough Forever Ink to ensure that she will always recall this first real meal with me. And a life of culinary wonders will entail. She could end up a famous chef. Maybe she ends up the next host of BIZARRE FOODS, who knows?

I try hard to keep perspective, but the truth is: for many hours a day it's me and an infant. No one else is chiming in. No one else is even walking past the goddamn house all afternoon. We're way way out there on an island, two specks on the sand to any search planes. So, perspective and all it's practical rewards are rare. Fucking-A rare. I speak to the sun in the sky. I need a dodgeball with a face on it.

And so I guess that's why when I'm making coffee this morning, I notice the cleaned-out sweet potato baby food container laid out atop the dishes I washed last night. Oh my/it's true.

Violet, once when you finished the first solid foods Papa ever fed you, he saved the food packaging. Put it in that giant Tupperware Museum he made for you. The one in the closet with your name block letter'd in purple magic marker. There's a lot of stuff like that in there, sweetie.

Do you wanna see it?

No? You're going to 'the library'? Oh, ok.

That's cool, that's cool.

Someday you might.

Wanna see it, I mean.

Laughing At The Battlefield.

Saturday evening we had thunder but then just spits of rain. Monica was helping me unroll sod in our yard which was nice and different since we rarely do any home projects together. Unless you consider gallons of red wine and four seasons of WEEDS a project. I don't. And the fact that we had gone to our very first marriage counseling session that morning sort of swirled a bit of hopefulness into the 7 o'clock atmosphere. Violet was over in her car seat, on the bricks. The dogs were rubbing their bodies in the cool new grass. Up til then the yard has been dust and stubby clumps of weeds.

The therapy thing had gone well if you're waiting to hear about that. We liked the lady enough. She wasn't old or uppity; she didn't seem to mind cursing. That's a huge one for The Bielanko clan: we're big swearers. After the thing was over and we were driving back down the mountain, Monica and I talked a little about it, but not really a lot. Inside, I believe we were both excited about the prospects. On the surface though, well, we aren't able to be that forthright yet. To get all giddy about an expensive counseling session would be very foreign to us. We're way too ghetto. We agreed to try to keep it going if we can swing the cost.

So, that evening out in the yard we unravel soft green . The whole idea is to have a place where we can watch Violet take her first steps some day in the not so distant future. A little place where she won't trip over a wad of dog crap and land on an old arrowhead. And maybe a place where we can all cook some pork chops and corn on the grill. Relax some.

At one point during our labors our daughter is grinning at her Mama's silly antics and just bursts into full-on laughter. High giggles and deeper amused gasps stop me across the yard. Violet is laughing out loud for the first time in her young life. True obvious laughter. I head over there and now we both tickle her feet with our manure'd fingertips. There's no time to wash...gotta keep this sensational chuckle alive. For awhile we do and it's one of the coolest moments of my life. Then Violet tires of the whole scene. Still. I hope it is the first in about a hundred years of constant laughter for her. I'd drain all my blood into a washtub this sec if I knew it would promise her that.

We finish up the yard. I go get some burritos. Then, the long day done, we watch some DEXTER and drink some wine: satisfied enough with our real Saturday projects to enjoy a spin on the couch for what it is. Tomorrow morning we will wake up and have another damn fight about whose getting up in the night to change and feed and whose working full-time and whose a c@#t and who isn't.

The whole new grass/new us/new dawning metaphor crossed my mind here. But we're not that graceful, me and her. We need the counseling AND the baby laughing. The wine on Saturday night AND the early rising on Sunday morning. We'll find our way, I figure.

At least we got a yard now, you know...in case it just all comes down to a flat-out wrestling match.

Saturday Morning Ted Bundy Sightseeing Tour.

Tomorrow morning me and Monica have to get up early to go up into the mountains. Early morning hikes in alpine mist are our salvation. Virgin dews. Elk calves in dark pine. We become one with nature, with God. With one another. Naked in a spring fed creek...we are married to the hawk and the wind.

Psyche.

No, we ARE going up into the mountains, but it's just because we have our first marriage counseling thingy and that's where it is. At 7:30am on a Saturday morning. I'm guessing that out of the three of us sitting in our little triangle at least one of us is bound to still be drunk from Friday night.

On the way up to the place we pass one of the places where Ted Bundy once dumped one of his bodies. See?...ride around with me and you learn shit. Interesting shit. I plan on laying that one on Monica just as we're passing it; I suspect it will throw her off her game a little and give me a slight advantage in those first few critical moments when the therapist is chit-chattingly sizing us up, figuring which one of us she'd rather have sex with, and which one of us is wrong about everything.

I should wear cologne, huh? Throw off the therapist too. Start the serious morning with a bang. Cologne fucks shit up BigTime...especially if you only wear it once, a lot of it. And with that there isn't a university bonded professional shrink in the world who won't immediately forget all of that intense studying in favor of the very simple yet elegant human reaction that this guy is wearing so much Wrangler Windfarm that he is without a doubt: fucking scary nuts.

Anyway. I'm just kidding. I kid. Truth is, I'm happy we're going. I'm not embarrassed or ashamed. Just like I'm not metro-sexually effervescent or high on some dangerous intellectual smugness. The damn thing is simple...we could use an ear, maybe some advice. Hopefully not discussion exercises that she hands out on a piece of lime green heavy duty paper; I feel ripped off when I get handed your dumb-ass exercise sheets. It's unoriginal and very 1970's.

Let us talk. Let me and Monica do what we do best but haven't been doing all that great lately. Let us rant and rave...we are magnificent at it. Dare I say, the best you'll ever have? Once we begin, with that A train of Maxwell House tearing through our individual tunnels, there is nothing that remains impossible. We could break through some previously unknown therapeutic wall...crashing through in an explosive blast of confessional rubble and dust! We could end up the SuperHeros of Marital Bliss, the ones who figured it out one historical Saturday morning by out-gabbing each other with passionate intensity! We could be famous. We could be rich.

Or we could end up being Violet's cool Mom and Dad, still in love after all these years. God, it would be so cool if we could knock all that out in one session. Not to mention the cost thing. Maybe two sessions, if you wanna be all "these things take time/stick with it" and shit.

I cannot wait to pop off that Ted Bundy thing.

A Fly In The House Of Love.

I go out in the yard to pick up Milo's shits with a plastic grocery bag for a glove. Eighteen, nineteen. A lot. They are scattered petrified grenades atop dried cherry blossoms; poor burnt miners in red velvet caskets. Violet watches me closely from her car seat on the bricks. Every third or fourth turd I stop and look over at her and toss a madman grin her way. It takes a second to lob but then it smacks into her and her baby stare erupts in smile.

"Beep-Boop!", I say to her.

Her eyes leave mine shyly. Its her little flirty look away. She holds her happy smile but tucks her sparkling eyeballs into a bush or one of the dogs and she knows I'm still looking and loves that she knows that I know what she's up to. Goddamn they start that shit young, boys.

I pick up a few more gold nuggets while watching my daughter watch a fly. For all I can tell: its the first fly she has ever really noticed. This hits me with 300 volt Jesus powered electricity. How exhilarating. What a tiny magnificence to watch your own baby watch her very first housefly in this life. I get moved hard. There is something sublime in it somehow. Something spiritual. It's not all that easy to put to words.

A gazillion flies from now, when Violet has lived so very much; when she has long since tasted the lips of various lovers/held big-bill money in her hands if only for a fleeting moment, the socket holes of my skull will lay within the Earth somewhere still seeing her that afternoon long ago when she first saw that buzzing bug inches from her teensy nose. It's a thing.

Max and Milo laze in the hunks of grass that manage to grow in our sunless yard. They're on either side of Violet's seat like a couple national bank gargoyles. Milo seems embarrassed at all his dumps. He won't look at me. I talk to him a little to let him know I'm cool with it. I don't know that it helps him. Max just looks bored; he refuses to shit in the yard where Milo shits. Some sort of genetic clean wolf thing, I guess. Still, I've seen him eat other dog's craps off a Brooklyn basketball court so I don't really see where he gets his airs to be honest.

Before long, I'm done. The yard is safe to walk through. I ease over to Violet as she's staring up at disappointed birds flitting around the empty bird feeder on a branch. One of the birds is a red-winged blackbird.

Another first for her eyes, I say to myself. Man-o-man.

How can so much awesomeness simply up and happen to one man in like twenty-six minutes? And on a hot and silent Wednesday afternoon in the most unwatched twenty feet of the world when all I was trying to do was collect a bag of dog dirt.

Un Rock N Roll.

I felt Violet hanging around long before I knew her. Walking around by myself in the cities of Marah tours I was on, I'd glance at myself in a Vodafone shop window or a kebab joint mirror and I'd see my face and try and focus on it through swarms of street life. My eyes would bob and weave through flowing crowds to settle for just a second on my face in storefront glass. Something had gradually become apparent to me... something in my world was missing. But what, who? The road had become a drastically lonely place for me. Once I had reveled in that solitude.

Standing in the Plaza Mayor in the center of Madrid a little over a year ago I was hobbled by some new unfamiliar loneliness. I dragged myself around the edge of the late afternoon square maybe a dozen times: just peering through shop windows at small plastic bullfighters and magnets of plastic hams; old men with their knotty hands cupped behind their backs walked alongside me on the same lap. The blue sky above the old buildings beckoned and I wanted to fly away. I wanted so badly to get out of Madrid, of Spain and Europe. I wanted to soar back to a place where I was needed. But such a place didn't really exist. Music and travel and strangers and many thousands of miles behind me just left me feeling empty anymore...left me feeling nothing. Once, they'd made me feel everything. That time was gone.

I was tired of this me. I felt like I'd been running for years.

Weeks went by and the tour plodded on like any long rock'n'roll tour. A diseased snail with lager blood. Each night in my hotel room, long after any crowds I'd seen had vanished and the guitars were locked away in cases in the back of a rented van, I'd stand in some random hotel bathroom with the shower running cold. At something like 3 or 4am I would lay down on a towel on the tile floor and just stare at the underside of the sink. I was by myself. But not exactly alone.

In my head I had begun to imagine a little one. A kid. Never before had I even dared to imagine that. Children were for other people. But now, for some strange reason, the idea sizzled to life in my imagination and wouldn't step off for anything. And the more I tried to ponder the possibilities there in German and English and Italian bathrooms, the more intensely curious I became. Why not share the rest of your days with someone who could use your help?, I asked myself. Why not stop all this living for me? I'd done that for so long. Too long.

I'd stopped trying to call home as much. Monica had grown used to me being away. Her once excited reaction to my Euro-calls had been rubbed and ground to just a chipped nub of itself. My voice on the other end didn't intrigue her or arouse her anymore. A lot of the times I just got her voice mail. So I stopped calling much. And with that gone, I only drifted further out with the wicked tide that had latched onto me. I was disoriented. Lost. Cathedrals and castles became ugly naked jesters flipping me the bird from roadside hills. I'd get drunk and blue. Even shingle sized chocolate bars began to lose their luster. So much was changing.

The last night of the tour we played a show outside Barcelona. The crowd was huge and fabulous. I went up, we all did, and gave it one last hell. When the final encore ended I got myself a bottle of beer like I'd done a thousand shows before. But this one was different and I really knew it.

Back at the hostel we only had an hour and change til we had to be out front for the long day of traveling back to America. I spent it all on the bathroom floor one last time. When I emerged, showered and donning the same salty ripe clothes I'd been wearing for four or five straight days...I emerged to the low whistles of pre-dawn Spanish songbirds warming up their tunes outside my open window. I picked up my bag and my room key and quietly shut the door. Exhausted, anxious, and feeling wonderfully/gloriously unrock'n'roll for the first time in so very many years.