kingdad

2006-12-08T22:34:00.000-05:00

Wish I could camouflage it in sprays of silver tinsel. Stuff the raw, lonely feeling down into the toe of a stocking. But I can't. Even with my child chattering away about Santa, Santa brings me the same shit every year- this feeling.

-The Isle of Misfit Toys
-I'll Be Home For Christmas

The lights hanging in the cold, empty air.

So, Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas to you.

2006-10-10T19:20:00.000-04:00

Something about Jeff Buckley singing "Hallelujah."

Maybe it was the wine. I don't roll in her arms much these days, so one ruby touch makes me raw to the aches and warm whispers of the world.

But I really do think it was Jeff Buckley. Lightly tapping on the door. His hands still wet, muddy from the Mississippi. Looking for someone to let him in. To let him sit and ready himself for leaving. To let him sit with his mortal voice once more before it falls still.

I think he drowned in the song. That there is nothing so perfect as his "Hallelujah" and he just had to breathe it in.

I think it broke Leonard Cohen. That he couldn't shoulder it. Every line is his face carries the mark of "Hallelujah." That he tried to speak of it's golden plumes, it's floating vapors with his heavy tongue. "Hallelujah" couldn't bear the blackness of the ink of it creator's pen. A beautiful child, but a bastard child still. Uncertain. It sullied itself in Leonard Cohen's throat, wallowed in the coldness of cheap organ treatments and a gospel choir-for-hire and it died there.

But Jeff Buckley simply tied it around his brow and floated off to heaven.

And so did I.

I hugged my daughter first. I breathed her in and drowned in the goodness of her little being.

Hallelujah

2005-06-02T23:27:00.000-04:00

I am a lonely swimmer, dashing my tired body against the dark coast.

There are no lights, only the wind and the sand, bone white backs bent under the long, white cane of the moon.

Cotes Du Rhone, U2'S Stay on infinite repeat, a debris field of loneliness spills across dense banks of shimmering cold shadows.

The girls swim in their own ocean, one much warmer than mine. The sound of their warm breath laps against the cold hull of HMS Kingdad as its bow kicks up a cloud and nuzzles into the soft mud of the bottom. Their mattress bobs along in the dreams of diligent angels.

Meanwhile, a regal stern towers against the open, blue canopy of the night, of Wagner, of perfectionism and of longing. A still shot hung in the moment just before the descent into the open mouths of sharks and sepia tone photographs.

I will always be a wreck. A sad postcard.

They will always have one another to cling to.

I am a shipwreck, a tongue of rainbow hued oil on the surface of the sea. I am a pillow of fire, a tap and a click in phantom ears, a searchlight, a curl of cork hung in the dark grasp of diesel fuel and scorched so'westers.

I am a straggler on the beach, crawling towards the embers of a dying campfire.

Towards warmth...

2005-04-22T01:01:00.000-04:00

Whirlwinds of green crawl across the road, drunken ghosts rising slowly, then racing into a chaotic arc before tearing off to vanish within the darkened crossed arms of the woods.

There is a constant sound outside of the open windows. The sound of the wind in the sea oats, of the ocean spray racing across the cool, damp sand under the clouded eye of a high, late summer moon.

Only it's April. And there is no ocean nearby. The constant throaty whisper outside is the sound of pollen, blown against the smooth, white face of our little house.

The world is trapped in a bright green noose. Green halos choke anemic streetlights. Spindly limbs and fresh buds labor under a phosphorescent glow in the spring darkness. The smell of new wisteria tangles with the acrid musk of nature's rampant fertility.

There is a blizzard of allergens marching down my street, painting cars, rocking chairs and early azalea blossoms.

Despite the heavy dose of Allegra, I am happy to submit. Happy to give in to the reckless affections of spring.

2005-03-26T21:28:00.000-05:00

I’m back.

Literally.

Pilots call them “aborted take offs.”

Things just don’t line up right; breaks are hastily applied bringing a huge mass to an abrupt halt, just before nosing skyward. Just in case.

This happened to me today. I just couldn’t line up myself up and make it all work.

I tried. I tried very hard. I analyzed all of the data and made every preparation that I could. I believed that I was going somewhere. I sat in the darkness, alone at my own helm, touching upon every resource that I had and they weren’t enough. I just couldn’t make it happen. I could not make myself move.

People depended on me and I just came to a stop.

I failed.

I have had quite a touch of flight phobia these past few years. I have missed a wedding because of it, driven from the asshole to the nose of the east coast just to escape the banking and bumping of winged uncertainty.

It wasn’t always this way. I used to have a drink; put on my headset and wonder how much longer it would be before I could do it all over again. At one time my airline of choice (Pakistani International Airways –best veggie meals ever-) was staffed by pilots that came on board smoking and wearing keffiyehs. I sat in the tail section and smoked and watched the planes shadow sweep across the decks of unknown ships and chalky sweeps of ice. I watched the rocky coastline of the British Isles smack against the most stunning green land I have ever seen, and then fall into the frothing mouth of The North Atlantic. The pilot would occasionally say, "We will be landing in Frankfurt in 20 minutes -if God wills it- thank you, and please enjoy whats left of your flight."

Not even two weeks ago I found myself clutching the armrests on the way to and from New Orleans, thinking that I had mastered it again. That I would fill up my orange suitcase and take my family everywhere.

And here I am today, lonelier than I have ever been in my life because my family had to leave without me. Ok, I left them. I left them standing there in a pile of shattered would-be vacation memories and shards of misplaced trust. I left them at the gate, vomit on my breath and my heart pounding against my eyeballs.

I stepped outside of my family, outside of the pressurized hull that keeps us all safe and together, gasping in the grip of a huge hand that just kept squeezing me and squeezing me. The two valiums, darvocet and mint tea I encased myself in this morning snapped worthlessly against my phobia’s first strike.

Siegfried had his linden leaf and I have my flight info.

My wife’s words and my daughter’s confused look swirled outside of the bloodied eye slit of my crushed helmet like flies as I lay on the ground waiting for the last breath to bubble out of my lungs.
I took part of them with me as I descinded into the tight coils of panic. I took moments that none of us will ever retrieve. Dreams that will rot in the peatbog of my self inflicted disability.

Like any coward, I tearfully hugged my family. I told them that I loved them and then I floated away into myself and walked quickly through the fishbone white throat of Terminal C towards the stairs that would lead me out of my self made hell, out into the light, into that certain smell of the world that all cowards cling to.

Like a rat claws at a piece of garbage floating in the wake of a ship that never sinks, I pounced on the smell of airport shuttles and the echoes of brave souls going places. I wanted to tear myself in half and vanish from the world like a curl of smoke.

I wanted to feed my worthless heart into my families luggage, into the the long, hungry 737 that would momentarily tear it's way into the sky with my wife and my daughter in it's bowels, so that some part of me wouldn't fail them.

Instead I stood and watched cars come and go, ingesting people, spewing them out. I listened to cell phones ring, to canned announcments, to engines sucking air and life from the runway. I stood there and wished that I was as good of a husband and a father as my girls wanted me to be.

The smell of being human sometimes smells like love, like warm oil from the heart of life’s engine, pushing us hard into a climb and and a certain tragectory to deliver us safely to our beds and into each other’s dreams.

And sometimes, it smells like emptiness, like desertion. And the smell of my family’s life lingering in this cold, quiet house tonight exaggerates the aroma my flight today, of my arrival to the totality of my weakness.

And it is weakness that I loathe in myself above all things.

2005-02-05T23:19:00.000-05:00

The death of the unfamiliar is death. The death of excitement, the death of me.

I remember thinking this.

Sometimes I still do as I drive the same paved line from work to my home everyday, when I look off into the woods while my car thinks for me. When it all moves so fast that it doesn't move anymore, when it all hums itself into the same easy color.

Either I arrive, or I don't. We still have to pay the babysitter.

Once it was a magnificent spring day in Berlin. The sky was blue and empty and the trees were already too green. It was a March day, and this day was the day of my birth. I rolled a cigarette and felt the 5 mark piece in my vest pocket, so heavy between my thumb and forefinger. Whenever my new life in this new city felt comfortable, all I had to do was touch the coins in my pocket and I was on edge again. My whole life’s experience before this day was six hours away from me now, across the Atlantic. Visible in my mind, beyond my grasp, sleeping while I talked too much, giddy from golden beer. I could see my Mother frying bacon for Dad while I tried to climb through the wisteria of another fitful attempt at sleep in this new, German world.

And the woman that broke me in half before I came here? No matter what time it was she climbed through the smoke and the new names and the lost tongues around me, like a radio wave. Banking above me, a lost pilot with a belly full of bombs, a hungry searchlight against my thin city walls. She was the sound of bullets and dogs barking, of the cold, white hand that extends a warm cup of coffee and a new place to stay while hell blossoms in the garden.

There are only a few relics of this time packed away in my basement. My favorite is a photo, one of the few I still like to see. There I am, between the thighs of that March morning. Thin, radiant, a burning building with bangs and a vest and a cigarette held up into the face of time. Behind me a bunker, a perfect, stubborn brushed concrete cube.

The sun beautifies thick, East German spray paint-

"Where bunkers are built bombs fall!"

And now I am here. I am married. I am a Father, and in this photo there are no more red doors to knock on in the middle of the afternoon. No one to wreck with a few lines written in green ink and a Leonard Cohen song. No more Sundays while the world yelps away under a finger of smoke tracing through the window’s open mouth.

I don't smoke anymore anyway...

Once everything was new to me. I was a new being every time I unlidded my eyes.
Now it's my daughter. She is the new horizon. The newest and brightest horizon.
And my family is the only world that holds weight to me. My Wife and my daughter, my family.

This is our daughter's favorite word- family.

It's my favorite word too.

2005-01-13T01:20:00.000-05:00

When I was 8 years old and my dad had a heart attack the world around me exploded. Everyone came to our little grubby house to visit, helped clean, brought endless anemic offerings in dingy Tupperware bowls and spent hour after hour driving my mom to and from the hospital.

I played in my perfectly square room. I played under the bed with my flashlights and my GI Joe just like I did when my dad was home,
in my stiff blue Toughskins and my red sneakers like every other child in the 70's. I played in my room like I was supposed to. I missed my dad, but I knew he would come home and we would all just go back to being the way we were before he clawed at his chest and throat, dropped the pruning shears and fell off the ladder into the camellia bush.

He came home, and just like I thought, he joined me and GI Joe and all was well.

When my Grandmother had a stroke, when I was 19 years old, I went to the hospital for a few hours and looked at her. She was a small woman with a harsh face. I knew she loved me, but I didn't always feel it. The day she got so cold and tried to call for help while her body trembled I was in the woods behind my house smoking hash in the pony shed. We were neighbors, and I was supposed to go play cards with her that afternoon, but somehow it just seemed like a much better idea to get stoned and think about how hard it was to be around her.

She squeezed my hand as they pushed the stretcher into the clean, white ambulance. That was the last conscious interaction we had. I wanted to read her my poems as I stood at her bedside later, but was afraid she wouldn't like them. She was in a coma, but I knew she could hear me. I just held her hand while she sighed into a thicket of tubes and drip bags.

A few days later my grandmother died while I unbuttoned my girlfriend’s jeans under a bridge in a park. We smoked cigarettes, naked in her olive green sleeping bag and listened to the thunder rumble through the empty belly of the late May sky.

While one of my friends was dying, I absent mindedly sucked oysters from the shell and swished lukewarm champagne across my teeth near by. Happy Birthday to me.

When another painted his prized record collection with bits of his beautiful, stormy brain I tinkered with the rusty lawn mower in my backyard.

Somehow I have never been there when I needed to be. I just missed it.

I was present to help deliver my daughter into the world. This I did correctly, I hope. She spent her first hours sleeping on my chest after poor, tired wife drifted off after a brief, painful labor.

Now my own mother struggles against her body, against age. Against the effects of her stroke. Now I have fatherhood, marriage and work to shield me from the rawness of letting go of someone. Of surrendering part of my love to the hungry, dark mouth of faith.

Faith is the thing that I have hidden my hands from, under bridges, against a warm breast, an unfamiliar heartbeat. Racing in secret, behind the sharp, sweet smell of a small stone pipe, adrift in the perfect sea-green of a half empty empty bottle or falling into a palm full of perfect pink pills. Escaping into the hollows and constant loneliness of strange cities, creased postcards and one cigarette after another, while the voices of pigeons whispered the names of everyone I had ever failed. Cooing away to me in the rusty arms of an underpass while a tide of cars washed overhead.

Buried in the emptiness of my own words, the sad radiance of old photographs, of dozens of lit candles in my garden on The Day of The Dead. The sound of my Mother's slurred speech. The image of my Father walking slowly to the mailbox, almost deaf now, the sun warming the top of his balding head.

I have spent so much of my life trying to escape the eyes of faith, the eclipse of believing that tomorrow is coming.

But the sound of my home, the sound of my wife and my child sleeping in the next room overpowers me now.

Thankfully.

2004-12-16T23:24:00.000-05:00

This past Saturday, Princess and Kingdad found themselves in the park. Poor, tired wife stayed behind to tidy up the palace.

We take turns doing this chore by the way- I take a few Tuesdays, she takes a few Saturdays.

We stopped at a friends yard sale, mopped up on Hello Kitty and moved on.

It was a perfect winter day. The air was cold. The sky vast and cloudless, the sun a far off window, open and glowing. We were the only people in the park, running after each other, tilting our heads back, closing our eyes and swinging higher and higher. We laughed from the top of the slide to the bottom. We chased our shadows, looked for "bunny houses" in the endless drifts of leaves that swelled across the faded green lake of winter grass.

We squinted and spoke in warm clouds, into the thin, chill breeze of a golden December morning.

While we walked beside each other, almost drunk from happiness, not so far away my Mother tried to speak. She tried to tell my Father that she was afraid. That something was happening.

She was stretched across his lap, her face twitching into the nap of his old, blue sweater vest. He sat idly, his hands cold and his heart beating just a little too fast. In his mind he tried to make it find a rhythm, one he could break off and share with my mother.
His arm draped across her back, just like always.

She tried to squeeze his hand but couldn't. Her fingers just curled into the deepness of her palm. She tried to sit up, but her body just couldn't seem to remember how.

My Father was scared now. He picked up the dingy beige telephone with the huge numbers. He struggled to think of the numbers, of which ones to press. He poured through the little book on the table next to the phone, the one that is so full of my Mother's handwriting, her personality, the keepings of her soul. So many numbers, most of which have no names to shepherd them.

He took another deep breath and dialed. He called everyone he knew to call when things just didn't seem right.

He called my aunt, my sister.

He didn't call 911 though. To do this would be to admit that something was indeed terribly wrong. Something that would change their fading lives forever. It would be like calling the truth.

He didn't call me at work either. He didn't want to bother me.

My family rushed to the worn shell, the home of my elderly parents. The little square house- a pale stone sunk into a scrubby lot, a small, unmarked gravestone cowering under the sky and the weeds, bent away from the sun and the noisy life of the road that lies just beyond the living room window.

While blood tried it's best to push it's way past the clot in my Mother's brain, while oxygen did it's best to circulate in the storm that is her, my family just sat there. Still and dumb like a cave drawing.

While the Princess and Kingdad picked up acorns and pinecones, my Mother's tongue stopped tossing words past her crooked dentures. Her face, already a ravage of valium, bulimia and the heaviness of her very being just slackened and let go.

My mother slid beneath the dark, oily waters of the sea. She drifted down into the shimmering, open mouth of her stroke. Numb and tired.

Since she cannot talk now, she writes what she wants to say in a book that my ever-thoughtful and perfectly present sister has provided. One page -staggering blue lines looped together at odd junctions, falling in a loose cursive roll, says-

I love You
I'm glad you are here
I'm afraid

This was written earlier today. I don't know who she was talking to. She grunts for the pen while I am holding her lifeless left hand. For me she writes-

I love you
I miss my girl (meaning my daughter)
Go home
I love you
I'm glad you came
I can't talk
Help me!
Take this home (she points at something only she can see, and then closes her eyes)

As I sit next to her, TV blaring, visiting hours long over, the hospital ebbing into cool, green lights and muted pages, I listen to the fluid moving in the deep of her lungs.
I try to imagine how many times I have been comforted by the sound of my Mother's breath. How many times it scared me, or angered me.

What gravity she imposes over me.

Every good thing I know came from her voice, from the warmth of her fleshy arms.

And every fear I have, every bad habit is rooted in my relationship with her. Every nuance of the shade and the radiance of love leaks from the hulking wreck of my Mother. It beeps and bubbles away, wrapped in bone white sheets, draped in drip tubes, bloody gauze and sweat. It writes-

I am afraid
I love you

How many times have I whispered this into the mass of my Mother?
How many times has a child whispered this into it's Mother's breast? Into the hushed uncertainty of the darkened room?

My child. My Mother's child.

Mama
I am afraid
I love you

2004-12-01T23:00:00.000-05:00

From where I sit with the laptop I see through about a third of our dining room into our circus-trailer sized kitchen.

Kitchens are the holy of holies for me. The only place you get more intimate is the bedroom.

I am 37. I am married and share the magic and frustration of parenting a 2 1/2 year old fire brand with my wife. With this in mind it should be no surprise that I spend more time cooking in the kitchen than I do in the boudoir.

Sometimes when it's late and I have had just a little too much wine, my kitchen is a portal into a strange paradise. It calls to me like a siren, like a wanton, half-drunk Julia Child or a lustful young Donna Reed.

Jadeite green walls and Nantucket white cabinets with weathered chrome handles, old biscuit tins, Atlas glass spice, salt and pepper shakers lining window sills, German knives in a worn oak block, yellow ware bowls, vintage fiesta stacked a little too high, the tea towels of a thousand unknown old ladies folded smartly in the tall white hutch, a black and white tiled floor worn by endless steps from the counter to the 1923 buttercream yellow Roper range, and from there to the bone white double welled sink.

A few turmeric stains tell the tales of many hot culinary indiscretions.

There is an old, low diner stool for my favorite little sous-chef to stand on and whip up her pretend "cupcake scrambled eggs" and not far from her perch is the old cherry high chair. Above us all the ceiling fan hovers like an angel, and will give you a flat top if you stretch too far in between batches of Christmas cookies.

At night while I wrestle with my two sleepmates for a few inches of warmth I can hear the gentle, aged refrigerator cough and sigh as it tries to coolly conceal my excessive purchases.

As I swim against the torrent of uncertainty of my middle years, wondering where my self has wondered off to, my kitchen stands by my side waiting to testify. Waiting to show me the way back.

Of all the rooms in any house that I have ever lived in, the kitchen has always been the guardian of my heart and soul. Mercifully dispensing coffee and pancakes when I just couldn't go on and helping me to unlock the secret pathways into countless others, both past and present who have made my existence so much more than tolerable. The kitchen exudes the warm and wonderful aroma of life.

Guten nacht and guten apetit my dear kitchen.

2004-11-28T01:06:00.000-05:00

Once I was a bit slender and maybe just a little bit handsome. I was a dreamer, a wanderer. A smoker. I wrote when and wherever I could roll up a cigarette and sit still long enough. I had the euro-bang and vest thing going on. I remember how my little body felt contained in the familiar and loving confines of my old blue suede coat, curl of camel smoke and my beloved ash gray vest.

I suppose I have held up ok for someone that has worn his soles/soul thin in all of the wrong places. Handsome has been replaced by wise. Thin has yielded to healthy.
Of course with the unending ease and steadiness of my current middle aged life come occasional bouts with complaisance. This has always proved quite a deadly fog for the would-be mariner within.

Regardless, most of the gaping holes that my catchy, unhappy light poured through -magnificently I might add, like a cheap Turkish lantern in a brothel- have been mended by the sure love and almost foolish patience of wife, child and a host of gullible friends.

Maybe an angel or two should also be thanked. Which is why I watched Wings of Desire tonight.

How many times can one person thank you Wim Wenders?

Thank you for giving the German George Baily a cynics version of It's a Wonderful Life to sniffle over.

"Ich weiss jetzt, was kein Engel weiss."

2004-11-23T01:24:00.000-05:00

There are too many tyrants in this little palace.

Since I had no bunker to crawl into this evening, I did what I always do when I have absolutely had it. I drove around with no destination in mind, with only my blackest of moods to guide me.

I turn where the shadows are thickest, where ruined warehouses loom beyond the long rusty tracks, where pale halos of distant street lights bleed themselves white onto the tall dry grass, burned out barrels and broken malt liquor bottles of vacant lots. I pass the dingy little mill houses, endless dirt roads and yawning dead ends of my town.

My town is a necropolis. Sun up or sun down, this is a city where life nods behind drawn yellowed curtains, rocking slowly in front of Warm Morning heaters and cheap radios. Square beige houses that smell of overcooked canned beans, stale cigarette smoke and gas. Hovels that straddle empty train yards, silent factories and wasted fields. Stagnant drainage ditches, carpet scraps and abandoned earth movers tear into the few lonely pines that hold the spent horizon back from collapsing.

A girl I went to school with in the 7th grade was found beaten to death in one of these fields. She was poor, quiet and had a crooked smile. I remember she smiled a lot.

A policeman raped and killed her. She was a prostitute. He had done this before, to some other poor, awkward forgotten girl that was also a prostitute.

I always think of her when I drive through my old neighborhood.
She was just a buck toothed girl that I saw in the library every day, and then somehow she became a whore, and one day was murdered with a flashlight.

My mother is always quick to remind me that no matter what mannerisms I have adopted, no matter what kind of wine I choose to accompany my meal, that no matter what kinds of choices poor, tired wife and I make, that I am from a dusty, hollow place in the world. That I will always be a child of this ugly, desperate and sinister town. That once, I was happy to play in the junkyard and by the drained pool of the abandoned Salvation Army Hospital deep in the woods behind our small house.

There were always dead animals in the empty pool. They fell in and couldn't get out. They just starved there. Patches of matted fur too close to the ground. Mossy bones poking through the dry leaves.

I remember there was a well near the pool that a dog had fallen into and drowned. It floated there in the dark oily water until there was nothing left to float.

Nothing terrified me more as a child than the sight and thought of the animals.

Today they invoke the same fear in me that the girl with the crooked smile does. There is no way to comfort them. No way to pull them out of the field or the swimming pool or the well.
No way to protect them or love them back to someone's side.

They are forever lonely, dying things trapped in darkened amber.

Things that somehow got lost.

No matter how I have tried to escape the trash heap, I always come back to it. I drive to it every time I get lost, and I will always carry it's stench away with me each time I leave it.

I suppose I am stuck in amber too.

2004-11-17T21:23:00.000-05:00

You can brand me with a huge "P" if you wish.

I am rather pretentious sometimes.

My shortlist of pretentions/affectations:

mineral water
freshly shaven head
several shoulder bags
clogs
baggy trousers
won't drive it unless it's german
einsturzende neubauten
leonard cohen
persian music/cuisine
rumi poems
berlin
little silver rimmed glasses
often use the word "dreadful"
also use the word "savage" from time to time
klaus kinski
wino -but it better be from france/germany/austria
ex-chainsmoker
wagner
pate
artisan made meats and cheeses
wim wenders
egypt
shortwave radio
truffle infused anything
nerve.com
bruno ganz
ruined/lost/forgotten cities
peter handke poems
german cinema
sepiatone nude photography
hugo race
70's porn
schubert
chopin
sonic youth
czech films
turkish coffee
u-boats
malt swagger
indian markets
julie delphy
peeing/bidets
the architecture of albert speer
egon schiele
the great depression
LBJ
hurricanes/tornados/volcanos
black/chai teas
roy stuart
ww2 films/newsreels
marlene dietrich
johnny cash
giant metal objects
bunkers
radiant console

Should I go on?

As you may have noticed, I have not posted in quite some time.

I have an excuse, really, I do.

It's not because I am LAZY, I promise. I loathe the lazy! Please read a little Ayn Rand if you don't believe me.

It is because I am trying to spend that certain hour which I usually post with my family that I have grown silent.

That's love goddamnit!

And anyway, by the time they are off to bed I am not far behind them. I am almost 40 mind you!

With the above in mind I offer the following:

For the next two months -both of which are the busiest for my lowly profession -a grocer!- I will post four times.

That's twice a month!

Not bad for someone that has no time to spare and refuses to give up!

Too bad Leni Riefenstahl isn't around to film my heroic efforts.

But, with the turn of the new year I will re-emerge, guns blazing, warm brioche in hand, pale and full of trivial complaints (about my place in the world, and the holiness of precious little princess pink, and of course, poor, tired-of-me mama- and Pompeii and Amarna and whatever else it takes to suck you into my web) to post with the predictable rigidity of Teutonic bowels.

I promise.

As I type these last few words I think it's important for you to understand that flowing into my headset is:

Tristan und Isolde prelude to act 3
Bruno Walther conducting

Don't bother listening to Wagner if Bruno Walther is absent from the helm.

Good luck! And, godspeed you black emperor.....

2004-10-20T22:53:00.000-04:00

I wish I could say that my lengthy silence was due to a vacation. That I was too busy fishing and picking up shells with the girls to bother writing.

Yes, I have been fishing, if a mop handle can be considered a fishing pole.

Truth is, I've just been too busy trying to keep myself from sinking in a sea of work and chores and family, and petty mishaps, and more family, and the chronic back pain of course.

I have managed to steal a moment here and there to have lunch with the princess, and to work in the yard as the leaves spiral down around me in the cool, damp breeze.

I have also managed to list a few things on eBay.

I would say that I'll be better, that I will rush to the laptop at the end of each long day, but we know that would be a lie.

I'm not ready to take a "leave of absence" though. Even if the regularity of my blogging is less predictable than poor, tired wife's cycle, I, burned out overachiever, suburban alchemist, will render a few golden minutes from lead and write.

I promise.

2004-09-29T21:53:00.000-04:00

Spent the day cleaning the house.

While poor, tired wife chipped away in the quarry called work and royal imp painted spider webs at school, I readied my arsenal of tooth brushes and household chemicals.

I am Donald Rumsfeld with a vacuum in my hands. Nothing is safe or sacred when I unleash my anal retentiveness on a weeks worth of crumbs, dog/cat hair and soap rings.

every time I finish cleaning the house I tell myself that I need to start reading the "advisory statements" on the chemicals I use to make my world so perfectly sterile and white. When I finished today I realized that the noxious mixture of fumes I had been inhaling for most of the morning had cooked the cold right out of my swollen lungs and aching sinuses.

So, that's how I ended up with the post-cleaning Marlene Dietrich voice-

But, no mildew on our shower curtain, no two-day old turmeric stain in the sink, no dust bunnies skipping through the palace.

Ah-

"Falling in love again..."

2004-09-27T20:59:00.000-04:00

Ah, Max Richter, Gruner Veltliner and thou, oh lovely blog.

That's as good as it gets because the sickly girls are about to doze off together. I love it when they do that. I go in and look at them, curled together like the archetypical mother and child.

I love it even when I think, "hey, what about me!?"

Well, then it's Total Gruner baby.

Tonight was the kind of night that I wish for all week. Cooked a yummy feast for the girls, watched them chase each other around our tiny palace, laughing hysterically -the littlest runner naked and beaming- while I washed dishes and scrubbed countertops. Then the sound of bedtime stories in the other room, sniffles, a little cough and the eventual "snap" of the bedside lamp switch.

Thanks to Jeanne, it's starting to rain again.

Someone will stagger out of her bedroom in a few minutes and ask me for a drink of water, even though she has a full glass next to her bed, fresh and cold just like she likes it. She'll settle for a hug and a kiss instead and then stagger back into the darkened room and Mama's warm arms.

Crave poor, tired wife's company, but know I'm last in line.
Poor, tired wife and kingdad always step to the back of the line for our royal treasure.

It's supposed to be this way, right?

2004-09-25T22:39:00.000-04:00

...And on the eleventh day, kingdad created blog.

Sometimes its hard enough just to get through a day, why should I sit down and rehash it?

Ok-

The girls are both sick. Poor, tired wife caught whatever royal vector has been sneezing and coughing onto the doorknobs and pillowcases these last few days. Little germ machine has an ear infection now. Found this out when she woke from her nap screaming and holding her ear.

After a hasty trip to the doctor -the same ill assed old doctor that treated me when I was little kingdad- and some obnoxious pink medicine, she seems to be recovering.

Poor, tired wife is a different story. She's just starting to come down with the crud. Sore throat, runny nose, a hint of a short fuse.

The makings for a long weekend here at the palace.

Otherwise, the weather is cooler, my moon flowers are blooming and it's cider time. Between the long hours and household chores I've managed to read a few books. The last of which was The Lovely Bones.

Still trying to read or put down Atlas Shrugged. Either approach makes me feel like a failure. Thanks Ayn.

2004-09-14T22:08:00.000-04:00

Kingdad and poor, tired wife often poke fun at Life's Winners.* You know, folks that have three houses, three cars, two kids and many huge accounts to mind.

Kingdad was born into the one house, two bedrooms, one used car clan. My poor, old parents think that kingdad, poor, tired wife and royal imp have really arrived since we have two cars and an array of credit cards on which to spread our souls over. It's all a matter of perspective I suppose.

Oh yeah, by the way, I have this great new perspective. I want to be one of Life's Winners. I want my herniated disc to be massaged by the loving fingers of Mercedes Benz each morning as I sit in traffic. I want to ride out life's little storms on the front porch of my beach house. I want to think about our bills about as much as I think about what Oprah is reading these days.

Yes, I have crossed over. To quote the tiny, royal tyrant-
"I want it. Let me have it- NOW!!!!"

Maybe it's time I put down Atlas Shrugged....

2004-09-11T21:45:00.000-04:00

It was one of the most stunning days of the year. The kind of day that you wished for as August came to it's scorching end.

The morning was cool. A cloudless, pale blue sky framed the sun perfectly. As people adjusted their seats, opened their books, stared out of their windows and settled into a days work, Poor, not-so-tired-then wife and kingdad were just getting ready to go have our first ultrasound.

It was time to see our handiwork.

Like so many others, we sipped our coffee, skimmed through the paper and gazed out into the flawless heavens as we made our way to our destination.

The parking lot was full. We were excited, and for once didn't mind circling around looking for a space. We were late too. This however was not unusual for us.

We checked in and were instantly ushered into the lobby. I looked for a magazine while poor, not-so-tired-then wife disappeared into the long hallway carrying a little cup to fill.

Is there a doctor's office out there free of golfing magazines? In a perfect world perhaps. CNN was blaring. I could always watch that. But why was everyone gasping and crowding around the TV?

A plane? The World Trade Tower?

Everything stopped. No schedule was kept, no one remembered why they were there. There was no distinction between patient and doctor. The phones stopped ringing and no one said another word.
We all stood a little too close to each other in the anemic light of the lobby. A second plane streaked across the screen.

I don't know when, or why really, but someone decided that it was time to pretend that everything was ok, and that appointments must be kept and the world must keep spinning and it was time for our ultrasound.

There she was, peering out of her murky abode. An alien astronaut gazing out of her safe capsule, wondering what was happening. She moved towards the soundwaves that cascaded across her.

We still have the print outs. They look like something generated in the sonar room of a submarine. The date on the top right corner of the printout reads 09/11/01. Beneath it the time is a minute and a few seconds shy of the collapse of the second tower.

The nurse that administered the ultrasound was crying the entire time that she worked. She said she would always remember the luckiest, safest soul on the planet that day. I don't know if poor, not-so-tired-then wife felt the nurses tears as they fell onto her. Strange that I have never thought to ask.

True to the nurse's word she did remember. Every visit we made to that office she would ask about "that very special little being."

I wish we could always keep her that safe. Just like the families of all of the people that were just going to work, just starting another day that spectacular September morning wished, when they said goodbye at the airport or handed someone a briefcase and said, "see you for dinner?"

As we walked along the beach today I could not help but to think of that morning. The sound of each shell her tiny hand tossed into the faded green bucket seemed more precious than it did yesterday.

And that's pretty hard to imagine.

2004-09-10T22:06:00.000-04:00

This morning I discovered the perfect spot for coffee- The Atlantic Ocean.

The cool water raced across my bare feet as I stared off into a copper hued sunrise. Both hands wrapped around a warm mug. The sun had just risen above the sea’s far off spine, and was just beginning to trace the gently arched backs of the low violet clouds with its fiery golden fingertips.

The girls were still asleep. So was most everyone else on this little strand of coarse sand and tall sea oats. The waves tore away at the beach and tossed it back again. The wind chased clots of foam from the water’s reach and sent them speeding away, tumbling down the long, wheat colored shoreline, towards the darkened houses over the dunes.
I heard a magnificent voice in the water and in the wind, whispering through the long fine tresses of the sunrise as it spilled across my face.

Without a thought my soul quietly answered.

That’s right. We are enjoying a few days seaside.

2004-09-01T20:58:00.000-04:00

Just cooked one oh-so-yummy dinner for the family. In attendance: one poor, tired wife, one royal sunbeam, one mother-in-law, one sister-in-law and one slightly combative 18 month old niece.

The niece used to be docile and somewhat aloof. Now she is a little Mike Tyson, biting earlobes, gouging eyes and making unitelligible war noises as she manhandles her former royal oppressor. She's quite a show.

The ladies, and there were lots of them -and yes they were quite a demanding bunch- enjoyed:

Pan fried flounder with a lemon caper vinaigrette

Fresh field peas cooked slowly with a dollop (one stick) of butter

Heirloom tomato salad tossed with cilantro, cracked green
peppercorns, extra virgin olive oil, pomegranate vinegar and
lime juice

Some of us enjoyed a table worthy French merlot/cab blend

After dinner the ladies retired to the mall. I stayed behind in the toddler free zone to wash the dishes. Neubauten's Perpetuum Mobile shook the windows while I scrubbed away.

I kept laughing at a question poor, tired wife posed to the dinner table. Just how far would battling toddlers go if allowed. Imagine baby Gladiator. What would they be capable of if there was no one there to stop them?

Any thoughts?

2004-08-31T23:14:00.000-04:00

Started my day at the local bigbox home improvement store.

Great place to pick up a nascar cooler and some chrome clips to keep your mullet from getting in the spackling compound. Everything is day-glo orange and the sale associates are just a little too friendly. At least five of them looked me in the eye and said, "how you, man!" while speed walking past me.

But when cornered, did a single one of them know where the items I needed were located? "Sorry buddy..."

Went from the day-glo orange toolbox full of rednecks to the sun baked roof of my house. I have a leak. I have lots of leaks. I thought I just patched them all but a tropical storm dropped by the other day to point out a few more holes that I had missed.

Wet Patch. Sounds firm, efficient. Like it will just spring out of the can, take charge and smooth itself down across every last crack and crevice. There is a picture of a very clean man in a bright blue windsuit on top of his crazy-steep pointy roof with a shiny trowel just working away. He looks like Tony Soprano.

I didn't look like that when I finally descended the ladder for the day. I was covered in tar. Tar is Wet Patch's dirty little secret. Of course I had gloves on but somehow the thick blackness of Wet Patch found it's way into them. That's how good this stuff is I guess. I don't know how it got on my back, maybe when I fell and rolled across the roof?

Odorless Mineral Spirits. Sounds like something Eskimos should leave as an offering to their deceased ancestors. It looks and pours like cheap vodka. It is the only thing you can get Wet Patch off with. Of course you aren't supposed to use it on your skin, but hey, everybody else does. There is a don't ask "don't tell" policy when it comes to using it on your skin. After a long shower I still smell like Odorless Mineral Spirits. I wonder how much longer I will be flammable.

There is a monster hurricane headed our way this week. Guess I'll see how well I did when it arrives.

I wrapped up my day by arguing with poor, tired wife. I went to the library afterwards, and must agree with my Borders lovin' friend swish. Reading may be fundamental but the smell of fresh urine a la homeless man is not. Perhaps this is why so many people give in to the beast and join Oprah's Bookclub. I still refuse to wear the scarlet O. I managed to quickly check out a few books while holding my nose. On my way out it felt sooo good to tell the guy sitting by the door to "ask a rat for it asshole!" in response to his second obnoxious request for spare change. He promptly asked me for a cigarette afterwards, and called out "God bless you motherfucker!" as I walked away.

Soon, I too found myself amongst the pristine shelving of Borders, perusing the newest books and splashy magazines while polite students in super expensive clothes whispered into tiny cell phones, pecked away at Mac's and primly sipped iced chai lattes. An experience sans urine and panhandlers. I gave in and had an iced Americano, then it was off to the grocery store for a bitter, lonely man shopping spree.

Mineral water, pepino melons, custard apples, dark beer and toilet paper. Several men followed me around. Was it the custard apples or my new super short haircut? I felt like I was making a video for a Morrisey song.

Now its you -my precious and so often neglected blog, and me, a dark beer and an even darker Nick Cave before bed-

"Now as the nights grow longer and the season shifts
I look to my sorrowful wife
Who is quietly tending her flowers..."

The morrow brings a new and better beginning for one of us at least. The beloved royal imp starts preschool. I thought about her as I pushed my squeaky cart down aisle 5.

I always think about her.

I wish I could go wake her up and take her outside to show her the low, red moon hanging so perfectly still above the pine trees.

2004-08-29T22:08:00.000-04:00

So much to catch you up on-

Tensions at home, work stress, developmental milestones for the royal inchworm, not to mention the latest on my self loathing.

Oh yeah, weddings. That's a good place to start.

I am going to be in a wedding this weekend. Not an easy feat when your assistant is on vacation, your mother-in-law can't come down to help with childcare, and your broke ass has to rent an expensive but dull-as-hell tuxedo.

I always knew these two would make it legal. This is how I found my way into their wedding. Some small meddling on my part helped to quicken fate and here we all are planning to spend the better part of our weekend celebrating a perfect and much anticipated union.

Most of us are. Except those of us that are less than three feet tall. This is a "child-free" affair. I found this out at the last minute from a hastily left voice mail. I never received an invitation, but if I had, I would have had plenty of time to reconcile my disdain for the tackiness of our American culture.

Or so I gathered from the apologetic message.

"Kid-free!" Quite a surprise coming from the hipster couple that hates rules and wants kids. The couple that adores their friends and their children. The couple that seems like the perfect building block for a family.

Kids are great! Just keep them away from our wedding OK?

There was a convenient story to support the request, but to the person that adores his child, and seeks to include her in almost every aspect of his big life, it's just a story.

A small one at that.

I feel half wanted now. I never felt whole anyway, until I had a child. And trust me, I still look for the missing chunk of myself everyday. My child is most of my life.

I'm sorry happy couple, but I'm jumping through hoops to be a part of your big day. My family -you remember them- is jumping with me. They are helping me to get there, to be with you.

And I assure you, it's a group effort once you say "I do."

You'll see.

But I'll pardon this breech of reason. It is your big day after all. I'm just a small part of it. A token. Never mind that I can take my kid into the liquor store with me, a voting booth, everywhere except the porn store.

-And I will never admit to going THERE!

But fear not. She will pace back and forth in the palace. Her charms will not mar your perfect wedding. She will not compete with you. She will not meet your friends and family. She will not thrill at the mythic pomp and circumstance that we wrap our grown selves in when we say our vows. Don't worry, you won't hear her cry, or laugh, or gasp at the sheer awe of a wedding, -of your wedding- of sharing a part of your huge story. A little part of the huge story of all of us- She won't be there to tell you congratulations either.

Love. It's conditional. You better leave it at home.

Love is conditional at our age. At your wedding, or any wedding we will all be very grown and very sanitized and very calm, until we get drunk. And then we will let it all hang out.

One day my precious royal nuisance will see a picture of kingdada in a tux and ask, "Where's that dada? Who's that?" And I will say, sadly, "Oh you weren't there. You were too little. This was a day for big people only."

I never cease to wonder at the boundaries we create and impose.

2004-08-20T22:15:00.000-04:00

I have not been very nice to be around these past few days. I will confess to being "brooding and moody."

When I read my friend swish's post today, I said to myself, "Hey, I feel that way too..." But I don't have PMS. So I guess I'd have to say that I'm actually a little depressed and I am jealous that I don't have something in my body conspiring against me to blame it on.

Fuck. Now what?

Do I have to wrestle with the truth again?- that sometimes I'm never quite good enough or grand enough for myself. That I have wasted my smarts and talents along the way. That it's harder to turn it all around once you hit a certain age and place in your life.

Ok. I'm face down on the mat with truth now.

I suppose I had a good trigger for all of this. I ran into a couple of people from my past yesterday, two people that were very special and important to me. They loved me, and believed in me and treated me very much like a son.

Trouble is, I'm not their son, and for some reason seeing them made me feel very tiny.

Not to mention older, thicker and grayer.

Splattered with food and pushing a cart full of dirty dishes I present a proud and worthy sight to the people that once encouraged me to go to law school. Alas, such potential. I toy with my name tag as I smile and smile and smile. It reads- KINGDAD-ASST.STORE MANAGER.

Wow! Go me!

By the way, one of the pair teaches law at the big-shit university I wrote about a few days ago. Wonder what he'd think of my hat-man story?

I can sense that my faux family is disappointed for me.

Its hard enough to swallow my own poor life decisions. Having someone else re-enforce the self-loathing really connected all of the dots for me.

At the end of all of this is my poor, tired of my-self-absorbed- ass family. So sorry family, I'll snap out of it.

You are the very best decision I have ever made.

Doesn't everyone detest lawyers anyway?

2004-08-18T21:21:00.002-04:00

Kingdad is a flaming extrovert.

Because I am a social being I am blessed with innumerable friends and associates. All of the mortals that I keep company with have a few essentials in common; huge hearts, brilliant, sleepless minds and the need to find an ideal in everything. Their souls are not quiet, passive souls.

With this stated it should come as no surprise that I greeted the stranger approaching me at the bar with a welcoming and sincere smile. He offered his smooth, open white palm, searching the uncertain space between us for a handshake.

There was trouble here though. Trouble cloaked in neutrality. There were no acute angles. No glaring colors or sounds. No warnings. Just perfect teeth, earthtone clothing and a soft voice, free of any accent.

Big mistake. Trouble offered his hand but not his name. He did not ask for mine either.

Trouble, warmly, "Nice hat."

kingdad, smiling at Trouble, "Thanks."

My newest most favorite of all hats is a straw cowboy hat. It's old and worn and beautiful. It's very much a farmer's hat.

Trouble, still clenching kingdad's trusting hand, "How much?"

kingdad- ".75 cents. Got it in a thrift store in Athens Georgia. Best .75 cents I ever spent."

Trouble- "No. How much?, how much do you want for it? How about $50?"

Huh? I didn't see this one coming.

kingdad- "Sorry, It's not for sale."

I smiled weakly, that oops-so-this-is-how-it-is smile and glanced down at my beer.

Trouble -his nasty hand on my shoulder now- says, "Come on. How much? Any amount. I'm sure you could use it."

The taste was in my mouth now. The schoolyard taste. The taste of ancient fist fights. I swallowed and took a slow sip of my beer. What next?

kingdad- "I'm sorry, what was that? Did you just say that you were sure that I could use it? Are you drunk or just tacky? What I can use is a respite from your presence. The hat is not for sale! Have a grand evening."

Trouble says, smiling and shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders, "Oh no, no, no offense. I'm so sorry. I just meant that here we are, sitting at the bar, and I'm sure a little money would be nice. How much? How much for the hat?"

Am I being "Punk'd?"

No! No I'm not being Punk'd. I'm not famous. This is real. This is classism. This is a state of mind that the blue collar boy in me loathes and seeks not to practice.

But this carpetbagger prick makes it difficult to be noble. He actually thinks that I'm some poor local yuk, willing to part with my hat for a little beer money.

Nevermind that I'm halfway through my third re-read of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.

I have also neglected to mention that this exchange is occurring just a few blocks away from one of the most prestigious universities in America, and that Trouble is with a group of drunken first year law students, and that I am just stopping in after band practice to visit with my brother-in-law the bartender.

kingdad- "Perhaps you should be looking for a little dignity. You should look elsewhere though, mine doesn't have pricetag. How about this, I'll give you ten dollars to go away."

Trouble- "I'm sorry. No offense. I wasn't trying to be rude. Come on, how much for the hat. Surely you'd take $75 for it. It's really nice. I want you to have the money."

My knuckles are itchy now. I'm starting to sweat.

kingdad- "Ok, I'll give you $15 to go away. No wait, better yet, I'll keep my money and you just piss off. It'll take more than my hat to make you interesting. You and your wallet are worthless to me."

Trouble- "Sorry, I wasn't..."

kingdad- "You should start backing away now."

And he did.

How perverse.

2004-08-11T22:52:00.000-04:00

Out of boredom I have been looting my old journals.

While never one for the "Dear Diary..." style entry,
I was nonetheless dramatic and naive.

Here is an entry from January of 1996. I wrote it in some shithole bar in Berlin called Cafe' Anfall, I'm pretty sure that was the name. A shithole it was, and that much I am sure of.

Berlin obviously wasn't far away enough. My heart was broken, and that was the sole reason I was there.

I was a Teutonic Jonah.

I urge you to enjoy this unedited, ancient adolescent musing-

03/06

Like a gun
Hidden under the bed
In a box.

Here was his heart
Wrapped in oilskins,
Packed away in sawdust.

Wrapped in locks of your hair,
Old postcards
And open matchbooks.

Salt stained,
Tattooed
The smell of warm machine oil and green ink

Whisper your name into it bloodless folds.
Drag it through the streets,
Drag it kicking and screaming down to the cold, black skinned river.

Shame it under the noon sun.
Burn it in secret,
Deep in the woods.

Curse it, spit on it, kiss it, cry.
Pray with it.
Hold it against your cheek.

Here was his heart.
Here is what was yours.
It’s Christmas, and your birthday-

2004-08-10T22:00:00.000-04:00

I have taken a vow of silence.

Ok, it has just been just way too easy to neglect my little forum these last 10 days. There really was lots of wisteria to prune off the back of the palace. Really.

Actually, I'm a wreck. I am always a wreck, I know, but this time it's different. The Royal Women have left me.

No, so sorry, they haven't smartened up and made a break for it. They simply went on vacation without me.

Retail management dictates that I am always covering someone else's vacation. I don't really get to take one of my own, especially when it's perfect get-away time. Instead I scavenge my time off from the desolate valleys of the calendar's badlands.

Like a luckless vulture I await my turn in line for the perfect vacation, only to scrape my beak against the brittle, fleshless bones of the used-up months. Months such as February and March. You know, those "in-between season" months when everything is cheap, chilly, wet and a rich shade of shit-brown.

Nick Cave says of early spring in The Loom of The Land, "It was the dirty end of winter..."

I love that song. it's a real weeper. Nick's singing to me as I take out my red this-is-so-official pen and pour over the quarterly calendar in my office, looking for a worthy sandbar on which to run my holiday ship aground.

Oh yeah, my office? I have to share so-called office. It's really just a grubby desk in a corner of a hotbox room.

When I look at the face of Ramses II's mummy I wonder what his office of state looked like. If you haven't ever seen a photo of his mummy, you should. His face is truly incredible. He was the most powerful man on Earth at one time. Even thousands of years later a mighty presence emanates from his regal face.

Alas, I am royalty in mind only.

As for my current state of solitude-

Most men would look at the time I have before me, free of wife and child, as a vacation in and of itself. Sure, I can dig out my old Flipper LP's and play "That's The Way of The World..." or "Sex Bomb" as loud as I want. I can drink wine and skip dinner. I can watch movies absent both absent of plot and long on subtitles, I can garden without interruption -which is what I have spent the most time doing- and keep whatever hours I wish.

In a figurative sense, I can go to bed with Wim Wenders and wake up to Wagner. I am Gotterdammerung damn it! Welcome to my self-absorbed twilight.

But, truth be told. I don't like living with only myself to say good morning to. Not anymore. I miss the joyful, chaotic chorus of my little royal-reason- to-live. I miss the tender directives of poor, tired wife. I crave the humanity of my home.

Try as I may to wash away my loneliness with the noble blood of France's best grapes, the plaintive raindrops of Ostad Lotfi's deftly plucked tar walking softly across the tin roof of my quiet soul, I am absolutely lonely for my family.

They are the best and biggest and brightest noise I have ever heard. They transcend my pathetic personal mythology. They maintain Ma'at for kingdad.

Ma'at?

Go read a book.

2004-08-01T22:21:00.000-04:00

Poor, tired wife sometimes refers to me as brooding and moody.

Whereas I simply think of myself as being fluid. My moods are appropriate to my environment. They change in response to the conditions around me.

Think of kingdad as a mood ring and life as the sweaty finger.

Take today for instance. I was on my way to work while most folks were midway through the Sunday paper. When I arrived I had the idea that my workday was going to be ok as far as work days go. Things seemed quiet, manageable. I would wrap up all of my loose ends today. I'd get ready for the very busy Monday ahead of me.

Then one of my huge retail coolers went down. I noticed a thick sludge in the bottom of the case where the drain should be, a rapidly rising temperature and that faint smell one notices when things just aren't as cold as they should be. Quite a situation to tackle in the middle of the brunch rush.

5 hours of plunging, scrubbing and de-icing passed until I had my problem solved. But now there was another problem to confront.

Since I had to crawl around on my hands and knees, in and out of, on and behind this huge piece of rebellious machinery, my back started screaming. It screamed and screamed for me to stop all of the foolish stooping and bending and lifting. But, I was too busy trying to be a perfect little problem solver. I just didn't listen.

I 'm trying not to listen even now. My red wine ear plugs seem to help.

My day just didn't get any better either, not until I got into my car and peeled away from the scene.

I also blew off family night. Every Sunday is family night. We get together with poor, tired wife's brother, a few of our friends and their kids. It's an important and welcome ritual. I'm sure when asked where kingdad was, poor, tired wife offered- "brooding and moody !"

But I'm not brooding and moody. I'm royally fucking cranky!

2004-07-31T01:50:00.000-04:00

Just got to get it out of the way-

Yes sir John Kerry, yes!, of course I will vote for you!

But, I'm sorrier than hell that you look like Abe Lincoln. Really, you do. Poor tired wife thinks that you resemble Abe's scrotum, but you should forgive her for saying that because she's gonna vote for you too. Besides, excepting Mary Todd Lincoln and the delegates attending the DNC who's seen honest Abe's saggy old change purse lately?

I won't even start with the John Ritter/John Edwards thing.

So, I had a few crap days chasing the paycheck. Sure would like to be rich so I can stop wasting my time endlessly rotating "product," running numbers and trying to inspire underpaid youngsters to follow my every martha-like command.

Care to help with this new endeavor humble visitor?

At least my work day was brightened by two treasured visitors. Swish and hubby came in for a poke around the little market in the heart of the village of the damned. Sure was nice to see them. Actually, it made my night.

Considering my working man's angst, it's no surprise that I am up way later than I should be while poor, tired wife and snuggly royal bed warmer curl against each other in our way-too-small bed.

How can I go to bed when there is plenty of ruby-red lusciousness to be savored. Not to mention Sonic Youth drifting through my headset-

Mmmm, Kim Gordan whispers, "Beauty lies in the eye..."

I have been on a huge nostalgia kick with the music lately. I humbly recommend dusting off:

Hyaena -Siouxsie and The Banshees
It'll End in Tears -This Mortal Coil
The Bride Ship -Crime and The City Solution
Sister -Sonic Youth
The Good Son -Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds
Rum, Sodomy and The Lash -The Pogues
Foreign Affairs -Tom Waits
Sandanista! -The Clash
Porcupine -Echo and The Bunnymen
The Man Machine -Kraftwerk

One of these masterpieces could actually save your life.

As for something almost new, how could I drive to work everyday without being catapulted through rush hour traffic like a Valkyrie by Einsturzende Neubauten's Perpetuum Mobile!? The title track alone will produce an instant erection in manner und frauen alike. I promise.

I save God Speed You Black emperor's Lift Your Skinny Fists... for my fiery descent back into the ghetto necropolis I call home.

It's late, your just gonna have to trust me on all of this, ok?

2004-07-28T23:10:00.000-04:00

Took the little Highness to visit old fuzzy grandparents today.

As usual when we entered the humble house of kingdad's birth, the TV was blaring, the drapes were closed and I swear the heat was cranked to the nines.

Upon entering we were enveloped in thick mists of oldness. A miasma comprised of worn shag carpeting, burnt microwave popcorn, mothballs, numerous lotions, ointments and medications, suspended in midair by the evil spell of cheap air freshener and an unmistakable twinge of bathroom funk.

These are a few of my not-so-favorite things.

Still, underneath it all it strangely smells like home. Anyway, after two years of swampy diapers and the foul breath of the diaper genie the smell of my parent's decline is negligible.

Royal visitor is unfazed by the dark and aged den. She knows that inside treats are waiting- candies that I hurry by in the grocery store, toys that I frown upon and food that isn't really food at all. She lets go of my hand and rushes forward to revel in the thrills of the forbidden, the indulgent twinkle of Grandma and Granddaddy. My parents look youthful for an instant. Everything in the room lights up.

Except for me. I hurt inside. Its so hard to see all of our clocks racing ahead, as I sit on the tired sofa and watch my parents fade away.

I was told today that my Dad recently had a mini-stroke. Of course I had one of those 'told you so' moments with my Mother, because I knew my Dad's recent confusion seemed much more pronounced these last few visits, and was told it was nothing unusual. It has always been hard for him to admit his vunerability even though it's a huge neon sign that flashes above his little bald head.

What makes the royal imp happy, makes me sad.

I never thought that it would be so hard to go home, but it is. It's hard to see the peolple that raised you, that held your hand and read to you, that taught you most everything that you know simply diminish.

Couldn't help myself on the way home and played old friend Dexter Romweber's Blues That Defy My Soul just a little louder than I probably should have.

My passenger didn't seem to mind since she was all pumped up on sugar.

2004-07-20T21:09:00.000-04:00

I am a perfectionist. This means that I am cursed. I see silver linings, but they always need a very thorough polishing.

My friends still think that I am kidding when I tell them that I clean the bathroom with a toothbrush.

I am working on this little character flaw. Really, I am. For example, everyday I try to find fault with half of the things that needed drastic improvement the day before.

To achieve my objective, I simply lie to myself.

Tonight we went to look at a house in our neighborhood that we've been admiring lately. Our appointment was around dinner time, which is ironically, when I was attempting to cook dinner. The hardwood coals were glowing perfectly as we left for a supposedly short tour of our would-be dream house.

Of course by the time we got back the coals had burned down to piles of lukewarm ash. It was also closing in on 9 pm As it happens I have a new little rule to guide myself with, and that's not to cook or eat dinner past 7:45 pm. So, I found myself in quite a bind.

Still the answer was simple-

Poor, tired wife and sleepless royal powder keg are sitting together enjoying the few things that I could put on the table quickly while I sit down in the other room to feast on steaming hot self-loathing and a hefty side of red wine.

I'll bend someone else's rules, but my own rules are unbreakable golden laws. They are the divine tenets that keep my crazy kingdom intact.

Where's that silver polish?...

2004-07-18T22:29:00.000-04:00

Sometimes the act of driving can be enjoyable.

I became my own private Volkswagen ad tonight. The temperature has dropped a little these last few nights, so everywhere I go I have the windows down.

Tonight as the cool night air rushed through the car I got lost in my favorite summer listen, Serge Gainsbourg.

What a brilliant man Serge was.

His music is bold, mixing many contradictory seasonings that just somehow cook out to become his own savvy dish. He was a huge fan of Afro-pop, bubblegum music (and the nubile chantueses that popularized it) and jazz.

He forcefed a generation of superficial record execs the stunning beauty of his ugly genius. He was most often drunk, sometimes high, always clever and usually reeked of stale smoke and sex. He wrote songs that questioned and mocked love, politics and modern European culture. He is best known for his steamy duets with lover Brigitte Bardot and wife Jane Birkin.

He is also remembered for propositioning Whitney Houston in French on an American late night talk show shortly before his death of a heart attack.

As I made my way home in the darkness from running errands Serge Gainsbourg made the ordinary sweet and thrilling. With each carefully constructed phrase I pushed against the gas pedal a little harder.

I had no choice. It was 'l'anamour' and 'les sucettes' that drove me. It was 'je t'aime... moi non plus' that made pulling into the driveway for the evening painful.

2004-07-16T23:12:00.000-04:00

Beloved Aunt Mimi and Uncle Peepee came for a visit this past week. They are the kind of friends that end up feeling more like family than family does sometimes. They broke our hearts by moving to Waco Texas.

Sure, we gave them no end of guilt for leaving us. We shoveled load after steaming load at them for moving away, and away to Waco at that. But they come home still. And when they come, our little royal abode glows a little brighter and feels just a bit more regal.

Ok, so we downed a fifth of rum in an evening. But the glow was real I tell ya...

We went on an impromptu royal progress to the sea together just before the prodigal bums up and left us again.

The beach we visited is so seedy that I now refer to it as "the little scab by the sea."

In just one short stroll Uncle Peepee and Kingdad saw the following sights:

A 14-15 year old Hispanic girl with waist length bleached blond hair. Packed snugly into terry cloth hot pants (just a thread or two away from being a thong) and an inch wide tube top sans any undergarments, she was dutifully sweeping the floor of her family's brothel/grocery store with a cigarette hanging from her painted, glossed and perfectly outlined lips. She had a few tattoos located on some choice physical real estate and seemed to be available "to let."

Another lost teenaged waif wearing a shirt that said "pornstar." She looked more than a little drunk and was sitting on the porch with five or six middle aged drunk men. One of them kept pulling her onto his lap and kept yelling, "it's just a little black and white thang baby. Come on!..." She went from lap to lap as we sauntered by. I later noticed her walking with another tragedy that was perhaps her mother. They were with the same group of men, although they seemed to have gotten quite high by then.

Some very leathery people with horrible hair drinking low carb beer with their kids. This scene provided the answer to our "where are the parents here" question.

Lots of men with little teeny-tiny legs and great big bellies strutting around their sandy territories like great silver-backed gorillas. Shirtless of course, he-breasts swaying over giant paunches. All of these men had spent way too much time in the sun and were the color of wet cardboard. More than a few of them had mullets and sported really blotchy patriotic tattoos

A strange she-creature with foot deep make-up in fishnet stockings crawling out of her big shiny new truck, Pat Benetar's 'Love is a Battlefield' blaring from the open cab. She leered at us and then proceeded to look at Uncle Peepee's large drooling dog with an unmistakably lusty, longing gaze. Apparently anything awful was possible here (Dear Penthouse Letters...) so we bolted!

Everywhere we went people seemed to think we were gay German tourists. Was it our straw cowboy hats? Gosh, everyone else was wearing them too.

We ate at a so-called restaurant that served steamed shrimp that was not deveined. A note to all you know-it-all waiters out there- yes that is shrimp shit in that thar vein, and NO- it's not "supposed ta look like that."

Otherwise we had a wonderful tour of the lowest of the low country.

Come back Mimi and Peepee!!!!!!!!

2004-07-08T22:25:00.000-04:00

It gets harder and harder to write these days.

So many nights I sit and stare at the empty screen. I usually end up nodding off after typing a few letters.

Life used to flow from my fingers.

Now I am swirling in it's eddy. Perhaps this is better than sitting wide eyed and naked on the cold bank, tracing the letters of life's little story about with my fingers in the sand.

I don't take enough pictures or make enough phone calls either. I have put down my net and am letting the days flutter away freely.

What will be left to find in my ruins one day, if I should just start to feel it and stop recording it?

2004-07-02T08:51:00.000-04:00

Have had more to do than to say these days. Sometimes this is good.

Last night I went to a movie with poor, tired wife. It's been two years since we last sat in a theatre together. There was no making out this time. Thank you trusted babysitter for getting us out of the royal confines.

Of course we went to see Fahrenheit 9/11.

As much as I have tried to refrain from discussing politics here at kingcentral I have to say this, just once-

If there is such a thing as justice and democracy in America then when will we see Bush and Cheney being led off to trial in handcuffs. Better still, being led into the same courtroom where Saddam Hussein sits today.

Afterall, Bush and Cheney have destroyed two countries.

Just a thought.

2004-06-23T21:21:00.000-04:00

Still sick!

Woke up feeling a little stronger only to be felled by a migraine before I had even finished my first cup of coffee. I did beat it back, but it takes so much out of me each time when I do. Poor, tired wife and old, shaky parents came to my rescue by entertaining the royal pixie while I did battle within my skull. She does like to get moving first thing, so I was indeed rescued.

We managed to salvage part of our stormy day together, with a trip to the grocery store -where a certain small shopper absolutely pillaged the free pineapple samples- and our first trip to the library together.

Royal reader behaved better than I had expected. She did chase a pale little boy with huge Gollum-like eyes until he ran crying to his papa. Just when he thought he'd found safe harbor she approached him to ask, "What'cha doin? Are you scared? Look, I got a book, see..." His huge eyes bulged a little further than they should have and he shrunk to his knees. At this point I played nicey-nice and pretended to take control over someone's behavior. Quietly, the pale, bug-eyed boy's smaller rat-eyed brother sat on the floor to the left of papa thumbing through his book a bit too quickly. He didn't seem to notice anything going on around him. His book was upside down.

Pale, bug-eyed boys always get chased. That's why they usually grow up to manage banks, build pipe bombs or become porn stars. Rat-eyed boys always seem to squeak by, mostly unnoticed, but usually do well for themselves. Sometimes they even grow up to become President. Rats are wily creatures.

So after lots of pain, rain and good company this day is over. The animals are quiet, one sleeping on the rug by my feet and the other stretched rebelliously across poor, tired wife's brand new barkcloth pillows. I can almost hear the girls snoring together in the other room.

Earlier I wanted my two days off to start all over again, but I guess it's how the time ends that really makes the difference.

2004-06-21T22:16:00.000-04:00

After watching the remake of Salem's Lot, it's hard to believe that Rob Lowe will ever work again.
What a truly dreadful "television event."

Never mind that it was broadcast in two installments over two nights and that I watched every last horrible second of it.

I really don't watch much TV, but tonight I had a good excuse.

I'm sick. I'm really fucking sick. What else is there to do when you are sporting a 102.6 degree temp, a constant thud behind your eyeballs, an elephant's foot on your lungs and your throat feels like you have been gargling with hot coals? Put on a hoodie, take more meds and watch TNT until the warm embrace of Actifed overcomes you.

Happy day after Father's Day to me!

Speaking of Father's-

Today my Father came over to watch the royal treasure for a few hours. He can't hear so well anymore, so you have to shout when you talk to him and then he wants to know why your angry. The only voice he seems to hear clearly, hanging on her every word, shout and whisper is that of his royal granddaughter. He worships her. My mother does too, but she didn't come today so it was all Pops.

It tears me up to watch him with her, because I can see just how he was with me, and how one day I will feel as lonely for my little child running around spilling juice and saying "I love you Dada!" as he must feel. And of course I can't help realizing that I will want to see my Father one day and he won't be there anymore.

My Father is an amazing gentle man. I love him so much it makes me sad.

When I hold my daughter's hand, when I listen to her breath while she's sleeping, I am overcome by my love for her presence. It is a love more powerful than any other I have ever known. I have my parents to thank for this, for sharing their love with me so that I would know how to share it with her.

2004-06-17T00:00:00.000-04:00

Royal daughter is turning into a Royal Ramone. When asked what she wants for breakfast the answer is "pizza!" For lunch?, "pizza!" How about dinner? "Pizza Dadas"

Clever little diplomat pluralizes the person she is trying to obtain something from. Makes you think, "Wow, there's more of me! I must be pretty fucking important." An effective bargaining tool. Maybe I'm not the only sucker that falls for it, but I do fall for it everytime.

So today I found myself at our favorite grungy little pie-house for lunch. They know her by name there now. When we walked in the "pizzaman" said to his coworker, "Toss two slices in, she's back." She has a way with the food service sector. It's in her blood. No matter where we happen to eat, she gets the best table and a tour of the kitchen.

Our romance with the pie is perhaps an unhealthy but nonetheless wonderful ritual. Its part of our bond. It used to be strictly a Saturday thing, but now it's anytime we are together for the afternoon when I am off. Whatever moments we steal together makes me happy.

I love taking the royal one anywhere, but there is just something magic to me about taking her out for a nibble. Sharing a meal is definitely synonymous with love in our household. Even if someone else makes it.

Our lunch-

While two slices bubble away in the old double stacker, a pile of steak sizzles away on the griddle.

Sorry PETA, I just had to cave in. A hot NY style cheese steak hoagie is just too powerful of a temptation to resist now that I am eating meat again. I never was very good at denying myself much of anything as poor,tired vegetarian wife likes to point out so often.

"Dada ate a cow today honey, how about that?"

I furrow my bushy brow and moo.

It's as if I'd stopped to purcahse an eight ball on the way home from a brothel.

Sorry poor, tired mama, but every cell in my made-to-eat-meat body is driving me to eat flesh. Pretty low sin on the totem I'd say. What next? Will I pawn our lawn mower for ground chuck? Is there such a thing as a "gateway" meat?

I'm a carnivore again. There, I said it.

And I like it.

Fear not. Royal daughter doesn't eat the forbidden flesh. When she's old enough to understand where it comes from then it's her choice to make.

Until then it's just two slices for the little Ramone and a whole cow for Dadas

2004-06-16T00:01:00.000-04:00

I have wallowed.

I have whined a little, but yes, I have whined.

I have shared it all with you too. So now I can't deny it.

Somehow in the midst of the me bashing, I decided to make a pact with myself.

If you give a spoon to a prisoner they will probably do one of two things with it. The first thing is to eat, whatever the hell they eat in the pokey, and the other is to dig a tunnel. I like the tunnel idea. What's not to love about a tunnel, an escape plan, a way out!?

I have a spoon. I have a myriad of spoons actually, and I will use each and every last one of them to end up with the sweet sunlight on my face. Poor, tired wife will be relieved and royal daughter will be proud. Kingdad is bustin' loose.

Came up with the name, "Console" for the new band. Think of an instrument panel, not an act of empathy.
We play our first show this Friday.

This is going to be one bent, dirty spoon.

2004-06-13T23:20:00.000-04:00

Some people need to go to a meeting.

Some people need to get right with Jesus.

Me, I just need to drive home from work in a thunderstorm with the Nick Cave pounding the railroad spike of "The Carny" into the center of my soul.

And just when the clouds seem to have tossed the sun into a quicklime pit for good, there's always The Pogues -Shane MacGowan's shot-o-gravel sweet voice- peeling the lead from my horizon, "Down All The Days..."

I balance my life with love and music.

No one thing is the answer, but at least I listen.

2004-06-11T22:52:00.000-04:00

A wonderful, sharp woman once cautioned me that I was too serious.

She spent time in an East German prison for helping people escape to West Berlin. She was sort of a German Eartha Kitt to me. She wore a cape, smoked incessantly, wore sandals that were made to resemble black snakes and kept her short, choppy hair a less-than-natural shade of red. She often wore leather pants to breakfast. Not a bad look for someone over 50.

I used to joke that we were from the same planet and that's why she was so fond of me. She laughed, for only a second of course, before exhaling smoke into my face and telling my that I looked like a hedgehog, and there were no hedgehogs on her planet. My hair was choppy then too.

Besides, was I "really so sure that she was fond of me?"

Of course I was.

This wonderful, sharp woman also cautioned me against getting lost in "Blut und Erde Musik" Only the Germans would have a term like "Blood and Earth Music."

And here I am years later sitting with my back to the window as lightening turns the room into an x-ray, listening to the soundtrack from "Betty Blue" and contemplating what it means to be a "post-modern Flying Dutchman."

Am I too serious, or am I just plain self-indulgent? Pretentious too?

Don't be in any big hurry to 'message' me the answer to this little musing. I know it.

A most wonderful and sharp poor, tired wife -who has never smoked and has beautiful, naturally red hair- knows it too, better than anyone. She gives me the same message daily, but in English and it is less of a cautionary observation coming from her. I think it's a plea. "Lighten up asshole, please!"

I'm trying, really I am. But it is so hard to find a balance between dark and stormy. This is why I had to remind myself of Frau R.S. At least she earned her personal stormcloud.

When I think of the nature of my complaints it would seem that mine was ordered from Urban Outfitters.

2004-06-10T21:47:00.000-04:00

I write as often as I get lucky these days. Sorry.

Its so hard to decide which pail to squeeze the last drip of my energy into.
OK, I am always going to choose sex first. I am married afterall.

I miss the clockless salad days of staying home with royal daughter. Seems like there was always time to do it all. I shopped, I cooked and I cleaned. I kept a certain little someone entertained, changed, napped and fed all day long without complaint. I fed poor, tired wife meal after amazing meal. I practiced with my band, wrote poetry, read two books a week. I worked in my then glorious garden, and maintained two others for friends. I was close to getting my own business off the ground. I blogged more often than most married folks have sex each week.

Life was under constant construction. I was loose, happy.

I was free.

And now once a week I sit down to pour it all out and there is just so little left to pour. I see and feel and think as much as I did back in my "sabbatical." But now I am just so fucking tired. I am always tired. By the time the dishes are done, so am I.

And for this I am so sorry.

I think of my beloved ancient Egypt. How the sun's fiery fingers once played across the gilt skin of Amarna. Across polished stone and freshly kohled eyes.

Today the sun rose high and slowly fell into the dusty, silent mouth of ruins nestled far away in a chalky white open palm above the Nile River. The same sun rose over me this morning as I drove to work, slurping burnt coffee from a broken travel mug, weaving dully from lane to lane while news of nothing oozed from the radio. And then the sun collapsed over my home, just a few hours ago while poor, tired wife read "Lowly Worm" to our precious royal somnambulist.

I don't even remember finishing my coffee this morning. Where did this wine I am now drinking come from?

Energy is drawn from us, water pulled from the cool hollows of the ground to evaporate. Our days stretch and burn away, into dusty amber colored shadow. A bleached bone sticking from the dried mud of a once teeming watering hole is all that remains to speak of life.

2004-06-03T21:34:00.001-04:00

My wife recently asked me if I was having a mid-life crisis.

"No," I told her, "I'm just bored."

One of the many things that I am quite bored with is the term "mid-life crisis."

It completely neuters the truth. It turns a profound series of revelations into a Hallmark moment. I'm pretty sure that we are one of the only cultures that actually uses the term "mid-life crisis," which explains so much about our culture.

Perhaps I should start saying "MLC" just to keep in step with the whole "WMD" trend.

So far I haven't run off with my secretary -I don't even have one. I have no desire to drive an ostentatious sports car, and I have not gone on the Adkins diet. Really, I am just bored, and maybe a bit blue.

It is sad that time becomes so precious because we seem to have less of it to spend with what is truly precious to us in life. How many of us will ask ourselves as we are dying, "Why didn't I spend one more day at work? Just one more -gasp- day. Who won American Idol?..."

Here is a short list of things that just don't move me- ever-

WORK- I cannot lie. I wish I had been born with platinum spoons hanging from my ass and mouth. I'd rather be playing music, painting my toenails and writing meaningless manifestos while admiring the view of the river Spree from the window of my flat. Instead I see myself attempting to sell organic produce to women wearing platinum tennis bracelets. They name their children Hunter, Zoe and Mitchell.

MONEY- Sure, I love having it. I love spending it too. Buying a CD every now and then really helps me to continue the illusion that I am happy and free. When I throw a nice Rhone together with a piece of endangered fish I feel like a king for a moment. Then I have to wash the dishes.

LIVING IN THE US- So sorry to all of you flag wavers out there, but I think living in the US is dreadful. Yes we are free, sort of, and free to be the tackiest beings on earth, and yes, I will leave it one day, so save your red, white and stinky blue breath. As long as my parents are breathing I will continue to drive everywhere, supersize every last thing that I purchase, endure American Idol, The Outback Steakhouse, Walmart, school shootings, and the outrage over Janet's nasty lookin' nipple. But one day, Hello Berlin!

TV- With the exception of the occasional archaeology documentary, and a few HBO unmentionables, I know enough cynical, well-off, balding white guys without having to feign interest in a pretend one named Frasier.

KATHY LEE GIFFORD- When she pens "KATHY LEE- AN ANAL DIARY" then maybe I will reconsider.

PARIS HILTON- Someone has recycled George Hamilton! Paris is a bit more orange than George, but I suspect his sex tape would have lasted longer.

SHIZZLE MY NIZZLE- From Compton to MTV. Snoop has become the spokesman for the slightly lighter than peach crowd. Funny how this seems to always happen.

NASCAR- Rednecks dressed in Kraftwerk garb, endlessly circling each other at incredibly high speeds. NASCAR sort of makes Shania Twain make sense. Maybe they should circle her.

THE ADKINS DIET- You may die skinny my friend, but you are still gonna die. Also, you and your slender-but-fat-packed arteries are driving up my families health insurance premiums.

GOLF- Nothing can make your ass any tighter in kingdad's world. What a waste of good, green grass. The two-tone shoes are the only point of interest in this so-called sport. Notebook paper is everybit as white as the game of golf, yet much more interesting somehow.

I have to cut myself off here. It's late, my list is long and I suspect I am boring you.

2004-05-27T22:30:00.000-04:00

Sometimes my drive home from you-know-where is like taking a train ride through Land of The Futile.

I always try to leave work at a reasonable time, which means about two hours after I was supposed to.

No matter how early I leave to get to work I am always ten minutes late, and no matter what time I attempt to leave I am always two hours late getting home. Strange indeed.

So I start my little tour of the absurd by sitting in traffic. There is always an abundance of traffic here. Thanks to my uncomfortable, fuel eating, overpriced lemon-of-a-VW for at least having a kick-ass stereo.

I sit in a molten pool of lower lumbar pain with Blixa Bargeld. Blixa asks me, "Wo ist der Schlussel? Wo ist mein Hut?" He then states, "Ich gehe jetzt."

Too bad I am not going too. I sit through the same traffic light for twenty minutes. Next to me an anemic skinny blonde in a Goliath SUV chats it up on her little silver phone. Never can tell when you might have to storm an Ann Taylor. Horse power always comes in handy to the weak.

As I look homeward (sorry Thomas W.) I am confronted by two scenes of total futility. A scrawny Hispanic man blows grass clippings into the street with a leaf blower only to have them curl back to the curb behind him as traffic whizzes by.

Undaunted he blows on. Of course this would not happen in my lane.

In front of him is a bronze, rather muscular woman riding a stand-up riding mower (imagine a chariot if you will, for heroic landscapers) talking on a cell phone. She screams into the phone and blows grass into the street and all over the little man walking behind her with the leaf blower.

Am I really getting up to do this all over again tomorrow?

Why can't I just stay home with my radiant inspiration and scramble eggs all day?

Royal sunbeam has really done well with the breast-free lifestyle so far. She sleeps a lot. Is this one of the first twelve steps?

I hope poor, tired wife is faring as well as she cruises L.A.

2004-05-25T00:11:00.000-04:00

There is lot's of late night activity here at Camp Wean-Ray.

Special Royal Resident started off quiet enough, then became restless just as I was ready to say "all is well." to nervous wife on the telephone.

I said it anyway. I tried to be a good husband.

She has gotten up three times, downed three bottles of whole milk, two cups of water, and told me that she wanted to "go to Super Target to get Mommy."

She forgot that Mommy happens to be in "Cowifornifornifa"

It's too late to go to Super Target anyway. How many times can I feign interest in the same gaudy fiestaware-wannabes this week while Royal Shopper screams for Hello Kitty sunglasses?

I have decided to bend the rules and allow Special Royal Resident to sleep on the sofa for a little while as this seems to be the only place she wants to be.

Poor, tired wife and Aunt Mimi have arrived safely in LA. I have done my best to encourage "Mommy" to spend money like we actually have some, drink screwdrivers morning, noon and night, look up Dr. Dre and eat sushi for breakfast. But, I know she will toss and turn just like the little being on the couch behind me, and measure her days by the absence "nurse me's."

I can hear their bond stretching as I type. At the same time, I can also feel the love that they left with one another, love that is always within reaching distance in the middle of the night.

2004-05-21T22:59:00.000-04:00

There is someone in my house that has no idea that she is about to be weaned.

Even though our little lacto-junky seems to understand that poor, tired wife is getting "into da airpawane and, um, and um, um gonna go ta Cowifornifornifa**" on Monday, little does she understand the rest. It's over. The well has run dry. Frank Sinatra is going to float between Hollywood-sized sets of poor, tired wife's arid breasts crooning "My Way" while royal daughter wanders about in the foreground looking confused.

**sort of sounds like Bobby Brown asking Whitney where the pills are stashed at a surprise traffic stop.

Kingdad and royal imp have prime seating for WeanFest. We are going to go through this particular Hell together. Well, ok, my mother-in-law is coming down to help, even though I told her that the vodka tonics are enough to nurse us through. She's a saint.

I am actually looking forward to this trial. Now I'll see if I'm half the dad I profess to be. Perhaps I should teach my little milk deprived music lover to sing, "I love it when you call me Big Poppa..."

What a wonderful welcome home this would be.

2004-05-19T23:57:00.001-04:00

I never imagined that I could love anyone as much as I love my daughter.

Before we had her, people told us about this feeling, and I just feigned some crude understanding of what they meant. But when I first saw her and held her that early morning when she was born, what I had heard or thought about didn’t even scratch the surface.

There is no way on earth that I can tell you how much I love her, or anyone else now for that matter.

The world is full of weights and measures. Weighing and measuring and counting things is dull.

Love is just not meant to be tossed on the scale.

How can I quantify the elation I feel when my daughter shows me something that she made? Or she asks me to carry her when she is too tired to walk. Or swears, or laughs. I can’t. I can just tell you that at that moment every molecule that I am comprised of is charged with pure electric life.

This fiery little person is it for me!

It is so tragic to think that most of us spend more time coolly and quietly pushing headstones towards our graves than we do swooning at the sight and sound of someone we helplessly adore, someone or something that makes us feel slightly immortal for an instant.

People that do not love scare the shit out of me.

2004-05-18T22:50:00.000-04:00

I just got back from seeing Einsturzende Neubauten.

I took my brother-in-law, who shall be referred to from here on out as Uncle Pants.

Uncle Pants is also one of my closest friends. Up until my last post, we were also in a band together. We started the band almost eleven years ago. Things were so much easier then, no wives, no kids and no steady incomes. Our lives were marinated in cheap malt liquor and enshrouded by cigarette smoke. Music is a great bond between us.

One day Pants was dumb enough to let me meet his sister. You'd think after all he knew about me he wouldn't have let that happen. But he did.

He kept a picture of sis on his mantle. Every time that I went over for a visit I would say, "Your sister sure looks like Molly Ringwald. I've always had a thing for Molly Ringwald. Hmmm..."

Uncle Pants often says he wished he'd flipped the picture over before I noticed it. Now he's stuck with me.

We had such an amazing time together these last few days.

I'm glad Pants finally got to see Neubauten.

The stage was packed with giant springs, sheets of polished chrome, cylinders joined into chandelier shaped clusters with endless coils of wire, massive aluminum tubes and a myriad of drums, canisters and metal bars.

Add a few middle-aged well dressed Germans to this and you have a rock show.

Pants and kingdad instantly agreed, pretty inspirational to see a group of people make such a colossal sound together. They have been showering mesmerized fans with sparks and jet exhaust for well over twenty years, and they just seem to be entering their prime.

We also agreed that it is scary to stare the future in the face. The Neu-boys are still skinny in most places, but there were some paunches to be seen poised majestically above high-waisted, tight black trousers. There were some saggy chins in attendance too.

Why do men's necks resemble the necks of iguanas as they grow older?

The show was amazing. Sounds so delicate that they could've been composed by snowflakes, followed by sonic booms, scrapes and cracks, the sounds of alien machines mating in an electric midnight ocean.

And the sound of the German tongue, which is still the very heart of poetry to my ears.

Royal daughter jumps around when I play Neubauten at home. She happily identifies with Blixa Bargeld's sing-song musings. There is a certain Willy Wonka-like quality to him I suppose.

Pants said it best,

"Blixa looks like a singing carp in a suit with a wig on his head."

A magic singing carp really.

As magical as my trip was, coming home casts a much bigger spell on me. I am just not at peace until I hear the sound of poor, tired wife and royal daughter breathing together in the darkness while I try to get comfortable, searching for sleep.

2004-05-11T01:43:00.001-04:00

Just quit my band of almost eleven years. We are getting old enough to play cruise ships now. I don't look very good in a powder blue tux, so I had to make the move.

Sorry boys.

I've started a new project. So far just a duo. We conjure up spooks from the quiet sands, guide long-lost pilots as they circle endlessly overhead. And we can beach whales too. We use a guitar, a singing saw and a shortwave radio to pull this off.

Too bad we can't do the "turn the water into wine" thing. That's the only thing holding us back at the moment. Sure would be nice to not have to actually purchase wine. I have managed to upsell myself these last few years.

Gone are the days of Boone's Farm.

Gone are the days of Malt Swagger

Sometimes you just have to kiss a seemingly perfect familiar thrill goodbye. Just before it looses it's remaining magic. Then look back fondly with that "far-away smile."

Sorry boys.

2004-05-09T01:17:00.000-04:00

If I could, I would commission a giant golden statue to be made in her likeness. Well, her likeness as she likes it.

It would sit in the center of a sapphire hued pool, in the midst of a sprawling garden, raised on a base of gleaming stone, accentuated by electrum, pink sapphires and rubies. The sun would reflect off of her flawless skin and marry with her patient nature. At all times of the day, she would radiate. The very image of love under the protective canopy of a shining naos.

An army of attendants would scurry about her, ritually taking care of her every need. Endless pedicures, facials, neck rubs and countless other adorations would be lavished upon her.

Of course, clinging to her taut gilt calves would be two needy waifs. Insignificant in size compared to the magnificent height of the gleaming idol, but obvious still, a pair of dependents that could not possibly exist without her. Parasites that thrive in her presence.

As a final touch, she would appear to be at rest and free of worry as her perfect golden breasts constantly gushed milk.

It is a good thing indeed that I am king in mind only.

But poor, tired wife, the real power behind the well being of our household really does deserve such a golden totem. Who else can hold the world upright with one hand on a scant three hours of sleep, somehow maintaining balance and order while the selfish dreamers around her yammer for more? Her beauty never fades and her care for those in need of love, attention and comfort never diminishes.

I shudder to think of what would befall us without The Queen Mum.

Sad that the mothers of the world get only one day of acknowledgement. Perhaps this is why the world remains in such peril.

Happy Mother's Day poor, tired Mom! Your court truly loves you.

2004-05-05T22:14:00.000-04:00

Extreme Makeover is so extremely UGLY.

I keep hoping to see someone with teary eyes, sobbing and pleading, "Doc, can you make me look like Joan Rivers?" In my fantasy world it's someone like Idi Amin. Ok, Idi is dead, but maybe Joan is too. Who knows? Surgeons are so talented these days.

At the end of the show a panel of judges, including Simon from American Idolatry and the ever-so-lovely Melissa Rivers will have to guess which contestant is the real Joan.

I think that Melissa Rivers is a by-product of one of Joan's surgeries. Perhaps an excised bunion or a polyp.

Poor, tired wife thinks that Extreme Makeover Reversal could be fun, You know, Gisele Bundchen could be transformed into Dick Cheney. She also suggests a possible market for Extreme Baby Makeover.

Any day now The Coliseum will reopen and we will all cheer the hungry lions.

2004-04-30T23:26:00.000-04:00

Why do people drive Hummers?

Every time I see one I want to don my keffiyah, pick up a fake RPG and have a little fun with the driver.

So sorry to burst the worthless ten-ton bubble you may be driving around in, but unless there is a war going on in the burb where you make your HQ, you have no excuse for driving a tank.

Tonight on the way home, just as Joe Strummer's voice rasps above the gentle guitar of 'Rebel Waltz' the cabin of my car is flooded by an intense and unnatural glow. I look into the rearview mirror and swear that I am being followed by an oil rig. I've never seen so many lights.

Is it a UFO? No such luck, it's a fucking Humvee.

Of course the little general driving it has to pass me. I am driving a small, sensible German car after all. I am the perfect target.

As the massive, bright yellow barge roars by me, I take notice of the driver. Our eyes meet in the darkness. I understand now, this is who drives a Hummer. The driver is none other than a very little man that I happened to toss out of the store I used to manage for shoplifting. He used to steal from our store because we "showed him great disrespect" by asking him not to park his goliath SUV in the handicapped space in front of our entranceway. A peculiar kink for a doctor.

Napoleon buries the gas pedal into the floorboard. Five and not-quite half a foot of coifed, whiter-than-white mighty maleness surges by. My VW shakes in his wake. Joe Strummer stutters.

The behemoth and it's tiny pilot position themselves in front of me. In a final act of subjugation I am force-fed the vanity plate.
It simply reads- "MINE"

Victor now leads the vanquished.

I wonder?, should little Dr. Stealmore have spent his new found wealth on a penile extension instead of a huge assault vehicle. At some point, he does have to park it and get out. What does he use for camouflage then?

I know it might sound judgmental when kingdad alleges a correlation between driving a Humvee and wielding an insignificant weapon.

But that's ok. I'm the king here.

2004-04-30T00:17:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the gods for the Darvocet! It not only eases my pain, but affords me a well earned and greatly detached glimpse into the murky fishbowl of my ridiculous professional life.

I keep hoping that the drugs will strangle off my useless perfectionism, but so far no luck. The world still appears to be half empty and its inhabitants unfocused, uncaring and sloppy.

Outside of my door, there is not one piece of un-bruised fruit in my basket.

I sit through endless meetings and hours talking to freakish customers who are plagued by "god awful gas" and "recently acquired wheat allergies."

I sometimes wonder if one miligram more would enable me to dole out the much needed truth, "Gee Mrs. Crampyass, maybe the soy and the glutens aren't really the issue here, maybe you're just fucking nuts!"

What misdeed did I commit in my past life to justify being held hostage by the digestive disorders of strangers.

So hard to return to work after three days in the company of my family, but at least love makes the stench of my own problems smell like freshly opened gardenia blossoms after a day at work.

2004-04-29T00:02:00.000-04:00

Just who and what are The Wiggles?

This was the burning issue at the park today.

A bunch of broken down old daddies get together every Wednesday. Usually we meet at the home of my brother-in-law, but today was just too beautiful to spend inside. The park where we met is in the center of the richest, whitest old neighborhood in the otherwise ruined ghetto-necropolis we call home.

As I expected, the grounds were full of leisurely lily-white young moms toting Prada diaper bags, wearing Italian sandals and talking on tiny flip phones while their poor old nannies and pedigreed brood tentatively interacted with rest of us. There is no avoiding us, it is a city park after all.

It didn’t take long to spot my crew. Big thrift-store sun glasses, low-top Chucks, goofy Bing Crosby golf hats and taped up travel mugs are the trappings of our caste.

I was greeted with, “Arrrgh! Ahoy there Captain Feathersword!”

Ok, I do wear a pirate-like red stocking cap, clogs, stripped socks and I look a little salt stained. But Capt. Feathersword?

Whose ass does Capt. Feathersword kiss to associate with The Wiggles? What service or substance does the shady purple plumed pirate provide to hold the esteem of our dear, ribald boys? Is he the keeper of dark career ruining knowledge?

I do not take this greeting lightly. It is a dubious honor.

As we discuss our fantasy image of The Wiggles –men that children adore and lonely mommies want to get busy with- we notice the nervous white tide receding around us.

We start singing Wiggles tunes, but with altered lyrics-

“Where’s Jeff? Is he on the nod? Where’s Jeff? Is he on top of your mom?…”

I won’t even get into our clever interpretations of “Wiggle Bay” and “Fruit Salad.”

We decide that perhaps The Wiggles are wanton debauchers of young interns, greedy tyrants, failed, angry drama school dropouts, drug-sucking home wreckers, savages cloaked in tight pants and primary colors. They are perma-erect Rolling Stones of children’s television.

As I look around at the now empty park I suspect that one day soon, our daughters and sons will not claim us.

2004-04-28T01:16:00.000-04:00

Some people clutch St. Christopher medals. Some folks pray. Some get high, and more than a few 12 step it.

Me? I turn to my daughter when in need.

Ok, sometimes I down a bottle of wine too, and thanks to a bad back, Darvocet has recently donned shining armor and mounted his trusty steed Flexural to ride to my rescue.

But royal daughter is the truth, the way and the light for kingdad. Now matter how leaden my sky becomes, royal pixie breaks over the horizon, a golden mass of laughter and warmth and reminds me to shrug it off and keep walking.

Today has been one of those days when I have needed a reminder. I have been met with a pie in the face at every turn. A pie in the face has never been very funny to me- ever. Sorry Lucy, not even you could make it funny.

Thank you royal daughter for keeping Ma'at intact.

2004-04-26T01:47:00.000-04:00

OK- I'm liking the poetry thing.

Once ruby red
In the mouth
In the hand
Like iodine tracing the unknown branches of the overburdened heart

Lanterns on the darkened shore
Strange sounds beyond the open window
A naked savage alphabet spoken into the musky neck of the moon
Our world is soft and heroic

Courtly
Perfumed
Inflamed
Clever -always clever and grand

We are kings
We are drunkards
We are jackals
Licking our wounds outside of the city walls

We are thin strains of music hung in hot, dead air
Sand in empty pockets
We are sorry words, stagnant on the green tongue of the marshes
Ill words spoken in hunger and shadow

And now the gates are frozen shut
Lightening rolls endlessly into the quiet ground
I wrap your name in oilcloth
And carry it to the cliffs

I think of you and burn the fields
Still the rivers
I carry you in my overcoat like a postcard
Or a pistol

-kingdad

2004-04-24T00:10:00.000-04:00

Ever wanted to take a peek into Purgatory? I got a glimpse today. I even got to go in for a tour. Here's what I saw-

The doctor has stiff sand colored hair. It marries well with the parchment paper hue of his tight, way-too-tan hide. The doctor smiles a lot. The word "buddy" keeps getting stuck in his pencil thin moustache as he absent mindedly glances at my chart. He wears a little gold pinky ring crowned with a diamond that doesn't really look at home in it's setting. His sockless feet curl back and forth in worn out Gucci loafers. You can tell that the good doctor smokes; even though his aftershave is doing it's very best to keep it secret. I wouldn't be surprised if he had a flask in the bulging pocket of his once-white coat.

He calls me "buddy" again.

"On a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest and one being the lowest, what is your pain level buddy?"

I'm so happy that the doctor explained that ten holds a higher value than one. I could've had problems with this.

I think about the constant ache that has become my sidekick. "well sir, how about this- imagine that someone drove a railroad spike into your spine, and all day long they just kept tapping on it."

The doctor stares off into space for a moment. His jaundiced eyes finally come to rest on a heavily creased poster detailing children's ear infections. This is a strange thing to find in an office that deals exclusively with on the job injuries. I sense that a set dresser has been at work here.

"So buddy, would it be safe to say that your pain level is about a five, with five being in between one and ten?"

Before speaking I stop to count my fingers.

"No, I'd say that nine is a good place to start."

"Well, I'd say that you are in a fair amount of pain then, right buddy?"

I contemplate explaining that the word "fair" is closer to a "five" on the doctor's original scale, and that "the pain is almost goddamn unfucking bearable Doctor Leatherskin!" is much closer to what I'm thinking.

I decide to just nod and say, "Yes, I'm experiencing a fair amount of pain." I do not use the word "buddy" however.

I really wasn't ready to hear, "How would you describe the pain?"

Hmmm- "Well doctor, the pain, well it really fucking hurts!!!"

At this point the good Doctor Leatherskin must realize that he's overdue for his afternoon nip and smoke, because he just gets up and says, "How about that x-ray now buddy?" and then leaves the room. A miasma of Ralph Lauren, gin and ashtrays rise in his wake as he disappears in the darkened hallway, which is plastered with ear infection posters.

Doctor Leatherskin did give me this useful hint-

"Alcohol will intensify the effect of this drug buddy."

Thanks for the tip Doc, I'll try it

2004-04-23T00:05:00.000-04:00

Sometimes when you have nothing to say, say nothing with a poem-

Highway culture circles left
Then right
Then left again
And back on itself

Stale air and French fry grease
Cheap gas
Fireworks
Another tower squats above the broken tree tops

The light is burned out
A knob is missing
In the Glove Box
Maybe in the trunk this time

Bags
Wrappers
Stained tissues
Cigarette butts and dirty Styrofoam cups

Out of phase
Speaking in tongues
Screams swim through the pale night-tides of static
"Someone saved my life tonight, should've they?"

There's that rattle again
The shoulder enclosure
The flares
The rainbow of diesel fuel in the puddle

Abandoned
Empty
Stripped
Overheated

The sun creeps across deer carcasses
Across beer bottles and "For Sale" signs
Bats circle black lazy-eights in the icy open mouth of sodium lamps
Billboards stab into the innocent green hillside

We roll into nothing
Pass unseen through buffet lines
Rest stops
No vacancies

We cross faded double lines
Tear through the white belly of early spring fogs
We cast no shadows
Our highbeam's cold whisper echoes in the ribcage of forgotten cornfields

-kingdad

2004-04-22T00:32:00.000-04:00

Spent the day doing what I love to do best- playing outside with royal imp.

We planted our summer herb garden, danced to The Pogues, worshipped our giant golden benefactor and took a most delightful midday nap.

Now I'm up late, red wine in hand, back shooting sparks into my soul and Gorecki in the headset. I have a late-night Persian meal for the morrow in the making. The house is quiet and smells like cinnamon and freshly roasted coriander. I'm content.

If I died in my sleep I'd consider myself blessed as this most perfect of perfect days has come to an end.

2004-04-18T22:09:00.000-04:00

I am always on the verge. Always flip-flopping on the doormat between worlds. I am forever looking forward, or backward. The present is an awfully hard place for me to dwell in.

For some reason, I need to feel perpetually in transit, to feel that there is a promise of something greater, something just beyond my reach, something meant for me to attain. It's a faint light luring me a little further down the path, a voice in the woods, singing to me, calling me to turn back..

I simply need to be more than I am. I have felt this way as long as I can remember. When all the other kids in elementary school dreamed of being firemen or nurses, I dreamed of being crowned pharaoh in dusty, hot Thebes, of being Keith Richards, of watching the lightening-white blossoms of siege guns peel the skin off of the frozen night sky on the outskirts of Stalingrad.

Not too shabby for a kid. Still, no offense to you Richard Wagner, but who wants to be Parsifal?

Underneath the swollen blue eye of the cloudless mid April heavens, a whirlwind of pollen whips into a phantom-green sheet in my wake. As I race my silver German chariot towards the left bank of you-know-where, I try to divine my true purpose. I drink lukewarm coffee and listen to Blixa Bargeld breathe the phrase, "They build a ship each winter time, for launch to sea, before the storm..." as I torture myself.

I torture myself on the way home too, but I listen to NPR then. It is always worse on that leg of the journey for some reason.

Is this really it?

Is the counter balance of my heart and soul to spend half of my life ordering and stocking "product?" Is it to be the go-to man for the mundane esoterics of culinary snobbery? Don't get me wrong, I'm awfully good at both, so don't invite me over to dinner and serve me corked wine and canned veggies!

If there is an afterlife, how will I dress the chalky whiteness of my daily life to capture the interest of the gods? What real value can really be attached to "the bottom line" after all?

My taste of the sweet life's nectar has been too short. I must offer my regal dependent better advice than I have received.

These last few days I spend an hour or two with the royal one in the loving heat of the sun before work. Each night I arrive home to a drowsy house, and before long the clock cracks it's angry red lash and screams, "lights out!"

I dream of a silvery hand swinging a most magnificent lantern, just beyond the last stand of tall Lebanon cedars in my ancient dream.

I always keep walking.

2004-04-17T00:38:00.000-04:00

I'm not at all surprised. Royal daughter holds court gracefully. She really holds it too, visiting with each group of friends and family just long enough to make them feel special before moving on. People just seem to orbit around her, and she knows it.

A most shameless court-holder myself, I must confess, I am rather proud of my "royal pixie."

There are no tantrums at her party, no mad shouts of, "MINE! MINE! MINE!" She seems to be genuinely comfortable with the large group of people that are gathered to pay her tribute. I watch in awe as she milks it for all it is worth, tossing a few smiles here, a few there. Her face beams as she races from person to person.

Of course, this is a two year old that I'm referring to.

I suspect that it will only get worse.

2004-04-14T23:24:00.000-04:00

About this time two years ago, I was trying to load up the family van in five minute intervals. After tossing in a bag, a pillow and whatever the hell else was on our "birthing list," I'd run back into the bedroom and sit beside poor, tired wife who was busy tossing all of our recently learned "birthing exercises" back into my face.

Kingdad- "Just relax and breathe, let's count the minutes between contractions..."

Poor, tired wife- "I don't want to fucking count! Just shut up for a minute. Don't squeeze my hand so hard..."

Kingdad- "Ok, just imagine a warm breeze... Would you like some lip balm?"

Poor, tired wife- "Lip balm?! What?! Just get me to the fucking hospital- NOW!"

Two years has really raced by, and we still use the same warm, loving language with one another.

Spend most of the evening cooking for royal daughter's birthday party. We are going to meet friends and family in the park tomorrow. How middle-aged of us. I cook a Persian feast for the royal birthday girl, show her all of the colorful dishes. She isn't really interested. A blue elephant squirt bottle commands all of her attention.

Wish I had something like that to distract me.

2004-04-10T23:42:00.000-04:00

Today, my long sorry journey to you-know-where was lightened by the faint siren song of blossoming wisteria.

There are few things in nature that rival wisteria's mysterious scent. It's the smell of someone left on cotton sheets. A delicate impression on a pillow. It reaches into you, it reminds you of all of the lips that you have ever kissed, all of the secret charms that you have ever spoken into someone's ear in the warm spring darkness. It is the smell of youth, the smell of midnight, of a neck, of a love letter.

While the world is sunless and still, wisteria gently climbs into the naked open arches of the trees. It laces slowly through slight gaps in fences, wraps it's taut ringlets around the outstretched fingers of streetlights and powerlines. It traces drowsy, aromatic loops over the smooth sleeping skin of tin roofs. Clusters of pale lavender, peach, and seashell white blossoms hang from an open bodice of tender leaves and a wistful tangle of climbing earth-brown vines.

Like good loving, wisteria does it's best work at night.

I am late to get on the road to you-know-where, but whatever ill I have shouldered these last few days has been torn from me.

The window is down and the ambrosia-breath of wisteria is whispering in my ear.

2004-04-10T00:25:00.000-04:00

Like a wraith, I am trapped between this place and that, belonging to neither.

I stand at the bottom of a well, looking upwards to an unreachable sun. The light creeps down just far enough to warm part of my face. It's just enough to keep me going, and yet it is a constant reminder of what I cannot reach.

Spend the morning with an unusually energized royal daughter. She will be two years old next week. I remember when she couldn't hold her head up, when her eyes were still narrow and cloudy. I remember her toothless grin, the day that she struggled to roll herself over. All of these memories and images careen in my work-weary head as royal daughter looks across the table at our one-eyed breakfast stealing cat and says with great panache, "Get down fuckin' kitty!"

She really has the kitty figured out.

I think to redirect her choice of words, but quickly concede to her wisdom.

We play in her imaginary kitchen after the eggs and toast vanish. She likes to make "green cookies" in her little oven, and of course she keeps the coffee flowing for me in her little tea cups.

At some point we both realize that it's time for kingdad to put on the work clothes, transforming from prince to pauper in mere minutes. "No work dada! Come on outside, no work!" Her tiny, warm hand pulls at my chef's coat. "Take it off dada!"

I am back in the well looking up again.

I carry the warmth of my daughter's voice with me, an amulet to protect me from the cool darkness and indifference of another workday.

2004-03-31T21:51:00.000-05:00

Everyone I know is lugging around a personal storm cloud right now, down to the cranky, nervous dog.

By the way, she came home from the vet today with huge patches of fur shaved away to reveal giant scabby lesions. Can't wait to take her for a walk.

Royal family lives on "the fringe" of a very nice neighborhood and we always turn heads with our "exotic" orange chow mix. Very pale people in very shiny athletic gear stop to ask, "Is that beautiful doggie a dingo?" "No sir, she's a mutt. We think she's part chow and part jackal, who knows..." Expensive shoes pick up the pace at this point and a cold smirk says "Plebeians out!" Hey, you asked.

Everyone and everything in Kingdad's hemisphere is literally sick and broken. After eating Cobain-like doses of Ibuprofen and washing it all down with ample amounts of France's cheapest ruby-red best, I don't feel like complaining much, but I will include myself in the lot of the sick and broken in the interest of fairness. My back still throbs, but I'm starting to revel in the intensity. I feel organic, alive. I suppose my love of Wagner operas is not so peculiar after all, I am my own Flying Dutchman.

I am grateful that a real storm came and gave us all a little relief.

The storm is slow to creep over the western horizon. Electric skeletal fingers form a quick blue arc, groping the tops of trees and roofs. Easy to imagine the upturned fields of WWI France, a hellish thunder echoing off every still surface. You can smell the storm an hour before you can feel the pressure and the temperature drop. You can feel it rushing forward in the dark. Unseen and mighty. Then comes the ten-penny nail sized rain. The lightening turns the world into an x-ray. I can see through poor, tired wife's teeth, see beyond royal daughter's drowsy thoughts.

Royal daughter still feels ill, so the storm was more of an annoyance than a treat. She doesn't seem to appreciate anything larger than her royal self.

I can't say that I am disappointed by this.

Finish off the day with Einsturzende Neubauten's "Ein seltener Vogel" and another ruby-red bed-time vision while poor, tired wife and royal daughter embrace shimmering shafts of light and twisting dolphins underneath the cool aquamarine mantles of sleep.

2004-03-30T23:23:00.000-05:00

Poor, tired wife and royal daughter sit staring into the glowing mouth of American Idol. I can't help but refer to it as American
Idolatry. To tune out the collapse of culture as I know it, I try to write while listening to the new Blonde Redhead disc, "Misery is a Butterfly" on my headset.

Soon it will be quiet. Sleepy women will wander off to brush teeth and enshroud themselves in peach colored flannel.

Tonight, the world is dark and wet. A chill evening rain drips slowly from spent camellia blossoms. Heavy limbs hang in quietude as the night deepens. Across the neighborhood, lights appear in windows early, someone builds a fire, sending a wisp of sweet smelling smoke racing toward the heavy belly of the sapphire colored sky. A dog paces and barks in the distance.

This morning, royal family woke to gusty winds pulling at the tops of the bud-laden trees. A slate gray pall stretches over our little home. Spring is a moody adolescent, bursting recklessly through the last dirty layers of winter.

What a perfect day to spend reclining with lethargic royal daughter. Royal daughter has taken to the velvet sofa these last few days, curling herself around furry bear and pink blanket. Today I was invited up into the royal litter. While the world toiled away we slept, safely hidden from the ugly needs, shadows and noises outside of our door.

She returned from her progress to the Midwest quite weakened. Never seen her in such a state, tired eyed, no interest in food, very little to say. Frightening to see her gigantic personality bested by an illness.

Nothing has ever worried me so much.

The center of my being has been changed, forever altered from the first time that I looked onto the magnificent face of my daughter, a rootless dreamer, entranced by the presence of the sun. I conjure her company up when I am away from her, when I am trapped, ensnared by miserable interactions and lost in soulless places. She has become my lantern.

I silently share this truth with her as I hold her feverish head against my chest.

As the day wears on I am eventually rewarded by this request-

"Eggs Dada, I want eggs and toast."

2004-03-27T01:40:00.000-05:00

In ancient Egypt, priests made extra income interpreting dreams. Dreams were very important to the ancient Egyptians. Their notion of the soul made the boundaries between the sleeping and the conscious worlds very mutable.

I often envision a priest, head freshly shaven, crouched next to me, reed in hand, contemplative, sweaty, stopping me here and there for more detail. The heat is unbelievable, a dreamworld of it's own, slowing everything to the simplest necessity of movement. A hazy, humid world perched on the edge of total stillness, hovering between the scorching legs of noon and the quiet urgings of evening. Above, the planets are aligned unusually close to a low, half-lidded eye of a moon.

My eyes are closed, my mouth is dry. The headrest is stiff and cool against my neck. The priest rocks back and forth on his haunches. The reed moves quickly across the pot-shard. A bead of sweat drips across the painted clay. He mumbles, starts again. My back throbs. I dig into memories of my souls nighttime wanderings. I speak names I do not know. Cower under tall shadows, run endlessly, pointlessly. I am dead, I am old, I am young, I am me, I am someone else. It is always dark. I am always looking for the doorway to the morning. Hugging the hot rock cliff wall, eyes closed. What is the spell.

"...Am I troubled? I am always troubled-"

Far off, royal daughter is sick. Poor, tired wife is exhausted, and I am here, awake. Heart and back buried under a dull thud. I must find the golden doorway, and open it, for my family.

2004-03-26T10:16:00.000-05:00

Royal family away for the weekend. Can't really sleep well without them. Most people look forward to a little time alone. It's not the same once you have a family. The vodka tonics and Blixa Bargeld can't fill up those empty places in my home. I find myself tiptoeing around late as if I am going to accidentally wake up royal daughter or poor, tired wife.

I cooked a big breakfast for myself, read the paper outside in the loving arms of the warm March sun.

Wonder what new sights and sounds are thrilling far-off royal daughter. Yesterday she went to the zoo for the first time. Poor, tired wife said she was fascinated by the otters and the dolphins. Mischievous beings prefer each others company afterall.

Have to return to work in a few hours.

Wrenched my back yesterday morning. It hurts to sit, stand, lay flat and even breath. Not only has returning to you-know-where wrecked my heart and home, but now it wants my body. I will take two more Ibu's and try imagine family riding the subway together for the first time.

More to follow I'm sure.

2004-03-23T21:17:00.000-05:00

It doesn't take much to make kingdad feel blue. I wallow in despair sometimes, in the amber faux-gaslight of our empty living room, one too many glasses of red wine in hand, the sound of Moussavi's ever-mournful Ney echoing through my headphones.

I am lost in a marsh. The wind is the death-rattle of a whispering ghost, hissing through the dry reeds. The sun overhead taunts me, daring me to escape the maze. And somehow I do. I always do. It may not take much to make me feel melancholic, but then again, it doesn't take much to fill me with joy either.

Tonight it was being with royal daughter and poor, tired wife, feeding them an amazing meal and watching them nest together in the wide red velvet palm of the sofa, that showed me the radiant path out of the haunted marshland.

Tomorrow royal daughter and poor, tired wife begin a royal progress. Off to visit family in the Midwest. Kingdad will stay behind. I know now that their absence will be louder than the loudest krautrock that I will attempt to fill my empty home with.

Rise and Fall, sure-

But somehow, it's still good to be the king.

2004-03-22T21:51:00.000-05:00

Most lost and found ads read like this-

Lost: Small black cell phone. Last seen on 03/26/04.
Reward offered for safe return.

I have my own ad to put out there. Here goes-

Lost: Small yet wonderful existence. Last seen the day before I started work.
Family heartbroken. Child just gets bigger and bigger... Can you help?
Reward offered for return to happiness.

Where in the hell have I been?

There was a point not so long ago that I made a vow to never miss a sunset, to pull off the road when I saw something that required marveling at, to dance at high noon with royal daughter, to nap, to cook dinner for poor, tired wife at least 5 nights a week. To be a reverent and loyal fan of all things wonderful in the world...

Just where is that guy?

Welcome to The Rise and Fall of Kingdad.

2004-03-15T23:34:00.000-05:00

The day started out with all of the typical spring bells and whistles, an endless pale blue sky, ditch the cardigan warmth, endless congeniality...

This day definitely held promise.

I was up at 5:30, had lots of coffee, read the paper. Had a nice long drive to sitter's house with daughter, really thought there was a cherry on the top of the cake.

It is my Friday afterall. Surely things are about to be in my favor...

Now that it's over, just gotta say, with a few small exceptions, the day really looked and smelled like an ashtray.

Maybe I'll win the lottery tomorrow.

2004-03-14T00:36:00.000-05:00

Just purchased tickets to see Einsturtzende Neubauten! That's a big deal when you are exiled in a cultural wasteland like the little Elba I call home.

Thank you www.neubauten.org. Thank you insomnia, thank you second/third glass of lovely ruby red Rhone wine.

Maybe I'll listen to "Der Weg ins Freie" one more time before I make my way to bed.

2004-03-13T23:19:00.000-05:00

Each morning I join a rush hour swarm. We move and sit and sit and move and then descend on a vast park and ride lot in the middle of the "planned community" where I work. The "community" looks like a movie set, a fabrication of an idea of what a town should be. There is a market square lined with shops and offices. Ringing the square are a few green-spaces, trails, a church, a school and a movie theater. In the morning on my way to you-know-where, I see moms and dads walking their kids to school. In the evening I see people milling around one of the outdoor cafe' areas that dot the sidewalks. At first I was touched by the life around me, but now I believe the people I see everyday are just paid extras, because at night when I get out of work there is not a soul to be seen. At a certain time they all just seem to disappear from "Our Town."

Nestled behind "Our Town's" Methodist church -which is made out of massive fake stones- is a park and ride lot. A vast field of graying asphalt tattooed with hundreds of painted yellow lines that define parking spaces. Like everything in "Our Town" the park and ride lot has been carefully planned, so it is beautifully landscaped. I cannot determine if this is really to camouflage the lots existence or if it is to give the mass of work-weary drones that use it a last minute burst of serenity before they hustle off to chip rocks at the corporate quarry. In the center of the lot there are always two or three busses waiting to ferry drones away. The busses look like huge dusty beasts, crouched expectantly under the bright azure morning light.

Cars circle, park and empty, masses move rapidly. Things happen quickly here. We all have someplace to be.

One hour later and the extras are all gone. The lot is now full, the big beasts have moved on. Now there are lots of little beasts left to sit idle. A strange herd waiting for the call of an unseen Sheppard. Sunlight winks off of metallic hides, a warm breeze stirs through budding branches, birds hop about under cars, by tires, pecking at dropped bits of bagels and Egg McMuffins. An empty Styrofoam cup rolls in a lazy circle. The voices of children echo off the fake-stone walls of the church playground. A crow calls out from a shadow in the last untouched pines on the hillside.

I come back to the lot at night. Aside from my car, the lot is empty.

At least it looks empty.

I start to notice a strange radiance. The pale white breath of streetlights warms the smooth, tattooed skin. The lot is a beach on another world. Flat, warm, holding back a curious dark ocean of deserted shops and lightless windows. Tight hedgerows rise behind the shimmering paved coastline like dunes. I am a beachcomber. As I walk across the lot I see the days forgotten stories scattered at my feet. A keychain, a shattered travel mug, a sock, a coloring book, a dead bird. The night breeze is different, stronger, cooler. It ripples across the tops of the hedgerow, across the asphalt. It carries the sound of the darkness, it's strange fragrance.

Just before getting in my car I see a fox. It stops and sniffs the wind and continues on it's unseen path.

Home is quiet and dark when I arrive. Poor, tired wife and royal daughter are asleep. I will end my night with a glass of wine in the rocking chair. A book on my lap perhaps.

Just a few more hours to breakfast.

2004-03-09T00:36:00.000-05:00

A long day at home never seems quite as long as a long day at work. Even when royal daughter refuses to nap, eat or comply with my futile requests, the day just seems shorter. The light at the end of the tunnel brighter.

While work may be free of Elmo's abrasive ramblings, and the wiping of poopy bottoms, it still emits it's own caustic stench. It is almost easier to meet the needs of one very spirited child then to meet the needs of a very confused public. At least royal daughter knows what she wants when she shrieks for it. I can't say the same for my peers.

My work week is finally over, and I will spare further details. Work is just work, that's all. It magically transports money into our checking account so that it can magically be transported out again, keeping royal family fed and clothed, and we do like our expensive cheeses and gold toenail polish around here.

The real meaning to my day was recaptured by the sight of a regal upstart with strawberry blond hair rubbing her tired eyes. Daughter spent the day playing with family friend and her two sons. I am jealous, but grateful.

Within five minutes royal daughter's tender yawn becomes a steady rolling snore. I watch the sunlight slip across her cheek in the rearview mirror as I thread my way through rush hour traffic. I choose a rural route home, winding past fields full of rust colored cows, heads bent over late winter grass. The meadows spill and fold and collapse into dense emerald shadows. Dry brush and bare trees rise from the spine of low slopes across the cascading pastures.

Straining against the wash of bronze light, stark against the low spring sun's brilliance, perfect rows of bone-hued houses appear, standing inches apart from one another, like tombstones. A cold ugliness against the beautiful naked curve of the earth. Subdivisions tear across the open eyed horizon. Some crouch, barely hidden behind the broken jaw of old hardwoods between the road and the sky. Cars stream from them, into them, around them. The highway looms ahead. The sound of trucks seeps in through the open sunroof like the sound of night surf.

I no longer hear the reassuring sound of daughter's snore, just the sound of an ocean of traffic washing us further and further away. Daylight stretches across roofs and signs, clutching at signposts and cell towers before slipping under.

2004-03-05T23:20:00.000-05:00

Funny, I just got home from work, looked at the clock and realized that I have to go back to work in less than eight hours. Should I even bother sleeping?

I came home to a scene from The Andromeda Strain. The lights are all on, but there is no life to be found. Poor, tired wife is curled in a fetal position on top on the sheets. I can see how exhausted she is in the dark. I am afraid to peek in on royal daughter. She may get up, but it won't be to see me. I'm not the one with the breast milk. I do have a tonic in hand, but royal daughter is too young to find comfort in that.

I have to wake up nervous dog for some attention. She should be up anyway, guarding my slumbering clan.

I really do have to wake her up!

Someone has to love me, has to wait up for me...

Just looked at the clock again and realized that it's now my birthday. I guess I'll go to bed after all.

2004-03-03T22:09:00.000-05:00

In my neighborhood the arrival of spring is foretold by the aroma of cheap bar-b-que sauce bubbling away over glowing charcoal. You can tell the sauce is really cheap because it's smell easily overpowers that of open flame and burning embers.

It may have some home spun label, perhaps a drawing of a pig wrapped in a towel standing by a giant cauldron, a chicken wearing a chefs hat or a cow wearing sunglasses. It's made by a "Capt'n, Sheriff, Mama, Junior masterpieceswampstickyfirewaterpeteroyjimsomebody." It's really cooked up in the steaming bowels of a giant chemical plant hidden in some darkened bend of the Ohio River Valley. A place where flames shoot from humming stacks, hard hats are worn and red lights blink off and on for no reason. It could've been motor oil once, but someone in up in admin had a vision, "Same viscosity, different color..."

As I make my way home from a meeting tonight, coasting through the sweet fake smell of spring, the car is transformed into an expensive silver chicken wing, smothered in a tawdry sauce.

There is another harbinger of spring around here, the sound of gun shots. People are so happy to be out in the streets again, no longer confined by winter to killing each other indoors.

Take long walk with poor, tired wife, royal daughter and nervous dog before meeting. Royal daughter is thrilled by the sound of two owls calling out to each other for a springtime quickie.

Nervous dog, usually wary of unruly royal daughter in close quarters, is suddenly very protective of the little regal being that pads along so loudly beside her. Nervous dog bristles and snarls at anyone passing by.

The air is cool and moist and smells like earth and rotten wood. A pale mist clings to the open umbrella of tree limbs overhead.

We walk slowly, a little too close together.

It's later than we want it to be.

Have to steal these moments now that work has snuck back into our house.

2004-03-03T00:03:00.000-05:00

Since rejoining the work force, so many people have asked me how it feels.

What can I say?

Well, it feels like I've gone back to work.

How's that?!

My time is not really mine. My family is no longer the focal point of my day. I am paid to push people around that are not related to me.

It's Profit vs. Prophet. You get it don't you? I am a trusted, valued slave.

People keep asking me if I'm "excited." By work?

Had I purchased a house, found some money, taken on a lover, anything other than punching a clock- I'd say yes.

So now that you get it let's move on to something else. I would like to savor my denial a bit longer. We can talk about this later.

Have you ever heard a singing saw?

I have. I heard it tonight. What a voice! Now I'm excited.

2004-02-25T21:20:00.000-05:00

The weather has changed. Something is coming. It's cold and the wind has picked up over the last few hours. Clouds are starting to crowd the horizon. Shadows seem exaggerated, people more hurried. Around the thin curled lip of the low crescent moon a halo has appeared. Not one, but two faint icy rings poised in perfect stillness, a sapphire diadem suspended in a plum colored silken chest.

I spend most of the day on an edge that no one else sees. Every thing rubs me raw. I have wet sand between my heart and my soul.

Royal daughter must wonder why I am so clingy. It's usually her voice that pleads, "Hold you! Hold you!.." Not today. She is the only warmth that I feel, the only thing that seems solid and true. We listen to The Replacement's "Can't Hardly Wait" over and over again, dancing together in the warm sunlight that spills lazily onto the floor through the dining room window. Each time the song ends she says, "More! More Dada more!"

We go visit shaky old grandparents. Children always seem to run home.

My head is freshly shaven. I had a most amazing meal. I will climb into bed early and rise before the sun. I feel apprehensive, slightly distant, yet animated and ready.

I have to tell myself, I'm not climbing into "The Mercy Seat" tomorrow-

I'M JUST GOING BACK TO WORK!

2004-02-23T22:50:00.000-05:00

The television has really helped me to understand the decline of The Roman Empire. I think of the excesses enjoyed by a jaded republic. Savage maulings, elaborately choreographed bloodsport, humiliation and death. Each display more audacious than it's predecessor, but never quite gruesome enough to sate or truly repulse Rome's worldly onlookers. It is said that an emperor's reign was judged by the offerings of The coliseum.

Should I thank The Discovery channel for this knowledge, perhaps a give a grateful nod to The History channel?

How about Fox? -Yes! The Fox Network has taught me everything that I need to know about the decline of a supposedly sophisticated civilization. Tonight "The Littlest Groom" served as my textbook.

The premise of this little gem is that a midget must find a mate amongst twelve women. Some of the women are "big people" and some are "little people."

The show is filmed "Bachelor" style, in some large tacky estate by the sea, where every date unfolds in an unbelievably exotic locale, like the crater of a long-dormant volcano, or the deck of a dead tycoon's multi-million dollar yacht.

Except "The Littlest Groom" has been shortchanged. There are no lush swaying palms, no softly breaking waves to spill across pale sands, no moonlit ocean to lap at the base of darkened cliffs. No, our little guy gets to romance his harem in a run down skateboard park, by a concrete pond with bamboo fishing pole in hand, at a putt-putt course. The plants in the would-be villa are plastic and the carpets came off the rack at Home Depot. To further emphasize the disparity, our tiny gladiator is dressed in an array of ill-fitting suits, all looking like they have been pilfered from Gary Coleman's long lost wardrobe.

As if the appearance of "The Littlest Groom" isn't a sure harbinger our immanent collapse, enter another little combatant to the arena-

Enter The Donald! Someone has actually attempted raise Donald Trump from the dead, and they have almost succeeded. Despite his wealth he is still stuck with a two dollar comb-over and an incredibly heinous gold-plated apartment. The sheer ugliness of the whiny Wall Street Wannabee contestants that clamor for The Donalds approval on "The Apprentice" is enough to keep me glued for a few minutes. Just a few minutes...

Is our culture the Hell that everyone is supposed to go to if they don't change their ways? When we officially become The United States of Sodom and Gemorrah I don't think it will be gay weddings and Janet's Jackson's nipple that gets us there.

As spectators in the coliseum we are enthralled with bigger obscenities. We remain glued to our seats watching beautiful bikini clad citizens battle it out, manufacturing relationships, cheating, lying and screwing over absolutely anyone to win one million dollars.

That's not a great sum after one renders unto Caesar.

I finally picked up the remote and turned off the tube when poor, tired wife went to bed. As "The Average Joe" went from panoramic to pixel, I just had to say it-

"You're fired!"

2004-02-21T17:20:00.000-05:00

I prune away winters damage, trimming back the silvery broad stalks of the massive cardoon plant that dominates the entrance to our side garden. Poor, tired wife pushes royal daughter around garden on her big red tricycle. I count the days silently while they circle around, laughing together.

Both look so radiant to me, pale freckled skin flushed crepe myrtle pink under the perfect midday sun. I rake up piles of rusty brown clippings. As I stoop to pick them up I think of how much fun I could have with royal daughter making paper out of the dried leaves. Kingdad recently read about the ancient process of paper making and thought it would be a good springtime project to share with inquisitive royal daughter. Kingdad is clearly a dreamer. Pushing royal daughter around on her red tricycle is a more realistic ambition. Hats off to poor, tired wife for being the anchor to this family.

Leave wonderful outdoor family scene behind to visit new jobsite. Lots of paperwork awaits to cushion my reentry into the well lit dreamless world of work. A long drive affords me time to contemplate the impact this monumental change will have on us all. All of the windows are down. I listen to Ostad Lotfi play his setar and recite Rumi poems in Parsi. His voice so earthy, sonorous. I understand everything he says of longing and the loneliness of love.

I see beloved infectiously optimistic ex-coworker at new jobsite. I do my very best to interpret this as the good omen that it surely must be.

This family needs good omens.

2004-02-21T10:54:00.000-05:00

Another perfect day. Trees so recently dressed in fluffy white snow are starting to bud. Long dormant bulbs force bright green shoots through the warming ground. Birds lustily pick through emerging new grass in search of plump worms and slow moving beetles. Pairs of small Finches are starting to build nests in the thick clumps of ivy that frame the front porch of our little house.

Every living thing under the warm benevolent February sun seems to have a new agenda.

Kingdad does. I am preparing to return to work. I have a nest to feather with steady paychecks and product discounts. The slow perfect fall and winter spent at home with family is over. Gone are the days of Persian lute music and toenail painting, of long decadent naps with snuggly royal daughter, of non-stop "hey, meet me for the Indian buffet," of walking to the park to swing, of going anywhere royal daughter and kingdad felt like going that day without the ugly tendrils of a timeframe snaking through the foundation of our joy.

My dreamy kingdom is collapsing, it's sleepy fun-loving citizens falling into the mouth of an ugliness that cannot be escaped. Amarna, Pompeii, Minoan Crete, Alexandria...

This is the last work-free weekend poor, tired wife, royal daughter and kingdad will share together for a very long time. The surreal gorgeousness of the morning light is a taunting reminder, a flawless last meal, a vision of the throne I am about to abdicate.

Now out into the beautiful day we go.

2004-02-18T22:29:00.000-05:00

Each night at this time, the train tears through downtown, as quickly as a child hurries past a graveyard.

The train is a rusty iron lightening bolt racing past abandoned buildings, broken bottles and unseen homeless camps, past rows of stillborn taxicabs and the petty streetcorner disputes of whores. Gunshots and the howling of stray dogs vanish in the wake of it's deep rumbling voice. It's low troubled whistle echoes across deserted one way streets and down trash strewn ravines.

When the train passes into the deeper night of other places, my day vanishes into silence. Gone with the day is the laughter of precious daughter. Gone is the welcome sound of poor, tired wife coming home from work.

There is no flourish, no Wagnerian "Gotterdammerung" to mark it's death. Just the faint oceanic murmer of the heat cycling on and off, the dull hum of the refrigerator in the darkened kitchen, the lonely passage of the distant night train. I imagine the rustle of pigeon feathers underneath the overpass,
the cold bony face of the moon peering through the open tiers of the empty parking deck across the street from the old post office.

The dishes are washed, dog and cat curled into slumbering question marks, daughter and poor, tired wife wrestle with dreams. The day is over.

The day was fantastically light, warm, so beautiful and noisy. The sounds of wet snow slumping from the tops of leafless trees, of moisture being forced from the ground by the sunlight's long golden fingers. All things rushed forward towards the open luminous door of a day that forshadowed spring.

Daughter spent the day stringing sentences together, teaching me her ancient clever language. Holding my hand and pulling me to the window saying, "See Dada, see, no snow Dada!" Grandparents came over and daughter held court.

And now it has all melted.

The loudness of the day borne away in the hollow belly of a boxcar.

2004-02-11T22:05:00.000-05:00

Vodka tonics are to adults what real snowcones are to children. While daughter is lost in her dreams of the what the coming snowy morning may bring, kingdad is busy making his snowman tonight.

No offense to the recently departed-

I would say that I woke up feeling like a corpse, but that would imply that I actually slept. Sure, I copped a few snores, maybe even dribbled a little into the pillow, but this was after I took enough Ibuprofen to stun a mule. For someone with my threshold this is a lot. They felt like M&M's in my hand at 2:38am. Weighty and magical.

Poor, tired wife got up at 4:30am. I have no idea how she does it. She ferries between worlds with little complaint.

I however do not. I am old and broken down and that's that. At twenty two I did not anticipate seeing thirty, so I lived like I wouldn't. At thirty two I was so pleased that I had surpassed my earlier expectations that I proceeded with proven "live it up" agenda. And then the sun rose this morning and I woke up a few short steps from forty with about four cups of lukewarm coffee to greet me.

I just lost it. It guess it takes a lot more than two hours of sleep and four cups of crap coffee to give me that special happy to be alive and oh so glad to see you feeling. Even two and a half hour nap with queen-snuggly-daughter did little to ease the rabid inner bear of kingdad.

Now I understand how Louis Farrakhan feels. Yes, there is a conspiracy, you are all out to get me, and today is proof of it.

2004-02-07T22:20:00.000-05:00

Daughter has conned her way back into bed. She never left it really. Being warm and snuggly just works for her. Must remember this as I try to get my own way with others.

Find it so hard to conjure up warm and snuggly on the few hours of sleep I've had. It is so much worse for poor, tired wife, although she never looks it. Kingdad has never looked very lively- EVER! So a few missed nods and it's Keith Richards that winks back in the morning mirror.

Had another horrible migraine few days back, this time with added nosebleed and tingling useless extremities. Am looking so relaxed I'm sure. Have MRI scheduled on Sunday to see what's trapped inside my aching brain. Can't wait to explain vast burnt patches from days of youthful experimentation to doctor. Who knew back then?

Poor, tired wife took turn at cooking breakfast this morning while daughter ran around in her stripy red pj's, demanding non-stop Elmofest.

Elmo has returned. He's like Robert Downey Jr. You think he's history, and then he's fresh out of rehab and back in your livingroom. She just can't put him down. Kingdad sips hot coffee -thank you poor, tired wife- and reads the paper. Nice way to relax before job interview.

YES, JOB INTERVIEW!!!!!!

We can't roll change forever, can we? How else can we provide daughter with the goat gouda she so deserves?

Quite a drive to appointment, quite a beautiful day. Warm and bright, trees budding, slender green grass emerging from damp clumps of long fallen leaves. A faint mist rises gracefully from the densely packed piles of dirty ice plowed onto the roadside.

I feel awake, energetic, freshly shaven, perhaps even handsome viewed from a few car lengths away. I am a Volkswagen commercial, salt and pepper Caesar do, roll necked pistachio green sweater, God Speed You Black Emperor pouring heroically from the open sunroof.

Interview goes well, offer made. A lovely number is tossed across table for my consideration. Manage to stretch tight feigned smile across gaping fears. Loose myself in coolness of water glass. Lots of hand shaking. Finally escorted from hell-hot conference room.

Much to think about on way home. Images of rapidly growing daughter emerge from cascading showers of money. Daughter reaches out for me and I am not there, I am too busy working. "Dada?" Daughter walks across a lonely landscape, tripping over sharp upturned edges of 401-K plans and incentive payouts, desperately calling my name, "Dada?" I cannot put margin reports down...

"Where the hell was Dada?" This is all I hear as I head home, a fast-moving silver thought bubble lost in Saturday traffic. It's so hard to imagine missing one moment of wonderful, magic-being daughter's life.

So many reasons to pull over on way home. I walk into the edge of the woods and look straight up. Bare tree limbs spill across the satin sheets of a pale azure sky. Dark tresses spill across tufted cornflower blue clouds. A passing jet pulls a thin pearl tinted thread in it's wake. The wind is cold. The sky is an unmade bed.

Nick Cave taunts me as I creep home to unsuspecting family,
"It's a wonderful life, that you bring..."

2004-02-03T23:04:00.000-05:00

So strange that our culture goes to such extremes to avoid the truths of our being. Thoughts of intimacy, sex, and death really touch that magic nerve in people. Our American culture has a sporting relationship with the trio. If it is not something to be attained and mastered, then it is taboo.

Think I'm reaching for this one? Just watch The Bachelor. Unless People Magazine plasters winners past and present on it's cover, we rarely stop to wonder what happens between the happy contestants once the game is over. Should we be asking ourselves why we are OK with the game format?

How many of us are actually at peace with our lives? Not many I think, perhaps this is why we are all so eager to avoid the mention of the word death until someone is asking us which side of the yard we would like our ashes to be scattered over.

I hope I don't die tomorrow, because I don't know where I want my left-overs to be left.

I think people are almost as afraid to love as they are to die. It's really impossible to control either and this is why it is so easy to deny both. Notice I choose not to use the word "escape" here.

If I do die tomorrow at least I have shared my love. Both the beauty and the ugliness of it. When I am tossed into the mulch pile no one will be milling around wondering where my heart was.

Old dying friend died tonight. He waited until he got home to give in. I hear it was
quick and peaceful. I knew he would wait until he was where he wanted to be, at home.
I kept a candle burning for him in my garden these last two days, and now I will keep one burning for the people closest to him, his girlfriend, his family, the people that will reach over in the middle of the night to see if he is there, the people that will want to pick up the phone to hear his voice on a birthday, or to see if he is coming home for a visit anytime soon, to see if he is still clean, or where he is playing a gig.

My moments with him are long past. I have no lack of memories to conjure up. I've missed him often, long before cheap opportunist cancer showed up, like People Magazine, playing upon my regrets and contorting my emotions into a selfish, tasty read.

I did not need to see him to know who he was, what he was, and what he thought. I knew him. It was so easy to love him endlessly for this.

I got to tell him this before he died. How lucky am I?

I was cooking dinner for my girls when he left. I am happiest when I am in my kitchen cooking for the people that I love, I am at home then. I hope that he felt the same way when he decided to go, happy to be home.

2004-02-02T22:34:00.000-05:00

Just returned from visit with old friend and former roomie.

He is 36 years old, was diagnosed with cancer less than two months ago, and he is DYING RIGHT NOW!

As I drove to the hospital I thought of all of the things that I wanted to say to him. So many thoughts and memories to send him on his way with. I really just want to let him know that I truly love him, and that he has made my life so much more interesting by appearing in it from time to time.

I have not really seen much of dying old friend these last several years. There is no reason for this, it's just the way our story together goes. He is intense! He is intimidating. He is a very ancient soul indeed, and I have always regarded him with complete awe. For me this is rare. Dying old friend has survived so much. He can just look through you.

As I turn the corner in the long freshly waxed hallway I approach dying old friend's room and I loose it. I have not seen him in months, and now I have to see him shrunken and pale and preparing for his death. He cannot avoid it this time.

He is full of soft tumors and his lungs are quickly filling with fluid. He has been put on narcotics to ease the constant pain and pressure caused by the tumors. He is a recovering addict and I understand from his girlfriend that he was not crazy about the idea of dying high. He has great difficulty breathing.

There are at least twenty people sitting on the floor outside of his room in the wing. Because he is worsening so quickly, the doctor suggest that small groups of people go in for just a few minutes at a time. I am standing near the slightly open door to his room waiting for my visit. He sees me, he smiles, his eyes so large, he weakly waves me in and mouths my name.

Everything that I wanted to tell him vanishes as I look at him. He is so thin that I can see his organs bulging through his tight, ash colored skin. He looks at me for a moment and he tries to sit up. He holds out his hand. It is tangled in tubes. I take his hand and lean into him. I lay my face into the hollow between his neck and shoulder. He smells so familiar to me, yet he smells like death, he is being eaten up as we hold each other. I cry and tell him that I love him so very much and that I just want to sit here and hold his hand for awhile. He smiles again, just for a second, and then he is twists in pain.

He cannot get comfortable, every way that he moves hurts him. It hurts him to be still. He groans and I see that he will die very soon, to escape the discomfort of drowning in his own body. I hold his hand tighter and just think of how easy it always was for me to love him.

I have to go about my day tomorrow with the knowledge that he will close his eyes and die while I am changing a diaper or washing dishes.

I decide to leave a candle burning in my garden for him tonight and hope that he passes quickly, without fear, holding someone's hand while he sleeps.

2004-02-02T01:24:00.000-05:00

2004-02-01T23:05:00.000-05:00

Somedays are actually a bit different. Some days seem to belong to no one at all, no one living.

Have been painting poor, tired wife's office during "free" time for last several weeks. Poor, tired wife's office is in ancient mansion in the ruined heart of dead city. Before poor, tired wife and co. moved into it, mansion was a home, a USO, a crackhouse, another crackhouse, and finally a roosting spot for thousands of starlings, bats, pigeons and addicts.

Now mansion is a crisis center, surrounded by massive expanse of wrought iron fence. Grand facade of mansion stares onto side of low, flat roofed television station. From the foyer of poor, tired wife's office the sunset is wrecked by lonely upturned ear of gigantic satellite dish, poised expectantly towards chilly, message free heavens. One monolithic bent ear, surrounded by subordinate rows of smaller, lonelier ears, all listening for same unheard voice. Beyond the television station poor, tired wife can see the back door of local homeless shelter.

The only audible voices here are human. Angry and desperate voices. Gunshots occasionally punctuate sentences.

From my vantage point I see a young Hispanic woman walking toward the busline with her baby. She pulls her bundle closer, into the folds of her coat as she hurries pass several obvious gang members. They shout after her, she breaks into a hurried jog.

A bottle is tossed into the scrubby lot outside of the wrought iron fence that encircles poor, tired wife's work place. The ember of a cigarette skips from the window of a speeding cab. The sky is remarkably clear. Low clouds the color of lead and clay roll slowly across the low belly of the pale, aquamarine sky. Twilight sags heavily on the rooftops of city skyline.

Each building exaggerated against the eerie color of the suns rose-gold deathmask. Starlings and swifts vanish into open chimneys, and the ruined skylights of abandoned buildings.

I can smell a match from the street below. Hear the footsteps of a child walking flatfooted beside his drunken mother. Hear the shouts of a whore as she simultaneously negotiates the price of a rock of cocaine and the fee for a trick in a rusty Toyota pickup. Sounds like an even trade.

The afternoon is dying, slowly, loudly, like a drunk, sinking into drainspouts, pouring out into the filthy streets, lost in the idle honking of car horns and roar of empty night busses. Pale persimmon and violet tones mingle and darken. The air becomes cool and thin. Neon messages rip through streaked convenience store windows, phonebooths cast a lurid glow across the tall weeds of mean streetcorners. The windows of a few tall buildings trap the last amber glow of sunset, then expel the brilliant bronze aura into the indifferent haze of fluorescent light.

I clean my tray and brushes in the long, heavy clawfoot tub in the upstairs bathroom of poor, tired wife's office. The soundtrack to "Betty Blue" is nearing its end as I wash the last of the pearl finish off-white trim paint from my brush.

I cannot help myself, I become lost in memory. How many times have I have repeated this scene? I remember painting the apartment of my German girlfriend. So wonderfully insecure and high on Turkish hashish, Nick Cave croons, "This is the Weeping Song..." on the radio as my roller applies perfect coats of paper-white paint to the smooth plaster walls of girlfriend's soon-to-be-trendy East Berlin flat. Taking a break, I sit on the windowsill, back to the perfect cloudless March afternoon, smoking, trying to decipher the message left by each bullet hole in the courtyard wall below.

I remember painting the walls of my first apartment, the first of too many. Choosing subtle tones, like a glaring peachy pink to ward off my self indulgent adolescent loneliness. I feel comfortable in the kitchen and nowhere else.

Hot water rolls from the long brass tap. I squeeze more color from my roller, chalk tinted water spirals over my knuckles and into the drain. I recall painting what is now my daughter's room. I find the most perfect shade of lilac and quickly cover the room with a spraygun. It takes weeks to remove the old cloth and tack wall paper before getting started. I still see poor, tired wife running her perfect, slender fingers over endless lengths of beadboard to find tiny, rusty tacks. We have no idea that guestroom will soon house permanent visitor.

As I connect with painters past and present, it happens. I hear a sound in the hallway. My bag, full of CD's, has been kicked over by someone cresting the top of the stairwell. I feel it just before it happens, a faint chill, enough to make me stop and listen just before actually hearing anything. I race into the hallway, offering, "Hello?!"

Prior to that moment I recall a painting, a text from the book of "He Who Goes Forth By Day..." I don't know if I remember it or just ponder it. But I see it, freshly tinted, deep inside a mountain, hidden behind the irregular jawline of the arid cliffs, in a smooth, deep chamber...

Is the day over when the lamp oil runs out?, when the spirits seep from the rock and whisper you out of the mountain?, expel you to the warmth and safety of home? Did it feel the same then as it does now to watch the sun drop into the open mouth of the west? To watch a mother quicken her pace, clutching her child close to her warm body as she hurries to avoid unseen perils?

I feel aware of time as I rinse my brushes and rollers.

What the hell is that, not three feet from where I am standing?! I feel another chill. I move quickly, throwing the door open. My bag has noisily "fallen" over, my CD's are scattered about. Very strange considering that my bag had only a few discs in it, heavy and flat against the floor.

I stoop to pick them up. Relieved that I know the source of the sound, unusual but not extraordinary I think at first. Only something is not right. I feel watched, cold, and yes, I am afraid.

I look up towards winding, double stairway to see a tall, dark haired woman looking at me as she rapidly ascends the stairs. I call out a hearty "hello!" thinking for a second this is poor,tired wife's coworker. But it is not! When I blink she is gone.

This is no momentary fantasy, I can see the faint brown hair on her arms, the flush of color in her cheeks. I see the reflection of the overhead lights in her molasses brown eyes. I hear her determined footsteps just before we make eye contact. I greet her and stop and she is gone before I can fathom that she is not quite there.

This happened just a few hours ago! As soon as I realize that there is no one on the staircase I throw my things together and leave "coworker" to mingle with paint fumes.

The Ka exists. The eternal bird comes home to roost, like a starling, like a swift, and sometimes we are aware enough to witness it.

2004-02-01T10:46:00.000-05:00

The sun has returned. The thaw begins. Like a new tooth, the world cuts its way through the once pristine icy glaze. I'm sure there are those who rejoice at the sight, at the muddy triumph of normalcy. The worn spines of roads, the ugliness of manufactured communities and the whatever-you-want-whenever-you-need-it re-emerging from the wild inconvenient beauty of nature. Thank god we can all get back to escaping the quiet truth of ourselves.

Daughter has friend over for morning visit. Daughter and friend quickly retreat to daughter's room. Daughter insists, "Dada out!" while little pal kicks back on daughter's tiny bed. Has it started already? Is this a taste of what's to come?
The transfer of power from Elmo to Teletubbies was sudden but expected. Given choice between the two, kingdad will take soft spoken, well-dressed euro-tubbies, over shaggy, naked, know-it-all speed freak Elmo. Unlike Elmo, kingdad refuses to be so easily usurped by other. Kingdad's position in daughter's heart must remain secure! Little pal cannot cook daughter breakfast anyway, so threat of replacement quickly diminishes.

Daughter may be fickle but appreciates stability. Little pal -the newcomer- has limited insight into daughter's complex psyche. Move quickly to assert control over situation. Hmmm...turkey bacon, sourdough muffins, eggs scrambled with goat gouda, strawberry milk and yes, clean diapers for everyone.

Daughter and little pal orbit kitchen table until eggs are gone.

Friend goes home, daughter takes long nap, house is quiet. As I wash dishes my thoughts return to poor, discarded Elmo. Where did he come from anyway?

I begin to imagine the seedy side of Sesame Street. I imagine a nicotine stained motel room, solitary window open to the sound of sirens, to the smell of urine and midday humidity. A pigeon coos, the radio is too loud, a fan rattles in the corner, the room reeks of warm machine oil, stale cigarette smoke and sex.

There is a couple. Entwined in an ugly knot of naked flesh on top of thin, dingy sheets. He rolls over and reaches for an empty baggy on the small table next to the bed. He laughs maniacally shaking the bag above her face. She mumbles, strokes his hairy chest, knocks over the full ashtray perched on his swollen belly. More laughter, more mumbling. There they are, I picture them so clearly in my mind, bathed in a cocaine hued post-coital glow, Robin Williams and Macy Gray, noses inflamed, basking like lizards in the late afternoon sunlight.

Elmo a lovechild?! Have I discovered his obscene origin?

2004-01-27T21:28:00.000-05:00

I am Siegfried, good intentioned, naive, strong. Lost in a deep, wintry forest, unaware that I have been rendered vulnerable by the idle twisting fall of a solitary linden leaf.

Winter Storm Warning! First day of sentence-

The world is heavy and still, every sound suspended in the frosty evening mists. The sky sags, a hushed, pink canopy stitched together with icy vapors and trapped light. Snow and sleet, angels falling slowly, perfect, orphaned, drifting end to end, lonely through the skirts of the January sky.

We chase one another in fitful expectant dreams, unaware. A silent film. The Sugarplum Fairy plays endlessly. We pull closer. Nestle deeper.

Under the crystalline shroud of winter, the sun never really rises and never really sets. The day is long and weak, anemic. We become sudden prisoners. Although prisoners of great comfort, stoically exiled under family quilts, lingering over unending breakfasts, newspaper in hand, content in the company of one another's laziness. We feast, move slowly, take long showers, aristocratic convicts clutching soft green Fiestaware mugs, pampered charges escaping the attention of a hard warden.

Second day of sentence comes to pass-

Daughter and poor, tired wife make brownies to pass time. Kingdad begs for mercy under foot of sudden migraine. Each tap-tap-tap of spoon makes kingdad wince. Dropped pot-lids make stomach kink. Poor, tired wife's compassion is useless. There is no hurt like this one. No kind word will do here. Heart is beating too close to lungs. Assassin in skull trying to kill me from inside out. Cannot see very much now. Take new medicine. Wonder if snakebite feels like this, disconnected, dull, pounding, absolute.

This migraine is different, smarter. Knows just how to break me. Like being tortured by closest friend, pushes all the right buttons. Almost ask poor, tired wife to call for help, but think passing into "great shade" unnoticed might offer quick relief.

Thankful for images of family now. Hear daughter calling "Dada!?" while running through house. Daughter's footsteps become erupting depthcharges, booming against optic nerve. Daughter's voice curses lovingly through poisoned blood. Just might make it.

Pass from Vulcan's hammer to sleep. Am I dead? Have the meds kicked in? I dream of the afterworld, my afterworld. I know this place. I concocted it. Don't we all concoct it. Still, so much bigger than I remember.

Headache is now angry glowing spirit imprisoned in lamp. I am like Ptah of Memphis, mummiform, layered smartly in taut thin sheets of quicksilver. The first being, calling forth the land to rise above the chaotic seas of creation. The hills of my afterlife are high and numerous, rolling gently above troubled waves. Everything is spun of fine silver snow. The sky is vast and iridescent. Always perfect twilight here.

Behind me stands a tall simple house, a golden house with high seamless walls. Featureless except for one mighty door, swung open, nothing visible past the massive hinge. Before me, rising above the swelling hills, like ship's masts, are cedar trees. Huge and solid, made of pure electrum, branches fanning out into the sky, lovers fingers lost in a stormy tangle of dark hair. Flaming fruit hang low in the icy branches. A soft wind stirs the sterling dust. It rises in a fantastic shimmer, chainmail in the morning sun, settling in the deep hollows of tree trunks and coating the evergreen leaves of the golden fruit.

I am here alone for awhile. Aware only of my own presence. The lantern's light fades, persimmon to saffron to river chalk, to a thin curl of smoke. The endless evening darkens until I am pulled silently into the open gate.

Inside the gate, the quiet hymn of daughter and poor, tired wife breathing deeply together, of nervous dog flushing squirrel from the tall dry grasses of her dreams, the manic sputter of fat, sleeping kitty. There is the static hiss of sleet against the storm windows, like that of an old record playing and the sound of air freezing in a perfect multi-colored halo around the invisible moon...

2004-01-24T23:14:00.000-05:00

It never ceases to amaze me, the mere hint of ice or snow in the southern weather forecast and society breaks down. Kingdad thinks society has already gone bust, until the word "icestorm" appears, swathed in a provocative red banner lazily scrolling across the bottom of the television screen. OK, I confess. I watch "it" from time to time. I draw the line at Oprah though. People watch Oprah for the same reason that they slow down to look at an accident.

The word "icestorm" must be a code. An enigmatic message that initiates complete anarchy. "Calling all jackasses, commence hoarding!" Typically sheep-like citizens instantly become wolves. Grocery stores are overrun, everyone lunging for day old English muffins and out of date milk. Entire pallets of eggs are gone in seconds. Aisles of dubious off-brand bottled water -water that once cooled a reactor in Eastern Europe perhaps- are decimated by sweaty mobs. Good snow fearing folk are wrapped from head to toe in performance fleece. The hive has gone crazy! My fellow Southerners lost in a white-out of paranoia.

I brave greedy swarm for noble cause, daughter's breakfast. Daughter has few eggs left to scramble and no turkey bacon to feed nervous dog with. Daughter's happiness is worth confronting end-of-world scene. Eating breakfast helps one endure the end times I hear.

Must go grease skillets and ready for disaster now.

2004-01-24T00:29:00.000-05:00

I've seen this film before- starts the same way, ends the same way, always playing. You can come in at any point and know whats going on, leave, return, sleep through it, talk through it, mouth the lines, doesn't matter. It's sillyputty, it's white noise, it's reassuring and cozy, it's my day.

Believe story starts/ends in rocking chair on previous evening, not really sure.

Woke up wondering where I was until hearing poor, tired wife call out name. Name starts to sound familiar at increased volume. Believe from intonation that poor, tired wife has been calling name for quite a while. Perhaps this is a method poor, tired wife learned from Maoist "deprogramming" literature.

Kingdad is not to be flushed from the tall, sand-hued reeds of dreamland so easily however. Enter cute, ruthless apprentice. Daughter quickly joins assault with a skillful thrust of car keys toward facial area. Thus I am delivered from the pale violet marshes of sleep into an abrupt, formless morning. Daughter demands bacon, eggs and toast and then speeds away.

I will go, give up, hands upon head if there is coffee to be had. Surely there must be coffee to cushion my re-entry to the world of the waking. Poor, tired wife's love for me is clearly expressed day after day by the making of coffee, which she can no longer drink. Yesterday was no exception, there was coffee, well not wholly. There was an unholy mixture of caffeinated coffee and de-caffeinated coffee. Sure, it was hot, and tasted familiar, and woke at least half of me up, but in retrospect it was akin to having half a soul. OK, extreme analogy. How about this one- masturbation compared to gettin' busy to some Al Greene.

After 3rd cup and local section of newspaper I begin to wonder, is there a certain layer of consciousness, a dim stairway between fatigue and death where dreams originate? Have been up and down stairs often these last two evenings, looking for truth, lamp in hand, a lonely sonambulist, pacing, latern's light eaten by the dark mouth of sleep. Entranced by the echo of my own droning snores, I continue to search, a faint dream of golden Troy...

Perhaps waking stiff-necked, head slumped against shoulder, chest covered in drool, wine glass still in hand, in over-rocked rocking chair is as good as it really gets. Perhaps as answers go, this is all there is to be found within the ruins of rest. Quotes the raven, "I'm so fucking tired!"

I do know this for sure, on the verge of the preceding day's twilight, poor, tired wife and daughter conjure up images of vanished Pompeii, knotted together, pulled tightly into one another's warmth and comfort on sofa. Both pale but glowing, cheeks flushed pink like early march camellia buds. Poor, tired wife and daughter breath heavily, slowly, in a way that makes me stop, just for a second, feeling like I have dumbly chanced upon something, something too sacred to disturb.

Staying where I am, I close my eyes and surrender, isn't this how these kinds of stories should go?

2004-01-20T23:39:00.000-05:00

Can't even remember how day started at this point. Seems like it went something like this- Woke up in stupor, fumbled through day, gave up and took midday nap with daughter, woke up in stupor and continued to fumble through day.

Daughter attends school/playgroup/keepparentfromgoinginsane setting for a few hours twice a week. Today is one of those blessed days where daughter gets dropped off, allowing kingdad the chance to piss away few precious hours cleaning and numbly wondering where time goes.

Occasional administrative by-product generated by the hosts of these little outings is a newsletter that aims to keep kingdad informed. From this infrequent publication -which is printed on a most calming shade of green paper- is gleaned information of great importance. For instance, who knew that packing a PB&J sandwich in daughter's lunch could trigger heinous reaction in weak, allergy prone schoolmate? Seems that "trace residue from nuts" can be quite harmful in the hands of berserk toddlers. Further more, who knew that today was a teacher's workday? Not kingdad. Somehow this information was hidden from me, camouflaged within the cool, deceptive cloak of cheap green paper. Perhaps others caught it, but no, not kingdad.

So, jacked up on coffee and strawberry milk respectively, kingdad and daughter embrace the frigid morning drive, arrive at destination with time to spare for once, penetrate the numerous Fischer-Price My First Security System features at facility, and once inside, walk with great expectation up seemingly endless stairwell, only to stumble into the freshly sanitized void that is teacher's workday.

Imagine the movie -28 Days Later- but there is no deadly virus, there are no blood spewing zombies, only pale teachers milling around like miners in the darkened, quiet, child-free hallways, while their spouses diligently scrub away "nut residue" from tacky, plastic castles and three wheeled day-glo dumptrucks. Imagine kingdad and daughter as we arrive, giddy, heroic, only to become bewildered, disappointed, victims of a savage and unknown mandate.

Home we go! Daughter blankly calls out name of classmate as she is strapped into cold carseat, looks away, then sighs. Nothing left to do but scramble half dozen eggs and fry last of turkey bacon while English muffin burns to a cinder in beautiful German toaster. We move on quickly in this house. Daughter happily sprays nervous dog with jet of cold water from nozzle in sink. Anything to keep daughter content while kingdad sizzles and flips away frustration of lost morning. Nervous dog needs bath anyway. No harm done. Wet, nervous, stinky dog quickly forgives all when offered blackened English muffin. Our day can be salvaged.

Yes, it may be freezing outside, and the day off to an uncertain start, but overhead the sun is a radiant being, it's golden visage framed perfectly in the vibrant blue canopy of the cold January noon. What a fantastic opportunity for a wintersday walk with daughter. We will surely triumph over teacher's workday.

I brew fresh coffee with travel mug in mind. Sippy cups are filled, sandwich bags stuffed with goldfish. Daughter readied, mittened hands held high, shrieks wildly, "walk! walk dada! walk!" We are happy, we have purpose. Daughter quickly becomes silent, hands fall to side, daughter becomes still and focused, perfectly arched eyebrows furrow, soft features sharpen. A distinct heavy odor now emanates from all aspects of daughter...

A heinous diaper, a few heavy yawns, mounds of dishes -it's time to fold. The couch forgives all, the forgotten workday, the aborted walk, the overall haze of our so-called day. All frantic efforts instantly suspended, and we yield. The ringer is off, shades are lowered, daughter is warm against me and begins to snore.

2004-01-20T00:24:00.000-05:00

Spend morning listening to friend's lusty tales while daughter quickly creates vast debris field around us. We simply live to do this with friend every Monday. Our weekly gossip is juicy and bitter. We down pots of coffee and reveal yet again that we are quickly getting older, smarter and more needy. Daughter breaks in from time to time with adamant request for buttered toast.

So, over the weekend, friend got some much deserved romancin' after long hiatus. Also over weekend, friend got much deserved beautiful, pink suede handbag, although sans suede brush! Shame on you thoughtless retailer! Still, so happy for friend. Throughout morning my attention keeps drifting from friends escapades to friend's handbag. Hmmm... So much room for extra diapers and snacks. Hmmm...When will I get some lovin'? I am green with envy. Strange how necessity guides ones thoughts.

Daughter took four hour siesta after friend left because daughter refuses to sleep through the night. Daughter is 21 months old. Daughter is adorable, but daughter is a vampire, feasting on poor, tired wife. She feeds all night and sleeps all day and I have become the Renfield to her Dracula. Daughter keeps poor, tired wife poised on the threshold of the land of the living.

Must save poor, tired wife somehow. She certainly deserves it, keeping both of her parasites well provided for and happily at home. In spite of her fatigue poor, tired wife is remarkably kind, loving and supportive. Poor, tired wife is also a HOTTIE! Hard to believe she achieves all of this on less than five hours of sleep a night.

So sorry, kingdad is a deep sleeper.

Everyday is alike- feed daughter huge southern-style breakfast, watch Sesame Street, color, eat daughter's leftovers, throw toys at fat, sleeping kitty, wash mounds of dishes, drink pots of coffee, make lunch, wash mounds of dishes, paint daughters -ok, mine too- toenails gold, read, run around dining room table, play with and destroy expensive kitchen gadgets, run errands, buy groceries, twirl in circles while listening to inappropriate music, make poor, nervous dog more nervous, watch Elmo DVD again and again, and hopefully take four hour NAP!

You get it by now right? Every day is alike, but wonderful still. I feel like a beetle that is happily trapped in amber.

Daughter is awake and crying now, must put down wine and attempt to offer comfort before delivering her to poor, tired wife's arms.