Two weeks ago, my daughter, the tentatively named Aaliyah Lynn Rose, began to Ip Man my girlfriend’s womb. Aaliyah was only 21 weeks along – or negative 19 weeks old depending on how you want to look at it – yet her kicks were concussive and sharp. When placing my hand over Melissa’s stomach to feel the strikes, my hand moved, as if a snake roiled beneath her skin.

I didn’t know a person so small could boot so hard but I’m impressed and a little proud and hopeful. Those legs are suited for jumping and running or high kicking tattooed oil riggers wearing studded leather vests, combat boots and Affliction t-shirts when they ask for her number amid the thrashing bodies and beer-slicked floors of whatever honky-tonk bar Aaliyah uses a fake ID to gain entry to.

I’m going to Las Vegas in two days and, surprisingly, I’m spending more time thinking about an unborn girl who throws a pre-natal tantrum each night when I start wondering, out loud, if there exists a more unpleasantly assembled woman than Debra Morgan from Dexter. 

It’s possible this feeling is normal and actually relieving to those (ahem, my mother) who believe I am incapable of any emotion beyond anger and gnawing fear that I will no longer be able to find a good yet affordable platter of chicken wings in this city.

Aaliyah’s kicks marked the exact moment my fear of ruining the life of yet another who loved and depended on me, and the disappointment she wasn’t a boy, vanished.

Undoubtably, I’ll have fun in a non-sexual way  (I spent more time, on my last visit, calling my then-girlfriend each night at specific intervals to assuage her suspicions I was wearing a Freemont Street transgendered’s underwear on my head), it still involves my leaving my family for four days at a time I feel I should be there.

Aaliyah’s growing fast, and moving constantly, and, most importantly,  appears to respond to my voice. I’m positive she kicks when she hears my voice because she’s counselling her mother to put together and knapsack and bolt in the night but I’m told, by those with prenatal experience, the baby’s calasthenical response to my voice could not be for a more opposite reason.

On top of all that, it’s the narcissist’s greatest fear that affairs will collapse into chaos if he is not there to hold it together – even though the narcissist himself is the cause of most of it in the first place. So yeah, I would sleep a lot easier in Vegas if I had an alarm system or if Melissa carried a gun or if we had a Panic Room that worked a bit better than the one Jodie Foster tried to hide from Forest Whitaker in.

Long story short, this post is a roundabout way of saying: “Hey everyone, my baby’s kicking and I’m happy for it and will be thinking about both my girls for every moment I’m down there, whether I’m gambling or being escorted from the Bellagio casino for throwing up in a potted plant.”