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

Fun With Mom

     The other day I was having lunch at a restaurant, and across the aisle was a mother and her young son.  It was a Chinese buffet place, so very casual dining to say the least.  The boy was about five years old, and I was reminded of when I was that young, spending time during the day with my own mother.  It was back in the late 60’s, and at that time most mothers stayed home all day with their children while the husband worked.  As a result, mothers would just have to take their children with them if they had to run errands, go shopping or whatever had to be done. 

      I don’t want to get into the debate about working women or stay at home moms, and what is better or worse for children or adults.  I do notice one difference with regards to the parent/child relationship when I was young and what it seems to be today.  When I was a child, my parents did the things they had to do or wanted to do, and I was expected to go along and deal with it.  These days it seems many parents worry about entertaining their children constantly, and letting them dictate what activities they will be participating in.  Children pick the family vacation destinations, pick the TV shows, pick what’s for dinner, and so on. 

     When I was a child, I ate what was put in front of me, watched what my parents watched, and went on vacation wherever the family car took me in the summer.  It wasn’t some horrible childhood. I usually ended up enjoying whatever I did or got to eat or watch, and it made me grow as a person, and exposed me to more things than I would have encountered had I just got my way all the time.

     Understand also that I did get my way sometimes.  When I was in grade school my mother would take me to matinee movies in the summer, to my cousins to go swimming, to the park or a petting zoo.  The thing was, I understood that I got to do those things when my mother had time to do them, when her responsibilities and the things she had to do allowed her the time to cater to my wishes.

      My mother worked on Thursday and Friday nights as a cocktail waitress at a bowling alley to bring some extra money into the house.  My father bowled at the same alley in a league on Friday nights, so I was left with a babysitter when I was young, and my brother to watch me as I got older.  One of my favorite things during that time was that my parents would always bring me a capsule from the quarter gumball machine.  They got home late, well after I was in bed, but they would put the capsule on my dresser so I would find it as soon as I woke up in the morning.  It usually contained a small toy, although my two favorites were either refrigerator magnets or when it was a Looney Tunes sticker.  I had quite a collection on my wall, Bugs, Daffy, Sylvester, almost every character from the cartoons.

      I remember one time when I was about eight years old, I opened the capsule to find a small poster of the band Bread.  It was a picture of the band standing in a meadow, and it had the title of one of their hits written across the bottom: “Baby I'm-a Want You”.  It was very lame and a little creepy, but I was only eight.  My older brother had rock posters on his walls, so I hung it on mine and thought I was cool like him.  In retrospect, my tiny Bread poster with all it’s crease lines from being folded up to fit in a gumball machine capsule was really not cool at all, but it made me very happy when I was young.  If I had my way, I’m sure I wouldn’t have chosen to get a cheap poster of some easy listening band, but that’s what I got and I was very happy to get it.  I never felt forgotten or unloved, because even when my parents were out working or bowling, they still got me something for a quarter that let me know they were thinking about me.

     I had a couple of birthday parties at the bowling alley.  My mom had a book of birthday cakes, and for my birthday I would look through the book and pick out what cake I wanted and she would make it.  The bowling alley birthday party I remembered most was when I had her make a treasure chest cake, complete with chocolate coins spilling out of the top.

     My parents told me stories years later about the bowling alley.  Most of the stories revolved around The Isely Brothers, who lived nearby and would always come there to drink or with their families to bowl.  If you want to set my mother off, just mention Ron Isley to her.  She said he was a rotten little prick(Her words!) that would try to hide bowling sheets in his jacket to get out of paying for them, and stiff the bar for drinks and tips.  Telling me about him later was the first time I heard my mother curse like that, and talk to me as an adult talking to another adult, even though I was only 16 or so. I was starting to see my mom as a fully formed adult and woman, not just as my personal maid and nurturer.  I think a lot of men never get to that place, and expect their wives to fulfill that role at some point later on, and that's a shame. That was years later, though, let's get back to my childhood. 

      My mother used to take me shopping with her and my great-grandmother.  I didn’t like the shopping so much, but it meant we could go to this certain restaurant and I would get a cream puff for dessert.  As a child, I didn’t need constant and extravagant rewards.  In fact, when I had to spend the morning shopping with mom once in a while, we would stop at a diner out on Route 4 and get lunch, and I was so happy to be eating there with the little juke box at the table.  I would flip happily through all the songs trying to decide which two songs I would play for my coin.  In my youth, if you behaved while being dragged from store to store with mom, your reward was you got to eat!

      The worst thing was when we had to get the car inspected.  In Jersey at that time, there were state inspection stations, and everyone had to go to them. If it was late in the month, everybody was there, and sometimes it was an hour wait in line to get in and get the car inspected.  Being a child, it seemed like forever.  My mother would bring some toys for me, or read to me, but nothing could make those waits tolerable.  It had to be done though, and I was expected to deal with it.  It taught me patience, and that sometimes life was doing things that you didn’t particularly want to do; something today’s society seems to tell us is not the case.  Today everything is instant gratification, and I’m as bad as anyone else in that regard.  We’ve been conditioned to have everything on demand, and while it is convenient, it robs us of the feeling that small things can be special and satisfying.  Rewards are not supposed to be constant and easy to come by, but nowadays they seem to be.

     One of my last memories of doing something with my mom was when I was eleven.  Jaws was a huge hit, and my brother and his friends talked about it constantly.  I really wanted to see it, so my mother took me to a matinee.  She wanted to be there in case I got frightened.  Partway through the movie, when sheriff Brody is spooning chum into the water, the shark popped its head out of the water and my mother jumped and gasped loudly.  I quickly leaned over and shushed her, and told her not to embarrass me.  That to me seems like the definitive end of my childhood time spent with mom.  I don’t really have any other stand out memories of doing something that was just her and me.  I’m sure we did, but it would never be as special as it was when I was younger.  At a certain point in every child’s life, it becomes a burden to do something publicly with your parents, and that was the first time I felt that way.

      Watching the mother and her young son in the Chinese restaurant in the present day made me smile to think about the times out with my own mom.  The child wasn’t playing any handheld video games, he was talking to his mother, asking questions, and she wasn’t on her smart phone or otherwise preoccupied, she was talking to him and they both managed to enjoy it.  As I was getting up to leave I noticed his coat had slipped off his seat and onto the floor.  I mentioned it to his mother and she rolled her eyes and chuckled. 

     “Honey, your coat is on the floor again.”  She told him, pleasantly, and not at all scolding him.  He reached under and picked it up without complaint, and I’m sure this scene had played out a thousand times before, just as I’m sure it had when I was young.  The incident didn’t diminish the mood one bit, and she thanked me for pointing it out and I was on my way.

      I was glad I got to see a mother and her child having a pleasant time together, and having mutual respect for each other.  Mostly I only seem to notice parents and their child in public when the child is whining or demanding something in the middle of a store aisle, or the parent is either yelling at them or ignoring them.  I imagine I just don’t notice the children and parents that aren’t dysfunctional a,nd that’s a shame.  I’m sure there are a lot of women with their children out every time I go somewhere, and they are just enjoying their time together.  It makes me happy that the same relationship I enjoyed with my mother as a child is still going on everyday, all around me.

©David Ferraris 2013                                                                                                                          

It’s Not Really About The Bear

7/25/2012

It’s Not Really About The Bear

     I have fleetingly mentioned in other stories that my finger had been bitten off by a bear and I realize that it’s not fair to bring it up so nonchalantly and never tell the story about how it happened.  I’m not sure why I never wrote it down, but I will do so now and see if I can figure out if it took so long for any other reason besides my laziness.

     I think that before I tell it I will have to give some background on my friend Wayne who was the catalyst for the whole story taking place.  In fact, most of my stories that start with the sentence “My friend Wayne and I…” usually end up with me in the emergency room or waking up in some strange place hung-over.  There will be time for those other stories later.

     Wayne was one of those friends you have that are a little strange.  You and your other friends let them off the hook for things you would not tolerate from anyone else.  You find yourself explaining to other people “I know, I know, but that’s just ______.”  Fill in the blank with some friend of yours that fits the description because everyone has them.  I had Wayne.

      Wayne would do things like make plans with you to do something that cost money and after you’ve paid he would come up with some excuse why he didn’t have the money now, but he would pay you next time.  Of course he never did.  His most frequent excuse was that the Mac machine ruined his card while he was trying to get the money.  He is the only person I know who had his Mac card ruined every other week consistently for several years! 

      He would also make up stories that never happened or brag about things he never did or at least exaggerated greatly about what really happened.  He did it out of insecurity, and the sad thing was none of us ever thought less of Wayne and he didn’t have to lie or make stuff up for us to be his friend, but like a lot of  people his insecurities in himself outweighed his trust in his friends and I could never hold that against him.

     Besides, that’s not all Wayne was.  He was a very good and dependable friend where it really counted.  He always had my back and he would come help you anytime you asked.  He had been there for my friends and me when nobody else was and we appreciated him for that.

      I first met Wayne some 16 years ago and we first became friends when he stood up for me in a bar against a guy much bigger than me, much bigger than Wayne for that matter.  It was a misunderstanding over a woman and I hadn’t even done anything wrong, but this guy was mad and there was no explaining.  He was a body builder and taking steroids and I had seen him beat up other people in the past.  I would have gotten my ass kicked if not for Wayne.  He got in the bigger guys face and the bigger guy backed down.

     One thing about Wayne, he was a fighter.  He wasn’t a jerk about it and I never really saw him start a fight, but he was always ready to finish one.

     He was one of those people who liked to claim that he was part Indian, but when he was drinking, the tribe he descended from tended to change.  One time it was Cherokee, the next he was a Blackfoot Sioux.  On a side note:  I think it’s funny that there were hundreds of different Indian tribes in this country, but whenever I meet some drunk in a bar who claims to be part Indian it’s never one of the tribes no one has ever heard of but always Cherokee or Sioux or Apache.  Never one of the seemingly endless tribes that all the small towns are named after.  The federal government officially recognizes 565 tribes, but I never met some redneck that claimed to be from the Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, or the Muckleshoot tribe, or some other tribe that doesn’t sound as cool as Comanche. 

     One incident regarding the Indian thing with Wayne was when my friend Phil went out riding motorcycle with him.  He warned Phil that he had better wear some sunscreen because it was hot out and he might burn.  Wayne further explained that because of his Indian heritage he would be fine.  Well, when they showed up at my place that night Phil was fine but Wayne was badly sun burned.  To make matters worse he had been wearing a shirt that was made of netting and he had the pattern burned into his skin.  I remember Phil asking him “so how’s that work out for you Cochise?” and we all laughed.  As he typically did, Wayne ignored it and acted as if nothing had happened and didn’t understand why we thought it was so funny.  Wayne would just grin what we came to call his “Joker” grin, named after the Batman villain.  Wayne knew when he was caught in a lie and there was nothing left for him to do but grin and bear it.

     Another thing about Wayne was that he always tried to get people to call him by his nickname “Hollywood.”  It was somewhat sad that no one had given him this nickname, he just thought it would be cool it people would call him that.  People should not have to give themselves a nickname.  No one was even sure where the nickname came from or what it was supposed to mean. 

     Oh well, back to the bear.

     It was Thursday, November 4, 2004.  Wayne told me about how his friend Eric had a brother who raised exotic animals and claimed he trained them for movies and such, but who really knew how much was true when you were dealing with Wayne.  At any rate, Wayne knew I liked animals and he went on to tell me that this person had a bear that was now grown and it needed to be moved to a bigger cage, and I could come with him and help if I wanted to.  There was also a lion, a tiger, and some other animals there I could see.  I wasn’t going to miss an opportunity to pet a tiger.

     Wayne and I took my car and we drove up past Wind Gap and onto some twisty back roads until we came to the house.  There was a makeshift gate in a wooden fence that Wayne opened so I could drive the car through.  I made my way up a winding driveway to the house.  Across from the house were cages that held some of the animals.  Eric’s brother wasn’t there yet so I took some time to go see the animals.  The lion and tiger were in one cage, and not a very big one.  These days I am really against keeping animals captive unless they are really well housed in a very natural environment, and even then I’m not too thrilled about it.  At the time these events occurred I hadn’t given it a lot of thought, and although I was assured at the time that the animals were well taken care of and exercised, upon reflection I am not sure if that was the case. The lion was at the back of the cage lounging up on a shelf and the tiger came right over to the fence.  The lion was a male and he looked very regal sitting there with his big mane and solemn face. 

     The tiger was a female and as I said, she came right over so I put my hand through the bars and pet her.  She rolled on the ground and I started scratching her belly, which she seemed to love.  She licked my hand and I honestly didn’t think twice about what I was doing.  I haven’t changed since I was a small kid.  I was always running up to strange dogs or trying to touch wildlife that should be better left alone.  I could never understand why the animals couldn’t sense that I was no threat and simply wanted to pet them.  I’m not quite as naïve about animals as a grown up, but I will still try to hand feed a deer or a squirrel if I see one, usually to no avail.  That being said, I must admit I do get nervous hiking in the woods now where there may be bears anywhere nearby.

      I took a few pictures of the lion and tiger and then I made my way over to the bear cage.  The bears cage was made from chain link fencing.  That’s the reason we were here, to move him out of this cage and into a better one.

     It was a black bear, and while the bear was still a young adult, he was almost full-grown.  I’m six feet tall, and when it came over to the fence it stood up on its hind legs with its paws against the side of the cage and its face was level with mine.  I held my hand up to the cage and let him sniff it through the fencing.  I had taken one picture of the bear before I went over to the cage and I looked down at my camera to make sure it was still turned on, not thinking about my other hand that was still held up for the bear to smell a few inches from the cage.

     This next part is a little graphic, so be forewarned.

     I felt something touch my hand and I looked up just in time to see the bear’s tongue snaking through the fencing and wrapping around the pinky of my left hand and pull it into his mouth.  His front teeth grabbed hold of it and there I stood frozen in time with my finger in a bear’s mouth.  I looked at him and he returned my gaze with a quizzical stare that told me he wasn’t sure what this was all about.  It might be a game, I might be feeding him a treat, but whatever it was there was no anger or ferocity in the bears expression or demeanor.

     The only thing I could think to do was to scold the bear as you would a puppy that had hold of a sock. 

     I waved my finger in front of it and told it “No.  Bad bear.  Let go.”  The bear simply looked confused.  He was tugging my finger somewhat gently (as far as bears go) and my palm was against the fence with the wire forming one of the diamond shapes in the fence digging into where my pinky joined the rest of my hand. 

     Then I felt the bears teeth start to crunch down on my finger.  In a sudden flash of inspiration, I realized that if I banged my other hand on the fence right in front of the bears face I might startle it and he would let go.

     I want to go on record right now that I have since decided it is never a good idea to try to startle a large wild animal into doing anything.  The bear did seem startled for a second, then he proceeded to sever the bone in my finger and pull.  As is often the case with car accidents, the events seemed to unfold in slow motion.  With the bone disconnected the bear pulled back and the skin and tendons of my finger stretched like mozzarella cheese much farther than I could ever have imagined it could.  Mercifully the flesh reached its breaking point and ripped off.

     Wayne had been standing next to me and we were now both staring dumbly at my severed finger with what was left of the bone sticking out.  I was shocked at how white the bone looked and wondered why it wasn’t bleeding a lot more than it was.

     Wayne then looked at me and with wide eyes stated the obvious: “That bear just ate your fucking finger!”

     “It sure did.”  I replied, confirming his assessment.  I wish I could report that we had some philosophical epiphany that produced something more intellectual to mark the occasion, but that was it.

     I had been playing guitar since I was a kid so the first thing I did was move the rest of the fingers on my hand to see if I could still form chords or play leads.  It seemed possible.  I looked back in the cage to see if the bear had spit out my finger, but he had not.  It seemed he had eaten it.

     Eric was just coming out of the basement door and I yelled over to him that I needed to go to the emergency room.  I went into the basement with him and he gave me a rag to wrap around my hand.  He was clearly agitated and was more worried that his brother would be mad at him for bringing me there and letting this happen.  I impressed upon him the importance of getting me to the hospital and I assured him that I wouldn’t tell the doctors about the bear so he made up an elaborate lie to tell the hospital about an old conveyer belt we were supposedly working on that caught my finger in the drive chain.  I quickly agreed to the story if it got me to a hospital quicker.

     I made one more quick pass by the bear cage just to check to see if he had spit my finger out, but he had not, so off we went.  I insisted on driving my own car so I followed behind Eric’s truck as he led the way.  Wayne was sitting in the passenger seat of my car and I had him call my father on my cell phone and hold it to my ear so I could talk to him.

     “Hello dad?” I said when my fathers voice appeared on the other end of the line, “it’s me, Dave. Listen, I’m driving to the hospital, a bear ate my finger.”

     “Yeah, right, what’s going on?” Came his reply.

     “I’m telling you, I’m on the way to the hospital because the bear ate my finger.”

      The conversation went on like that until I finally convinced him that I was telling the truth.  I left off telling him I’d call with more information once I got there.

     After following Eric for some time, we pulled into a shopping center parking lot and Eric parked his truck.  I got out of my car to find out what the problem was, and he informed me that we were here.  Here turned out to be a Redi-Care facility in the strip mall, and I again impressed on him that I needed to go to an actual hospital.  He told me that they could handle it here and I should just go in. 

     I told them to follow me and I would prove that I needed a hospital.  We walked in and I asked the nurse/receptionist if I could see a doctor right away.  A doctor came out of a doorway behind the counter and asked what the problem was.

    “Can you do something for this?” I asked, unwrapping the towel and holding up my hand with it’s missing finger. 

     The doctors face went a little white and he stammered “what the hell are you doing here?  Get to a hospital immediately!” 

     “See?” I said to Eric angrily, “Now take me to the fucking hospital!”

     We finally got to Easton Hospital and they took me right in. They took my blood pressure and found it was normal and told me I must be in shock, but I explained to them that my blood pressure never seems to go up or down and I was fine.  The nurse got a little snippy with me and insisted I must be in shock and I didn’t know what I was saying.  I informed her that I had driven myself here with a stop off at the useless Redy-Care to which Wayne and Eric both confirmed and she seemed to be satisfied that indeed I was not in shock.

     They moved me out of the waiting room and onto a bed and there I sat and waited, my head now filled with morphine.  I continued to wait, while Wayne and Eric tried to chat up one of the nurses, even though I could tell right away that they didn’t have a chance. 

     Guys are funny that way.  We were all in our mid to late thirties, and she had to be no older than 22, but men never seem to notice when they become the old guy trying to impress young women that they used to make fun of when they were younger.  It must be an evolutionary thing, still trying to pass your genes on even though you now live outside the herd and the stallion has driven you off the females.  You just continue to rut from the edge of the tree line and hope some desperate female notices you.

     I actually hated her, because she kept talking about my missing finger and saying how she loved gore and that’s why she was a nurse.  In fact, I’m not even sure if she was a nurse.  She was pretty stupid, and very unprofessional, and frankly I don’t know why Wayne and Eric were interested in her in the first place. To be fair though, they were kind of bored and they did have all their fingers, so why should I cast stones?

     She actually asked to see my finger because she liked looking at gross stuff (I swear to God, her exact words!) but by now I was getting freaked out looking at it and I kept it wrapped up in a towel with an ice pack.

     I continued to wait.  I had been here for an hour or so, and they informed me that their hand surgeon was on his way, he was hung up in surgery now, but he will be here in no time. In a telling example both of Wayne’s ignorance and loyalty, he actually inquired if they could cut off one of his fingers and sew it on to my hand so I would still be able to play guitar.  He really thought it was possible, and couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t do it!

     About five hours later (!) the hand surgeon showed up.  He was Indian, not like the phony American Indian that Wayne was, but the South Asian Indian variety.  His bedside manner was not the best, but I don’t especially think it was because he was Indian, I think he was just a bit of a jerk.  He helpfully informed me that he probably could have saved more of my finger had he been there quicker, which was not really comforting and what I wanted to hear, but the morphine took the edge off of any anger or frustration I may have been feeling.  He told me he would need to take some more of the bone off, and I assumed that meant some kind of expensive surgical saw or some such apparatus, but he pulled out what looked like a pair of garden shears. 

     At this point the horrible young nurse asked if she could observe. He inquired if she was studying in whatever field it was that involved working on people’s hands that had been partially eaten by bears, but she explained that she just liked gory shit.  I told him to get her the hell away from me and told him I wanted to lodge a complaint against her. I never did lodge the complaint, but I feel sorry for anyone subjected to having that idiot for a nurse. I still can’t imagine how she had lasted in the hospital that long, I mean she wasn’t that good looking.

     So the surgeon snipped off more of my bone with the garden shear-looking thing and sewed me up.  He again reminded me that I might lose more of the skin because it had taken so long for someone (him) to get to it.  He suggested cutting it all the way back so it would look like I never had a pinky, but I wanted to try to save as much as I could. I told him I played guitar, and he chuckled and said “well, maybe not anymore”.  Like I said, he was kind of a jerk.

     After that, I went home to recuperate, but a few days later it was clear that the skin was dying and I would lose more of my finger.  I had harbored some secret hope that I might be super-human, or at the least part reptile, and the missing portion of my finger might miraculously regenerate, but it was not to be.  My lousy body was not even going to heal the ¾” of skin I was now going to lose.  I still haven’t lost my childlike innocence in the regard that I still think I might somehow be immortal, or have some other amazing and as yet undiscovered powers, but I am resigned to the fact that they do not reside in my fingers. 

     So it was off to some surgical center and the doctor got out the shears and clipped off some more bone and sewed me up once again.  That’s pretty much it. I healed eventually, and now I have a stub where my left pinky used to be.  I still play guitar, but my leads suffer and I usually have to learn songs in different tunings, but it wasn’t as if I was going to be a rock star anyway.

     Wayne died August 4, 2008, around 5:00 PM.  His truck left the roadway, went across a lawn and into the side of a church.  I hadn’t seen a lot of Wayne in the months leading up to his death.  About a year earlier he had gotten a payout from a botched hernia operation, which was the culmination of several years of legal wrangling over an injury that may or may not have happened at work and been eligible for workers comp.  It was finally just settled and they paid Wayne to go away. Part of the agreement was that Wayne could make no more claim to medical treatment, and although I questioned Wayne on the wisdom of signing that agreement with the hernia still bulging out of his stomach and nothing resolved medically, he just wanted the money. I had been hearing for years of all the things we were going to do when Wayne got this money, and all the payback I would receive for all the years of paying his way when he had no money, but that never materialized. Wayne started blowing through the money and you never knew when he was going to pop up drunk at your door with beer and coke and whomever he was towing along with him. 

     We had both been part of the heavy metal club scene drug culture, and Wayne never seemed to leave the bars or the drugs far behind. Don’t get me wrong, he wasn’t crazy with it and upon occasion my friends and I still partied a little when we got together for old times sake, but none of the all night binges anymore.  We had left those days behind, but when Wayne got that money he started going out every night and doing drugs several nights a week.  Wayne was a monster with the drinking and drugs.  He could handle a lot and keep right on going. I was pretty good at it myself back in the day, but I couldn’t keep up with him.

      A couple of months before he died he started acting strange.  He always seemed to be sick, throwing up a lot and saying it was the flu.  He showed up at my house one night and was crying, telling me he didn’t like himself because he got in fights too often, but he was drunk and he snapped out of it a few minutes later I didn’t really think a whole lot of it. I asked him if everything was all right and he reassured me it was and smiled that Joker grin and wouldn’t discuss it anymore.

     The last time I spoke to him was a week or two before he died.  He showed up unannounced at my place and wanted to come in. He was drunk and loud and I explained to him through the door that I was watching my girlfriends pet bird and it was out of the cage and I couldn’t open the door right now.  He started saying I was lying and I didn’t want to see him, and that was not like Wayne at all.  I told him to hang on a minute and I would put the bird away and come outside and talk to him.  He got angry and left muttering incoherently. 

     I felt bad that Wayne was upset, I called his cell phone but it was off and went right to voice mail, which wasn’t that uncommon the last few months. Wayne always had some excuse that the cell phone company had screwed something up, but I knew he must not be paying his bill. 

      I spoke to a friend the next day and he told me that Wayne came to his place after he left mine.  Once there awhile Wayne told my friend that he had been snorting heroin the last couple of months.  This was very surprising, if not for the obvious reasons.  Wayne had been very vocal for many years about how he had a family member who had gotten messed up with heroin, and he better not catch any of us doing it.  He was adamant about it, almost threatening us and we used to laugh because although some of us did a little coke now and then, we did not intend to ever do Heroin!  We wouldn’t even know where to get it, but in a weird way we felt touched that Wayne would care about us enough to always give us the impassioned lecture every other month or so. 

     Which made it all the more strange when he left my friend to go in the bathroom and snort some and came out and basically nodded off in a chair.  My friend let him sleep for an hour or so and when he got up and said he was leaving my friend tried to make him stay and sleep there. Wayne told him not to worry about it, that he had places to be.  And he left.  And that was the last time any of my close friends or I saw Wayne.

     My friend also told me that when Wayne got there he was bitching about me and how I was lying to him about the bird and I didn’t want to see him.  He explained to Wayne that I was, in fact, watching the bird and I wasn’t lying and I was still his friend.  Wayne calmed down then and felt better about it, and mentioned that he would call me tomorrow and apologize, but I never got that call. It’s okay, I had already forgiven him when he left my place the night before.  What was I gonna do? That was just Wayne.  I do feel better that he knew I wasn’t lying or trying to get rid of him. He really was one of my closest friends and I still miss him to this very day.  I’m sure some people reading this knew Wayne and can attest to the fact that even though he could be a loose cannon at times, he was a solid human being, if not a bit of a tragic figure.

     I don’t know if drugs played into his death, but I would assume they did in some way.  I never wanted to hear the details of how he died in his truck against that church.  It still almost doesn’t seem possible that he’s dead, he seemed so much larger than life at times. One of the things I miss most about Wayne is that he was the last friend I had that was wiling to go anywhere or do anything at a moments notice.  My close friends now are all like me, loners.  They say no man is like an island, but my friends and I are about as close as you can get.  I don’t have a social circle as much as I have an archipelago.  Sometimes I still think I hear him outside my door and whenever the phone rings after 11:00 my first thought is of him.  While I may be better off without those occasional wild nights and crazy tangents Wayne brought to my life, the world seems a little empty without them.   I miss you Hollywood.