Lyli says: "People and friends tell me I have blue eyes."

Then: "Papa's stuff is happy." - she gestures around our ransacked book-laden living room.

I am reminded of what an amazing task is set before me and I wonder what it must be like to only see my children a few hours or minutes a day. Do most fathers continue to marvel at what I have grown accustomed to? What a terrible fate, when repetition and time conspire to make the marvelous mundane.

This morning I run errands: post office, diapers, gas, some frozen food (shop for the fresh before I come home from the weekend's work). At home Eamon watches the girls for s spell while I pick apples, split wood, breakdown cardboard boxes, clean a portion of the barn, empty the ash from the woodstove. At nap time I have a beer, read a comic, fold some clothes, smoke a cigarette. It's so hard sometimes to pick a single task when confronted with such a multitude of duties.

My peeling-fresh tattoo reminds me to treat my life like my art. I study a small patch where the skin, dyed red, has flaked away, more red beneath the blistered layers like fleshy onion. My thoughts squander themselves on permanence, her rigid philosophies rarely barely welcomed in my realm. Parts of me draw further in despite whatever last week's pledges may have entailed. Sharing small slivers of life with other parents swells my self-confidence but makes me shy about my own stories... if sense decides to grace that with her presence, so be it.

Overloaded as usual. When I have time to work and focus all I do is waste and relax. Slept almost 11 hours last night. Hadn't done that for more than two years, at least. Felt strange but good, I was wide awake this morning and my neck and shins didn't hurt as much as they have recently. A wet day in the woods. I revel in it, rain washing sins and bits of bullshit down some emo-dimensional drain to somewhere other than here, which is fine by me. Outside the mists blur the lines between real and ether. I trace fairytales along the tree-line, flirting with this grey horizon, seduced by this most silver sky.