Too Many Deads On The Dance Floor

“Most guys your age don’t survive this,” Gini told me.  “They miss the warning signs, and so that first heart attack is fatal.  You did the right thing.  Gold star.”
Still.  I had a hot date that night, at a club I was very eager to go to, to try a new technique with fire that I hadn’t used before.  I was bored in the hospital for six hours before the tests started returning positive results for heart troubles.  I was, in fact, already trying to check myself out, and grudgingly agreed for one more blood test – the test that showed the actual danger.  It’s all too easy to contemplate an alternate future where I checked out early, went to the club, and in the excitement had something deadly happen.
Between that and my exploded appendix – you may recall I walked around for at least three days with a fully burst organ, leaking toxins into my system – there are too many of my potential pasts that lead to dead Ferretts.  This is more than a little unsettling.
It feels, quite frankly, a little magical.
 

Stations of the Tommy

I walk slow as a man because as a kid, I always slowed down for my Uncle Tommy.
Tommy had a cane, and was tender, so he moved at a slow shuffle.  His blood didn’t clot well, so at the age of seven I knew how to spell his disease: “hemophilia.”  His blood poured into the spaces in his joints, ate his cartilage, so by the time he was thirty, if you put your ear to his shoulder, you could hear his bones rubbing directly against each other.  They sounded like crackers being crumbled.
So Tommy, near-crippled with arthritis, walked slow.  Never weakly – the man had an unstoppable willpower, when he aimed it – but slow.  So even as a young kid, I matched his pace.  Why would I want to go anywhere and not have Tommy with me?  Tommy, with his cool music and his love of videogames and his sense of style?
Tommy never let it stop him, but he was in constant anguish.  You could tell by his grunts when he got up.  By the sea of amber pill bottles by his couch.  By the way he pursed his lips whenever he changed direction.  He moved slow because moving fast would have been unbearable, yet staying still would have been unacceptable.  He found time to smile between flashes of pain.
Now I’m walking slow for a different reason.  My breastbone was cut in two, split like a chicken breast.  My lungs are still re-inflating from the surgery.  I can manage a slow shuffle, occasionally speeding up to a brisk walk for about twenty feet, and then I’m in agony.
It comforts me to know that I’m walking in Tommy’s shoes.
I never got that whole Catholic thing of taking comfort in Christ’s suffering; not that I don’t admire Christ, for I do deeply, but the man was hurt because of idiots and I could never really get behind that.  Christ’s wounds seemed extravagant, a hot patch for a human flaw, and being glad that he was hurt seemed petty to me.
But Tommy is gone now, taken by pancreatic cancer.  (Not the HIV he lived with for twenty years, not the hepatitis he also caught from his thousands of blood transfusions, but cancer.  It took three layered diseases to take my Tommy out, I think proudly.)
He’s dead.  But I’m walking his path.  This painful shuffle, this balancing of walking to the bathroom versus using the urine container, this constant reminder of smallness…. Tommy did that.  Yet through all of that, he was kind to me, understanding, found the time to counsel me through some pretty fucked-up teenaged years, to play Centipede down at the arcade, to crack beers and share terrible jokes.
I wear my Tommy-ness like a cloak, now.  He’s gone, but somehow I understand him more, deepening my knowledge of what he was like, and that is a payment that’s almost worth the effort.  With every step, I know Tommy was there before me.  With every pill, I know Tommy felt this weariness.  With every frustration, I know Tommy felt it and more, and so I too can bear it.
I’m not a cripple when I walk with Tommy, for Tommy was not a cripple.  He was a strong man carrying some heavy burdens.
And so am I.

"…But You Get The Honey Badger For Free!"

“I’d like to buy this television.  It’s got the high definition I’m looking for.”
“Good news!  This wide-screen TV also comes with a complimentary honey badger, at no charge!”
“…a honey badger?  Isn’t that, like, the meanest animal on earth?”
“We prefer to think of it as ‘fuzzy-wuzzy destruction.’  But it’s totally free!  You’ll pay absolutely nothing to have in your home, destroying your couch!  Biting you in your sleep!  Devouring your other pets and vomiting up their bones!”
“Can I just have the television?”
“No, no, you don’t get to decline.  We’ve already put the honey badger in your car.  It’s chewed off the knobs on your radio, so you’ll definitely need the additional entertainment of this brand new television!”
“Couldn’t I just buy another television?”
“Did you not say that this TV had the high definition you were looking for?”
“…yes.”
“Then I think your choice is clear.  Sign here.  Quickly!  Before the honey badger gnaws through your brake line.”
“All right, fine.  But what do I feed my honey badger?”
“Neighbors.  Homeless people.  Ultimately, nosy policemen.”

Now, obviously, this is a silly example, but I see too many people in relationships with a single, extremely positive aspect  – great sex, a partner with a good job,  a lover who tolerates your depression, a partner who would do anything for you.
…then there’s the honey badger.
The honey badger represents all the things that don’t work about this relationship – the furious outbursts, the emotional withdrawal by way of punishment, the sneering disdain of all your other passions, possibly even physical abuse.  There’s usually more than one in this kind of relationship.  And when you point out how obscenely dysfunctional this pairing is and how ultimately unhappy it makes them, they always say the same thing:
“But s/he gives me X.  I just can’t find X anywhere else.”
And that’s the hi-definition television at work.  Yes.  You can find that good aspect elsewhere, and almost certainly housed in a better boy/girlfriend.  Just like there are thousands of televisions that have hi-def cables, there are tons of people who can provide you with great sex or financial stability or depressive support.
Now, it’s scary that you’ll have to go looking, which is a distinct pain in the ass, because I’m not going to tell you that these folks are common.  No, you’ll have to do your due diligence here, comparison shopping at a lot of stores, doing online research, checking Craigslist for surprise bargains.  It’s a lot of work, and some days, yes, you may despair.
But your current television comes with a free honey badger to wreck your life… and there’s no separating the two.  Take the good sex, the honey badger is tagging along.  And that honey badger is ripping apart your other relationships, destroying parts of your happiness, forcing you to be always on guard for the next crazy honey badger assault.  And that’s not a good relationship.  That’s actually a terrible relationship with one good upside that you can mistakenly cling to.
But there are other honey badger-free televisions with the same features.  You can find a better TV somewhere – maybe not one with all the options you had before, and it’ll be a little scary learning to handle the new remote control, but you’ll find this new honey badger-free television has its own upsides you’ll grow to love.
And more importantly, you don’t have to spend your life managing some crazy-ass beast.
Seriously, though.  There are millions of human beings out there, each with their own benefits.  I’m not saying people are interchangeable – they’re not.  But when your lover is shredding your life from the inside, it doesn’t matter how clear this rerun of “Frasier” looks.  It’s time to go.

You Know What Still Weirds Me Out About OKCupid? And, You Know, People?

Three years ago, OKCupid had two separate controls for rating a potential match: Personality and Beauty.  You rated each profile along a five-star rating, one according to what you thought of the personality they expressed in their profile, and another according how strongly you were attracted to the person in the photos.
They collapsed that to a single rating, because as it turned out, most people just chose the same value for both.
Dude, that is fucked up.
There’s a running gag on FetLife (the Facebook for Kinksters) that no guy actually reads the profile, they just look at the pictures and then send messages.  Which is true.  Back when I posted a few shots of my then-girlfriend Jen on my Fet Profile, I got a couple of hi-LAR-ious requests from ignorant men wanting to have sex with me.  I almost took ’em up on it, just to watch the look on their face when they realized I was not the woman in the pictures.
Still, I think the fact that OKCupid’s helpful tool went unused is a sad sign of how society gets fucked around the axle when it comes to attraction.  One of the things that has saved me from a billion terrible relationships is that I can realize that I might want to boink the popcorn out of any given woman, but we’d irritate the hell out of each other during repeated, intimate contact.  When that happens, I’ll fantasize, but I won’t make any moves.
Unfortunately, this is not the way most people work.  When you have only one line of attraction, and the physical is high, then what folks start to do is find ways to bring this heavenly creature’s personality up to snuff.  Which means that you start making excuses for these Amazonian Gods and Goddesses – interpreting their disinterest as cool study of the world, their arrogant dismissal of the things you love as “high taste,” their erratic schedules as proof that they’re unique, fun-loving people.  And because you have no way of making that all-important distinction of, “Beauty: 5, Personality: 2,” you eventually create a situation where you have fabricated a whole personality for someone that doesn’t exist, just so you can try to boink them.
….which, like a dog chasing his tail, thankfully you don’t usually catch ’em.  But when you do, you’re in for months of ugly wearing as you slowly come to realize, Wait, I hate this person.
Look, I’m not saying never to boink a really pretty person who you don’t get along with. Do!  Safely!  Consensually!  Exorbitantly!  But the danger is in trying to transform that single-serving friendship into a relationship.  And you do that by fabricating bits of their personality that don’t actually exist, which is never a good idea.
What your body craves is not the same as what your mind craves, I promise.  Understanding that difference is a vital, healthy thing, one that leads to both more fulfilling relationships and more fulfilling sex, since having control over what you want is a wondrous, wondrous thing. Understand that you can spooge tons of bodily fluids to anyone’s images, and yet outside of the boudoir you might despise each other.
Let that be what it is.  Read their fucking profile.  Get an idea of who this person is that your body wants to bang like a screen door.  Then decide what kind of thing you would desire from them, and whether they might actually want to give that to you, and craft a relationship perfectly devised to this synergy of fleshly pursuit and emotional interplay.
But do not fool yourself.  Do not date people you’ve made up out of whole cloth just so you can gain access to a taut rump.  And even though OKCupid has bowed to the pressure, do not assume that a five-star rating is really a single rating.  It’s at least two.  Maybe five.  Think about all the axes before you make your move.

A Bigger World, A Draining World: A Coda

It was twenty-one bitter degrees out when I went for my walk today, and the wind chill seemed determined to blow every one of those icy gusts straight up my pajama pants.  Gini had gone back home to get her phone, telling me to go on without her… but that was half a block ago, and I wasn’t sure if she was coming back.  I took tiny steps with my sneakers; each step was treacherous, with snow, ice, unexpected slopes.  My hand ached with cold because I had to clamp my hat to my head lest a gust of wind carry it away, my knuckles turning white. If I fell, I didn’t know anyone would come to get me.
And that block.  It went on forever.  A sidewalk that was an endless series of concrete squares, houses that took five minutes to shuffle past, landmarks an eternity away.
I kept walking.  Putting step after step down.
You’re larger, motherfucker, I spat in the world’s icy teeth.  You threaten to swallow me.  But I’m gonna walk you down to size.  One step at a time is how I master you.  Each step makes you smaller.  Makes you mine.
I kept walking.  Alone.  Unaided.
Unstoppable.

A Bigger World, A Draining World

I used to jog around this block, I thought.  And not even be winded when I got back home.
Yet there I was, teetering along, huffing and panting at a pace so slow our tiny dog kept looking back in puzzlement to wonder what the holdup was.  That distance, once so casually manageable, seemed like the trek to Mount Doom.  I was mentally remapping old landmarks to fit my new framing, thinking, okay, after those footprints in the cement, there’s the tree three-quarters of the way up the road.  And, if that’s true, then we’ve been doing this long enough for my shirt to be soaked in sweat and we’re not halfway done.
The world has swelled since I had my heart attack.  It is a larger place, filled with more spaces and intervals, scary in its immensity.  I remain undaunted – I know where I am, I can find my way back home – but it is like opening up your back door to discover the thatch of woods in your back yard has become a deep and dark forest, thick with tripping roots and quicksand.
It’s a bit mystical, as Gini is by my side and to her, the world is normal-sized.  I am bewitched.  To her, this is just the block around her house, and I have been transformed into a feeble patient, a withered husk to be shuffled along.  And that’s the curse.  I’m still me – my sense of humor is intact, my drive is intact, my ferocity and latching onto every opportunity is still there – it’s everything else that’s changed.  Yet she cannot see that.
To her, I’m the one who’s shrunk.
Among the disabled, there’s a popular essay short-handed as spoon theory – where you’re given so many spoons per day to use, and burn them up on mundane tasks, and when you’re out of spoons you are unable to do anything else.  But that is in many ways a bad metaphor, for there are very few places that will accept spoons as valid currency.  No, after a devastating illness your whole internal economy has been devastated, like post-war Iraq, where you used to be able to count on a steady flow of electricity and now there are storms of brownouts and whole days where your house is dark.  Things that used to be free now cost.  There was a time when nipping off to the bathroom was a gimme and I – holder of the teacup-sized bladder – could pee at will.
In this larger world, where the chair is bigger and the hallway is now the size of a city block, the effort it takes to get to the bathroom has a distinct cost.  It’s not an unpayable cost, but it is rather like arising to realize that a toll-taker has taken up residence at the end of your driveway and it’s gonna cost you a quarter every time you back out.
Yet you are still you.  Here I am, giggling at the same Big Bang Theory reruns, plotting the same stories, snarking on the usual social networks.  I’m not changed.  The world has.  It’s full of more drugs, more routines, more checkups, more doctors, and all of that is getting in the way of being who I want to be.
Yet for all of this hugeness, it’s also smaller.  Because my wife has had the trauma of watching her husband have a close-to-death experience – nothing where I was going down on the table, but having the question of Will Ferrett still be around? kicks up all sorts of ugly psychic residue, like a malicious child stomping through a well-tended garden.  You can see the stress on her face, the way she can barely concentrate on work.  Her whole future has been smeared and must be rebuilt.
It’s a smaller world for me because Gini takes her cues from me.  If I have a crying breakdown in the shower, she’s going to resonate with that like a struck fork.  If I apologize for not being able to do something, then she gets upset because, well, that’s just another reminder of how transformed I am at this instant.  She gets knocked askew when I tell her that I’m sorry that she has to do something for me, or express frustration and/or terror at a huge thing that used to be trivial, or just do anything aside from being brave.
She will bear my weaknesses, of course, because we are a loving couple.  She is here to support me.  She has not asked me to change my behavior in one iota, nor would she.  But the truth is, she’d feel a lot better if I just acted as though I was well again.  Which means if I want Gini to feel as good as possible – and of course I do – then in the middle of this hubbub, I must be stoic.  This neighborhood block, which seems to go on like a boring movie with no end credits in sight, is no big deal.  This pain is minor.  This inability to do things is, well, just part of it, for I must be chipper.
I wound her if I react the wrong way, and I want both of us to be healthy when it is all done.  And so here we are, two people absolutely committed to each other’s wellness, locked in to trying our best.  For us, it’s temporary – I will, I am told, be an ordinary feeble man in another three to four weeks, at which point the rehabilitation takes place, in which case I’ll be stronger than I was before. Which is a gratitude I carry.  This is not forever.  Unlike many of my disabled friends, I am a tourist, and will be exiting given a little luck.
But for now, I’m enspelled.  I have to go for a walk around the block today, as a part of my therapy.  I do not know how large it will be.  It could be trivial, it could be devastating.  Yet no matter how large it is, I must step out with confidence, grasp my wife’s hand, and tell her that it’s all good today.
This is love.  This pain.  This is rehabilitation and life and adoration all in a basket, and doubtlessly I’ll weaken at some point and lean on Gini because I must, and feel her strain as she takes up my load, because we’re both in love.  And in transition.  And so very, very human.

Coda

“Be careful,” I gasp, settling down onto the bed.  “My chest hasn’t stretched this far – it’s hard to breathe…”
“I’m careful,” Gini tells me.  She moves slowly, tentatively, sliding in next to me, looking to me for reassurance that she isn’t causing me pain.  My sternum was snipped open when they operated on my heart, breaking all my ribs, and as such any weight on my chest is like having them broken all over again.  She rests her head lightly on my shoulder, and I sigh.
“Not on – my belly – “I tell her, the pain in the hollow of my throat, moving her arm away from its usual resting place.  “Down here.  On my thigh.  Take my hand.”
She does.  “Does it hurt?” she asks.
“Yes,” I tell her.  “A little.  But it’s worth it.”
Click.
For the first time in two weeks, we are snuggled together.
It’s been hard to be together since the surgery – a held hand, her massaging my feet, an awkward pained hug in the kitchen.  We’re a physical couple.
“I can’t believe how sleepy I am,” she says.  I stroke her hair, feeling the muscles in her body untense, because her body finally understands what her mind has been trying to tell it: Ferrett is back.  “I’m sorry, I know you’re not tired….”
“Sleep, my love,” I tell her.  She curls up against me, relaxed in a way she hasn’t been since that first awful text I sent her two-plus weeks ago, pressing up against me, needing me in the way that I have always needed her, and as she starts to snore it is like the pound of sea on the surf, the righteous tide which we are owed, this rhythm of our bodies together again.