6/21/2011

    For no good reason I was thinking the other day that the thing I miss most about being a young child may be the feeling I had lying in the back seat of my parents car at night.  I loved looking out the back window at the stars, or more often at passing streetlights or the occasional sign lit up in front of a gas station or diner.  I would always try to figure out how close to home I was by counting traffic lights, or how many left and right turns we were making.

     Those were the days when people (at least my family) weren’t as concerned with seatbelts.  In fact, the seatbelts in the backseat of our family car had long since disappeared into the space between the seat and the back cushion, never to be seen again.

     I always felt completely safe back there.  When you’re young (if you’re lucky) your dad seems like the most capable man in the world and you feel like he is in control and can protect you from anything.  I feel sorry for people who didn’t have that when they were children, and upon writing it just now, I realize why some of the people I know have serious problems stemming from their childhood, but it’s not the place for that now.

     I felt so safe that I would often fall asleep on the drive home, although I think many small children experienced that regardless of the safety factor.  Being tired accounted for a lot of it.

     Sometimes we would be at the home of friends or relatives that had no children to play with and as the night dragged on I would become cranky and bored.  When the moment came that I could finally crawl into the backseat, it felt as comfortable as my own bed.

     Sometimes my parents would take me to a drive-in movie and I would go already wearing my pajamas.  If I didn’t fall asleep by the end of the movie I definitely did on the ride home.  It always seemed magical in the morning when I woke up in my own bed with no memory of how I got there.

     True, it wasn’t always great in the backseat.  Sometimes I would have to share it with my brother and that almost never went well.  We would fidget and fight and get regular and ominous warnings about what would happen if we didn’t behave.

     The worst was when we took a car trip from New Jersey to Arizona in the early seventies. In the backseat with me were my brother and our big black lab Max.  I have many fond memories of that trip, but hardly any of them occurred in the backseat.

     One thing I did like was that we got rub-on decals for the windows for each state we went through.  Even a year or two later when they were flaking and peeling off I still loved looking at them and trying to make out the state bird of Missouri (the Bluebird) or the capital of New Mexico (Santa Fe).

     A few years back I was dating a girl with a young son and he would ride in the backseat of my car (belted and strapped in of course!) and I had the chance to see it from my fathers perspective.  He was as curious as I was looking at everything outside as it went past and talking non-stop about all of it.  He had no fear either, and he used to love it whenever we were in a big empty parking lot because I would drive the car around and around in a tight circle, just shy of actually doing donuts.  He always wanted to go faster and his face lit up with pure joy.  I would look back at him and he would smile back and I felt like I was invincible.

     I never had children and it doesn’t look like I will at this point in my life.  Who knows what other “dad” moments I missed out on.  I just know that I really enjoyed those drives knowing I was in the front seat and the kid in the backseat felt at least a little like I did when I was his age.

     Maybe that’s the selfish joy of being a parent, reliving a part of your life when you felt happiest through your own child.

     Maybe it’s not selfish at all.

© David Ferraris 2011

Excerpt from story "Blackheart" - 1993

     Obviously if I enjoy very little in life I am not going to like work.  I’m not sure of the actual definition of work (and I’m much to lazy to look it up) but I imagine it must contain something about being an activity that you hate.  It is the opposite of play, right?

     I’m not sure what that’s worth, but some days I hate my job and some days I really hate my job.  Another interesting fact from my big files of things I’ve cataloged in my mind for no reason other than to drag them out and torment myself further:  a huge percentage of the American population spends about 1/3 of their lives doing something that they, for the most part, despise.  I know there are some smug douche-bags that profess to love their jobs and get some kind of fulfillment from them, but I’m not talking about those fools.

     I’m talking about the majority of people who have to work some shitty job with some asshole boss because they need to feed and clothe themselves or their family, and if they feel like maybe they might enjoy not having to put up with it they are branded lazy or ungrateful.

     Throw in another 1/3 for sleeping, and that leaves the last third for heart-break, illness, sexual, mental and physical abuse, social anxiety, unwanted pregnancies, STD’s, missing the prom and lots of bad television… well that’s pretty small percentage left over for sheer joy.

     If you listen to most people they’ll tell you “who said life is supposed to be fun?” or “you gotta take the good with the bad.”  “No one ever said life was fair.” is another good one.

     I don’t expect it to be fair, and I’ll take the good with the bad, but who decided to let some arbitrary social structure mete out my fun in small, sparingly placed doses?

     When man was starting out all you had to do to fill your function in society was gather your share of nuts and berries or kill your antelope or fish.  Now someone decides which nuts and berries you gather and they sell them to the highest bidder.  They take your antelope and fish and they eat what they want and give the carcass to whomever they please.

     Man no longer controls his own destiny.  You either play by the rules no matter how skewed against you they are or you get plowed under, and as you play by these rules keep reassuring yourself that life’s not supposed to be fun or fair.

     But I digress.

     There haven’t been many times in my 15 years or so of working life that the experience was pleasant.  Today was one of those times when I had to go to New York and fix a piece of machinery.

     This machine was on the roof of the Chase building, a 50 story skyscraper on the lower tip of Manhattan.  The machine belonged to a construction company made up of 1^st and 2^nd generation Irish immigrants and when I was done working I started talking to the foreman Sean about the view from the top of the building.

     “Beautiful view, huh?” I asked him, truly impressed by the sight of the water with the statue of liberty rising in the middle of it.

     “Yeah, beautiful alright.”  He agreed in his thick Irish brogue.

     “Not such a bad job when you get a view like this all day.” I continued.

     “Yeah, I guess.” He spat back, “That’s about all.”  I could sense Sean wasn’t getting the same thrill out of the seascape as I was.

     “What’s that over there?” I asked, pressing on with the conversation.

     “That’s Ellis Island.”  He told me.

     “It’s pretty.  Very clean” I commented.  “At least people see something nice and clean when they arrive in the country,” feeling stupid as I said it realizing that people no longer arrive on crowded in boats in the harbor.

     “Yeah, it’s like everything else.  Looks nice on the outside, huh.”  It appeared Sean took my ridiculous comment as analogy.

     I had dealt with Sean before and never found him to be this miserable and cynical and I told him so.

     “Sorry.” He apologized, “I’m just sick of working for this company.  I’m looking for something else, but you know, there’s not much out there right now.”

     “Well, you know it’s America.  You can be anything you want.”

     “Hmm.  That crap again.”  He spit over the railing.  “I don’t believe that’s true anywhere, especially here.”

     I wasn’t used to being the cheerful one in the conversation, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

     “What’s that island?” I asked, pointing in a different direction.

     “Governor’s Island.” Sean informed me.

     “That’s clean too.” I offered.  “In fact, it’s beautiful.”  It was beautiful.  The grass was so green and it had a huge courtyard.  The buildings were spotless.  “What’s on that island?”

     “Rich people.” He sneered.  Apparently islands with clean buildings on it really annoyed Sean.  “They can only get there by ferry.  They live out there in their own little world.” 

      I don’t know if any of Sean’s assertions were true, but he certainly believed them.

     We stared for another moment, me in my unaccustomed joy and Sean in his ill-fitting temper.

     “I think I may go back to Ireland.”  He said out of nowhere.

     “Isn’t being in America what you thought it would be?” I asked him.

     “Yes and no.  I knew it wouldn’t be as good or as bad as I imagined.  How could anyone know another land completely different from their homeland until they got there?”

     “That’s true, I guess.” I offered feebly.  I didn’t feel like I was contributing any good points about life to the conversation.

     “I just never felt like I belonged here.”  He told me.  “Like I was part of the crowd.”

     “And that’s why you want to leave?”

     “No, I want to leave because I feel like I’m starting to belong here.”  He was staring sown at the streets now, at the cars going by, and the people, very small below.   I thought about the Rolling Stones song, you know, “Go ahead bite the big apple, don’t mind the maggots.”  I felt a little like my old self again.

     “I’m not sure I understand exactly, Sean.” I told him.

     “Well, the people I meet in America all seem to have a vague feeling of discomfort.  They’re on edge but they’re also resigned to the fact that it’s just the way they’re always going to feel.”  He looked at me and there seemed to be real fear in his eyes.  “I’m starting to feel that way too, and it feels like dying.”

     He stared at me for a minute, then he seemed to wake up and realize where he was that he was talking to a mechanic on a construction job.  He chuckled unconvincingly, not even caring that I knew it was a phony laugh meant to bridge an awkward moment.

     “Anyway,” he repeated, I think I might go back to Ireland.”

     “I thought you came here from Ireland because you were unhappy.”  I contended.  “Why go back?”

     “Well,” He replied, “sometimes I think you don’t recognize happiness until you see it from far away.”

     I thought that was a really wonderful way of looking at things.  I thought it was a beautiful realization that everything you need to make you happy is right in front of you and you have to lose it to make you appreciate it.

     Then I thought about it another way.  Maybe it’s just that when you don’t have something you think that getting it will make you happy.  Thus happiness always seems like something far away.  People always want what they can’t have.  If people wanted true happiness they would stop trying to find it everywhere else.

     Then it disturbed me to think that the one constant in both those angles is that you have the means to be happy right in front of you all the time.  Maybe the idea of happiness that’s wrong.  Maybe people imagine happiness to be much grander than it really is, that’s why they never find it.  Maybe it’s a little, insignificant thing and people trip over it while chasing illusions.  I’ll have to mention that to Topper sometime.

     At any rate I said goodbye to Sean and decided to have a quick stroll around the rooftop.  I looked off of each side, and when I looked off the last side I noticed a building in the distance with an elaborate roof-top garden.  It had a lot of wonderful looking flowers and in the middle was a large topiary sculpture of an airplane.  It was an old airplane, like a biplane from the first world war.

     I thought how odd it is that there was something that beautiful and no one on the streets below would ever see it or even know it was there.

     Then I saw, way off in the distance, a man on another rooftop.  He was looking right at me, across block after block of buildings and traffic.  We continued looking at each other for a moment, and I thought to myself ‘poor bastard, his building is at least 15 stories lower than mine.  He can’t see near the things I can see.  He can’t even see the beautiful garden with the biplane made out of hedges.

     Suddenly I raised my hand over my head and waved it back and forth, just once.  Up came his hand and he waved back, and although I couldn’t see it, I know he was smiling.

     ‘Good for him’ I thought, ‘who cares how tall his building is.’

     I was happy to realize that my black thoughts couldn’t reach him from here and sour his joy.

     What in the world was I becoming anyway?  I packed up my toolbox and went back to the elevator.

© David Ferraris 2011

6/13/07

      I think there are two types of people in this world.  There are people who deal with a lot of real shit and would just once in a while feel so much better if someone would acknowledge it, or say they appreciate you, or a random “I love you” now and then.

     The other type are people who create drama and problems in their lives, so they carry around a lot of false burdens.  Perhaps the only way to deal with these false burdens is with mock emotions and phony pain.  It’s all made up.  Maybe it’s because somewhere back in their life some horrible, un-imaginable pain scarred them so deeply that they fill their heads up with these loud and false afflictions to drown that memory out.  I don’t know.

     What I do know is that letting these people know that you acknowledge what they do, or appreciate what they do, or that you just love them really has no effect on them.  It doesn’t matter.  You might as well tell them that you have just clipped your fingernails, because it doesn’t affect them one way or the other.

     But the really bad thing is that if one of these people is the person in you’re life that you’ve been waiting to tell you about the appreciation or the love…well, you are in for a very long wait indeed.

© David Ferraris 2011

A Tale Of All Cities 11/11/07

The world was a mess.  Ask anyone, anyone at all and they would tell you.  Their reasons for the world being a mess were wrapped around their own personal problems and realities, and that was normal.  But he world was indeed a mess.

    The problem was, people were worn down, beaten into submission.  Nothing was new, nothing was special, nothing was secret.  Nothing was magic.  The lesser minded were terrified, the greater minded disgusted.  God was dead to anyone who cared to notice.  The frightened frenetically sought God out it the most ludicrous and unholy places.  The only place He existed was in the very best of us, and there were scant few of those.  The few that were left, no one tried to seek out.  They found the loudest and the most grotesque and gave them their allegiance, and so the cancer grew until it rotted all the goodness that once existed in us.

     In the past, the motivated, the driven, strived to better humankind.  Now they drained the very hope and life out of the rest, surrendering to the worst of greed and gluttony, climbing up the backs of the masses, holding them in contempt as they sucked them dry and left only empty shells.

     All utopias had failed man again, all governments, all leadership. All the faith and trust afforded any leader was mocked and abused until no one could stand to believe what they knew was true.

     People who stood up straight were driven to their knees.  People on their knees were turned into cobblestones for people who did not deserve to tread upon the earth, let alone the backs of their brothers.  People came to accept slow torture, everyday genocide, poison skies and water, rape and murder of the innocent, manmade famine and disease so long as it didn’t affect them.

     We were ghosts, shadows that seemingly could not affect the very world we lived in.  Once again society had been used to lull us asleep, divide us instead of reinforce our sense of community, of all of us being in this together.

     No trust, no faith, no love existed between the six billion people clinging to the planet and hoping for just a small bit of pure joy.

© David Ferraris 2011

Emotional Guy 3/27/09

I’m kind of a sensitive guy.  I’ve always been an easy mark for sappy endings.  I’ve always been full of empathy for everyone, and even for some things.  Animals for sure.  I care about animals more than a lot of humans and I won’t apologize for that.  I’ve even felt badly for inanimate objects from time to time in my life.  I remember having to get rid of my stuffed animal when I threw up on it when I was a child.  I even felt bad when I had to junk my first car.

     As I got older, I still had those sad or melancholy feelings when I watched a tear-jerker or romantic movie.  I would still cry occasionally when something hit me particularly hard, a lot of times something in a movie or TV show that would surprise me by the effect it had on me. 

      Then I got to a point where I noticed that the only time I would ever cry was while I was watching “It’s a Wonderful Life.”  Always at the very end, where the whole town showed up to help him out and he realized that he had touched so many people and they all loved him. (Sorry to spoil if you’re the last person alive who hasn’t seen this movie!) 

     One Christmas after blowing my nose and feeling foolish for crying at the same movie again, I started to wonder why this was the only thing that made me cry anymore, and why I would cry at the happiest part of the movie.  I didn’t cry when the Bailey Building and Loan was failing, or when he was in the bar full of hate and self pity, or even when he was seeing what became of the woman he loved when he found out what it was like when he hadn’t ever been born.  It slowly dawned on me that I was crying because I realized that there would never be a moment like that where I would feel that happy and that loved in my entire life.

     I’ve noticed that the only time I feel really sad while watching a movie or TV show or reading a book is when it’s something along these lines.  I feel the saddest when I feel longing for a situation I’ve never had.  Tonight, watching a TV show I felt sad when one of the characters tried to reconnect with a feeling from his child hood of his first summer love.  I never had a first summer love when I was young, if ever.  Yet here I was, all depressed about something I thought I might have missed out on.

     When did I become such a selfish person?  Why such a drama queen?  Since when did I like to wallow in self-pity?  I don’t feel that sad when I see bad things happen to the characters in movies.  I only feel sad when I can convolute some situation in the story to let me feel sorry for myself about some thing I never had but now feel I missed out on.

     Don’t get me wrong, I feel sorry for real people when bad things happen to them.  I’m not a monster, at least not in the real world.  But if you could ask George Bailey he’d probably have an opinion or two.  I guess I would have been the only one in town besides Potter that didn’t show up that night and give him what little money I had.  I’d be at home feeling petty and jealous and wondering why I wasn’t friends with everyone in town.

     Like my parents.  My parents are friends with everybody in town.  The town they live in now.  Also, the town they lived in before I was born, the town we lived in while I was growing up, the town we moved to in the middle of my growing up…Well you get the idea.  And if you want to know how I know about the friends before I was born that’s because my parents are in their seventies and they still hang out with some of those people and they still send and receive Christmas cards from most of the rest.

     I’m not like that.  In fact, when I move, or if I outgrow a friend in the slightest, I move on.  I can only think of one friendship that I maintain with someone from another state whom I still see once or twice a year.  What about the other fifteen or so people from that group?  I haven’t seen or spoke to them since the day I left my job and my life in that state.  I think of them from time to time, but apparently I don’t care enough to call them or visit them.

     I’m not like my parents.  In fact, I remember a couple of years ago when they had their 50^th anniversary party and 80 or so of their friends from all stages of their lives showed up and it made me happy to see them so happy.  Still, something made me feel sad, and I didn’t realize this until just now, I swear to you.  I think a small part of me felt that same sadness I feel when I watch George Bailey and his friends.  This was real life and there were the same number of people that came to see George all there for my parents.  So it seems that if I never have a moment like that in my life I shouldn’t blame the people who don’t show up.  I should blame the guy sitting there by himself.

     My brother made a nice little speech at that party, correlating my parents love with that of Tony and Maria in West Side Story, which was also celebrating its 50th anniversary at the time.  It was a little bit of a stretch imagining my mother and father dancing around as star-crossed lovers, but it was very sweet and well-received.  I thought about saying something myself, but I’m not that fond of speaking in front of people. I now regret not saying what I was going to say.  It was the beginning of story I had started writing many years before and never got around to finishing.  I would have done some paraphrasing, but it was something I wrote for them and I will include it here as I wrote it for a story called The Girl Who Loved New York.

Don’t get me wrong, I love New York too.  I just love it the way most people do, from a distance.  The buildings are great, and the museum and theaters are wonderful.  The traffics a bitch almost around the clock and the people, while generally tolerant are better left alone for the most part, but there is something romantic and seductive about it.

     For me, though, the way to view New York is from across the Hudson.  I can remember far back into my childhood when my parents would drive along the Palisades in New Jersey on a Sunday night and I’d marvel at the New York skyline when it would suddenly pop-up between the trees or a rocky outcropping.

     I always associate the New York skyline with 50’s music because my parents always listened to an oldies program on those Sunday night drives.  I think the show was called “The Doo-Wop Shop”, and the glittering lights of the city had background music from The Platters, The Rays, Dion and the Blemonts…a thousand names from those Sunday excursions.

     There’s one thing I’ll give the city.  While Time Square at night isn’t quite as pretty on the street as it looks on Dick Clarks New Years show, and a hot dog from a sidewalk vendor isn’t as appetizing in real life as it looks in movie street scenes, well the posters you see of the New York skyline at night; they’re honest to God true.  It’s even better in real life.  Maybe because you see the whole thing, from miles away and it blurs the faults and blemishes.  I don’t know.  But I will always remember it best through the back window of my parents car as I dozed off to “Silhouettes on the Shade”, or Earth Angel”

     Perhaps that’s why I’ve always seen love; you know, your vision of what you think love is gonna be like, embodied in those drives.  I saw my parents, married and happy, reliving a little part of their lives.  They met, courted and married in the fifties, and I’m sure they must have spent some of that time here on these roads, winding down through the cliff-side with doo-wop music in the background and New York looming before them.
     It struck me as wonderful that they could now include their child in the ritual, and that seemed like love to me more than anything else in the world.

© David Ferraris 2011

10/18/08

When you’re young and your heart is broken you know it all the time.  You dwell on it constantly, you replay all your feelings over and over again in your head.  You obsess over every detail of any memory involving the relationship that caused it.  It is a full time job.

     Maybe it’s because at that time your life is still in front of you and it seems like the biggest thing you’ve had to face up until that point.  There may have been other traumas, greater pains, but a broken heart is just so personal and it all belongs to you.  You control it, you give it its power.

    Then, when you’re older, and your heart gets broken it kind of goes unnoticed a lot of the time.  Maybe there’s more going on, you’ve become more jaded, who knows why it is.  Now your broken heart is a dull ache, festering away somewhere and you can’t quite focus on it.  You vaguely know it’s there but you try not to make eye-contact with it, tiptoe past it and let it sleep.

     Then you see something, hear a song, or notice some fragrance and the pain of that broken heart hits you from out of nowhere.  It knocks you backward, you can’t breathe, tears well up in your eyes and it hurts so much worse than it ever did when you were young.

     That’s the bitch of the thing.  When you’re older that broken heart may not scream at you every minute, but all those years have accumulated a lot more hurt, a lot more disappointment, and you feel every ounce of every emotion your life has ever produced, and it’s going to score a direct hit.

© David Ferraris 2011

story excerpt

I think at the core we are all still that person we were at seventeen.  After seventeen we still grow through experience and self examination (at least you do if you’re any kind decent human being), but all we can do after that is put on dampers or make modifications on what has been hard set since then.

     You may realize your behavior in a certain situation is wrong, but it will always be your first instinct.  If that behavior is non-beneficial to what you are trying to achieve in life and it burns you too many times you will have to control it and train yourself to stifle it or keep failing. 

    Over the years you accumulate a lot of checks and balances that basically exist to keep the reins on your adolescent self and prevent him or her from popping up and making a mess of your adult life.

     That’s why people fuck up almost on a daily basis.  It’s a very thin line to walk everyday, keeping track of all of your modifications and new rules you’ve made for yourself since high school while all the time that inner person that you’ve convinced yourself that you can’t trust keeps crashing around inside you demanding to be heard.

© David Ferraris 2011

1/3/06

   I got my hair cut today.  When I was a kid I went to the barber.  There seemed to be one on every corner with their striped spinning pole.  By the time I was nine or ten my mother would send me up to the corner by myself to get my haircut.  When I was a kid there were only a few choices as far as haircuts went: part on the left, part on the right or part in the middle.  I’m not sure why the part in the middle was an option, I didn’t know any boys with that particular style.

     Worse than that was the dreaded “bowl-cut”, so named because it looked like your mother put a bowl on your head and trimmed off any hair that stuck out.  I don’t think any mother has done that to her son since the first half of the 20^th century, but in the seventies in north Jersey there must have been some horrible barbers because every few weeks there was always at least one kid in class who showed up with that particular hair style.  I may have even arrived in class sporting a bowl cut at some point, but I have probably blocked it out of my memory and I know my mother certainly didn’t give me one.

     Mom, of course, went to the beauty parlor.

     Around the beginning of high school I was going to one of those places in the mall, Holiday Hair I think it was called.  You had a few more choices than you had at the barber shop, but not much more.

     Nowadays you have salons, and terms like “barber” and “beauty parlor” have kind of lost their meaning.  In my mind that change came around 1984.  I say that because towards the end of high school I started to let my hair grow longer.  All my life in school I tried to go unnoticed, but in 12^th grade I kind of lost it and wanted to be different and generally rebellious; but that’s part of another story.

     My mother was grudgingly tolerant of my hair, but she decided one day that is I were going to have long hair, it would have to have some kind of style.  She mad an appointment at her salon and we went with my father in tow.  It seemed like a big deal, mom probably seeing this as the last chance she had to exert any kind of control over me.  Why dad came along, I don’t know.  I don’t think he knew what to make of the long hair and I’m sure he wanted to see what the “salon” was going to do to his son.

     I waited at the salon until it was my turn, and I met Galen, who owned “Hair Creations” in Souderton, Pennsylvania.  He was somewhat effeminate, as I think I can safely say men who own hair salons usually are. 

     It was strange having a man wash and cut my hair.  One of the perks of going to the place in the mall was that a girl washed and cut your hair.  For a sixteen year old boy there were few bigger highlights in your life than having a twenty-something girl brushing up against you while they did your hair.  I was secretly angry at having to miss out on that.

     Not that I wasn’t outwardly angry about the whole thing.  I was still a teenager and I had the normal mix of anger and apathy regarding the whole experience.

     “What kind of style were you thinking of?”  Galen asked me once I was in the chair.

     “Whatever.” I replied with my too cool for you teenage attitude.  For the past few years my entire vocabulary in conversation with adults consisted of that word, “whatever”.  It was a universal response for anything.

     Galen studied me for a few moments and then cut my hair.  Actually, he styled my hair, and when he was done I was amazed.  I didn’t let on that I was amazed, of course.  I couldn’t let my mother have this victory, but damn my hair looked good!

     All the way home my mother told me how good it looked and my father agreed, although I could tell he still didn’t know exactly what to make of the whole thing.  I imagine somewhere in his mind he was asking himself ‘did I just take my son to the beauty parlor?’ and not liking any answers he was getting.

     I remember we stopped at the IGA, a local supermarket, on the way home.  While my parents were at the check out I took up my customary position fifteen feet away from them and pretended to look at magazines.

     It was then that I noticed two girls looking at me and smiling.  Check that, they were actually flirting with me!  Seeing as this had never happened before I had to assume it was due to the new hairstyle.

     And so my fate was sealed.  I have never gone anywhere else for a haircut since.  In that time the salon changed locations twice.  At one point Galen made it into a salon/flower shop.  How stereo-typical can you get?  About four years ago Galen stopped cutting hair and Kevin started cutting it.  Kevin had been working for Galen since I had first  gone there, and if Galen was effeminate, then Kevin is… well, really effeminate.

     Galen had some sort of breakdown or midlife crisis soon after and eventually sold the place to the people who owned the gym next door.  Well, the gym plus the salon made the whole thing a “day spa”.  I guess we’re on the third evolution of the beauty parlor, at least in my lifetime.  It is now called Genesis Day Spa and Kevin still works there and cuts my hair, but I haven’t yet gone in for any of the massage or exfoliating procedures they now offer.

     Getting back to today’s haircut, when I got off the highway at the Souderton exit I noticed a sign stuck in the ground at the top of the ramp.  It was an advertisement for “Sage Day Spa”, directly across  from Staples.  Had Genesis changed their name?  Had they built a Staples across the street from them in the last month?  Souderton hardly seemed a big enough town to support two day spas.

     I pulled into the parking lot and it was still Genesis and there was no Staples to be found.  Once in the chair I remarked to Kevin about the sign.

     This started a long dialog from Kevin about Sage Day Spa.  Apparently some woman he knew, Karen I think her name was, had opened the spa last month.  He proceeded to tell me how he had gone to dinner with the woman last week and she had drunk too many cosmos.  She had gotten loud and abrasive, and he had been mortified and he was going to just leave her there.  It went on in much greater depth and got very catty.

     My mind started wandering and I questioned my need to drive twenty miles to get my hair cut.   Was my hair really that big a deal anymore?  I had cut it very short years earlier and it didn’t really need that much expertise, did it?  I certainly had more pressing needs as far as my personal appearance goes. 

      I remembered seeing a place close to home that advertised itself as a man’s haircut place.  Apparently they had sports on TV, gave you a free beer and had hot girls cut your hair.  I suddenly realized that they had tapped into that boyhood scenario of the mall haircut with it’s twenty minutes of titillating contact.  I wondered if I should just get my hair cut there.  It would certainly be manlier than listening to Kevin’s melodrama about the salon wars of rural Pennsylvania.  Plus there would be that fleeting brush of swaying breasts on the back of your head…

     By the time Kevin was finished with me, I had just about convinced myself to find somewhere else to get my hair cut, if not at the manly place at least at a regular barber, if they still existed.  I paid my bill, resisted the urge to buy more froofy hair gels and styling waxes, and left.

     On my way home I had to stop at the grocery store.  Standing in the produce section, I caught a woman checking me out.  In the international food aisle a woman engaged me some meaningless conversation about which canned bean brand I thought was better.  In the checkout line a woman complimented me on my haircut.

     At that moment the teenager in the back of my brain informed me that I damn well would keep on going to Kevin for my haircuts.

© David Ferraris 2011

Fantasy Life 4/2/10

     I am not a big fan of people, that’s no secret, and if you didn’t already know that you haven’t been paying attention.  Even though I don’t really think much of most of the people I come across, I think we are all very alike in a lot of ways.  It’s kind of like DNA.  It doesn’t take much variance gene-wise to create a wide variety of life.  People are all individuals, yet at the same time they’re all made up of the same basic ingredients.  They share many of the same desires and fears, feel the same insecurities and feel foolish about all the same things.

      They also think that nobody else could possibly feel the things they do and they are all much harder on themselves than they are on each other.  That’s probably the biggest reason the human race has even made it this far.  Self-doubt has kept the majority of people’s ego in check and preserved the status quo to some degree.  Of course, it’s also held us back in almost every way, stunting us emotionally and as a species as a whole.

     It’s allowed the people whose insecurities and fears have made them controlling bullies to ruin the lives of those that have let their insecurities and fears make them weak and subservient.  That’s a shame.  It’s also a very simple way to sum up what is most likely the biggest problem facing the human race now and throughout history. 

     But that’s not really what this is about, anyway.

     This is about people and relationships, or more exactly about how people in those relationships almost always seem to have to settle for less than what they really want.  I’m not even talking about in the grand scheme of things; I’m talking about in little ways that nobody even appears to notice.  I could be wrong about this, but I think if you examine your own life and relationships and what you really want (and I have to believe that most people on the planet have the capacity to dream or I’m just going to check out right now) I think it may be one of those little happy moments when you discover that we do all think about and desire the same things.

     It happens like this:  Whenever anyone pictures something they would like in their head they always have an ideal image of what that thing will be like, and they will inevitably be disappointed when in reality it doesn’t work out that way.  That can’t be helped in most cases because that is how life works.  You can’t control the weather so the rain ruins your picnic.  You can’t control the laws of physics so your team loses the game.  You can’t control the population so your dictatorship is overthrown by a military junta that sets up a regime even worse than the one it replaced.  Okay, the last one is a bit extreme, but it’s just that there are too many variables in the world that seem to conspire to make sure your dreams never come true.  It’s always a gamble and the odds are against you, and you just have to learn to accept a little disappointment in life.

     Unfortunately, I think most people get confused and they rail at the things they can’t control and accept the things that should be unacceptable.  This is where the relationship part comes in.

     Let’s say you realize you want to spend Sunday with your husband or boyfriend doing a little shopping and maybe having a nice lunch.  You picture the new pair of shoes or skirt you want and imagine the car ride a few towns over to the store that has the shoes you like.  It would be nice to go on a little drive, listening to the radio, pointing out the sights or just shooting the breeze with the person you love.  Maybe once you get there and park the car you can hold hands while you walk down the sidewalk to the store.  Maybe you can even let him think he’s helping you pick out your shoes or that his opinion matters one way or the other.  Really, what do guys know about shoes?  Then you can go to a nice little restaurant, maybe with an outdoor patio and have a pleasant meal and share a desert.  On the ride home you can both be so happy that you don’t even have to talk, but at some point you will look at each other and you will both think about what a great day it was and you will smile one of those special smiles that are only brought on by the feeling of complete love and comfort that you only feel with this one person on the planet. 

     Before you even map out half of that fantasy in your head, you feel foolish for even thinking it.  You instantly realize that it could never happen that way.  You would settle for not getting into an argument over something stupid on the ride there, him not running out of patience in the shoe store and you not swearing that you’ll never go shopping with him again and not getting in a fight about which restaurant to eat at.  The silence on the ride home would be fine because at that point you wouldn’t want to speak to each other anyway.

     Then you realize you even put up with all that crap if he would at least want to go with you.

     When you are disappointed about the rainy picnic or the losing game or the regime change, like I said, it’s a gamble.  When your little fantasies are ruined on a continual basis  by the person you love , well that’s just shitty because you should be playing with a stacked deck.  It’s not gambling, it’s counting on the one person you’ve given your heart to and them not caring at all.

     You can’t control another person the same way you can’t control the weather, but once in awhile the man or woman you love should make a little effort to make some of your dreams come true.  The world loses more of it’s magic the older you get, and if you can’t pull your head out of your own ass for a moment and make it magical for an hour or two for the one you love, then why the hell are we in relationships anyway?

     People accept it all the time and I don’t think they should.  I’m not saying every couple in the world should be living in a fairy tale land where all of their wishes come true, I’m just saying once in a while you should bite the bullet and miss the football game and get off your ass and make your girls fantasy day happen.

     The same thing happens to men, too.  We have our ideal fantasy situations (and no, I’m not talking about that one) that never seem to come to pass.  Guys do have some thought and romance in them and maybe because society dictates that we are not expected to possess those traits most woman never notice it.

     Maybe we should talk to each other and find out what the other person wants and not chastise them for wanting it but simply make it happen.  We can’t all be that self-absorbed and unwilling to put forth a little effort to make even the dreams of the low-expectation creatures manyof us have turned into come true.  There is precious little magic left in the world and it all exists around love.

     Here’s hoping all your dreams come true.

© 2011 David Ferraris

Rain 4/87

     Rain.

     The earliest memory he had was of rain.

     He was young, very young, less than two years old perhaps.  His family had been having an outdoor party at his parent’s house, and suddenly the rain came.  The memory started with the rain, and he found out later that it had been Memorial Day, and the family had gathered there after watching his grandfather march in a parade earlier.

     Now he was sitting in the yard, getting drenched and crying.  The rain had startled him, and everyone was running about collecting things and carrying them inside, out of the rain. 

     He was scared and confused, and everyone hurrying around him didn’t help matters any.  Finally someone snatched him up and laid him in his crib in the back room.

Once in his crib and soothed hastily by his mother, he calmed down and the rain falling against the window lulled him to sleep.

     Now, as a grown man, he would sometimes remember this as he lay in bed at night and the rain softly drummed out it’s rhythm on the glass.  He marveled at how one thing could drive him from extreme fear one minute to relaxing calm the next.

     Then he thought it fitting that his first memory in life should be a contradiction and a paradox.

     Then the rain would lull him to sleep.

© 2011 David Ferraris

Lights 10/86

Last night as I passed a graveyard

I saw a hundred flickering lights;

glitter amongst the headstones.

I went to them and saw

that they were not lights, but souls,

weeping at their graves.

When I asked them why they wept they replied:

“Death is not the eternal peace they promised,

it simply gives you more time to think”

© 2011 David Ferraris

Pets 5/18/09

     I have written on more than one occasion that I prefer animals to people for the most part.  I always have, and I’m not sure it’s because animals are so wonderful or if human beings are so disappointing.  Most likely it’s a little from column A, a little from column B.  Liking animals so much (and coming from a family that also likes them) I’ve had pets for most of my life.  They have always brought me great comfort and enjoyment and at times what feels like unconditional love, which may or may not be more about treats.

     If you have ever had pets, you are also aware of the major drawback:  unless your pet is some sort of large tortoise, chances are it will not outlive you.  Your life is marked through the years by the death of your beloved animals, and the more pets you have the shorter the time is between departures.  If you’re lucky the end comes for a particular pet after a long life (long relative to whatever type of pet it was) and the pet goes easy and comfortably.  That’s not always the case.

      Almost everyone had a cat or dog that got hit by a car.  Every kid I ever met (me included) had a hamster or gerbil that disappeared, sometimes for good, sometimes turning up months later dried-up under the baseboard heater.

      I think the best pet dying story (and forgive me for seeming to make light of such a horrible subject, but it is funny) was the story of two brothers I know.  When they were young, like most kids, they were obsessed with getting sea monkeys.  In the ads they looked like little people, sometimes a male and a female wearing crowns, like they were king and queen of Atlantis.  In reality, of course, they were brine shrimp, tiny flecks floating in the water a terrible let down.

     Well, it was the older brother’s birthday and he got the sea monkeys and both of them were quite excited to finally have them.  They didn’t have a fishbowl, so they filled one of those big oversized novelty brandy snifters that someone you knew always had in the seventies with water and dumped in the packet of sea monkeys.  The next day the sea monkeys were swimming around.  They were still tiny, tiny enough to not yet crush the dreams of actual monkey-people as pets, so that night they went to bed still believing all the wonderful possibilities illustrated on the box.

     At that time, their father was quite the alcoholic, so while they were up in their beds sleeping, he arrived home very inebriated.  Still wanting a drink, he spied the big brandy snifter and…well, you guessed it.  He drank his son’s pets.  Every last one.  I wouldn’t even begin to try to figure out what kind of effect that would have on a child.  It is not so tragic in the fact that pets that were consumed were only tiny brine shrimp whose part in the ecosystem is usually just that, to be eaten by something larger.  It’s not like the guy ate their dog.  But it must have left some scar on them.  A few years ago they presented me with a picture they found of Mike at the birthday party holding up the sea monkey box and beaming so happily.  I have it on my refrigerator and I’m actually touched that they gave it to me simply because I think it’s such a bizarre story and they know how much it fascinates me.

     On a side note: the younger brother, Dave, is obsessed with monkeys.  He thinks about them all the time, he makes jokes about them constantly and he gives his girlfriend a stuffed monkey for every birthday, Christmas or Valentines Day.  I don’t know if it’s connected, but I figured I’d mention it.

     Of course, the other option is the sad drive to the vets with a pet whose time has come.  You know it from the minute you get in the car.  Pets making that last trip always go wrapped in a towel on your lap.  If you’re getting in the car and they aren’t in a pet carrier, you already know what the outcome is going to be.  They are usually too weak to do much struggling and you spend that last trip telling them how good they are and how much you love them.

     I remember when I took my cat Harry on that last trip.  I stayed with him while the vet did what he had to do and Harry slowly went limp as I pet him.  We always take our animals back home and bury them, so I wrapped him up and the vet provided me with a box and I lay him in it.  At that moment it struck me to remember that Harry’s mother, a stray we had taken in many years before named Mittens, had given birth to him and his siblings under my bed.  Harry was the first out and Harry was a big cat, half Himalayan, and Mittens had screamed very loud while passing him.  I picked Harry up right after that and set him in a box lined with towels.  I was the first to touch him when he was born, and now here I was at the moment of his death putting him in another box.  That circle of life moment hit me very hard and that’s when I really started crying. 

     There have been countless others in my lifetime.  There are other ways for pets to go.  Our dog Angel went to have an operation and when they opened her up they found so much cancer in her that there was no point in finishing the surgery.  We never got to say goodbye, and to this day my father does not handle pets operations well at all.  I feel worse because the night before the operation I was going to stop over at my parents and bring her a McDonald’s cheeseburger and wish her luck on her operation.  I had other things to do that night and I never made it, but I figured she would appreciate the burger after her operation more and figured no harm done.  Then I found out she had gone and I wouldn’t be seeing her again and…well, I still haven’t gotten over that.

     Which brings me to today.  I had to meet my parents at the vets today because it was our cat Pumpkins time to go for that last ride wrapped in his towel on my mothers lap.  He came to us years ago as a stray and he had lived a hard life.  He was a beat up, mangy thing, but he was still a very affectionate and loving cat.  He may have been a streetwise tomcat, but he was such an old softy you had to wonder how he had managed to make it all those years outside.

     My fondest memory of him was five years ago when I had one of my fingers eaten by a bear.  Yes, I know what I’ve just written, but that’s a story for another day.  I spent a few days convalescing at my parents’ house on the couch.  Pumpkin hardly left my side.  When I awoke in the morning he was lying on the pillow next to me, watching over me and caring for me.

     I also used to love watching him play or even just walk around the house, because he did everything seemingly a beat slower than the world around him.  Sometimes he reminded me of the old Bugs Bunny cartoons when they would break a bottle of ether and they would all move and talk so slowly.

     This morning his heart problem finally caught up with him and he wasn’t going to make it.  At the vet they checked him over and any of the treatment options did not have much chance of working and would probably make the cats last few days a torment.  Soon it was over for Pumpkin, and I couldn’t possibly go into any detail about it while it is still this fresh in my mind.  I carried him out in the same towel he came there in and we took him to my parents’ house and buried him with the rest of the pets whose time had come while they lived there.

     And then my father and I went back to work.   I was trying not to be sad and bitter, but it just seemed like a horrible part of life and made me question why it had to be that way. 

     A few hours later my father and I went to the store with a friend of the family, a widow who was buying a new TV.  We brought the TV from the store to her house and I set it up for her in her living room.

     We’ve known Dotty for about 27 years now, and for a lot of that time she’s had horses and goats.  I hadn’t been there for awhile, and after the TV was set up, I wanted to go out to the barn and see the animals.  The goats had recently had babies, so there were three little goats running around, and they would stay just out of reach and bleat at me, not knowing if they should trust me.  Their mom knew better and spent her time trying to find out if we had Tootsie rolls for her. (we did)

    Most of the goats were pygmies, but there was one big Billy-goat named Crybaby that was following us around and was in a playful mood.  I was trying to pet the horses and he kept butting me and pushing me.  Finally my father and I took turns grabbing his horns and engaging in a reverse tug of war to see if he could push us backwards.  He could.  I was laughing out loud at his antics as he would run a few steps towards me and then bolt off in the other direction prancing and jumping and happy to have made me nervous for a moment.  He was, after all, a good sized goat with pretty big horns, but I knew he was just playing.

     So after that horrible morning putting my cat to sleep I found myself laughing and having fun with an ornery goat and the rest of them.  Just that simply life was good again, and it reminded me that the reason it seems so sad at the end of our pets’ lives is because of just how good our lives are with them up until that point.

Perhaps nothing illustrates that joy more than this picture:

© David Ferraris 2011

Birth

     “Ah, my little one.” God told the small thing which lay in his embrace.  “I give to you my breath so that you may breathe.  I give to you my earth so that you may take of it and share in its beauty and wealth.”

     It suckled at Gods breast, and this was allowed as he was neither sex, both mother and father to mankind, and knowledge and reason flowed into it.

     “Soon your eyes shall open unto a new world, a vast and glorious world in which you will come to think of yourself the most glorious of all.  You will be right in your assumption, are as all men, at least partially right.  You have the potential.”

     “Potential to rise higher than the birds, though not as gracefully.”

    “Potential to blossom more beautifully than a flower though not as delicately.”

     The Lord sighed, looking at his creation.

     “But no,” He told it, “You shall learn to hurt more than yourself, you shall learn to kill where you do not need, you shall spite yourself and others.  Such is your way.”

     “Now you must go, and I can do nothing more to guide you.  I cannot care, I cannot emote, for you who have made me all powerful have not afforded me that small luxury.”

     He scratched the small black mark on its soul that marked it as man, and then spread his arms.  It was borne down on the slightest whisper of wind, to live its life and make its own mark upon mankind.

© David Ferraris 2011