6/13/07

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

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

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

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

© David Ferraris 2011

A Tale Of All Cities 11/11/07

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© David Ferraris 2011

Emotional Guy 3/27/09

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© David Ferraris 2011

10/18/08

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

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

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

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

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

© David Ferraris 2011

story excerpt

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

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

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

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

© David Ferraris 2011

1/3/06

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

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

     Mom, of course, went to the beauty parlor.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

© David Ferraris 2011

Fantasy Life 4/2/10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Here’s hoping all your dreams come true.

© 2011 David Ferraris