The Clowns

     Donald had always hated clowns.  More than hated them, he feared them.  The things that brought amusement and laughter to other kids had terrified him, had struck some chord in him that he did not care for.  Their smiling, greasepaint masks seemed to hide something sinister, something not real.
     Laughter too, wasn’t laughter used to cover up anything unpleasant, and weren’t clown’s laughter the phoniest laughs around?  Whatever clowns were, they were not amusing to Donald.
     His parents discovered that on his fifth birthday, when they took him to the circus.  In his seven years on the planet Donald’s memories were few, but one stood out more than any other.
     Sterling’s Traveling Circus it was called.  Not much of a circus, really.  They set up in a field on the edge of town, but the circus was kind of a big deal compared to the mundane day-to-day small town life most of the people in the area led.  So his parents took him, a birthday treat, and he liked the sights, the smells, the food, and the animals.  He sat rapt as the trapeze artists flew overhead and when acrobats rode the horses around the ring.
     Then the clowns appeared, and he froze.  Lots of clowns: big clowns, little clowns, fat and skinny, all painted with those jeering smiles, dressed in baggy clothes which held no real shape beneath them.
     His parents hadn’t noticed his apprehension at first.  They laughed along with the crowd at the clowns antics.  Buckets of water that turned into confetti, vaudevillian pratfalls, ridiculous pantomimes.  Donald and his parents had seats in the first row, only the best for Donald’s birthday.  He was close to them, but he still felt a little reassured between his mother and father.
     Then, one of the clowns came his way.  It stopped right in front of him and looked at him.  He sat frozen.  The clown made some motions with his hands and then – POOF – a bouquet of paper flowers appeared.  Donald screamed as everyone around him ooohed and aaahed.   The tears that streamed down his face got his mothers attention and she tried to soothe him, tell him it was all in fun.  The clown made a mock sad face at him, and put his finger to his lip and shushed him.
     The clown was still right in front of him, and looked directly at him and smiled.  Donald started to calm down a little and thought it might be alright for a moment.  Then the clown did something that apparently no one but Donald noticed.  Its lips parted slightly and one long, jagged tooth slipped out.  It slowly pierced the clown’s lower lip and a small trickle of blood ran through the white greasepaint, down its chin.  Then the clown was laughing and running through the sawdust to join his friends.
     Donald’s parents finally had to take him home; he couldn’t be quieted at the circus after that.  The trickle of blood haunted his dreams since that night.  Right after the incident the nightmares were frequent, almost nightly, but now, two years later they only occurred once every two months or so.  Donald was getting too big to get hysterical at every little bad dream.  Some nights though they were true night terrors, and he would wake up sweating, tears streaming down his cheeks, and he would curl up tight beneath his blankets and wait for sunrise.
     What Donald didn’t know was that when the clown was near he had put something in his mother’s purse, something small that Donald’s mother hadn’t even noticed until they got home.
     “Look honey,” she said to her husband, showing him the small rubber clown she had found in her bag.  “That clown must have stuck that in there when he was playing with Donny.”
     “Well don’t give it to him now.” Her husband replied. “It’s liable to send him into another fit.”
     So she put it away in her dresser, and thought that someday when he was older she would give it to him and they would laugh at how silly he had been.
 
     Children are curious.  Donald, now six, was playing in the house while his mother was in the backyard talking to the neighbor.  He was exploring, and had already exhausted all the mysteries in the rest of the house, so he ventured into his parents bedroom.  He looked in the closet, but that was just clothes and shoes.  The nightstand contained only papers and booklets that he had no comprehension of.
     His mother’s dresser however held all manner of things.  Her jewelry box, which held the silver dollars his grandpa had given him before he went away, the ones his mom was keeping for him until he got older.  Some teeth the tooth fairy had taken.  How did they end up here?  Donald was beginning to figure this one out, and soon the tooth fairy would go the same route as Santa did, into disbelief.
     He opened a drawer.  Nothing in there but bras and underwear.  He opened the next one and froze.  A clown!  He had to stifle a scream when he saw the small rubber doll.  He slammed the drawer shut.  What was a clown doing in mommy’s dresser? He wanted to run from the room, but he didn’t want that thing in the same house as him.
     He summoned up all his courage and opened the drawer.  He looked at the clown, not sure what he wanted to do, but knowing he had to do it soon.  His mother would not be out back much longer.  He wished he had gone out to play in the yard near her instead of insisting on staying inside and watching cartoons.
     He finally snatched up the doll and closed the drawer.  He made his way to the front door, and as he did he could swear he felt the clown move in his grasp. He squeezed tighter and bolted through the house and out the front door.  The only place he could think of to dispose of it was the sewer in front of the house.  He hurled the clown through the grate, and it landed in the storm drain four feet below.  Its brightness contrasted sharply with the black muck, and Donald could see it clearly, lying on its back, staring up at him. Then it raised its arm and waved at him.
     Donald ran back into the house.
     The next day, playing on the dead end street where he lived, he peered into the sewer.  The clown was not there.  ‘Good” he thought, ‘it had been washed away by last nights rain.’  At least that’s what he hoped.
     A couple of weeks later he finally got the nerve to look in his mother’s drawer again.  He grabbed the handle and slowly pulled it open and peeked in.
     The rubber clown lay on its back, a small trickle of blood running down its chin.  Donald did run screaming from the room this time, into the backyard where his mother had a hard time calming him down.  He wouldn’t say what had him so upset, but he would never stay in the house by himself again after that.

     In a small tent, miles away from where Donald lay sleeping, six figures sat around a table.  The interior of the tent was bathed in the dull glow of a gas lamp.  They were clowns, gathered about the table, laughing as perhaps you might expect clowns to do at night, when no one was around.  Except the laughter was not jovial, it came more like a hyena-like, high pitched squealing outburst.
     The clowns were still in full make-up, or rather, they were clowns.  A clown is only a clown when made up to be a clown.  These creatures were always clowns; they could never be ordinary men.  They weren’t human at all.
      The object of their amusement was a small child, a boy approaching his fourth birthday.  One clown, in his baggy, polka dot outfit held the boy up in front of him, his face close to the child’s face, mocking its terror stricken look.  The child started to cry and then scream while the clowns laughed, amused by the fear they were causing.
     “Come on kid,” the clown holding him said, “don’t cry.  You need to be quiet.  Here, I’ll help.”  With that he grasped the little boy’s tongue and twisted in free of his mouth and threw it on the dirt floor, where another clown pounced on it.  Blood welled up from the boy’s mouth, vomiting down his chest.
     “That’s better!” The clown smiled as the others howled.
     Then the clown started to drink …

     Carl Russell couldn’t sleep.  He tried night after night, but he couldn’t do it.  Here he was again, over near the clown tent.  No one came near the clown’s tent, not at night anyway.  The clowns always kept their lodging as far from the rest of the company as they could, and the other workers were fine with that.
     When you worked in a circus you stayed to yourselves anyway, in your little group.  Even now he should be with the other laborers in their trailer, sleeping.  The clown’s business was the clown’s business and that was that.  Besides, what he was suspecting the clowns of was absurd.
     What did he care anyway?  52 years old and still wandering around with the carnivals.  He had left home at 16 and soon the found that the only place he could get work was in the carnival circuit.  Lousy pay, no family, no love, no life outside work.  He didn’t even feel he fit in with the circus people.  Most of the other workers, performers or sideshow freaks felt close to one another, like some sort of substitute family, but Carl never felt a kinship and he never stayed at one circus very long.
     So why was he so worried about these goddamn clowns?  In a few weeks he’d be out of here and working some other traveling show.  Screw this circus and its clowns and everyone else in it.
     He shuddered as he thought back on the night a couple of weeks back.  He couldn’t sleep that night either, but just because he had indigestion.  The food you got in his line of work often did not sit well with him, especially now that he was older.  He went for a walk in the night air, hoping he would feel better.  He hadn’t realized he had wandered close to the clown’s tent until he thought he heard what sounded like a child crying.  More like screaming, a horrible wailing scream.  He heard the clowns laughing maniacally, and then the child’s screaming stopped.
     He had hurried back to his trailer and tried to forget the sounds and go to sleep, but the cries stayed with him and he could not block it from his thoughts.
     So every night since found him near the clown’s tent, and on two other occasions he heard what seemed to be a child crying and then silence.  It couldn’t mean what he thought it meant, the clowns couldn’t be murderers, could they?  The thought seemed ridiculous, but what else could the sounds he was hearing mean?  He needed to look into the tent, but the thought terrified him.
      He was getting nearer to their tent when he suddenly heard a child screaming again.  He made his way as quickly as he could to just outside the tent.  The child’s cries had stopped, but his heart was racing in his chest and he had broken out in a cold sweat.  He had to admit, he was terrified.
     He wasn’t sure what he should do.  He couldn’t just burst in there and demand to know what was going on, cold he?  He felt helpless and weak, but his fear could not be surmounted and he stood frozen.  Then he thought he heard something, a small noise, like muffled crying.  The child was still alive!
      He tried to gather his thoughts, to try to get the sick feeling to leave him, but he still felt nauseous and was still trembling. Then the clowns started howling again.   He could make out the faint shadows of the clowns on the walls of the tent, they seemed to be in a frenzy.  They were making strange guttural sounds, and seemed to be skirmishing over something, like a pack of wolves fighting over a meal.
      He had to move, had to do something, so he quickly circled his way around until he noticed a small tear in the side of the canvas tent.  The clowns had settled down now, so he had to be careful.   He tentatively put his eye up to the hole, as if expecting a clown’s finger to suddenly poke his eye out with a giggle.
     He peered in and saw the clowns sitting around the table, and in the gaslight they seemed harmless enough, like some cheesy painting they sold at flea markets.  They were laughing good-naturedly, sitting around the way you might sit at a picnic table with friends in the backyard on a summer night.  He slowly let out his breath, unaware he had been holding it in.  No child, just clowns relaxing at night, perhaps planning tomorrow’s show.  
     Then he noticed on the ground, a child’s pajamas, crumpled and torn.  He looked at the clowns again; his heart racing like it would explode.  Now he noticed the clown’s greasepaint had run, smeared down their chins, their necks.  It was red greasepaint, that was all, he tried to tell himself.  No, it was blood, he knew it, and he saw one clown hold up something small and white, then crunch it between his teeth and suck the marrow out.
     He pulled back from the hole in the tent and tried to control his nausea, if he vomited now they would hear him and he’d be done for.  He steadied himself and looked back into the tent.
     The clowns were still seated, laughing and joking, and it sickened him to realize that this was polite after dinner conversation.  Suddenly their attention was drawn to the entrance of the tent.  The flap opened and he saw something very small move into the tent.  It was a tiny clown, not more than ten inches tall, almost like a small doll.  It capered and danced its way across the floor where it ceremoniously bowed at the clown’s feet.
     “Peebo!” the clown wearing the polka dotted suit exclaimed, “You’ve returned.”
     “Yes.” Replied the tiny clown, “It has taken a little longer than usual, but the child is ready.”
     “Good, good,” The clown smiled , “Tomorrow night little one, bring him to us!”
      “Yes master.” And the tiny clown bowed again and trotted out of the tent and into the night.  Carl backed away from the tent and made his way back to the trailer.  What the fuck had he just witnessed?

     The next night as Donald was in bed trying to fall asleep, he heard a noise coming from somewhere in his room.  He peered into the darkness but saw nothing.  He waited for his eyes to adjust to the moonlight streaming in through the window, and he wondered if he should just bolt from the room.  He couldn’t.  His parents were getting tired of him trying to crawl into their bed at night.  He was seven and a half years old now, too old to be scared all the time.
      Suddenly there was a slight movement on the floor, something in the darkness.  Then he saw something dance into the moonlight.  Donald saw what it was: the clown!  The clown doll was in his room, dancing across his bedroom floor.  He wanted to scream, but he sat frozen, unable to take his eyes off the clown.  It cart-wheeled and spun, tumbling about on the carpet.  Donald started to sob.  There was a rising fear in him that told him he would never see the inside of his bedroom again, his mother would never hold him and fuss over him, all that was lost.  Still he sat, transfixed by the doll on the floor, feeling himself becoming entranced by it’s movements and soon that’s what he was.

    This night Carl was back outside the clown tent, and earlier than usual.  As soon as the others had gone to sleep, he slipped out of the trailer and made his way here.  Earlier that day he had spoke to one of the other workers and bought a gun, a cheap .38 caliber pistol.  Unregistered weapons were fairly easy to come by in his line of work.  He wasn’t sure how much good it would do against these things, but he felt better having something for protection.  He didn’t even have a plan, and he was still holding onto some faint hope, telling himself that there was some other explanation he hadn’t considered, but he knew the truth.  Still, something in head could not accept that clowns were eating children.
      His thoughts were interrupted by a rustling sound and he saw something even harder for his mind to acknowledge.  From the night sky came the little clown, gliding down on the wind.  Behind it sailed a small boy wearing pajamas, and they landed gently in front of the entrance to the tent. The boy stared blankly at the small figure, which danced forward through the flap.  The boy followed, disappearing into the tent.  Carl stood there, holding his breath, frozen in disbelief and fear.
     Then he heard the boy scream.
     Without thinking he rushed into the tent, and he realized immediately he had made a huge mistake.  He stood in the doorway, the gun still uselessly in his pocket.  The clown in the polka dots held Donald with both arms pinned to his sides, off the ground and staring in wide-eyed terror into the clown’s face.  The other clowns looked at Carl, seemingly amused, and he suddenly realized that there were only five of them.
     The sixth clown grabbed him from behind, and placed one of his hands over Carl’s mouth.  The clown hugged him tight with the other arm, and seemed much stronger than he should have.  Carl tried to struggle, but he couldn’t budge.  Then he felt breath on the back of his neck and heard the clown whisper in his ear.
     “Watch.” It said.
     Carl watched the clown lower his face, almost touching Donald’s nose.  He saw the clowns mouth open wide, then even wider.   He saw a mouthful of wicked teeth, too many teeth, sharp and twisted.  The mouth opened still wider, as if the clown’s jaw had become unhinged and his whole head opened up.  The clown’s mouth enveloped the entire lower half of Donald’s face.  The gas light seemed to intensify, and fire burned in the clown’s eyes.  The other clowns were braying and howling, a bone chilling, primeval sound.  The clown then closed his jaws, and Carl heard a horrible crunching sound and the boy’s legs were thrashing the air frantically.  Then mercifully the body went limp.  Blood was running down the front of the clown’s polka dotted suit, and the other clowns were approaching him, licking their lips.
     Carl passed out before he even noticed that the clown was no longer holding him.

     Pain.  Applause.  Bright lights.
     Carl opened his eyes and looked around him.  He was in the main tent, on his back and looking up.  The stands were packed, and he realized where he was.  He was in the main ring, it was show time.  He was in a large box, being wheeled out into the center ring. His feet protruded from one end and his head from the opposite end.  His whole body felt like it was on fire.  His face felt funny and hot, and he realized it was covered in greasepaint.  He tried to open his mouth and the pain was unbearable.  He could feel the wire, the wire that was stitched through his gums, holding his mouth shut.  He started to cry.  He knew what would happen next.  He’d seen it a dozen times, but only now could he appreciate the trick.  How many murders had people witnessed and never knew?
     It was like sawing the lady in half, and the clowns had done it often.  He imagined he was painted like the others that had gone before him.  The clown in the box was always made up to be very sad, as he was now.  Then the clowns, with much pomp and circumstance, would present the long knives to the crowd.  The clown in the box would look on in what the crowd assumed was mock terror and then the big surprise would come and everyone would cheer.
     ‘If they only knew’ thought Carl helplessly.
      At the center of the ring the clown with the polka dotted suit, after he was sure the crowd was quite satisfied that the knives were genuine, plunged them into the top of the box.
     Carl felt the blades pierce him, one at the groin and one through the heart and he strained to scream against the wire holding his mouth shut.  Then a large spray of confetti spewed form the box where the knives had entered, and Carl watched it fall to the ground like tears as he died.

© 2011 David Ferraris

AmazingMan

     Mary eased her car off the side of the road, in the little gravel pull off next to Joe and Ellen’s car, which was already parked there.  She rolled down her passenger side window and asked if they'd been waiting long.

     As they said their hellos and discussed which trail they would be hiking, she was suddenly startled by a knock on her window.  She looked out and there he stood: AmazingMan.  In his green tights and yellow cape, his muscles bulging, the perfect male specimen.  She rolled down her window.

     "Can I help you?" she asked.

     "The question is, can I help you?"  He replied.  It sounded like he had said it too many times already in too many other situations.  Not exactly rehearsed, but still the way a smarmy barfly lothario might deliver a line designed to pick up a girl but was destined to fail.

     “No, not today AmazingMan, I’m just meeting my friends to go hiking.”  She told him.

     “Oh, okay” He replied, sounding disappointed.  “No kidnap ransom being delivered?  You can tell me, you don’t need to be afraid of them.” He scowled in Joe and Ellen’s direction.

     “No, nothing like that.” Mary assured him.  “Just, you know, going hiking.”

     “Hmmm.” AmazingMan furrowed his brow.  “Are you sure this isn’t some kind of drug deal?”

     “You have x-ray vision AmazingMan, you would certainly see if there were any drugs here.”

     “Yes, that’s true.” He agreed.  “Okay citizen, be secure in the knowledge that AmazingMan is always on the alert, watching out for the good people of this fair city …”

     “I know AmazingMan, She cut him off, “thanks and all, but my friends and I really need to hit the trail, so …” 

     “So …?”

     “So, could you please move so I can get out of my car and go hiking?”

    “Certainly.”  He stammered, “You have a good day and be sure to observe all the rules posted along the trail.  They are put there for your safety”

     “Okay.”  She answered, short and terse.

     She finally just opened the door against his thigh and he got the message and moved back. 

     “I’m off then, unless there’s something else you need me to help you with.”

     “Nope.  We’re quite okay here. Bye.”  She went around the car to her friends.

     AmazingMan walked away, looking dejected.  He would usually fly of course, but he secretly hoped walking would drive home his unhappiness and make them feel guilty.  It didn’t.  As he got a distance away from the cars, he trained his super hearing on them.

     “It’s kind of sad, isn’t it?”  Ellen was saying, “There’s really no crime for him to fight anymore.”

     “Yes, but he doesn’t have to pester innocent people all the time, does he?” Joe asked.

     “Shhhh!” Warned Mary, “He might hear you!”

      Joe and Ellen were right though.  Since he had come here a year and a half ago, the crime had really dried up.  When criminals realized there was an invincible flying strongman that could see through walls, hear you from blocks away and move faster than sound they either gave up on crime or moved to another part of the country.  He thought perhaps some super villain might arise to become his arch nemesis, but it turned out that there were no super villains.  Most criminals weren’t that smart, and the ones that were knew enough not to challenge a very powerful crime fighter from another planet over and over again. 

     Nor were there any super criminals from any other worlds.  It turned out that space was immense.  The only reason he had arrived from earth was because his father, with his great intellect and his civilization’s vast technology, managed to send him here directly and on purpose.  The chances of another person from another civilization doing the same thing were astronomical, let alone someone from beyond the stars just happening upon Earth randomly.

     With no crime to fight, he was basically useless unless there was some kind of natural disaster to help with, but even they were few and far between these days.  He could blow a hurricane or tornado off course before they even did any damage, and that only took a half hour at most.  If there was an earthquake somewhere he couldn’t do much to stop it, and humans had gotten surprising good at responding to disasters and rescuing and rebuilding.  He was mostly in the way in those situations. 

     He supposed he should go assume his alter ego Sam Smith, and get back to his job.  He thanked his lucky stars that he had the ability to produce AmazingMan any time the TV station wanted an interview.  It was true though that there wasn’t as much of a call for interviews with him anymore.  

     That was another thing.  Why didn’t his boss even figure out why he could even get in touch with AmazingMan?  He helped and protected humans, but they sure were stupid.  Take off his glasses and put on a cape and nobody even looked twice.  Not one of his so-called “friends” ever noticed him long enough to put two and two together and figure out that he was AmazingMan.  He sighed.  People sure knew how to be a disappointment.

     He suddenly felt foolish to realize that he was still walking.  He half-heartedly leapt in the air and took off, making his way to channel 19’s studio.

     When he first arrived here from the family farm, he had figured on getting a job at the local newspaper.   Where better to keep your finger on the pulse of a busy metropolis?  Alas, there were only two papers in town and the same out-of-town conglomerate owned them both.  Most of the stories in the papers came from the wire service and there was very little news left in them.  The daily edition was mostly entertainment news, local sports and classified ads.

     The closest thing he could find to a city news desk was the local television news, but even that was a joke.  Still, they were on top of breaking crime stories because sensationalism sells.  He wanted a job writing copy for the anchors, but with no college degree or any real experience, he was out of luck.  He finally took a course at the community college learning to work a camera.  He got an unpaid internship at he station and even then they weren’t looking to hire him when he graduated.  He finally just started crime fighting and used the “getting an interview with AmazingMan” angle to finally get a job operating the camera.  Truth be told, though, he wasn’t really very good at it.  He hardly worked the camera much anymore; he mostly just tried to stay out of the way.  He was just grateful that his AmazingMan connection would ensure that he always had a job. 

     He landed behind the studio and quickly changed and snuck inside. 

     “Anyone been looking for me?”  He asked everyone on set.

     “No” half of them replied, not even looking up from whatever they were doing.

     “Okay, well if anyone needs anything …” he added

     “NO!” said the same people.

      AmazingMan, who was now Sam Smith again by virtue of his glasses, walked down the hall to Lori Lund’s office.  Lori, like everyone else here, pretty much ignored Sam Smith.  She was the evening co-anchor, and she was also AmazingMan’s girlfriend.  Well, kind of.  She was always flirting with him, finding ways to be around him, he would catch her mooning over his picture.  At least she used to. She was always happy to talk to Sam, if for nothing else to ask if he had spoken to AmazingMan lately, or if he asked about her.   Lately it seemed the bloom was off the rose for her.

     He poked his head in her office door. 

     “Hi Lori.”  He called out, “How’s it going today.”

     “Fine Sam” She answered without looking up.  “I’m really busy right now, okay.”

      “You know, if you wanted, I could see if I could get a hold of AmazingMan, tell him to stop by or call.”

     “No, that’s okay Sam.” She replied, still not even looking up from her desk.

     “Oh, yeah, alright.  I’ll be working tonight if you want to talk or anything.”  He stood there for a second.  “Tonight.  At work.”  He added, and felt foolish for doing so but it was all part of the Sam Smith act. 

      It used to be, but now he was starting to feel like Sam most of the time and more like the made up act was AmazingMan.  He really had spent the vast majority of his life being Sam Smith, not AmazingMan anyway.  Who was he really? 

      Questions like those made his head ache so he left Lori’s office and headed off to find a nice spot out of the way of everyone that was actually doing work.

      Lori was thankful Sam left.  He was nice enough, and she knew he had a little crush on her, but so did a lot of guys.  She was on the evening news every night, so she had her fair share of men fawning over her.  Now it was uncomfortable though, with him knowing AmazingMan and all.  It wasn’t that she didn’t care for AmazingMan, she did, but … oh she didn’t even know these days. 

      It was all very exciting at first; he was so big and important and seemed dangerous fighting all those criminals.  AmazingMan really got her juices flowing when he first arrived, but now it didn’t seem so new and dangerous, it felt like a routine. 

      In addition, it was all a lot of flirting that never seemed to go anywhere.  They never really dated or went out to a restaurant or club, but how could they?  Was there in reality any future with AmazingMan?  Besides, where did he go when he wasn’t flying around town fighting crime?  Did he have a bunch of other girls all over town?  Or the world for that matter?  He could go anywhere at any time with anyone, and enough girls would swoon wherever he showed up.  Perhaps not so much anymore.  She thought it funny that the fact that girls not swooning now diminished him a little in her eyes, but when they were swooning it made her miserable and jealous and that made her want him more. 

     Maybe he was gay.

     Sam was standing against a wall watching the crew tape off the marks on the floor for tonight’s broadcast when his boss came over to him. 

     “Sam, can I talk to you in my office?”  Maury Brown asked.

     “Sure thing” Sam replied.  Maybe someone wants an interview with AmazingMan.  Perhaps Lori even put him up to it so she had an excuse to see him again.

     “Looking for an exclusive with AmazingMan, chief?” Sam asked hopefully.

     “Not exactly Sam.” Maury told him. “It’s never easy to say something like this Sam.  Things aren’t going real well around the station; we’re trying to cut costs.  We’re going to have to let you go.”

     Sam stood dumfounded. 

     “Excuse me, what?” He managed.

     “It’s not me Sam, it’s the higher ups.  They’re always looking to cut the budget.”

     “But … but … what if you want to talk to AmazingMan?  I can get in touch with him if you need a story.”

     “Well Sam,” Maury said, “There’s really no story there anymore, is there?   AmazingMan’s yesterday’s news.  There’s no real crime anymore.  Hell, we have to lead with stories from other cities these days.  Nothing sensational happens around here anymore.”

     “Maury, I need my job.  Where would I go?  Besides, Lori’s here …”  He stopped and looked at Maury, realizing what he had just said.

     “Exactly, she could probably get in touch with him if we needed.”

     Sam just stared at him.  Wow, he was a moron. 

     “Please Maury,” there must be something you can do”

     “Well, maybe I could knock you back to part time.”

     “Okay.”  Sam agreed immediately.  “I can work part time.”

     “And being part time means no more health benefits.  Obamacare and all that.”  Maury pressed further.

     “That’s fine.” Sam replied sullenly.  Truth be told, only working part time gave him more time to fight crime … well, to look for crime.  He didn’t need the health care.  Still, it stung him to have to accept the demotion and loss of benefits. 

     He had resorted to squeezing coal into diamonds long ago to supplement his income so money really wasn’t a problem.  His job was just one more area that he failed at, but there were ways around it.

     He left the studio after shaking Maury’s hand and actually thanking him for the pay cut. 

     He didn’t like being Sam Smith anymore.  He could live with it because he got to be AmazingMan some of the time, adored and celebrated.  Those days were behind him now, apparently. 

     He had thought about packing up and moving to a new town, wiping out crime there.  That wouldn’t work.  People were stupid, but eventually they would start figuring out what was going on whenever Sam Smith shows up to work with his AmazingMan connections.  Besides, Lori was here.  He felt foolish and impotent even thinking that.  He supposed he could just stay Sam Smith here and head out to another city when he could, but he had done enough commuting in his life already.

     No, there was only one answer.  He had no purpose, no life, no girl, nothing really.  He couldn’t even tell people who he really was.

     He ducked into an alley and took off as AmazingMan.  He couldn’t kill himself here on Earth, nothing was strong enough to harm him.  Perhaps if he flew directly into the Sun, that would burn him up and this torturous life would be over. 

    Outward he flew, leaving the Earth behind, past Venus and Mercury before he plunged into the Sun.  At first, the flames and then the roiling mass of the Sun engulfed his body, and he waited for it to be over.  Then it came to him as it always did at this point.  This alien star only made him stronger.  There would be no peace today.

     AmazingMan sighed heavily and slowly headed back to Earth.

© David Ferraris 2013

The Tequila Journals(1991)

Foreword

     It seems lately that it’s harder and harder for me to write anything down on paper.  I’m easily distracted by any activity around me, if I even bother to pick up a pen.  I have had not felt The Need for a long while, and I was beginning to wonder if it would ever return,

     Lately I’ve been surrounding myself with interesting people, people with talent and promise (although much of it, alas, will go unfulfilled) and they are making me feel – I don’t know – ashamed.  I feel hypocritical, trying to make them realize their potential while mine slowly fades away.  Well, you’ll see that in the story, not here.

    It’s not just that factor either.   A big part of it is that it seems like it might be fun to get this all down on paper.  Shame I can live with, but I won’t pass up fun.  Fun will probably kill me someday, but until then I’ll keep looking for new and crazy things to do.

     But enough of that justification bullshit.  Why the Tequila Journals?  Quite simple. 

     Sweet Tequila is a band.  They are real; they exist, as does everyone in this saga.  This is a story of me and my dealings with the band and the people surrounding them.  It will be a warts and all kind of story so be prepared.

     It’s also called the Tequila Journals because I’m writing it in a small spiral notebook.  It’s 150 sheets, college ruled.  It’s 9-1/2” x 6”. 

     It was decided that I should be the manager of this band Sweet Tequila, so I figured ‘why not’ and that’s what I started to do.  The first 9 pages of this notebook contain some dates and phone numbers, but that’s all.  I don’t know what’s happening with me being manager now or anything.  Now I just seem to be caught up in this wild mixed up ride along with everybody else.

     It’s a three subject notebook, so each section is 50 pages long.  It reminds me of a small journal an explorer or reporter might use.  I’m starting this story on page 51.  If I reach page 150 and I still haven’t written on pages 10-49 I’ll continue the story there.  If I gain control of the situation and things organize themselves, pages 10-49 will fill up and I’ll never see the last page of this thing because I’ll be way too busy to keep a journal.

     Only God knows how it will all end, and He ain’t telling.  On the way I’m sure that sooner or later I’m gonna need another notebook.

Dancing again,

DCF

  

Goodbye to the Old Ways

     July 4^th, 1991 I found myself at a big outdoor party.  I was at this particular park the year before also.  It was beginning to seem like a tradition already.  In the year or so preceding I’d managed to fall into a crowd, the crowd if you will.  We were some of the beautiful people, I guess, if there was such a thing in the Lehigh Valley.  We had all fallen together around a band called “Omynus” and while they were okay musicians their charisma counted for a lot more people at their shows than their talent.

     Oddly enough, that didn’t bother me.  It should have.  It bothered the hell out of Bryan and he told me so whenever he was with me on an “Omynus night”, a night the band was playing out.  Bryan was never much into an image thing, but I was getting a big kick out of it.

     The whole crowd was into partying big time.  Cocaine was preferred, a few of the crowd being dealers themselves, but almost any drug was acceptable.

     All of the band members had wives or girlfriends, but that didn’t stop them from getting a lot of women.  Girls would flirt with them from the crowd, or pass them their numbers to hook up later, and there were lots of girls.  Everybody had their pick, and if the band member’s girlfriends were out that night it meant plenty of girls for me to choose from. 

     I had a great set up where I would meet up with all the girlfriends and hang out with them most of the night.  While part of that was keeping them all occupied so the guys could meet women, it also helped me immensely when all these girls told any woman that asked what a great guy I was.

     Then there was the drugs.  A couple of lines of coke at the house before we went to the club.  A couple of lines in the dressing room before the first set.  A line or two while the band was playing in the bathroom off the back of the toilet, or out in the parking lot in someone’s car.  Lines in the dressing room between sets. 

     The whole time you had to pick out a girl for the night and then take her back to wherever the after party was so the drug taking could really start.

     Okay, back to the party.

     The Omynus crowd was there, along with a wide assortment of other crowds.  Bikers, Deadheads, Thrashers, College Students.  A large cross-section of white trash and white trash wannabes. 

     I was not in good shape upon arrival.  I hadn’t gotten home until noon that day.  I had been out with a friend of mine, Miles, and we had met two somewhat stupid women the night before.  I ended up with a girl named Karen, whom I had met and bedded 10 months earlier (on an Omynus night of course) and hadn’t seen her since.

     That’s not entirely true.  I saw her once in the interim of those 10 months, but I didn’t remember who she was.  Needless to say, that meeting did not go smoothly or last long.  For the record, here is that meeting:

     Karen: “Hi, what’s up?”

     Me: “Nothing much.”  Vague stare. “What’s up with you?”

     Karen: “Do you remember me?”

     Me: “Yeaaah …” Pause.  “Robin!” I said proudly, amazed that I’d remembered her name in a sudden burst of recognition.

     Karen: “No.”  Icy stare. “It’s Karen.” Icier tone.

     Jenn:  “Dave, who’s she?”  Jenn was my girlfriend at the time.

     Mark:  “Oh shit!”  Mark had been there the night I met her the first time.

     We all stared at each other for a moment, then Karen walked away without a word.  Jenn stared at me bewildered for a few seconds and Mark drunkenly suppressed a laugh and the night slipped back into normalcy.

     Now, a few months later on that July 4^th eve Karen and her two friends drove Miles and I 45 minutes to someplace near Jim Thorpe, cooked us breakfast and fucked our brains out.   One of the girls drove, cooked most of the breakfast and left.  I ended up in the downstairs bedroom with Karen, while Miles and his catch for the night in the room directly above us.

     I won’t go into a lot of detail, but it struck me odd that in the bedroom Karen had a very detached way about her.  Once in bed, after she had dutifully stripped, she would lie there and wait for you to position her like a Barbie doll and do what you wished.  There was no real emotion, no real anything.  It was the only actual “dead fuck” I’d ever had. 

     Upstairs, however, Miles and his girl were apparently doing gymnastics.  The ceiling creaked as the bed bounced around the room, and the next day a couple of pictures were actually hanging crooked on the wall and Miles had huge scratches across his back.

    After Karen and her friend had dropped us off that July 4^th and left us standing next to Miles truck in the bar parking lot in unaccustomed daylight, we just stood there, not sure if the previous nights events had really occurred.

     Then I looked at the scratches on Miles’ back, the only physical evidence of the entire happening struck us as bizarrely funny. I started chuckling and soon both of us were laughing hysterically so that people walking into the stores in the small shopping center where the bar was located glanced warily at us and moved away quickly.  It was a pretty pathetic window in my life, I grant you that, but it basically summed up my Omynus life and where it had deposited me.

     I had arrived here without my heart and without my soul.  After I left Miles there and started home in my car, I noticed the space where they had been.  I felt empty and I didn’t like it, but I still had to admit that it had been fun before I noticed it.  Now that I had noticed I couldn’t ignore it and I needed to regain some self control.

     My life seems to go in cycles.  I take every tangent to the end and destroy myself and then try to redeem myself, and eventually I self destruct again.  Here I was, self-destructed and throwing my pearls before swine.  It was time to get some new pearls, and cast them at new swine.

     Bryan and I arrived and the first thing we noticed was that the beer for the day was Coors.  I don’t really like Coors, but I abhor Coors Light.  Silver Bullet my ass!  Coors Light is the most watered down, nothing tasting, offensive beverage ever concocted.  Plus, a lot of fat girls were always drinking Coors Light, so it doesn’t even keep you thin.  Anyone, male or female I see drinking Coors Light is immediately labeled as a mere amateur and not worthy of consideration by a true professional like me.  I resigned myself to drinking Coors.

     The beer was being dispensed from a truck.  There is something grotesquely beautiful about a truck that dispenses beer from little nozzles in the side of it.  I’m not sure exactly what it is, but, I mean … it’s a truckload of beer! A TRUCKLOAD!  When you think of truckloads of things you think of tons of warehouse merchandise or hundreds of gallons of gasoline, but it’s beer, and it all pours out through a little hole in the side.  Boy, I could use a beer right now.

    Bryan and I started to make our way towards the beer truck, but unfortunately when you know a lot of people at parties, they inadvertently stand between you and the alcohol.  We said our hellos and made our promises to quickly return, but it was slow going.  Twenty minutes later found us still fighting our way past people.

     Going past the stage I saw one of my friends, Dave, standing with his girlfriend.  Dave had been the lead singer of Omynus years before, and since had moved on to other bands.  We had spent many a night drinking, drugging and fighting.

     A night out with Dave was always strange.  Dave had gone through periods of his life where he was “born again”, and sometimes at the end of the night when the last line is done and the beer isn’t tasting very good anymore he would preach to me and tell me how I was going to hell.

     “Dave,” I would try to explain to him, “You live the same lifestyle that I do.  Aren’t you going to hell too?”

     “Not me.”  He would answer in all sincerity, “I’m accept Jesus as my savior.”

     “So that gives you license to do whatever you like?”

      “Basically.”  He honestly believed this, I swear.  “I’m a sinner, but because I accept Jesus, he will accept me into heaven as a sinner.”

     At this point I would usually get out of his truck or put my coat on and head home.  At least I would move away from him at whatever party we were at and go to sleep on the floor.

     Religion is a fucked up thing like that.  I believe there are so many of them because everyone has to sift through them all until they find one that suits their lifestyle.  It’s been my experience that people want a religion that either blames them for everything they do or absolves them from all guilt, and they’ll believe in anything to achieve it.

     Enough about religion.  I liked Dave, and I didn’t want something as silly as religion to ruin our friendship.

     Dave, the accepted sinner, nodded ‘hi’, so I nodded back and continued on my way.  Surely Dave understood the salvation of beer to the sinner who embraced drinking in such a radical way as Bryan and I.

     Then I stopped.  I grabbed Bryan’s arm and led him back to Dave.  Something wasn’t right.  I got back to him and saw that he had a swollen face and stitches in his lip.

     “What happened to you?” I asked.

     “Got drunk last night,” he managed to mumble, as best he could. “Got in a fight.”  His girlfriend Monique just glared at him.  I knew she had never been happy with Dave going out, and hanging out in bars.  I also knew she was several months pregnant with his child.

     Part of Dave and Monique’s problem with their relationship was that Monique wanted Dave to settle down and forget rock and roll, but Dave wasn’t ready to do that just yet.  Now he was going to be a father, and while he wasn’t sure he was happy about it, Monique was ecstatic.  Perhaps this would be the albatross that would drag Dave down and keep him at home.

     The funny thing was; the swollen face, the stitches … that wasn’t the strange thing I’d noticed about Dave.  What I’d noticed was a look on his face of resignation.  Dave was there to sing, but of course he couldn’t now.  He was there to party, but he didn’t want to.  Monique and the baby were part of it, but a small part.  Mostly, I think that Dave had the life beaten out of him the night before.  That little fire had finally been extinguished in his eyes, that fire that says you’re ready to run with the night and stay up until that last line is gone and the beer loses its appeal.  There will be more lines next time and the beer will taste good again, you know it.

     It would never be that way again for Dave, and some of you think that’s a good thing, and maybe it is.  I don’t like to see it though, and it saddens me to think it might happen to me someday.

     The look in Dave’s eyes said he was ready to reform and become an accepted non-sinner now, whatever it took to get off this rollercoaster he was on and get safe and lazy.  To be normal and accepted, not by Jesus, but by his family and his girlfriend and the world that never accepted him and what he loved.

     I used to get mad at Dave when he preached to me late at night, mostly because I thought him hypocritical.  Now I realize it wasn’t really hypocrisy in those late night talks.  It was Dave fighting with himself and trying to find his own answers, and if this was the answer he arrived at, so be it, but I still miss the violence and unpredictability of the way he used to be.

     We left Dave and continued on our way to the beer truck.  We were almost there when we heard someone say that the Coors had run out and all that remained was Coors Light.  This was not going to end well for anybody.

Dinosaurs: A Love Story

     Like most kids I loved dinosaurs.  I really loved dinosaurs though.  I had every dinosaur book you could find.  I had the entire collection of Aurora model dinosaurs, (although they ran the gamut from early reptiles to dinosaurs to mammoths and cavemen) and I still have them packed away in my back room.  I had a deal with my parents that if I saved half the money for a model they would match the other half.  I knew the price of every single one and whenever I had half the money for the next one I would pester and pester until we went to the store and I got it.

     One time when I was around six, I saw a set of little plastic dinosaurs and prehistoric animals I wanted.  I remember it came in a box like a little cardboard suitcase, complete with handle to carry it around.  The day came when my mother took me to the store to get it.  I don’t remember the name of the store, but everything was on display or in a catalog and you wrote the number of the item on a slip of paper and handed it in.  You then went to the back of the store and waited by a counter.  Behind the counter was a conveyor belt where the stuff you ordered eventually came through a curtain of plastic strips from the warehouse.  It was like waiting for your luggage at the airport.  It finally came out and when I got home I opened it and discovered that it contained two Dimetrodons and no Saber Tooth Tiger (Smilodon, know-nothing toy company!).  I was inconsolable.  My mother told me in no uncertain terms that we were not going back to exchange it, temper tantrum or not.  I think that might be the moment my innocence died and my cynicism took hold, not to mention my OCD.

     Speaking of OCD, I was intent on the correct pronunciation of each dinosaur. I would keep a list of any dinosaurs that I wasn’t sure of the names for the next time I had to go to the doctor.  Once my mother had pointed out that doctors knew Latin and could tell me the proper way to say the dinosaur’s names she never had to drag me there again.  I had to wait until the end of my checkup to ask him to read off the names and I would say them over and over in my head so I would always remember.  The trickiest one was a pterosaur named Rhamphorhynchus.  I still have a database in my head of hundreds of dinosaur and prehistoric animal genus and species names.  If I ever get on a quiz show and the category “dinosaur names” comes up, watch out!  Otherwise it is basically useless knowledge if you’re not a paleontologist.

     Speaking of which, when I was about eight I got a Dr. Seuss book called “My Book About Me”, which a child fills in all the information about themselves.  On the page where you have to fill in what you want to be when you grow up I wrote “paleontologist or shopkeeper”.  Two very dissimilar fields, I know, especially when you consider that by shopkeeper I meant grocery check out person at the local Grand Union!  For some reason, if I couldn’t be out in the field discovering some new dinosaur species or unraveling the mystery of ancient life I would be just as satisfied punching numbers in a cash register at a supermarket.

     When my family moved to Texas in the mid seventies I was thrilled to find out that there was a manmade lake in town and you could find fossils in the banks when the water level was low.  Could you ever!  My father would take me down there and I would pluck all kinds of ancient marine life right out of the dirt.  There were all kinds of ammonites, ancient mollusks, blastoids, cephalopods, so many amazing fossils there for the taking.  No one around there really thought anything of it, they were that common. 

     Then there were the dinosaurs.  My family took a ride to Glen Rose, to Texas to Dinosaur Valley State Park, and there in the Paluxy River were dinosaur footprints!  You could walk right into the river when it was low enough and put your foot right into the footprint of a dinosaur.  There were tracks from a Pleurocoelus, a sauropod dinosaur like Brontosaurus (which is in actuality called an Apatosaurus). Well, kind of.  Pleurocoelus was named the Texas state dinosaur, but then it was found that it might just be the same as the Maryland state dinosaur called Astrodon, meaning there was no such thing as a Pleurocoelus.  Then some of the prints and bones were found to come from a new species     named Paluxysaurus, after the river they were found in. So they changed the state dinosaur to Paluxysaurus, which might have been pointless because now it is believed that Paluxysaurus is just a Sauroposeidon, meaning it doesn’t exist either.  Dinosaurs are very confusing.  I probably know more names that aren’t dinosaurs any more than names that actually are at this point!

     My father worked on a construction site in Glen Rose, building a nuclear power plant and they would come across fossils all the time.  Whenever they did the job would shut down while scientists would study or remove the fossil, or at least decide if it was important enough to try to preserve.  Of course the workers hated when it happened because it meant no work and no pay until the fossil was removed.  My father told me about one day when they blew up some rock and there was a huge almost complete pterosaur skeleton in the cliff face.  The foreman discussed it for a bit and decided to just blow it up so the job could continue.  My father was sick about it, as was I when he told me.

     One night my mother and father took me for a ride, and we ended up at the jobsite.  My father took us to a building full of equipment, and in the back of the building he pulled a tarp off of a three foot square cube of rock.  They had found a perfect footprint from a therapod dinosaur which they all said was Tyrannosaurus, but was actually an Acrocanthosaurus,(amateurs!) the other dinosaur that left tracks in the Paluxy River.  It had amazing detail; you could see the point of each claw, and the skin pattern left in the mud that was now solid rock.  They kept it a secret and the plan was to put it in a glass case in the entranceway of the main building when it was finished.  I’m not sure if that ever came to pass as it was immoral if not illegal to keep a museum grade fossil found onsite and not report it to the authorities.  If you’re ever at the plant, look for it in the lobby and let me know.  I’d love to see it again.

     We left Texas and moved to Pennsylvania in the late seventies.  We bought a house in Coopersburg right at the time that a dinosaur trackbed was discovered in town.  It was kind of a big deal, not just to me but to everyone.  The first day at the house I jumped on my bike and rode up there.  Jim Turner was the geologist that first found the tracks, and he was on site that day.  He was impressed with the ridiculous amount of dinosaur knowledge a fourteen year old possessed and he let me work on the site cleaning footprints along with the scientists or grad students, or whoever they were.  People were showing up constantly to gawk, so he had me giving tours and explaining the prints and the types of dinosaurs that made them to the crowds.   As you could imagine I was in my glory!

     For the record, the tracks dated from the late Triassic period, around 220 million years ago.  They were earlier dinosaurs, not like the huge ones people are more familiar with.  The ones that stand out in my memory are Coelophysis and Grallator, both fairly small bipedal meat eaters and Phytosaurus, a crocodile-like reptile.

     One day as I was leaving the site I found a rock outside the fence near the highway that had a fern fossil imprinted in it.  I carried it back to Jim and he took it and that was the last I heard about it.  Very soon after that interest waned and for whatever reason the site was closed.  I was bummed out about not being able to be a junior paleontologist anymore, but life went on. 

     A month later, I was reading the new issue of a science magazine called Omni.  There was a section every month called “continuum” which focused on new science blurbs and stories.  There was a picture of my fern fossil with a little written piece about how it was found in Coopersburg and it was previously unknown in that area and strata.  It mentioned Jim’s name, but not mine.  That’s how it goes in the world of academia, I guess.

     About twelve years later thieves came in and cut the tracks out with concrete saws and no one knows where they ended up.  I was very sad to hear about it because I always hoped someday someone would purchase the land and make it into a museum or attraction.  The ironic thing is that the tracks weren’t really worth all that much monetarily, especially not when cut up and removed from the site.  The value was scientific, in that they were complete trackways of several different species all alongside and crossing over each other. 

     That’s where my interesting (some may disagree with that description!) dinosaur stories end.  I have maintained my love for anything prehistoric, but I have moved on from just dinosaurs.

     In the years since I have become more fascinated by earlier life, the Paleozoic era with the Cambrian explosion and the abundance and variety of life that followed.  I have a dream of one day going to the Burgess Shale, but who knows if I’ll ever get there. 

     I have a fairly decent fossil collection, some of which are probably fakes, like the many that dominate the fossil market these days.  You can find fossils being sold everywhere, on ebay, in fossil shops and flea markets, but there are so many fakes out there.  There’s big money in fossils now, so the whole market is corrupt.  If you see anything that comes from Morocco, chances are it’s not real and you should stay away from it.  If someone is selling you any decent size fossil for $40.00 or so it is a scam.  The fakes look very good these days; some experts even have trouble telling them apart from the real ones. 

     I have a very small trilobite fossil that I had mounted on a silver necklace that I have worn every day for over 20 years now.  I feel naked without it and it’s a geeky conversation starter, but I get a tiny thrill out of knowing that I’m wearing something left behind from an animal that lived 500 million years ago.

     Some times I feel a twinge of regret that I didn’t go to college, didn’t try my hardest to become a paleontologist like I wanted.  I have more interest now in physics and astronomy than in my old friends the dinosaurs, but I still like to read what I can about them.

     One day a few years back, I was in the grocery store using the self checkout lane.  As I scanned my groceries my necklace caught my eye and I suddenly realized something.  My Book About Me, my childhood book I wrote about myself.  Paleontologist or shopkeeper.  Here now, checking out my own groceries with a fossil around my neck … how many of you can say you came that close to your childhood dream?

 © 2013 David Ferraris

It's Hard To Believe ...

     People that know me know that I don’t believe in God.  Some of them ask me what I do believe in.  I guess because they can’t fathom existence without making it have a point.  I just don’t really see any need for a reason to exist. Some of them are incredulous.  They simply refuse to accept that I don’t believe and tell me I must be lying.  I’m not.

     What do I believe in?  Nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  I don’t just mean in the spiritual sense.  I don’t believe in ghosts, UFO’s, reincarnation, Bigfoot, out of body experiences, psychics, ESP, none of it.  I certainly don’t believe in anything that presents no evidence and the only argument people can give me in favor of it is that I have to have faith, or someone saw something or wrote something down and I should just take their word for it.

     Just look at things rationally and logically.  I won’t go into a big thing on religion because people believe what they want to believe and that’s that.  I just think it’s funny that on the face of it, it’s completely ridiculous.  The fact is that there are many religions, and each one believes it is the correct one, so that leaves a lot of other belief systems out in the cold.  The different religions even contradict themselves within their own teachings.  If what you believe consistently and convincingly conflicts with the evidence at hand you have to move on.  If any of you want to go over it sometime come on over with a bottle of wine and I’ll be happy to spend the evening discussing it with you.  Well, perhaps happy isn’t the correct word, but I’ll do it.

     As for the rest …

     Ghosts and reincarnation cancel each other out. Either your spirit or soul wanders the earth in ethereal form or it gets put into another body to live all over again.  You can’t have both.  If reincarnation is real, why are there more and more people?  There should be a set number of souls and therefore a set number of people for those souls to occupy.  I know there are convoluted excuses that try to explain how everything could coexist and make sense, but once you start having to explain it with wackier theories you might as well just give up.  Occam’s Razor and all, you know.  Besides, if ghosts existed someone would have gotten a decent picture of one by now.

     If you have an out of body experience, how are you seeing anything?  We see because our eyes have evolved to detect certain wavelengths of light and our brains then make sense out of the signals received.  Without physical eyes, how would we see anything in our spectral form?  If our spirits were detecting the things around us it would most certainly be by other means and wouldn’t look the same to us as it did when we were receiving the information through our optic nerves.  If anyone tells you they left their body and were looking down on themselves on an operating table or other such nonsense, remember that they were under heavy sedation at the time and anything they say is suspect.  Same goes for someone that was “clinically dead”.  Their brain was ceasing to function, why would I trust anything they think they experienced?

     Just like UFO’s.  If you understand the size of the universe and the distances involved and the technology it would take to traverse them …  well to believe that some far off civilization attained all that and then simply crashed into the desert in New Mexico or came here just to mutilate our cattle or probe our rectums, it makes no sense at all.  There is no alien technology.  Everything we have is based on the physics and chemistry around us, the progression of each invention and bit of technology can be tracked and its origins identified.  Likewise, aliens didn’t come here eons ago and build the pyramids or Machu Picchu.  Man did that, and to try to give the credit to imaginary space travelers just cheapens your own species accomplishments, even if those accomplishments were just stacking rocks on each other.  If these ancient builders where so great, why didn’t they know about the arch?  Taken in steps, everything progresses nicely along a timeline that makes sense, one step leading to the next, interrupted only by mankind destroying the knowledge that came before in stupid wars and mindless destruction.

    If psychics are really psychic, why don’t they just win the lottery?  Don’t give me any crap about their integrity, they are happy to exploit people’s misery for profit and gain.  Why are they never exactly right?  Why is everything so vague.  Either you can see the future or not.  If Nostradamus could actually see the future he would know that Hitler’s name was Hitler, not Hister. 

      Every “unexplained” animal that the so called “cryptozoologists” claim exists has been proven a hoax or a misinterpretation of normal phenomena. 

      I could go on, but I don’t want to. 

      The problem with a lot of these things is that they rely on other people’s observations or experiences, and anyone in law enforcement or the legal system can tell you that those things are the least reliable and highly subjective.  A good lawyer can have you doubting what you saw within minutes of seeing it.  I don’t trust people when they tell me about a movie or TV show they saw.  When I see it, it almost never matches the description someone gave me.  It’s all subjective, different people interpret the same information differently. 

     This brings me to another thing I don’t believe in: people.  No, I know people exist, (maybe, we’ll get to that later) I just have no faith in them.  It has been my experience that people are generally frightened and self-serving.  They live in fear and act accordingly.  We all do it, I am no better.   The best you can do is constant self-examination of your actions to be sure of your own motivation and effect they have on other people, but really, who has time for that?  Not many people, I’ve come to realize, but I give the ones that try a pass and are happy to call them my friends.  

      “The unexamined life is not worth living.”  That is a very succinct and brutal assessment, but I think it’s true.  Personal growth should be the objective, and it is for most of my friends.

     I also don’t believe in most of the things we take for granted.  Most of the things in our life are actually abstract notions, contingent on a worldwide agreement that they are real. 

     Money, for instance.  We accept that money has value, and we live our life exchanging it for goods and services, but it only works if we all agree to a ridiculous scenario.  We are off the gold standard, but even when we were on it our money existed then as it does now, only in abstract terms.  Our money is in the bank, in the stock market, circulating the globe as a series of numbers on a spreadsheet or in a computer somewhere.  It only has  value because we have decided to give it a value, but in reality our whole economy is based on everyone just taking someone else’s word on it that certain pieces of paper are worth more than others. 

     A large part of our economy is based on things that aren’t real.  The entire diet and weight loss industry is a joke.  It’s a multi billion dollar industry of people preying on other people with phony diets and exercise routines that we buy into because we are ashamed of our looks or unhappy with our appearance.  Unhappy with an appearance based on an unreal expectation that we should all strive to look the same, and that one certain look or body type is ideal.  We all buy into it at one point or another too.  We will laugh off a hundred workout DVD’s or diet fads, but the hundred and first will sucker us in. Technically many of them will actually work, but only in the short term.  Almost anyone that has tried a fad diet or quick weight loss program will tell you the effects are not permanent, if they work at all.  Weight loss and continued health is achieved through permanent lifestyle change, not short time periods of selective behavioral changes, but people make billions because they know we can convince ourselves there’s an easy way. 

     Then there’s the religion business, and I’m sorry, but it’s a business.  You may think your hometown church is not a business, but putting that aside there is still a multi-billion dollar industry in television evangelists and cults and so on.  Scientology, Mormons, the Catholic Church and all of its rooms full of treasures.  All based on some variation of an invisible force that will guide our lives and bring us peace and happiness.  If someone claiming to be a holy person ever mentions needing money you can be sure they are not very holy.

     A huge part of our economy is also based on phony medical scams.  Not just the TV ads for “all natural herbal remedies” or whatever bullshit they try to sell us, but virtually every part of the health care system.  Medical science has provided us with a much better quality of life and saved many a person that was sick, I’m not arguing that.  There is a huge other part of the whole system that is purely economical and cares only about money and nothing about the health and well being of people.

       Pharmaceutical companies try to convince you that you have maladies that don’t even exist, playing commercial after commercial trying to convince you that some vague uneasy feeling can be solved with a pill.  We, our children, our seniors are all over-medicated for the sole reason that it makes people money and we want an easy way out.  Rather than reign in some of our bad behavior, change our diet or take some amount of personal responsibility for ourselves we take a pill, one with so many side effects that the cure is usually worse than the disease.

     Then there’s the whole industry built around self help books, imagine it and it will be real, believe in it and it will come true!  Nothing ever changes though; we are not all rich and successful because we read a book.  Again, people taking advantage of our need to believe in a simple fix for our problems. 

     Ironically, a large part of our economy is also made up of the industry driving it: advertising.  Huge amounts of money are spent tricking us into buying all these goods and services, creating illusions about everything we see.  The people who make the product are convinced that they need advertisement, and then we need to be convinced we need all the junk that we buy.  They make us feel like we are inferior to others if we don’t look a certain way or follow certain fashions.  They scare us into thinking we need some of their crap and that will make us feel safer.  They make us believe some random item will somehow make our life better, fix what needs fixing, yet as soon as we get the item home and out of the box we feel an immediate letdown.  That letdown is what lets you know you’ve been fooled, that someone has played on your own weakness to bilk you out of a little of your money.  Material goods cannot fill emotional holes.

     Speaking of advertising, I don’t believe in politics or leaders.  I think that some evils are slightly lesser than others, but they are all basically evil.  Ultimately the only thing someone with power cares about is more power.  Every governing system has been corrupted.  The history of civilization has been one of powerful men building empires only to have them fall to ruin, yet we keep on doing it.  Always it turns into war and greed and avarice and another downfall.  We can’t help it I guess, it’s our nature.  So keep doing it, but stop telling me somehow this time it will be different.  Our own government is stalled, bogged down by partisanship, hatred and divisive tactics that everyone can agree is destroying us but no one seems to want to change.

      Think about it in simple terms.  The rich and powerful run the world. They run the government; they enact the law of the land.  If that is so, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the rich and powerful want it this way?  If they wanted it to be different they would be using their money and power and lobbyists to change it, but they are instead using those very things to keep everything the same, even make it worse.

      I don’t believe in conspiracy theories either.  Don’t get me wrong, I know a lot of clandestine and nefarious things are going on behind the scenes, but I think that the really out-there theories are themselves a form of conspiracy.  I think the people in power are glad that the crackpots are out there scaring us and diverting attention away from the things we should care about.  Whenever there is something big and crazy going on you can bet some law is getting passed at two in the morning that no one notices because attention is trained elsewhere.  

     The people in power only have power because we give it to them.  We could all decide one day that we don’t have to do what we’re told, but we go on day after day adhering to some vague notion of society and good behavior.  It’s a huge house of cards and we all get very nervous on a primal level if anything messes with it even a little bit.  A little chaos and we go to pieces and start making new rules and laws and blaming each other to try to desperately cling to our ridiculous idea that we are somehow in control of anything. 

     Then of course, there’s the news we’re fed everyday.  The news has long since become entertainment, driven by a need for ratings and money than actual information.  Sensationalism is the main tactic used to turn us into a gaggle of frightened voyeurs, gawking at stories that have little or no impact on our lives at all.  Who cares about murder trials that drag on for months?  If you don’t personally know the people involved, there’s no reason to invest yourself in other people’s misery on a daily basis.  You are just a ghoulish spectator of a media circus that exists to get ratings and make money and exploit your morbid curiosity and the people involved.

     I don’t even really believe in love.  I know it exists in some form or another, but I don’t think it makes much of a difference in most situations.  In my whole life everyone that has told me that they love me has hurt me, lied to me, or left me.  I have also done my share of those things to people I claimed to love.  We all have, we can’t seem to help it.  Most of the worst emotional pain is caused by people that have professed to love us at one time or another.  I think we should come up with another term besides love.  The only true love I have ever experienced in my life is the love I get from my parents.  It has proven to be unconditional and I can count on them like I can count on no other people on the planet. 

     Yet even having a parent is no guarantee of love.  There are a lot of really shitty parents out there and I am lucky to have mine.  Love isn’t a real thing. It’s another abstract idea that can mean a million different things.  What my parents and I have is not just some thing called love that appeared out of the blue, it is a conscious decision to put each other first and work to make sure we are there for each other.  Someday they will be gone, and I will have the memory of that bond, but would that be love?  Does love stop when someone that loves you dies?  Can love go on when there is no one there to give it to you?  Did my parents love me the moment I was born, or did that love grow and change a hundred times as I got older and our lives changed and we became different people?  Do they love me so much simply because they have a stronger genetic predisposition to care for their young more than some other people?   To just call such a complex and varied series of emotions spread over three lifetimes “love” seems to do it a disservice.

     So no, I do not believe in love.  I believe that some people are more loyal than others; I believe that some people fight their selfish urges for the good of others, but love can’t mean the bond my parents and I share and also mean something two people say to each other and then murder one another or break each others hearts a short time later.

      I like to think I can believe in myself, but that may not be possible either.  Your brain is not to be trusted.  You have to analyze everything it tells you, about other people, the world around you, and especially about yourself.  Your brain fills you with doubts; it will tell you anything to get what it wants, whether that thing is approval, drugs or alcohol, sugar, fat, caffeine, cigarettes, sex, whatever it wants.  That’s why so many people do things that end up hurting them and others in the long run.  Many of us eschew doing the right thing, the thing we absolutely know we should do, because we allow our brains to talk us into doing what we want to do, damn the consequences.  That’s not even taking into account for mental illnesses.  You know what they say; if you’re truly crazy you don’t know you’re crazy. 

     Think about it.  Peoples brains let them steal, lie, cheat, murder, rape, commit child abuse, spousal abuse, animal abuse, thousands of very horrible things and those people walk around amongst us every day.  Chances are, you’re one of them. Your brain can justify cheating on loved ones, lying, stealing, causing anguish and pain to everyone in your life only because your brain somehow talked you out of following your moral voice.

      Your brain is also very easy to fool on a basic level.  Any optical illusion demonstrates that visual manipulation of the brain is a simple thing.  Your ears are also very easy to fool, and when you combine the two there is a huge potential for misreading almost any situation.  Why do you think magic tricks work?  A split second of distraction, a bit of misdirection, and we are amazed and astounded.  That’s why scientists test things over and over and document all the minutiae that goes along with it. 

     The human body itself is 90% microbe.  That means we are actually only 10% human, the rest of us is actually a huge mass of bacteria and other microorganisms.  Microorganisms dominate the world, in species and biomass.  Everything else is merely a byproduct, existing only because the microbes are there. 

     All that is nothing compared to what comes next. 

     I can’t even believe in what we wishfully call reality.  When it gets down to the quantum level it really gets strange.  Take the double slit experiment.  It has proven that particles behavior is influenced by observing them.  They don’t become what we perceive as reality until we observe them.  If you’re not familiar with the double slit experiment, look it up and try to wrap your head around what’s going on in it.  The implications are mind-boggling.  Everything is made up of particles, particles that apparently can be in several places at one time, particles that can exist in different forms at the same time, never becoming one thing or the other until we observe them.  Extrapolating on that idea, it means for instance that there is very infinitesimal chance that the moon doesn’t exist until you look at it, at least not in the state we are used to.  I’m sure it does, but the tiny chance that it doesn’t is not zero, so it is possible. 

     That sounds suspiciously like a computer simulation or a video game.  Only the part of the game you are interacting with is visible, the rest of the simulated world is simply waiting in limbo, stored somewhere to be retrieved and pixilated when needed. Sometimes there is a little glitch and the graphics are out of whack.  Our brains even operate in the same way.  What we see is only sharp in a narrow field of vision.  Our brain mostly concentrates on motion, and simply fills in the rest.  It would be overwhelming for our minds to see everything all the time so it just tells us what is there is there and not to worry about it.  Also keep in mind, everything we see we actually see upside down. Our brain turns it right side up in our heads.

   Further, what about the part of the video game world in the distance, the part you can never access?   The non-playable area.  Always far off, never viewed sharp or in focus.  Doesn’t that kind of sound like the rest of our universe? The stars and galaxies forever out of reach, viewable only as blurry, pixilated dots on even our finest telescopes.  The amazing high definition, beautifully rendered shots of nebulae and star nurseries are composite images, culled from many sources.  When you just physically look at them as visible light through a lens it is pretty disappointing.    

     Our brains are like supercomputers, storing memories on a cellular hard drive, waiting to be recalled when needed.  It’s just a huge assortment of electrical impulses flashing through your brain, a chemically charged consciousness that ceases to be once the electricity is gone. 

      Computer graphics and the fancy CGI you see in movies is all possible because of fractals.  Fractal geometry is absolutely fascinating, and the way we figured out how to recreate the natural world in our video games is the same way nature does it.  Patterns repeated over and over again, the same on every level no matter how large or small.  Really, look it up if you don’t know it and prepare to have your mind blown again.  So what we see built by a computer program is accomplished the same way that the world around us does it.  Everything in existence can be explained mathematically.  That means that everything in existence can be represented and programmed mathematically. Einstein showed us that matter is energy and vice versa.  So if matter is energy, and a computer simulation is made up of electrical signals … well, you see where I’m going with that.

      So would we know it we are living in a computer simulation?  Believe it or not, there are serious experiments going on right now trying to detect if we are.

     Look at atoms.  Atoms are something like 99.9999999999999% empty space.  That means that we are basically made up of nothing.  In fact, if you took all the empty space out of all the atoms that make up every human being what you would have left would be the size of a sugar cube.  Think about that.  Every human on the planet.

      We don’t even touch anything.  Nothing.  We don’t stand on the earth, we hover over it.  A bat doesn’t touch the baseball when a player gets a hit.  We interpret the atoms repelling each other as touching something, but we’re not really touching anything at all.

     On top of that, 98% of the universe is completely invisible and undetectable, dark matter and dark energy.  Let’s not even get into multiverse theory, with its infinite number of parallel universes springing in and out of existence with every decision. Or string theory with its 10 or 26 dimensions, depending on your line of thinking.  Or quantum entanglement, probably the most mind-blowing thing I’ve ever heard of, and I’m writing that after the list I already gave you.

     Perhaps all the little quirks and oddities we experience in life are nothing more than tiny momentary blips in the program.  Maybe déjà vu, ghosts, psychic phenomena … maybe it’s all just a bit of bad code, a cosmic power spike that warps our perceived reality for a microsecond.

     So do I think we are all living in a computer simulation? Not really, although it does make the most sense with the evidence we’re provided with right now.  That’s the problem.  We’re never going to have enough information to really know exactly what’s going on.  Even the things that I know to be true are true only to the degree that they match what we have observed so far.  We may discover something tomorrow that causes some new paradigm shift in our way of thinking and changes everything again.  Until then, we have imaginations and we are free to dream, our own little universe in our heads contemplating the huge universe around us. 

    So if we can’t figure out exactly why we’re here, or even where here is or what it’s made of, it doesn’t really matter to me as far as living my life goes.  I’m curious about it, but otherwise I just live my life and do the best I can.  I try to make sure that I make peoples lives better (or at least not any worse) when I’m around them.  I try to have fun and be pleasant to the people I meet.  I treat animals very well in case they aren’t just part of a computer simulation and actually do live at the mercy of the psychotic apes that run the planet.  I try to bring comfort when I can, and try to be giving and do what I can for the people I care about.  I try to put other people’s needs ahead of my own if I can.  If everyone did that everybody’s needs would be met. Think about that, a whole world full of people caring for each other and not their own petty wants and desires, not hurting themselves and each other over and over again.

     But alas, I can’t even do that all the time.  As hard as I try, I still have my bad days, my momentary lapses of reason.  This is where the other part comes in: forgiveness.  I try to forgive other people if they can’t always live up to expectations.  More importantly, I try to forgive myself.  You should to.  Do your best and don’t sweat it if you aren’t living up to some unrealistic ideal you’ve set for yourself.  Nobody else is either.

     People are people, and they are all imperfect, they can all be selfish, hurtful and small.  As much as I say I hate people, I still want to think that we’ll all be okay somehow, that everything will be alright in the end, even though the odds are against us.  I guess that’s called hope, and it’s the one thing I wish I could believe in more than anything else.  Unfortunately, to me hope sounds like a dangerous thing.  To have hope is to constantly be let down.  So as much as I’d like to have hope, I don’t think I ever can.

     Then again, maybe I do.  Maybe in actuality I’m an eternal optimist, always hoping, always thinking that the world is a better place than it seems to be on paper.  Maybe there is such joy and wonder in all the little things that really do exist and occur in our universe all the time and I have faith in every tiny bit of it.  It could be I can see things for what they are, but that doesn’t mean I’m filled with dread and misgivings and let it rule my life.  Perhaps just being a very tiny part of it and being interconnected to all things is enough to give me a reason to keep getting up everyday and trying my best all over again, whatever the ultimate truth..

      You believe what you want.

© David Ferraris 2013