She had nearly lost patience in him. He wasn’t even funny, and except for his perfect dark skin tinged pink that made him look like an out of season ski-instructor, he wasn’t good looking. Dean’s ramblings annoyed her. Made her angry and want to kick something. Dean’s hair looked grimy most of the time, mostly because it was too thin to grow long and he was too vain to cut it. His coat was older than he was and the collar of his shirt had a light covering of pilling that made Dean appear as if his upper body was surrounded by a cartoonish glow. His beautiful skin was always shiny with sweat. The back hairs he shaved weeks ago were beginning to grow in, sticking through its light blue button-up.
...”so then I pick up the shoe, and there’s a toe in it. How does someone’s toe fall off into their shoe Debbie? How?”
He was quiet. She didn’t hear how the story began. She nodded.
Dean was tall and reminded Deb of a piece of muscle wrapped wire: that is the only reason why she stopped and talked to him that day long ago outside the diner they sat in now. One short conversation was all it took for them. Daylight made him look dirty, which embarrassed her, but everybody she knew liked Dean. Dean thought he was the luckiest man around for winning Debbie away from better looking guys. He didn’t ever say the word “underachiever,” but he knew what he was.
from "How To Save Baby Birds" (2002)
I knew when I wrote the story that I was describing the life of an unsatisfied woman. I know now that her unhappiness was not so much in her choice of mate but her sense that she was manipulated by social pressures and ego gratification and not an authentic desire for this dirty mechanic that likes to tell jokes. If Deb had been trained to prune her desires instead of squelching or smothering them she probably would not have been with someone in which she had disdain. It's a shame we don't consciously teach the young to desire; in fact we teach them that desire is the beginning of suffering, or that desire should be mastered, murdered or discarded.
If all at once we turned away from everything we felt tepid about, there would be an enormous culling of daytime television, bastard politicians, scum drudgery and bad fashion. Shaping our base human needs into coherent desires is filthy work with room for ample fuck ups, but it's a way out of a pre-loaded and pre-determined existance.
Devils Advocate says: "We can't have everyone running around doing what they want! We must curb our passions so our book groups don't fall apart and mothers nurse their babies and people don't throttle their Middle Management. And all of this talk of trying to sharpen your desire to get what you want is for people that that have food and can pay the mortgage and don't have trains that blow up. "
Yeah, desire and the time to understand it is up on the pointy part of Maslow's hierarchy of need. There are people out there that seriously need some pre determined shit in their lives or they are going to not make it through the next hour. This message is not for them...this message is not universal, it's for you dear reader.
ANYWAYS
There is no doubt however that the power of one man's desire can change everything around him forever, regardless of when or where he was born. Hannibal, Gandhi, Lady Godiva, Leonardo DaVinci, every religious figure that ever was, every poor woman in Poland that raised three kids alone (from any time period) that one guy that invented the car with the doors that went up.... Overcoming odds is dependent on the desire of the participant, (but sometimes never even matters...Auschwitz anyone?) Truthfully, we can't always get what we want. With trying out our passions though, we get better at picking what we want. Small satisfactions feed and hone what we choose to want, giving our passion a bridle and real power. The person that has not been numbed by the horrible idea that wanting something is bad and has the power of knowing what they want is a concrete threat to conformity and fearful idiots.
ANYWAYS
There is no doubt however that the power of one man's desire can change everything around him forever, regardless of when or where he was born. Hannibal, Gandhi, Lady Godiva, Leonardo DaVinci, every religious figure that ever was, every poor woman in Poland that raised three kids alone (from any time period) that one guy that invented the car with the doors that went up.... Overcoming odds is dependent on the desire of the participant, (but sometimes never even matters...Auschwitz anyone?) Truthfully, we can't always get what we want. With trying out our passions though, we get better at picking what we want. Small satisfactions feed and hone what we choose to want, giving our passion a bridle and real power. The person that has not been numbed by the horrible idea that wanting something is bad and has the power of knowing what they want is a concrete threat to conformity and fearful idiots.
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