Love is not enough

Man, this fucking bitch..

done took off..

Fucking with some college graduate, punk ass..

Abercrombie wearing mother fucker..

Left me broken hearted, in the Chevy.

It's all good though.. you know why?

I got ME, bitch.

So, I've come out of my funk a little--probably due to my recently having been reminded that there is, indeed, sex after Christene, and it's not bad at all--and you maybe deserve a less cryptic run-down of recent events. Here it is in a nutshell:

I came home to WA bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, on a big pink cloud of sobriety and ready to take life by the horns. Christene and I parted on loving, tender terms, and even now my heart melts a little thinking of the tears that she cried into my chest, begging me not to leave, telling me that I could still stay and that she would pay my mother back for the Greyhound tickets. My entire bus ride home was spent deep in the throes of home-sickness--not for Washington, but for my love's ice-blue eyes, the beautiful swell of the hips I loved to run my fingertips over, the thighs I loved to kiss..

When I got home, we spoke of me possibly going to smoke heroin, because it had been so long. I decided that unless my homie made it very easy for me, I would not go; I felt too good about sobriety, and more than anything I wanted to keep my promises (and also, at this point, wedding vows--which Christene had also written for me, not just me for her) to Christene, which was always easier when I was sober. Well, as fate would have it, it was very easy; there was a ride and everything.

I got high. I talked to Christene throughout, and for a couple of days it was okay. I went to a friend's house, my homie Matt, who didn't have a phone or a computer. I didn't have a ride back to my mother's house, but I could have gotten there if I had tried a little harder.. I just didn't really want to go there at the time. Three days passed, and I returned to my mother's house to kick drugs for a minute.

I wrote Christene a text. I had missed talking to her very much, and wanted very badly to do so. I remember now that one of the things she first said was "Oh baby, I wish you had called me.. :(" which didn't really make sense at the time.

We had written wedding vows to each other, as I mentioned before. I don't have hers sitting in front of me, but one of them was basically:

"I will always be nothing but true, everyone will know that I am yours and only yours. Your wife."

Remember that, as we continue.

If you're reading this, maybe you have read the entry(s) that I wrote about Christene before. If you did, you know how I feel about her, and how I have felt about her. I wrote the entry about how she was "something to lose," the only thing I had to lose, on the night that I came back to my mother's. I stayed there a few days, but left again to live the way that I have always lived.. like a rolling stone. I hustled up some money to pay my warrants, but partied on much of it, and before long I was broke and Christene was on her way back from South Carolina.

I was ecstatic. I couldn't wait to see her. My sunshine was coming back, and the world would be in order again soon. On the day of her return, I didn't have a chance to check my Facebook until her sister was already in the bus station parking lot, waiting for her. I got a ride, and when Christene was with her sister, I called. "Hey baby," I said, grinning despite myself. "I missed you so much! You're back!"

She was less than thrilled to talk to me, since I wasn't there to get her when she had gotten off the bus. She asked me to get some heroin and bring it to her at her sister's house. It took me about two hours to hook it up, and I went to Snohomish to see Christene, my heart racing as I pulled into the parking lot of her sister's apartments. I held her tight when I got out of the car, though the air was tense and she was not as happy as I would have liked. We went inside, and we smoked the drugs I had brought. I told her that I was getting sick off of the heroin now, and she was disappointed.

We made love. As we lay in bed afterward, the fog of much-needed sleep creeping into my thoughts, she confessed something to me.

"Baby.. I have to tell you something, okay? When you didn't call me for those three days, and I was in South Carolina.. I slept with someone."

Never mind the wedding vows. Never mind that I had been true to her. Ouch.

I stayed at her sister's for two days, and that fact gnawed at me. Where there had been conviction and steel before, my love burning bright and declared to the world on my blog entries and my Facebook, in my life and among my friends, it felt cheap and hollow. My vows, which I had poured my heart into and taken pride in, carried with me everywhere that I went, were meaningless.. because she had broken hers. It had taken maybe a week after I had left South Carolina. Forever had become eight days. I was angry. She told me that if I were to continue smoking drugs, we would not be able to be together. I was bitter, and I told her to fuck off. I was not returning to my mother's. She backpedaled a little, and said that we could still be together, but that I had to work on my problem.

I promised her that I would look into inpatient treatment, and I did. We made plans for a couple of days later, that Friday. I made an extra twenty dollars, and offered to take her to the movies. She said that she would get ready at her sister's baby's dad's house, and I killed a couple of hours and called her.

She didn't answer. I called a couple of more times; no answer. I texted her sister's phone, called it again. Her sister answered.

"Christene doesn't really want to talk right now," she said. "She.. doesn't know how to tell you that she doesn't want to be dragged back into your world right now," she told me. My heart sank, and a cold chill ran up my spine. "What do you mean?" I asked her, but I already knew. Stupid. Tears sprang to my eyes, and I hung up on Amber. I didn't know what to do. My friends all looked at me. "FUCK," I said loudly, and stared at the phone. "Fuck," I said again, and the tears fell down my cheeks.

I told her that I would get clean, that I would call her when I could be a positive influence in her life. She said that she would wait. I stopped smoking heroin that night.

She didn't wait. I wrote her messages on Facebook, telling her that I had begun the process of getting clean and that I didn't want to lose her. She didn't write back.

I took the hint, and realized that she was trying to leave me for good. I told her that I understood, though I didn't. Don't. I spent each day of my dope sickness hating myself and my life, wishing more than anything that I could just hold her and have her support, her laugh, her kisses. I remembered the days in South Carolina, those perfect, slow days. I remembered her calling me Turkey Moose. I remembered her having to move to the other bunk sometimes because I had restless legs, and me waking up halfway through the night and bringing her back to bed with me. I remembered the movies, Golden Corral on my birthday, telling her how much I loved her. I thought of all we had come through, and the odds we had beaten to stay together. Even now, I love her so much that it is difficult to think of closing this chapter of my life. But I have to. I know that she is a co-dependent girl, and I know that she is not alone right now, probably wasn't the day after I left her sister's. I know that that is what she has to do in order to forget me. It hurts, and I am beginning to do the same now. I told her that she should go and find happiness, that that would make me happy. It will. I just have to get through this slump so that I can find my own.. and I have begun to do that. I had the most amazing sex last night, and I didn't think that anyone but Christene would ever make me feel the way that I felt during that tryst again.

She said I know you gave me everything, but love is not enough, love is not enough, love is not enough.

So good luck, Christene. And good luck to myself, too. Merry Christmas, everyone.

Wish in one hand..

Have you ever felt like dying? Have you ever felt like you could die happy? Sometimes I'm not sure what the difference is. I test and test and test my limits, and in this case even proclaim that I have found the answer; that I've changed, by God, and it's time to reap the harvest of happiness that I have sown. I declare my discovery with one side of my mouth while I second-guess and trash talk it out of the other. Who but yours truly could be so completely ass backwards and confused? Who but me could get so fiercely behind something so hollow and useless? You can't imagine what it feels like to constantly butcher everything that you love on a regular basis. It's.. elating. Thrilling. Miserable. I think that I must be addicted to the bitter sweetness of love's demise, because I can't stand to watch it in life. I have proven this time after time.

Or at least, that's what I used to think. I once was a liar, an embellisher; I once painted pictures of myself for others that had little or nothing to do with the real me, wearing a vast array of pseudo-attractive masks and legends that often had only the most insubstantial of roots tucked into reality, putting their strange and beautiful forms between the eye of the beholder and my true face so that I didn't have to recognize the ugliest pieces of myself. As long as these unsightly flaws and defects were hidden from everyone else, I felt that I could sweep them under the rug, as it were; I even became so good at spinning these fictional versions of myself that I could often sneak the truth past myself and fall victim to my own glamour, thus perpetuating the fantasy ever more efficiently, deceiving all and any who cared enough to look.

Self consciousness has ruled my life for as long as I can remember. The desire to be something that I am not is nothing new to me. I have found, in my newfound policy of brutally honest self-reflection, that there are many contradictions inside of me, many desires and lamentations and passions that by their very existence deny one another. I want to love and protect, but also be free and weightless; I want a home so badly that I overlook the one that I have found until I have made my way to the "other side," and the grass is not as green as it had looked from afar. My heart is not satisfied with all that it loves and desires when it is within my grasp; it glories in hindsight, always yearning to bleed for sweet memories or distant dreams that were tangible but have found a new and less erratic horizon to call home, leaving my whims and unpredictability to thrash and make their demands to an audience of none.

Lonely.

Purged.

Unchallenged.

Just the way I (hate need spurn) like it..

If this latest attempt at self-destruction has truly left me bereft of the one thing I love in this world, I will have succeeded once more in reducing myself to zero, thus perpetuating my beloved cycle for the umpteenth time and securing my place in Hell once and for all. The truth is, I don't know how much more of this I can stand. Every time I throw in the towel and decide that I need to put my nose back to the grindstone, I look around me to find that opportunity has already moved on to find some young and enterprising soul that will close their eyes and fall into its arms unquestioningly rather than peppering it with useless doubts and fears before taking that grudging leap of faith.

I thought I knew who I was; for years I thought that I could not do without the things that set me apart the most in the world, the streets that made me hard and the drugs that made me bizarre. I thought I could not bear to lead a life bereft of the senselessness and chaos that had defined me for so long, and now I am faced with a future that has nothing else to offer--not even the greatest truth that I have found and fought so hard to hang on to, my one true love--and am disgusted by its implications. I do not want the bitter sweet tale in my arsenal, because its darkly beautiful tones of loss and sacrifice do not interest me as much as they may have interested the liar that once lived inside of me. I am no longer the actor that I was; I am not the suave, fast-talking corruptor that I was, nor am I the care-free womanizing player that I once liked to think. I do not take pride in the things that I once did, and pretty new faces no longer hold any sway over me. I want to be remembered as a bumbling, good-hearted protector with eyes for only one girl in the world; I want to find her next to me in the dark every time I wake up in the middle of the night, and I want every tear she cries to meet its end against my lips. I don't want to be a hustler.. I want to be a turkey moose. I don't really know what to do with myself at this juncture, and I can't think of anything to do but pray for an answer.. for once in my life I guess I will have to take the leap of faith, trust in the universe to put things in their rightful places, whether that coincides with my desires or not.

New beginnings.

Well, folks, let me tell you something. I am back here in Washington state, and as awesome as I recall things being when I was out "running and gunning," as it were, I can tell you from personal experience that it just isn't that awesome. You know, when I first got into heroin, I had things to lose. After a long history of meth addiction and a few felony convictions, I was finally doing something worthwhile: going to college. I had my own apartment, a vehicle, and my kids came over every weekend to hang at dad's place. I had a Playstation 3 on which I watched movies with my lovely girlfriend Christene, and played a few radical games which I will gladly plug here: Borderlands, Dragon Age 2, Bioshock, MAG, and a few others that I would love to add to the list but am unfortunately a wee bit too stoned to do so at this moment in time. Hey, guess what, it's fucking legal here in Washington state now, so I can officially partake as openly as I choose.

Legislation here is just plain cooler than yours. :)

Anyway, I had things to lose. I was happy, maybe for the first time, though my brains were still so fucking stuck on my "glory days" that I couldn't really fully grasp what I had. You can't possibly imagine what I have gone through and what I have PUT myself and my pretty little lady through to reach this point of view. I guess I had an idea of what I had sacrificed to my idiotic quest for the ultimate state of mind, but it never fully hit me. When I got too sick without drugs I would cry about it a little, sure, and if I was feeling particularly open I would sometimes illustrate to a sympathetic and equally drug-addled ear what the progression from there to here had been like, but it was all garbage. Recycled bits of the "woe is me, I had a wife and family" sob story I had heard so many times in my years on the streets. Here's what some of it might have sounded like:

"Dawg, this heroin shit sucks. You get high for, like, a fucking week, and then it's all maintenance. You get the creepy crawlies and can't sit still to save your fucking life, so sleeping is out. If you don't have that next hit, man, it's a week of real fun. You know how much I've given up for this shit?"

And so on and so forth.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I had detoxed several times off of heroin and gone back to it anyway. I thought that because I stole things for a living and had done more drugs than your average person, I was somehow on some other planet, separated completely from polite society by a chasm of sex, drugs and rock & roll. Maybe I was. But I have come to realize that that is and was only one part of me, that there is a whole other person inside me that I have paid far too little attention to the past four or so years that I have been completely gone. When I stop and think about it, I am slowly gaining things to lose, and I like the feeling.

Take Christene, for example. When I think of Christene, I am completely and totally happy. I miss the little camper in Sumter, SC. I miss her smell, her kisses, saying completely ridiculous things to her that would often get an equally ridiculous response. I miss her smile that crinkles up her eyes and is often accompanied by her RIDICULOUS laugh which I love so much it is making my eyes tear up a little at the moment. I miss the way she would lose things and then blame it on me, and then when I asked her where things were she would just gesture at her thousands of bags and say "it's in my bag." I laughed with Christene, I held her when her father was a dick-headed drunk and made her cry. I fell in love with her all over again in South Carolina, because although I knew that I had something before, I knew now that I had something to lose.

Get it?

I am staying with my mother now, and although she hates Christene, I know in time that she will come to share my thoughts, because I was such a drug abusing ass hole that I couldn't keep used tinfoil from popping up all over the apartment when Christene and I were staying with her, and I also couldn't keep the focus of blame from landing on my hapless girlfriend (it was mine AND Christene's fault when really the only one responsible was me) when petty thefts would occur around the house, et cetera. Oh, and all of this while LEAVING her, sometimes for weeks, and treating her like garbage in front of my family. Not to mention the constant threats of breaking up with her if she discovered me cheating, displacing all of the blame I could get my hands on. I'm not saying that Christene didn't have some sordid encounters on her end, but I am saying that they occurred while we were NOT dating--typically of my making--and that they were more often than not simple retaliations or attempts to cope without my presence, which failed quickly even when we were apart for months. Anyway, she was always faithful while I found ways to sneak off with someone else as often as I possibly could. If I were telling you a story about Good Christene and the Bad Man that ruined her life, you would feel pretty bad for this chick, right? Well I'm telling you about a real girl. She is a brunette, and she is perfect. She made a choice to stick it out through a life that she hated with me, and I love her for it. There is not a fraction of the women out there with half of her spirit, and almost all would have bailed out after the first few rounds.

Anyway, there's that. And I seem to be discovering a family out here while I'm not busy figuring out how to backpedal and re-ruin mine and Christene's lives after fighting so hard to break free of the cycle, namely my mother's little nest that she has built for herself. The house out here in Lake Stevens is a good one, though my mother seems to be finding every little problem with it the way that she would have in any of our previous homes. She is a serial improver, and she has a heart-stopping to-do list at all times. It makes for one good-looking and homey house, though I shunned it in my earlier years because it meant that there was always a lot for me to help with when all I wanted to do was listen to music and smoke weed, damnit. My little sister Samantha also lives here, and she is fifteen now, which is the perfect age for me to tend the already-burning fires of heavy metal in her heart. She has an adequately dark room with posters of rock stars on her wall, and we hang out and play X-Box games together. I think there is more of that to be done in my lifetime.

Anyway, take it from me, folks. Doing drugs has got nothing on real life. It's all full of colors and feelings, not just raw need and the desparate struggle to keep those needs satisfied day after day after day after day after day. I need at least one year free of the streets in my life these days, and then if I'm not satisfied with it I can turn right back around and get high as a mother fucker. I have a feeling I might just keep on trucking.

Birthday/Coming home

^that is a flailer song if ever I have heard one.. as well as a damn good tune

ANYWAY. On Nov. 21st, I celebrated 24 strange & eventful years on the face of this planet, roughly 10 of them devoted to doing as much as I possibly could to have a good time and avoid consistency & function as though they were plague-bearing vermin. I don't remember how I spent my birthday last year, but here in the Palmetto state it was a relatively tame affair spent at Golden Corral with Christene, followed by a trip to the store for a tall can of Icehouse (which I am finally drinking now) and a scratch ticket. After that, we watched "Seraphim Falls," a B-movie with A-list stars from the early-to-mid 2000s, and then I quite passed the fuck out for ten or eleven hours.

Life here has been like that. Tame, I mean. A beer, a couple of pills if they're around.. movies. Walks. Nostalgia--though for what, I don't know. You can read my first post ("Howdy") and see exactly how my mind worked during that time. I thought I was going to die. That part I didn't so much vocalize, but it's true no less, and understandably so. I have been lost for a long time, wandering my home county, surviving, feeding my various habits. Building bridges; burning them. Making good friends, only to watch them die or go to prison. Some of them have returned--from prison--but many are gone for years yet, some until 2020+. I came into this life young, very young for a kid raised basically in the suburbs with a confused but caring set of parents. I was home-schooled until eighth grade, and had minimal contact with the outside world, spending much of my time playing guitar and computer games, or reading books. If you're surprised at all by my ability to think and communicate in spite of my chosen lifestyle, you can thank my father for giving me impossible reads like "The Stand" by Stephen King and "Mexico" by James Michener (I believe that was Michener) at the age of seven.

By the time I reached public school, my time spent in Guitar chat rooms and exploring the immense wealth of musical knowledge on the web had made me a fan of such bands as Morbid Angel, Thorazine, Blind Guardian, Iced Earth and many other high-intensity metal bands (as well as a whole MESS of bands in between that I won't even begin to try and name on this blog). I was an A.D.D. kid with too much time invested in "rounding," and not enough time spent playing, too smart for my own good and finally becoming social at thirteen.

My home town was about as ready for me as I had been for it.

I went NUTS. My educational career lasted until about a quarter into my Freshman year, when I decided that eating mushrooms was more fun than doing my work in class. If you have ever fried, you know how hard it can be to hide from an inquisitive teacher (and vice principal, once they figured it out). At that age, too, drugs were tantamount to heinous and weren't tolerated well by the school district.

After that, I joined a heavy metal band and discovered amphetamines in a Marysville trailer park, two things that had basically nothing to do with one another but that happened relatively side-by-side.

Here's me with my old band, Death Rattle, who you can STILL check out on Myspace at www.myspace.com/deathrattle (I bet every Death Rattle since then was jealous that we got their domain name, too ;) )

That's about when my cycle began: build it up, burn it down. It had a lot more to do with drugs, I think, than I care to admit. I don't often think of those times, in those terms. I look back on my younger years and I see my problems in their adolescence, rather than their infancy or conception; I see me in my truck, a phonebook full of street people blowing me up for bags, a pistol under my seat. I often overlook the missed band practices, the home that housed my wondering family, the suddenly empty bed and the excuses. The lack of a rhyme or reason as an escape from reality, rather than as reality itself. Throwing up my middle fingers before they became stuck that way.

Back before people stopped telling me how much potential I had.

Back when life was fresh and exciting, before I wore out my freedom and the shouts and cries of rebellion in myself and among my peers had been reduced to the whispers of a tightly packed apartment filled with the strung out and homeless at 3 A.M.

Back when I believed in what I was doing.

Back when I had my blood family behind me.

Back when I had a fire burning inside of me.

Back when my father was my friend.

It has been a strange experience, seeing my life from this vantage point; something that I was convinced was flawed but entirely beautiful, a rare thing seldom appreciated in the right lighting by the people who witnessed and lived it themselves. I have never had so much clarity of sight, nor the desire to really look back on the true substance of it; just the demi-glamorous veil I had hung up around it. How long, I think, before I am blind to the true problem once more? Will I build something grand on these foundations of epiphane again, only to set fire to it?

The twenty-first was my birthday, and it was also the day I discovered I'm coming home. South Carolina has served well as a sort of "breather," a step back from the smoke and grind of my other life, but I see now that getting here and cleaning up was not the test; it was preparation for the real challenge, and the pains I went through to make it happen were a demonstration of just how desparate I was for the chance to pass. There is so much I have done on the street, so much I've given away to it, that it's become tired and not at all the freedom & wild, unbridledness of spirit that I remember.

There IS beauty in my experience, and I have resolved to try and capture a little more of it for you all in my blogs; it is not all thieving ass holes and robbing stores. No, that was certainly a part of the latter days of my addiction, which was a time of great sadness and self-discovery now that I have had a step back and a deeper look into it, but there was amazing freedom well-spent from time to time getting to know true fellowship and the thrum of the undercurrent of street life, the pulse of the world unseen. But there was something in the past that made all of the sacrifice and taboo worth it, something I had for a matter of years that I lost along the way and will probably never get back outside of capturing it as best I can with my written word for all of you. It is, as I said, a thing of the past. I have come to realize that those days are gone, and that now nothing can truly compare to the victories and sweetness of letting it go. My sister, Ryann Garner, was like me; in fact she may have been something wilder entirely, a pretty but beastly girl who wasn't afraid to fight or rob or declare war on whatever it was that stood in her way. She did a number of years in prison on more than one occasion, and she is now married and expecting a child with the man she loves. That is something that I would like to know, now; a life that isn't conditional, something that requires true work to build and grants years of happiness rather than a number of hours. I wonder what her awakening was like? Maybe something like mine, I like to think.

So we'll see what Washington has in store for me when I come back, though I think that it's probably something entirely different than what it has given me thus far, and it will require some discipline and probably a great amount of humility to accept it. I know that I have created adversity for myself, but I know also that I am not beyond redemption. Until next time, blogdom.

The Ballad of Kace Cheyes, pt. 2

Everyone should have a song.

I mean, if you think about it, our lives are a billion little snatches of lyrics. Take Pink Floyd's "Time," for instance.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day, you fritter and waste the hours in an off-hand way. Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown, waiting for someone or something to show you the way.

How normal, right? How painfully dull, like my first couple of weeks in Sumter. Don't get me wrong; the song is a great one. Pink Floyd are wonderful at what they do--or rather, what they did, before the band itself ceased to be, and the days of Roger Waters' self-stroking, all-but-solo, million-dollar butcheries began, preening around and sulling a name that was only fractionally his to sully--but what they were doing with "Time" and with several of the songs (or, it could be argued, the entire album) on "The Wall," which is the story of a tortured artist's life and descent into madness, was taking the ordinary and mundane, throwing them under a new shade of light and putting them to a tune. Using metaphor and innuendo, poetry, to make us feel that something that may have looked completely lame was actually spectacular, intricate, and a song about a boring day(s) becomes a life lesson, ending in a cryptic but beautiful passage:

Far away, across the field, the tolling of the island bell draws the faithful to their knees to hear the softly spoken magic spells.

Art, buddy. Story-telling; music. A song--somebody's song.

Though there are some differences between us these days, and my head may (or may not, maybe he would surprise me) be in a different place than ours were back when we raised Hell through Snohomish county, Kace Cheyes is someone I will always remember as a rider; they don't come with any more heart, or a more crooked, shit-eating fuckin' grin than that boy, and if you ever fuck with him, you'd better hope I don't catch you out of your house. So here's to the best car thief the world will ever know; my boy with meat cleavers for hands, Kace Cheyes.

I wrote him a little story. It's his fucking song. The Ballad of Kace Cheyes. You ready for part 2?

Josh Vee gets Tenderized

"Hey, wake him up."

"Kace, you know you aren't supposed to be here, didn't Ameron banish you or something?" said a sleepy, feminine voice to my left, slightly amused. That would be Jenn, of course, and there wasn't much that didn't amuse Jenn. She was a little like me, in a way, though quite a bit more amazing. She was my own age, and came from roughly the same lot in life; like me, Jenn was not a victim of circumstance. Less so, even. Jenn wasn't even a proper criminal. When it came right down to it, Jenn just wanted to party. She was my good friend, and after a "fling" during which she discovered I was a womanizing prick and I discovered that she was too smart to be played, we resigned to being cuddle buddies and developed a mutual respect for one another. So, the night before, we had fallen asleep together.

I was dope sick, and still had a few more days of sleep left in me, so all of this waking up business was too much to properly digest. So, I pretended to sleep on.

"What? That was like, a.. fuckin' week ago. He's gotta be over it by now. Plus," he said, kicking me, "we've got a sick man here."

"Fuck yooou, Kace," I groaned into the pillow.

"You wanna hit the Marysville Trail* with me or what?" he asked, and I could hear that goofy-assed smile in his voice. "Huh, Starvin' Marvin?"

"Lemme 'lone," I said, and rolled away, against Jenn. Or rather, where Jenn had been, before Kace had woken her and caused her to sit up, thus becoming less comfortable. Damn.

"And smoke all this heroin by myself? That's intimidating, bud, but if you insist.."

I heard him taking the foil out of his pocket, and groaned.

"I'm up, you sack of shit," I told him, sitting up. I was smiling, because if it weren't for Kace, it would have been a fucked up day at right about that point. Dope sickness, while not the world's most life-threatening or probably the most unpleasant ordeal, is nothing nice. Kace and I had made a point of having one another's backs with regard to heroin supply and demand, since the night we had met; when one of us had a supply and the other had a demand, we seemed to find ourselves sitting and comparing notes an awful lot.

"Zhat's what I sought," Kace said around the tooter** between his teeth, and we smoked.

"Dutch, I think you might be a drug addict," he said to me with a grin as the foil came my way. "Just a minute ago you said you weren't getting up, remember?"

"One of these days we're going to have to flail you up a new expression," I said to him. "You'll get trap-dust all over your teeth."

We smoked and Jenn pretended not to notice, because she hated heroin, even though she bought it for me from time to time when she took pity on my sick-face. Eventually, I realized that something was amiss.

"Man, where the hell is my phone?"

"You let that slut use it this morning, remember?" Jenn told me, referring to a girl I had brought to the trap house as a "booty call" and kept there for a few hours, until she had freaked me out by trying to shoot me up with meth in order to have "life changing sex." I believed that I worked just fine without a vein full of drugs, and when we had finished what we were doing, I promptly ceased to pay attention to her. She didn't like that much and had run upstairs to Josh Vee, a lesser man, and began to fill his dumb little head full of all kinds of inimical nonsense about me, gearing him up to start something that he would definitely not want to finish.

Now, in his defense, it isn't all Josh Vee's fault. He had just gotten over a tough breakup with one of the local girls, and with his lower-than-average IQ, he was very susceptible to Yvanna's "charms." It didn't take long for her to fill his head full of sob stories and win him over. Plus, I think I may have owed Josh twenty bucks or something, and I have a habit of losing track of my small debts sometimes, which just may have been the case with Josh. That has a way of clearing the road for some less-than-savory deeds.

So, Yvanna had come down and asked mein sleeping self if she could use my phone, and then "forgotten" to return it. The phone wasn't exactly working at the time, which made it a more comfortable loss to accept; the thousand and sixteen contacts in it, however, I needed.

"Is she still here?" I asked Jenn, and she shrugged. At that moment, as if on cue, there was a knock at the door and Josh Vee walked in.

"Hey Dutch," he said, looking like a window-licker as usual with his slightly Sid Vicious upper lip and hair a-fly as he walked in. "Do you have that twenty bucks? Yvanna wants to go and get some Dairy Queen.."

"Nah, bud, I'm sorry. Hey, do you know where my phone is?" I asked him.

"Well.. I don't know, man," he said slowly, obviously considering his options. "I think.. I may have seen it, earlier. Why?" He was smiling at the end, and my blood temperature went up by a degree or two.

I looked at Kace, and he was as smiley as ever, though there may have been a glint in those hawk eyes. He lived for uncomfortable situations, his heart swelled with glee at the first sign of static. It was something that both mystified and intrigued me about my friend; he was a shit starter, a problem creater, and it was even better if you had something to say about it.

"Well.. Yvanna asked me if she could use it this morning, and--hey, what the fuck is that on your.." I trailed off, looking at the Kenneth Cole watch on Josh's wrist. Wian had given me a Kenneth Cole watch just like that, and it was in the pocket of my..

I grabbed my Ecko hoodie off of the foot of the bed, and felt in the pocket. Nope, no watch.

Now, this situation warrants some explaining.

Wian is a man of his word. He will be the first to tell you that he's not always level headed, that he has some problems, and even from time to time isn't the best of friends (there have been two separate occasions during which I have caught him stealing something of mine, but our friendship was strong enough that we talked it out both times. I am not completely innocent of being a fucked up friend from time to time, myself). But when he attaches his word to something, he lives up to it or busts on the way. He had given me a watch and told me never to lose it, and I had extracted his word from him on the same in return, giving him a Guess watch that was one of the better ones I had owned at the time.

"Josh, that's my fucking watch on your wrist, dude."

"What?" Kace said, and he began to laugh. My heart raced, and the edges of my vision began to collect little sparkling filaments of something.

Josh stammered, and looked at the watch. "No, it's a Quartz crystal!" he said, before I could even accuse him of possessing a certain brand of watch.

"That's a fucking Kenneth Cole, Josh," I said. "What has Yvanna done to your fucking head, dude?"

"Well.. I didn't come down here to talk about this, and if you want to talk about it, we can do that outside!" he said, and turned on his heel and exited the room.

I looked at Kace for a minute, and he was smiling, his eyes shining with the glaze of craziness or something that often lived in them. I don't know what I looked like, but it must have been something else entirely, maybe a shade of sickly-shocked disbelief. Jenn put her hand on my shoulder. "Dutch, I'll go and talk to them, okay?" she said. I could feel my heart beating in my chest, rapping a tattoo against my ribs as my lungs swelled and waned entirely too fast. Kace laughed again, a short burst of guffaw that was as crazy as his expression.

Jenn left without another word, and I started to pack my things up. "This isn't fucking done, dude," I said. "I don't care if Jenn comes back down here with all of my shit, this isn't fucking over," I continued, talking as much to myself as to Kace, who helped me get my clothes and all the rest of my worldly possessions into my Dakine backpack. He didn't say anything.

Jenn came back down, and she had my phone. "She took it all, Dutch, but Josh won't give back the watch. I'm sorry. That fucking bitch.. who the fuck does she think she is?"

"Jenn, will you give us a ride to pick up my girl?" Kace asked her, and I was already standing with my backpack slung over my shoulder. Kace had my other bag, a suitcase.

"Yeah, of course," Jenn said, and Kace and I trooped up the stairs and out the back door. It was a nice day, I remember; sunny, some time in Spring's last gasp but not quite Summer's infancy. The trap house was full on the upper deck, a little crowd gathered outside of the hallway, close to Josh's room. I could hear Yvanna's voice rasping conspiratorially from inside Josh's window as we walked down the path toward the gate and Jenn's car, and turned to look after we had secured my belongings in the trunk. I considered Yvanna's face as she peered at me over the window sill, and something in my eyes must have told her what was about to happen, because her eyelids disappeared entirely as Kace and I walked back toward the house, purpose in our strides. She called something out, and I was too busy marching to pay attention to what it was. There was a dam-burst of people from the hallway into the living room as we entered, and the onlookers made a ring around the room, giving us a wide berth as Yvanna and Josh emerged from the throng and looked expectantly at me. Josh was wearing a smile that told me he he had was confident, and had probably been speaking with people and had somehow earned himself a following; he wasn't alone in here.

All of this I calculated, for a moment, and before I could open my mouth Kace had stepped up to Josh, offering his hand. Josh looked at it a moment, and his smile widened; what a bunch of jokers, that smile said, giving up already. That's what I thought. Josh took the hand, and with his left, Kace punched him right in his fucking teeth.

What happened next is a blur, but I will do my best to recount it. As Josh dropped, a native man I happen to like named Dennis stepped toward my friend, and I got in the middle. "Fuck that," I yelled, "He took my shit, Dennis!"

Yvanna stepped toward my friend then, and attempted to join the fray. I pushed her over her stooped lover, and she tumbled over him and into the bathroom as Kace and I took turns aiming a few kicks at Josh's crumpled form, then I turned to face the rest of the room. Dennis had backed off at my word, but Wian had taken his place. "What the hell is going on, Dutch?" he said, and I pointed a finger accusingly at Josh, who was scrambling away toward his room.

"That mother fucker," I panted, "took the watch that you gave me, Wian. Get it back from his fucking ass," I breathed, and Kace and I began to walk toward the back door again. Just then Josh came out of his room with a big ol' fucking knife in his hand, and I turned toward him and started screaming. I can't remember exactly what I said, but it definitely included "pussy" and "fight me like a man" as he half-advanced on me. I put my fists up and he didn't come any closer, and I continued to taunt him, telling him to put the knife down. When he didn't I made it clear to the house at large that this man was a bitch, and walked out the door. As I cleared the other side of the fence, Josh followed, and I teased him a little more, giving the gate a shove and knocking a section of the rotten fence over by accident, clearing the way for him to step over and make something of it, if he wanted to put the knife down. Jenn was already in the driver's seat. Wian emerged from the house and walked up to Josh, putting out his hand expectantly. Josh's bleeding mouth twisted up for a moment, but he took off the watch and placed it in Wian's outstretched hand. I took it and put it back on, and Kace guffawed again from the back seat of the car where he now sat, waiting.

"I wasted a whole lot of time trying to be your friend, Josh," I told him. "You are nothing but a punk ass, bitch made, tail-tucking little faggot," I told him. "A knife-having, ball-less, girly little boy," and approached the passenger seat of Jenn's car. He didn't say anything as I got in, and the engine started. I rolled the window down and hollered one last "bitch!" before we pulled out. There was silence in the car for a moment, and then all three of us began to laugh. "Did you see his fucking face?" I said, and the car filled with fresh peals of laughter. "That stupid fucking lip?"

We drove toward the other side of fourth, where Wegan was waiting.

The first punch anyone had ever thrown for me in the heat of the moment had taken off that day, one projectile problem delivered by one Kace Cheyes, and even now sitting behind this computer in South Carolina thinking back on that day in late spring, my heart is full of pride. Pride that I had found a friend worth keeping, someone who was going to not only talk about it but be about it the way I had always been for my best friends and partners, only to be let down when the shit hit the fan for me and they were nowhere to be found. There is a girl in Washington who could tell you about how I have my friends' backs, even though they often can't seem to come through in a pinch for me; her name, which I will of course change for her legal safety as it comes into question in future posts, which she will certainly be featured in at least one of for the glorious night I am telling you about now, is Joanna. She never threw a punch for me, but certainly did stand her ground one night (unlike the puling, jealous little punk I was sticking up for) with a Winchester thirty-thirty in her hands on my behalf, which I will tell you about another night. My point is, of course, that I did not entirely know what it was like to know a man with heart like Kace. If I did, it was an understanding between some other set of friends, a bond in someone else's life that I could not fully grasp.

Kace Cheyes is a man amongst men, and fuck you if you think any differently.

Until next time, when we sing the third and final installment in this song of his. Later, blogdom.

*Marysville Trail: code for smoking heroin, refers to the "heroin trails" (the name of this blog! ;P) that are left when the piece of heroin slides over foil while flame is applied

**tooter: a tube, usually a broken pen or a cut-in-half straw, used to inhale heroin smoke

Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Some seek shelter in the church, a refuge for those with faith; but we know how to smoke them out, a pyre will be raised - "Gods of War Arise," Amon Amarth

Impervious to FIRE, impervious to STEEL! MERCILESS VENGEANCE! - "The Goatrider's Horde," 3 Inches of Blood

You know what's funny? Not a God damn thing about today. This is the point in my life at which I usually freak out and do something unforgivable. What the fuck is wrong with people? What the fuck is wrong with me? I drank too much the other night, and I hate that shit. It has my mind all fucked up.

I really need an NA meeting. I need something.

What am I even doing here? This was always for Christene. It was all for Christene, always. We used to have our own place, and I was a college student, studying English, always on the verge of self annihilation, always drinking too much, always carrying on like I belonged to her world until I destroyed both of us. Why did I bring an innocent girl into my war campaign versus myself? Why is that kind of collateral damage acceptable, why do I make excuses, why am I so full of hate and sadness all of the time? Why is NOTHING ever good enough?

"Let's smoke our lives away," my good friend Johnny J used to always say.

I've always gone against the grain, always smiled crookedly in the face of serious life decisions. My teachers always loved me and thought that I just needed a challenge. What a load of bull shit. I am a bomb. I begin to build something, gaining momentum, and when it holds me up for a moment--some mystifying question like "how do I get a job?" Or maybe "what is the next step?"--I use that momentum to kick free of it, and crash. I had an apartment and student loans, and this idea that I was going to be an English professor, while Christene worked a desk job at a landscaping company nine to five-ish (maybe more like seven to three). My daughters visited me at that house, frequently, and for a while everything was great. I even had a car, a ninety seven Honda civic. A flat-screen TV and a playstation 3, a laptop where I played World of Warcraft because I'm secretly a fantasy nerd. It made me itch, the normalcy. Why does that make me itch? Why do I dress myself up in the vestments of someone that has a plan, only to rip them apart with my bare hands until the pieces resemble nothing sensible or functional, just striped discord, thundering chaos like a Slayer song or the aftermath of a riot brought on by some natural disaster?

I'm running out of opportunities. One day there will be nothing left but the drugs and burglaries, and one day I will have nowhere to turn but deeper into the rabbit hole, just the way I like it. Where does it stop? Murder, overdose, prison? Why then am I still so compelled to make a mess, bleed this place of resources and take out my hate and frustration on Marc and his belongings just because he has his own quirks and dislikes and has the audacity to not see things entirely from my point of view? Moron, I think. Less than me. Drunken hick deadbeat waste-of-oxygen mother FUCKER, you don't know me or where I come from and now you pay.

It's the same thing I did to my mother's ex husband Shawn, and when he fought me to the end the situation climaxed with me kicking in his apartment door and trying to hurt him. Why do I always have to underline other people's faults so much that they embolden my own to the point where people will have nothing more to do with me?

I am a great burner of bridges. I like to swim, I guess.

Sure people have problems, and they probably need help, but violent pacification is not therapeutic, and it generates further hate and mistrust. And what does it all come back to? I want things to deteriorate enough that I have nowhere else to go. I don't want to be here or there or anywhere that doesn't look like it's crawling with drugs and crankster gangsters. I resist happiness and I think things look better on fire, even though it's likely that one day those flames will close in and take me with them.

I really need a meeting, or something. Off to figure out the transit system here..

Commercial burglary: do it for the children.

Leave me be, I'm alright.. can't you see I'm just fine? Little skinny, okay.. I'm asleep anyway - "Swing On This," Alice in Chains

In recovery, I'm a failed disease! - "Artificial Red," Mad Season

Disclaimer: poetic license and freedom of speech give me the right to post these things and let you know that they are alleged and may possibly be fiction, thus discrediting them in a court of law or as nonfiction, per se. That being said, lighten up and stop trying to lock a brother down, pigs.. :)

My girlfriend got me sick today, and so I am not about to walk around and do stuff, because I got sick in the first place by loving on her and doing everything she asked, so now I am going to make HER life Hell in return.

Ha ha, being a parasite is good times.

So have any of you ever tried Life cereal with milk and pancake syrup? If you have, you know exactly why I need some. If you haven't .. well, some life YOU live. I first discovered this amazing concoction at a house in Everett, Washington, where I was too busy being domestic and trying to be a better boyfriend to smoke enough meth to stop me from being a stoner chef (a stage I find myself in from time to time when I rediscover eating, in which I invent new and delicious things like bagel sandwiches and eat corn and raviolis straight from the can).

The people I stayed with at the time were fairly decent people, parents of thirteen (no fucking joke, dude) recently engaged in a downward spiral thanks to none other than crystal meth, which is usually the cause of life failure in the early stages of addiction. Even so, they weren't a bad lot; Taylor (the father of this economy sized family) and Feather (the mother) were cool enough to invite my girlfriend and I into their home, though they knew nothing about us other than that we were very good friends ("street family") to.. are you ready for this mouthful? .. Taylor's baby's mom's boyfriend, Asher, who we all affectionately referred to as A.J. My "brother," in all of his smoked out and sleepless glory, is one of the best people I have ever known in my life, and I guess his vouching for us must have earned us a fairly esteemed position in their eyes (a well-deserved one, for I don't get faulty with people until they do it to me first, in ninety-five percent of all typical cases).

In this case, I was very respectful of the collective household in all situations, and even a helpful and functional member of the family for a time. I felt accepted, for a while; a feeling of safety and security surrounded my life there, and I never told a single soul that might compromise mine or my friends' livelihoods where the house was or that I stayed there. While I lived there, I never had to worry about the weather and my place in it throughout the night; too, I never had to worry about being caught and charged with shoplifting in order to feed my girl friend and I, as Feather was the recipient of a substantial amount of food stamps.

It was perfect.

As with all things in my life, there was a bit of a catch.

Though I am no model of function, as I have said in previous entries, even I believe that there is cause for alarm when the children in a home are exposed to felonious situations on a daily basis. In Taylor and Feather's case, the children were not only exposed, but were participants in the family business of burglarizing stores in the dead of night.

Taylor had been doing this for years, and was exceedingly methodical (I say this with both admiration and reproach, as you will soon understand) in his execution of the aforementioned burglaries. He and my brother Asher often did them together, with the assistance of Taylor's brother-in-law Parker as their means of transportation. I was impressed, as I typically am with such "outlandish" and unexpected demonstrations of criminal activity, and considered making something of a job out of accompanying them on their very illegal jaunts, which I soon found to be a mistake. You see, Taylor was very thorough and efficient at what he did, but the longer I knew him the more I came to realize just how new he was at smoking shards and just how affected by drugs his brain really was.

Taylor was recklessly flailed out of his God damned mind, and it was all too evident to me that though I was an accomplished drug addict who could hang tough and pull off a great deal of dirt* (and prided myself on my cool in well-executed jobs), I was not about to follow Taylor down on his obviously smoked out and fucking NUTSO path to destruction, a well-justified opinion when you read the story I am about to tell you, which may never have actually happened, and consider the fate that he met shortly after I came to this conclusion, thank GOD my brains aren't entirely swallowed by chemicals and I still have some common sense left in me.

It all started one night when I did not strictly feel like death, and I was not a resident of South Carolina with a fever of about five hundred and two point six, peering at a possibly stolen Kindle Fire all day long for entertainment...

The Stupidest Heist Ever

also known as..

Dutch Likes his Freedom, but Not Enough to Not Post Incriminating Stories About His Life, Because They Are Hilarious to Him

(excuse me while I drink a half a bottle of Nyquil before we begin)

Anyway..

Taylor, Asher and I stood behind a dumpster down the road from Parker's car (he didn't smoke shards, so we respectfully kept it away from him); we must have looked funny together, three grown men of progressive sizes (Taylor was the oldest and smallest, an early forty-something with a lightly receding hairline, standing five foot nine on a good day and weighing a buck fifty soaking wet; I was/still am about six feet tall at twenty-three, probably weighing two hundred pounds; Asher was the giant of the group, a cornfed manimal of thirtyish that stood six foot two or three and weighed in at maybe two sixty), smoking meth together as they prepared for a night on the town, ripping things off and spitting in the eye of the working man.

"Feather, we are just going out to work!" Taylor barked into Asher's phone, the eldritch light of the smart phone's display casting his face into eerie, writhing shadow as he hit the pipe and the phone's sensor slipped into an awkward enough position that it didn't quite know it was still being listened to. I could hear Feather's misgivings from my point of our triangle, and smiled at Asher, who also had a neurotic girlfriend that seemed to find something wrong with his every move, and was busily pretending not to notice the conversation happening on his telephone less than two feet away.

"Fuck, fine! Then maybe this time I won't come home! What? Fuck you then, you bitch, I'll send Parker home with the car and we'll get a different ride!"

I shifted my weight around from my left to my right foot and back again, peering at our surroundings as I waited for the pipe, or the end of Taylor's argument, which ever came first or was more interesting. We were in a little alley somewhere in the evil back streets of north Everett, and had left the house less than fifteen minutes before. I can't remember what Feather's problem was that night; the poor lady was a pill addicted mother of thirteen, and though Taylor usually brought home their living money from these occasional excursions, she often cried herself to sleep into the mouthpiece of the phone before he ever got a chance to start each time.

"Hey Asher, fuck my life, does that sound familiar or what?" I asked my brother in a low tone as the pipe came to me, and he made a kind of hissing, reproachful sound. Tsssss.

"That's nothing compared to Molly. She likes to tell me that I'm smoking heroin because I nod off when I'm on the phone. The fucking bitch never lets me sleep, and then tells me I'm smoking heroin and slaps me when I fall out. Can you believe it? Bitch bitch bitch when I'm awake, bitch bitch bitch when I'm asleep, and then she fucking hits me when I don't respond," he said, pausing for dramatic effect, "and calls me a woman beater when I wake up swinging."

I laughed into the pipe and gave up, passing it back to a busily bickering Taylor that was growing more heated by the second. It went absent-mindedly around to Asher, and we brothers talked while Taylor argued, until both the bowl and the argument had run their course.

"FUCK man, ain't that about a bitch?" Taylor asked when he finally hung up. "Heads up AJ, she says she's gonna sick Molly on you, too. We gotta let Parker sit this one out, any ideas for a ride?"

The phone rang, and Asher's expression was a portrait of distaste. I couldn't help it; I laughed. They looked at me, and then Asher looked at the phone and smiled. We all laughed then, and Asher held the phone out to me.

"It isn't Molly, it's Christene!"

"Oh what the fuck!" I roared, and we all laughed until we agreed that we had blown up the spot** enough. Molly and Christene took turns leaving fucked up voice mails and texts on Asher's phone as we walked back and, hoping to set a good example and appear focused, I said that they could wait until we had things figured out.

An old friend, Cadillac Mark (who actually drove a pickup by then, but Pickup Mark doesn't seem to have the same ring to it), said that he would provide stand-in wheels for the night, and so Parker dropped us off at his house behind the Casino. We waited, Taylor and I, standing in the country darkness of the Tulalip Indian reservation, while Asher disappeared down Mark's driveway. The minutes ticked by and became a half an hour; Taylor and I made small talk, pacing back and forth in the darkness of the night as we waited, until headlights spilled over us. I looked up at the vehicle, coming from the wrong end of the street, and instantly my heart sank.

"Fucking cops, dude," I said to Taylor, and at that moment Mark and Asher pulled out of the driveway. The tribal cop drove past us slowly as we got in the truck, and I tipped my hand at him through the window as we pulled into the street and were off.

"Hey, what the fuck?" Taylor asked the two in the front.

"My bad," Mark told him. "My dad was talking to AJ for a minute."

"That was almost a three hundred dollar conversation, boys," I said, thinking of the dope in my pocket.

"Well everyone's alright, so what are we doing?" Asher said, and Taylor looked at me.

"Tell him about the place."

An hour later we were walking down the road, away from Mark's truck, bandannas tied around our faces (mine red, of course) and a bag of tools slung over my shoulder. I had suggested a place to Taylor, a little store down the highway from a town we all knew as the meth capital of our state, for its dense woods and sparse neighbors. It was about two in the morning, and the two-story building was dark as we approached it. We crept around the side with the gas pumps, ensuring that it was dark and closed for the night, and Taylor took a pair of snips from his pocket as Asher and I crouched behind some bushes, walking up to a gray metal box on the wall and cutting the wires running out of it.

Asher and I rose and walked with Taylor around the side of the building, Asher boosting Taylor up and onto the roof. I paced the paremeter carefully as Asher hid his bulk behind a dumpster, tossing Taylor up various tools he needed to knock out the cameras and loudspeaker as he called for them.

An engine purred to a halt on the far side of the building, and I dove like double oh seven behind the bushes by the snipped telephone box, digging through my pocket and retrieving the bag of shards inside. Taylor was small enough and the roof expansive enough that he would be able to hide, and Asher had found a nook, but I very much watched the car full of girls as it pulled up to a gas pump. They were yelling drunkenly as the driver side door opened, and the girl that climbed out and swiped her credit card in the pump was laughing and making conversation with her unseen passengers as she pulled the nozzle free and began to pump gas into her vehicle. I relaxed and tried to appear as bush-like as possible, preparing to keister*** my drugs at the slightest sign that things were headed south, no pun intended.

The girls left when they were done, and the air likewise left me in a whufff. I scrambled to my feet and rounded the building, rasping up at Taylor: "Everything good?"

"Yeah, fine, where the Hell have you been? I've needed the bolt cutters for like five minutes."

"What? Dude, I was hiding from those people at the pumps!"

"What?!" I heard Taylor hit the deck with a thump, and shook my head. How had he not noticed?

"Dude, they aren't there anymore."

"Oh," he said, and I glimpsed his face as he leaned out over the edge again and extended a hhand. "Gimme them cutters, then."

I got him the bolt cutters, and waited. And waited. We spent another hour waiting for Taylor to finish up there, and when he had, we all hoisted ourselves up onto the roof. Taylor had found a window on the other side of a loft-like attic, and I helped Asher make his uncertain way across the roof, telling him to follow the nail patterns that indicated a truss.

Taylor pried the window open, and we climbed into the second-story office.

It was a mess, miscellaneous cleaning supplies and file cabinets scattered haphazardly around two desks with a computer and a fax machine.

And there, with a few things stacked up on top, a safe.

"Jackpot, baby!" Taylor said, and we all grinned at each other.

There was just one problem, we found as we searched the room.

There was no way out into the store below, except out a door into the night and down a flight of stairs. The safe was maybe seven hundred pounds, and even with the three of us, we weren't carrying it out of there.

"What the fuck is really going on?"

We puzzled over the problem awhile, and in what seemed like mere moments, it was getting light out.

"Asher, come on," I said after it had been established that we weren't leaving without the safe. "Let's see if there's a dolly downstairs or something."

We searched the premises time and again, and there was nothing. It became clear that we were going to have to push the safe off the second story balcony, so we pushed it out onto the porch on the other side of the door.

All hope of discretion was lost in the early morning light, and my heart beat faster as we rolled the safe across the porch landing. There were cars zooming this way and that on the highway, and I regarded my friends' bandanna-wrapped faces with alarm.

"We gotta be fast," I said to them.

We decided to push the heavy safe through the pickets of the fence surrounding the deck, and used its momentum to smash it through.

Smash!

The safe exploded through the pickets, and fell to the asphalt below. It didn't even bounce; rather it seemed to sink into the pavement, denting the driveway forever where it landed. We scurried downstairs, and Asher and I wrestled the safe back onto its wheels, pushing it back toward the cover of bushes separating the highway from the store.

"Let's go, man," I said, my heart racing in my chest. "Call Mark, let's get this thing out of here!"

My brother indicated the front door of the store with a finger, and I followed his gaze to where Taylor was now trying to get inside.

What. The. Fuck.

I scrambled across the parking lot, coming to a crouch beside Taylor, who was busily using the pry bar to try and wrench the double doors apart."What are you doing, dude?" I growled.

"I sell cigarettes that I get from these places," he explained, and I stared in disbelief.

"It's like six in the morning, dude! We got the safe, let's bounce!" I pleaded with him, all too conscious of the morning commute of cars on the highway now.

"Go if you want," he said.

What?

I noticed the gleam in Taylor's eye for the first time, the crazy gloss and wide pupils. He was flailed. "Dude," I said quietly, "don't get greedy. That's how you get caught."

"Then fucking GO," he hissed.

I wasn't about to leave my friend, so I did the next best thing. I kicked in the glass of the door and scrambled through, and turned the latch. Taylor came inside, and I dashed around the counter, grabbing up every carton I laid eyes on. It wasn't the good stuff--Grand Prix and Wildhorses--but I didn't care. Taylor came around and calmly collected the Marlboros and Basics from under the counter. Then, the alarm went off.

Now I don't care who you are, that shit is scary.

I began to grab useless shit, like key chains, off of the counter, and when I realized what I was doing I threw them at the register and grabbed my bag full of cigarettes, springing for the door. I dove back through the hole I had made in the glass, even though the door was open now, and ran across the parking lot to Asher, where Mark had just shown up.

"Let's get the fuck out of here! Go go go, we gotta get Taylor and bounce!" I hollered, getting behind Asher and attempting to push him toward the truck as the alarm shrieked into the morning.

We never did get the safe that day, although Taylor did get his cigarettes. They dropped me off and returned to the scene, but as I had predicted, it was swarming with police and fucked off by the time they got back there. You just can't get away with a bitching alarm at seven A.M. the way you can at two or three. I never did accompany Taylor on another job, and that's a good thing, because about three weeks later he got booked for questioning about a series of burglaries in King county, and he still hasn't seen the light of day while I survive to tell this tale, sicker than dog shit with fever blisters on my legs, but more or less okay here in South Carolina.

Ahhh, yes, that thought puts a smile on my face.

:)

Til next time, blogdom. It's nap time.. I'll holla back at snack time.

///////This picture is just fucking rad, and this post has nothing to do with the time I grew antennas///////

*dirt: illegal activity, usually referring to robbery or burglary, manipulation of funds that don't strictly belong to you, or taking off small and defenseless animals' collars and pretending they belong to you when they really belong to the next-block-over neighbors and not to you at all, and really have a name like Fluffy or Cutieface when you tell all your friends that it's your puppy named Felon

**blown up, blowing up: something that has been made obvious, using little discretion--usually refers to making criminal activity known to police

***keister: how else are you going to avoid taking a drug charge when you get taken in for a commercial burglary with a bag full of dope?

Angry face: I have one, too, and it robs people.. OR DOES IT?

Someone said it's alright.. save it now, don't say it for my sake!

Someone said it's alright.. faster now, you know I've got no brakes! - "No Brakes," the Offspring

What did you say? Are you talking to me? .. are YOU talking to ME? Walk on home, boy.. - "Walk," Pantera

You know, when I wrote my first entry on this thing, I did some fairly irresponsible things to your understanding of my situation. First of all, I gave you an impression of singularity, as though I were the only person on this journey, if you can call it that. The truth is, I probably would never have come this far from my comfort zone all by myself. My girlfriend (let's call her Christene, since it's possible that her and I aren't technically legal to be around one another) was the grand architect of this plan, our means to achieve it the result of a vengeful move to exact what I felt was justice for a wrong done to my lady friend and myself. Secondly, I didn't mention that the drunken mechanic with which we stay is her estranged father, responsible for keeping us awhile as we do whatever it is we came to do out here. If I had, it would have been easier to drop little bits of South Carolina life along the way, like the fact that her father Marc bock talks* like a proactive fatherly saint and then completely disregards what he said to her the next day. A great many of these drunken rampages involve Christene's mother in some way, who was shot and killed by her step father twelve years ago, and is a very sensitive subject for her. This is not something to shoot your mouth off about while drunk if you are a fifty something year old dead beat dad who hung up your hat and left before the girl you're talking to was even born, and then proceeded to stay lost on the opposite coast even after her mother was murdered and she began to be tossed about from family member to family member like a puppy for whom there is no room but no real means of humanely discarding. Coupled with the lifelong bachelor's slow realization that this whole "glorious homecoming" thing is proving to be more expensive, difficult and embarrassing than he had anticipated, the situation has slowly deteriorated before my eyes, with Marc transitioning from the doting and involved figure of our first few days to the detached and irritable ass hole that wakes up and makes his chronic broke-ness known all day long until he wraps things up at the shop and takes whatever money he DOES have to the bar to come home and further act like a drunken idiot.

Today, rather than deal with it anymore, I made a suggestion to Christene.

"Hey, you know what?" I said as we killed time like we always do, sitting around the twenty-foot long camper we occupied with Marc, watching movies while I typed away on my allegedly stolen Kindle Fire.

"What, Moose?" she said, invoking the name she had affectionately given me since our arrival at the camper, because I am six feet tall and two hundred pounds and make getting around the camper difficult for her five foot five father and five feet tall self.

"Let's go on a road trip," I told her, and I could feel the swell of excitement as it rose up and bloomed in my chest. "I mean, neither of us is happy here, so let's fucking bounce. Why not?"

"Because they do license checks** in South Carolina," she reminded me, "and neither of us has a license. Or a vehicle, for that matter. Did you think we were gonna hop on a couple of rocks and roll somewhere? They don't make rocks in your size, Moose."

"Obviously we would take the Neon," I said, referring to the vehicle her father always let us drive around town on the beer or Taco Bell runs he frequently sent us on, despite our mutual lack of a license.

There was silence for a moment, and I knew that she was considering whether or not this was actually feasible.

"What about the license checks, and gas?" she asked me quietly.

"They don't do license checks on the interstate, and we could be out of here by the time he realized something was up," I said, and realized that I was being completely serious. "We could do returns*** for gas, babe. Think about it! We lived on the street for years, and no one ever had to worry about gas while we were around."

"I can't do returns at Fred Meyer, anymore," she said, thinking of an incident in Washington in which we had tried to return a few hundred dollars' worth of stuff and failed.

"That was on the West coast," I told her. "There are totally different stores here."

It was true that, on the East coast, not as many places were as "hot" as they probably would have been on the West coast. We were virtually unknown with the police in the area, as well, and Marc's car was not exactly a red-flagged automobile itself. It was perfect.

"Where would we go?" she asked, and I answered almost immediately with what I felt should have been obvious:

"Home."

Marc, bedridden with the 'world's worst cold,' walked by just then and grumbled something about not having any cigarettes, and Cook Out is hiring. I told him I would love to go across town and apply at Cook Out (although he was supposed to have called about ten friends for "sure thing" jobs for both myself as well as Kristen).. and he tossed Christene the keys to the car.

We looked at each other as he walked back into his room, and I started to round up the clothes and miscellaneous belongings we'd left around the trailer; a pair of red sweats, used for a pillow, the few hats I'd left lying around. I considered calling my friend Johnny Marvel, because I'd left my sweater at his house, but instead picked up a sturdy Carhartt jacket I saw lying on the top bunk across the room and stuffed it into the blue bag I kept my stuff in. Christene watched silently, and when I was done, I looked meaningfully at her. We stood there a minute, and I could almost hear the thoughts as they ran through her head: this dumb mother fucker is responsible for seven eighths of the laws I've broken in my lifetime, and now he wants me to drive away from an admittedly dead-end situation and the long lost father I found out I never wanted or needed, in a car that will most definitely be reported stolen, although that doesn't necessarily mean jack shit in my experience.. look at him, he's already stolen the fucking thing, in his head. What the hell is the matter with this guy? Well, I guess we had better get going.

She picked her bag up and we walked outside, a new feeling of excitement and anticipation taking root in me. Sure, why not? It seemed to be the way of things with us, lately; maybe it wasn't right, per se, but hadn't Marco fucked me off on about a thousand levels back in Washington by the time Christene and I (allegedly) robbed him for a quarter pound of heroin and two thousand in cash? Hadn't Marc, who's name is even SPELLED similarly to the Mexican's that we may or may not have robbed, promised Christene the world, telling us to come to this far corner of the country in which we knew nobody and had nothing, where we could scarcely feed ourselves (today we ate a four year old box of dumpling mix we found by chance, mixed with the brackish water from the hose which Marc warned us not to use, though the man had been holding back every last cent he could to drink himself horizontal again when he was supposed to be going to the doctor and left us with no food or cigarettes) and every bright avenue ended in a great brick wall?

So we threw our bags in the back and started the car, as I pointed in the direction I had known was West ever since we first showed up in South Carolina. "I think there's a Cook Out in Everett that's hiring, babe. Let's stop there first, alright?"

*bock talk: "bock" refers to the sound that a chicken makes, as a bad meth addict who sells their belongings is called a "cluck," thus "bock talk" refers to the many promises and good-natured lies a person will tell when extremely high on drugs or, in Marc's case, liquor

**license checks: a sort of check point set up by police in the Carolinas, usually after dark, at which they can pull over any vehicle simply to ask the driver if they are legal to drive

***"returns": refers to shoplifting a few items from a store and taking advantage of their receiptless return policy, which can be done several times in a calendar year by each individual who attempts it, as long as they have identification and the items qualify (sometimes the employee catches on or becomes suspicious, and then you're fucked until you can come up with someone else to make the return). This yields a gift card, which can be used at the gas pump and inside to buy cigarettes or food as well

WARNING: I WAS J/K, THAT STORY WAS DEFINITELY BULL SHIT

Not because I wouldn't, believe me. A guy with a track record like mine and a recently acquired taste for spontaneity needs to vent and stuff once in a while to keep himself out of prison, you know? The facts however, unfortunately, point here: Christene and I have been dealt a pretty rough hand by life, lately. I accept mine with open arms, most of the time; Christene, however, has a harder time with hers. It was for her sake that I began conspiring to come to this place to begin with. As a man, it's my duty to take care of my girl. Marc was impressed with himself for the first few days, and it seemed like a good idea to put trust in him as far as a launch-pad back into the "real world" (as opposed to the "fake world" I have been existing in, I guess). It isn't working out quite how we had planned, but now I seem to have found employment, so it should be okay; that being said, nothing is set in stone yet. Since we can't live like this for much longer, and we might have to live like this for awhile if I don't go back to work framing soon, what comes next? I have never been a temperamental, quick-to-anger sort of person, but more of a slow boil/simmer type, and when a situation comes to its inevitable bitter conclusion, the flames burn hotter because of it. Results like these have stemmed from my unique confrontational skills (disclaimer: these results are based on what may or may not be fiction, and are very alleged and so forth, so if you are a prosecutor you can fuck off and die, baby):

- residential burglary (several times, but this one not that long ago was a very smoked out* one that involved a window that broke for like TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES, which I will detail soon because now I am drunk and it is hilarious)

- trap house destruction (mostly with Kace Cheyes, which you will hear about soon I'm sure)

- armed robbery (another hilarious story which involves pistol whipping and other fun felonious activities)

- financial fraud (WHOOPS Ms. Nettler, where did all your savings go?!)

and worst of all...

- FRIGHTENING THE PIGEONS.

So, what exactly might await us as we make our way deeper into this great, black abyss of unimpressedness and other assorted disappointments?

Well, quite possibly an allegedly stolen car put into a completely fantastical and faulty alias's name, as detailed by the first half of this post.

Let's start this shooting match off with what may or may not be a good example, because it probably isn't but just might be a complete and total fallacy.

EXHIBIT A (or B, since I've already fantasized about what I might do soon, and will make sure to leave YouTube evidence that will probably make me famous as it sends me to prison if that is indeed the case).

It's the only exhibit I have time to post before my buzz runs out, but I think it's pretty fucking good.

Once upon a time in a far away land called Snohomish County, Washington, lived a sometimes mean and sometimes nice lady named Bangel Erry. She had a vendetta against life because she was in the process of becoming totally smoked out and losing her house and kids, and also wanted to impress my brother Wian Olcott, and so after telling me that I could stay with her, she kicked me and my lady friend out two weeks later for no good God damned reason. This is the aftermath, greatly paraphrased up until a certain point...

"Hey Marco, a bunch of my stuff just went missing from the trap house because my lady friend and I may or may not have had a spare copy of the culprit's car key, which we could have but also might not have planned to use in our Great Escape to the East coast after she was a total cunt to us for no reason," I basically said to my boy Marco one day, whispering because I was in a hotel room on the Tulalip Indian reservation that he had paid for, home to one Chelsea Somethingorother that he had deigned to sleep with on the first night and now wanted nothing to do with.

"What does this have to do with me?" he probably didn't ask, but for the purpose of memory and getting right to the point, may have.

"Well, there's this television somewhere in her house.."

And so it was that Marco and I laid plans for him to pick myself and my old lady up from the hotel room he had spent the last twenty-four hours at, sneaking his laptop and other personal possessions out from under the would-be-very-angry nose of Chelsea Somethingorother, a mousey-faced little hood rat** with blonde hair and a bad attitude that looked like she belonged at a book club in a University somewhere and not at all in a hotel room bathroom with a needle in her arm, far too distracted by her fruitless attempts to hit her vein to notice as Christene and I rounded up ours and Marco's belongings and slipped quietly out of the motel room.

We met him at the McDonald's down the street, after he had told us a story to relate to Randi, his wife, about how we had gotten the laptop (something about a guy who was supposed to have brought it to us because of such and such reason and blah blah blah). Anyway, Randi had this REALLY good French Vanilla coffee thing, and Christene and I warmed ourselves with its deliciousness as we rode into the foggy night in the back seat of Marco's gold Cadillac (a very nice vehicle).

Some moron named Woen was in the passenger seat, and his ginger-headed creepiness was unsettling from the very beginning. This weirdo actually ended up stealing three grand from Marco (and made me and my girl suspects) during the incident I am about to describe, when our backs were turned and committed to a heinous act and Randi was walking down the street because of her warrants, like this:

"Marco, I'm going to walk down the street, okay?" said Randi as we pulled into suburbia, where Bangel lived. "I have a felony warrant."

We all agreed that would be best, and dropped her off while we pulled in to the driveway.

Bangel lived in a duplex, the other half vacant for the time being, closely situated beside other duplexes which were not quite so vacant. The neighbors' lights were off on both sides, and that was good enough for me. Christene got out and walked up to the door as we had planned, though Bangel was least fond of her; in situations like these, females tended to be the most disarming to unexpectedly discover standing at your door at three in the morning.

She waved to me after knocking a few times (everyone was apparently still out robbing my only worldly possessions from the trap house), and I got out of the car. Marco, as willing a co-defendant as they come, also got out, leaving Woen by himself to raid the contents of the glove box. I tried the door, and turned to Marco, but he was already off trying the other doors. Suddenly Woen was there, scaling the fence with my girl friend, and my urgent whispers for someone to come and put pressure on the door while I kicked it in went unheeded. Swearing under my breath, I approached the fence as a loud CRACK! pierced the night. "What the fuck was that?!" I rasped, craning my head over the fence. Woen, obviously the overcompensating Happy Helper now, had enlisted my girlfriend's help in attempting to pop the window off of its track, and had succeeded only in putting a great, big God-awful crack in it.

"Dude, we need a--" Woen began, and I could glimpse Marco coming over the fence on the opposite side of the yard. This was turning into a dog and pony show of epic proportions.

"You NEED to put pressure on this door while I kick it the fuck in, dude! Christene, get the fuck--"

"Just finish the fucking job, Dutch!" Marco growled, and we all puzzled over the window for two silent minutes, which gave me time to verify that the neighbors had not awoken, and that was quite alright. In a moment's time there were hands full of tools probing and bending the window, forcing it impossibly in its track this way and that, and a hushed blend of puzzled voices filled the darkness of the back yard.

CRACK!

"Oh what the fuck was that, it didn't even fucking crack anymore than it already has!" I whispered vehemently, deciding that the window was alive and fucking with us now as I hopped repeatedly, peering over the fence at the unchanged windows of the neighbors' house.

Three minutes later, when I had calmed down and stopped trying to herd my girlfriend back to the fence, the window finally gave enough to reach an arm around it and flip the latch, theoretically. I got a stick from the yard, and Christene reached around the Superwindow with it and swatted at the latch. I watched, forgetting to breathe as I wished over and over that someone had just leaned on the fucking door for me.

That's when it happened.

That fucking window gave up the ghost with a shrieking, shattering cacophany of death that reached for the ears of the sleeping, unsuspecting neighbors like Rosie O'donnell for a slice of cake on a giant stripper's ass at a Valentine's day parade. I immediately began to run in circles, and after five minutes of that, that fucking window was not done breaking. It broke until there was no glass in its frame, and the little shardlets of glass broke again on the soft and yielding grass, which bounced them back into the air and broke them again.

Marco grabbed and shook me back to my senses, saying something about how we had to get back to the door because Christene was inside now, and I gratefully jumped back over the fence only to see the dancing beams of flashlights clutched in the hands of small, crying children in the house next door through their open blinds.

I silently cursed every conniving, crafty grain of sand that had been superheated into the transparent surface of that Demon window, which continued to smash and crash and meet its end time and noisy fucking time again in the background as the front door latch bounced and rattled and did not yield for AGES, but finally after what must have been two hours, clicked. The door swung open, and Marco and I ran inside, getting on either side of a flatscreen that was about twenty inches smaller than I remembered. We hurried it toward the door and were jerked backwards as the coaxial cable, still plugged into the wall, resisted our retreat. I cursed audibly as I unscrewed it from the back of the television, and yelled at my girlfriend, who was exploring boxes full of cheap costume jewellery as though we were not about to get booked into county jail for the most retarded, noisy God damnable fifty-dollar burglary I had ever (maybe) committed.

Back at the car....

"Holy shit, dude, that was the most smoked out res burg I have ever had the displeasure of taking part in," I said to the car in general as Randi climbed in about a mile down the road, and the window finally gave its last shattering death rattle in the distance as the door closed and we sped off at what I felt in my speeding little heart was far too slow a pace.

"Yeah, how come no one thought to just kick the door?" Work's retarded, ginger face said, and I stared at him in shocked disbelief for the rest of the drive.

DISCLAIMER #500: This story may have been fictional, or may be totally true, but if you wanted to take me to jail for its possible implications, you would have to spend lots of money to come and get me, ha ha ha, ha ha, joke's on my probation officer, I actually put that dope in my pee during my last drug test so I could imagine the look on your face when you couldn't find me on check-in day.

Ahem, I digress. Make me mad, and I might go to jail doing something totally stupid to your house, but I might also get away and just cost you a lot of money in repairs, which will make you sad and put a smile on my face for weeks to come as I post said incident on my blog.

And now, I sleep.

Take it easy until next time, blogdom.

*smoked out: "on a good one," way too high on drugs

**hood rat: silly little walking vagina, drug slut

In closing, for you "visual learner" types, this is the closest thing I could find to my angry face, although that might not even be me, because it would be naughty for a convicted felon to possess a firearm:

That's right (what is right?).

There wasn't much left but the last twenty sack and the last twenty of my last check. I took a pill and went to sleep on the last step, woke up and took it in with a half breath. Then a deep sigh, I struck a match stick. I lit my cigarette, feeling half dead. Whiskey on my mind, then came the dead - Sheriff in the yard, here comes the rest. I sat like a ghost, they all passed by, my girl cried "baby this'll be my last bye." Baby in her arms, she took a cab home and told me I was only good for a sad song. A crooked smile I gave, nonchalant about it. Maybe she'll come back, but this time I doubt it. Act like I care, but I really don't.. wanted to change but somehow I know I really won't. See I'm the type of man who can't stay out of the bottle.. if the sun is out, I'd rather be in the shadow. Sadness is like a wound that I can't heal.. maybe I'll love blood, I just let it spill. And I never turned to church for a praying hand, God's not gonna lend another saving hand. And if the time came like it has time again, then I would watch the clock, and be late again.

- "London Bridge," Ed Sheeran & Yelawolf

A little shifting of gears, for a minute. God knows I've got the time.

With all of the drugs and homelessness and jail in my life, you might think I'd have been to treatment, or at least considered it. I have considered it, but not because I hated my life. A lot of people saw the kind of life I led on the West coast, and they told me that it didn't work. In some ways, it certainly didn't seem to. I am a father of two beautiful girls, born two years and one day apart, both in my own birthday month of November; I love them both very much, though I have had the most time to get to know my youngest, Trinity. I mentioned before that I had had my own identity crises, pathological spasms and crusades of change. Well, the biggest reason is that my lifestyle has come between my baby girl and I time and again. Not because I have ever put her in danger; I have done nothing but love her the best that I can. My time with Trin was never anything but that, and if it had been I would deserve every moment with her that her mother has taken from me. The fact that I am at present not allowed to be with my daughter is, largely, due to the relationship that her mother and I have always had.

That blame certainly lies entirely with me, or rather, the me that was. When Jordan and I got together, I was thirteen years old, and I spent the next seven or so years putting her through the hell of standing by someone on a crash course through the high life. She was abandoned, cheated on, lied to constantly, and watched me father a little girl that she felt should've been hers, years before we had our own child. It could be that I did a little work taxing* as well, and she heard some of the details from some especially loose-lipped friends and myself as well when I was feeling a little self-destructive. All of this from age thirteen on up to nineteen or twenty. Basically, the time that Jordan had to spend getting to know boys romantically, the already neurotic girl spent in pain. Our togetherness was lifeless long before it was dead, and the last time we were together in the biblical sense she joked, "Well, it's your last chance to knock me up."

Oh, irony.

Unlike my oldest daughter, Alexa, Trinity had a father who was older and a little wiser, unafflicted with the guilt and pressure that comes with conceiving a child with someone he had no business sleeping with in the first place. On the night she was born, I was almost asleep in a town of a thousand people called Cle Elum, Washington, a recent Job Corps graduate new to the idea of responsibility and well-versed in a life of wheeling and dealing**. I had work the next day (I excelled in Job Corps, quickly rising to the top of whatever I involved myself in, namely my dormitory and my trade, carpentry. As a result, with a little help from sober support meetings and a sponsor, I was successful and "functional" for a while afterward), and the last thing that I expected was that at three A.M. I was going to hear Jordan's mother Mickey's voice telling me that

--

"Jordan is going into labor, Dustin."

My brain was still fuzzy from the sleep that had crept so close, my long hair (badly in need of a trim) pulled back into a ponytail that was living on a prayer after enduring the tossing and turning that often accompanied my attempts to fall asleep. "Are you sure?" I asked dumbly, and instantly regretted it.

"Yes!" Mickey shouted into the phone, and the piercing shrill of her exasperated cry cut through a little of the fog in my brain.

I'm going to be a dad again, I thought, and my pulse quickened as the idea finally became reality. I had attended birthing classes some weekends with Jordan, had met the midwife she had planned to use (she was too small at four foot eleven for the natural delivery she had planned for, and the method of delivery would have to be Caesarian section, the doctors had said), but it had all been like watching someone else's life, speculating on something that was more whisper than breeze, something insubstantial that could never really happen to me. I was too young and afraid to be much a part of Alexa's birth--I had barely known, when she was born-- and I had done all I could to make up for lost time ever since Dave, the Residential Coordinator in Evergreen dorm at Cascades Job Corps, had told me that my ex had called to tell me that she was pregnant. All of that preparation and involvement had not come close to making me ready for the fluttering starkness of the moment, the knowledge that I was responsible for yet another life tonight, better not fuck this up, Dutch boy.

"What do I do?" I asked, and the score became universe two, me zero. "Start driving to Swedish!" Oh. Right. The hospital we'd checked out and discussed about thirty times.

There was a loud noise in the background, and then some hurried conversation, and the line went dead.

I may have tried Mickey back; I can't remember a whole lot of the details as I got ready in the spare bedroom of my parents' house in that little Washington mountain town, but for some reason I can still feel the bite of November air hitting my face, see the hazy glow of the neighbors' porch light peeking through the plump flakes of snow that littered the air in lazy sheets, free-falling in slow motion onto the sleeves of my Avirex hoodie as I made my way down the steps, crunching my way across the perfect surface of the fresh snow toward my white Ford F-250. I can still feel the resistance of the frozen frame as I tugged open the driver side door, a little puff of snow falling loose when I succeeded. When I turned the wipers on, there was no layer of ice left behind; it was just new powder, soft and yielding, insubstantial, like wisps of cotton. I remembered Christmas as a kid in Redmond, in the lower half of my grandmother's three-apartment house, how sometimes the snow looked like that in the morning. I wondered if my daughter would feel the way I felt on those Christmas mornings; I wondered if I would be there to groan my way to my feet at seven o'clock when she burst in the bedroom, squealing with excitement that Santa had been to our home in the night.

I thought about Jordan, her expression tight and sour one night in my home town, Marysville, as my friend Jason and I sang along to an Iron Maiden song,two care-free and drunk metal heads with long hair and torn blue jeans. "Come on, babe," I'd said to her, wearing the crooked smile she had come to despise. I have always had a problem deciding when is the appropriate time to be serious.

I had put my arm around her, and she had shrugged it off.

"It's our anniversary," she had said to me, "and we're sitting with your friend at your parents' house, drinking beer I hate, listening to music I hate. Sorry if I'm not ecstatic."

Jordan had loved IPA and metal music, once upon a time. It wasn't the beer or the music that she'd hated, and when I sent Jason home and asked her what she wanted to do, we had spent the night fighting. Because the problem was bigger than two twelve packs and Piece of Mind (one of Maiden's best, in my opinion).

I thought as I drove, and the postcard perfection of the mountains surrounding I-90 succeeded in putting the very real, tangible part of what was happening safely on the far side of a mental blanket, its sharp angles and vivid colors pillowed and made manageable by the unreality of the sparkling banks and buried, sleepy trees, a world strange and beautiful when seen from the heated cab of my truck.

When I-90 became 405 and civililization was once again evident on both sides, the twisted and cluster-fucked arterials and one-ways of Seattle turning the early morning gloom treacherous and confusing, I was still miles and miles from the truth. As I struggled to find parking around the gargantuan hospital and called Mickey time after time to no avail, as I painstakingly navigated my way to the proper wing and floor, it was all happening to a Dustin in another world, and it wasn't until I was dressed in scrubs with little shoe covers and loose plastic gloves like those the cafeteria women had worn in middle school, my baby girl in my arms, her little puff of dark hair pasted to her head with vernix, squeaking her displeasure at the room, that tears sprang to my eyes and my the oxygen was stolen from my shaking chest. I remember muttering my assent as Jordan, high as Jesus on morphine and whatever else they had put in her, told me not to let the nurses take her until the doctors had sewn her up, she wanted to hold her first. I remember Mickey's eyes beaming at me over the blue paper mask on her face, and the sinking in my gut when the nurses told me they had to take her and clean her up. I remember Mickey asking me if I wanted to help give my daughter her very first bath, and I didn't give a flying fuck that the nurse was irritated with all of us as she guided me through the process over the little metal sink on the cart at the far side of the room. It was unorthodox, and bossy; it was Jordan's will, all nails and no frills, and I loved her for it that morning on November 13th, because I didn't want those doctors to touch my baby with their cold and sterile hands, rough and clinical, loveless, any more than she did.

I gave my child up only with the greatest reluctance as the nurses came into our little hospital room throughout the night, standing over every table and every test like a hawk, one finger clutched in her tiny hands when they made her cry. I remember the flash of panicked reflex when a nurse almost dropped her, and I insisted that I would carry her wherever they needed her to go from that point. I learned to swaddle her and, when Jordan's first attempts at breast feeding had failed, feed her, and for the next three days I slept with her perched atop my chest, changed her diapers and kissed her at every opportunity. I talked to her, told her stories. And I took pictures.

And my baby girl grew.

From the start, Trinity and I were best friends. We are completely in love, and I can't recall ever making her cry before it was time to put her to bed, which she loathes.. and if anyone brought a situation around her that might not be strictly G rated in some way, I would make them wish they had been aborted.

You know what I think? I think Jordan gets irritated that, as Trinity's custodial parent, she should have to share her love with me.. she works hard, and has done an amazing job as Trinity's mother. But to her, I am still the dead beat, cheating, drug-addicted ass hole that made her teen years so difficult. She is romantically awkward and lonely now, bitter, and I know that she blames me. I also accept that blame.

"I will never keep her from you," Jordan had told me during her pregnancy and my residency at Job Corps. "We just won't be together."

It isn't the way it was, she argues when I remind her of the promise. It never is. Things change, I know they do. I have changed, probably have become something closer to that burning heart that she remembers from our youth. But that doesn't mean that, save for in my free time, I have done anything that might warrant my being cut out of her life completely. Trinity's father might not be a "saint," but how many of us are? Isn't the point that we hide the hypocrisy from our children, which I have done extremely well since day one, or are we all TRULY blameless and worthy of our children's worship? Is it the implied truth, or the stark reality of it that counts, when the hammer falls and we have to answer for who our children have or will have become?

Do I love my child, was I there when I was supposed to be? Do I want to be a father? Did I live up to her needs and Jordan's expectations, does my child love me? In many areas of my life, I have acted irresponsibly and put my middle fingers up for the world to see. My honest answers to these questions, though, are a resounding "yes." I consciously exceeded many of these expectations though I was met with much resistance and often judged entirely too harshly for my alternative lifestyle choices outside the bounds of parenthood. I am not a custodial parent, neither am I a beacon of function or responsibility. But I am a father. Trinity always had presents, when I was allowed to attend her birthdays; if Jordan had come to me with any real need, had she needed anything for Trinity--she pretty much had those bases covered with her dancing and aesthetician work--I would have, whatever my means, gotten it. I always cared for my daughter, and treated her as she should be treated. The things that keep me from her are not problems with the safety or function of our father/daughter relationship, but rather a conflict between her parents.

Before my last stint in jail, I was allowed to see my daughter. I called her mother from the collect call phone, because I often do that to let her know that I'm locked up and I won't be around for a minute. When I was released, she told me that if I wanted to see my daughter, I would have to engage in a legal battle I would surely lose because I "obviously wasn't doing what I was supposed to" if I was going to jail. There is a wide range of folks in jail, believe it or not; completely sober people are included in this blend, and may in fact account for a large portion of the population. Cops are ass holes, believe it or not; profiling, arresting ass holes, and right now even seasoned criminals such as myself are being released on their own recognizance**** back home because the jail is so full of new offenders.

And even if it weren't, how much does that really affect my daughter, one way or the other?

It's the twelfth, today. Let's hope that my brother tells her happy birthday for me tomorrow; God knows Jordan won't.

".. and I don't need a wife, I love my little girl but her mama need a life!" - "Lose my Mind," Young Buck

*taxing: when someone owes the dope man, somebody's got to go get that money

**wheeling and dealing: riding around and selling drugs or whatever's clever***

***whatever's clever: whatever seems good at the time

****personal recognizance (PR): "I got booked last night, but the judge PR'd me" released with a court date, which you are responsible for making