description

A Barber

In a small room with two mirrors, two swiveling chairs and three stationary ones, in a corner of Tel Aviv often overlooked by ordinary passerby, there is a barber. He seems a quiet man, a tactful man. Though it goes with his profession to be tactful and flattering as a rule, he seems rather sincere and serious when speaking of styles and colors.

Currently, it would be easy to make the mistake of thinking he was religious. The truth, if you inquire a bit, or if you hear him speaking to one of his regulars, is that his father has passed away, and he is in mourning. He is carrying out his mourning period, as is often done even by non-religious Jews, by not cutting his hair and beard and wearing a “Kipa”, a skullcap. The death of his father, not two weeks past, seems to weigh heavily upon him, because although his face lights up with a dazzling smile when greeting a true friend, it is fallen and tired the rest of the time.

All day long, he is on his feet without rest, charming and flattering the elderly women who come to get their hair dyed, joking with the men who come for a shave, welcoming in the stray stranger who finds his little shop. Despite being small, it is always overcrowded – he has dozens of regular customers, all popping in on their way to and from work, bringing their children and their dogs, making appointments on the fly or writing down their numbers for him to call them back and make proper engagements.

The warmth, the quiet chaos as customers change places constantly in the cramped shop, the kindness of the proprietor – all make the little spot a diamond in the rough of the Tel Aviv streets.

Austen-Esque

After spending every free moment of the day reading “Sense and Sensibility,” I found myself unable to resist the urge to try to write the sort of passage that might find itself in a Jane Austen book. I’m sure I haven’t succeeded very well, but there’s something irrationally enjoyable about trying to write in such a manner that you must hear the words being read aloud in your mind or you will not understand quite how the sentences end.

While it is true that the estate of Mr P was not large, it is also true that it was spacious enough for him, his wife, and their two young daughters, to live in comfortably. So they did, and while Mr P spent his life working hard in various positions involving sales, he managed to live without worrying about yearly income and without ever needing to trouble the minds of the women of his house.

Mrs P was by nature a peaceful woman, always cheerful, even in the depth of the great aches and pains which afflicted her in older age. She was an excellent example to her daughters, both of which grew up to be miraculously practical and intelligent women. The eldest, Amanda, was educated well and supported herself by her pen. She did, however, make the rather scandalous choice of making a second marriage, even after her first was dissolved mutually by both her and her cold-hearted husband. Her second marriage, by which she provided Mr and Mrs P with two grandchildren, it was agreed by all, was much more successful.

The younger of the sisters, Miranda, was always the more rebellious, and although she might have vexed Mr and Mrs P by her scandalous pursuits at one point in her life, she eventually became a source of pride to her family, for she was free in mind and in spirit in ways which the new world found becoming and agreeable, and even profitable.

While both Mr and Mrs P met untimely and early endings, their daughters kept up a steady stream of correspondences and remained the greatest of friends, even after needing to sell the estate which they so loved. Although deeply regrettable, the selling of their beloved Flora estate was nevertheless an unmatchable help in both the sisters’ lives, for both, headstrong and independent as they were, led quite modern lives and needed funds to keep these in order and comfort, as they aspired to do for many years to come.

Santa Ana

A Los-Angeles girl at heart and soul in many ways, there are certain feelings and scents and types of weather that I can identify as being utterly LA-ish, even though I have no good reason to know or understand LA weather to such an extent. For instance, there is a wind blowing outside my window right now – a warm wind, carrying with it dust and grit and a dryness that makes you need to lick your lips every few seconds.

This sort of wind is called a “Santa Ana” wind, because that’s the sort of wind that flows through that area in California. It’s a desert wind, and there’s something infinitely creepy about feeling it on one’s face at midnight in January. It is earthquake weather – it feels as if the earth is about to tear open, as if all the dogs are going to start becoming giddy soon, feeling the disaster coming on. It feels as if the sky will break open and sandy, dirty rain will fall, even though there are no clouds to speak of.

It is the sort of night that is build for unconventional horror stories, a night where you know you won’t be able to fall asleep because the warm air will prevent you being comfortable in your quilt. Moreover, the wind will be moaning its dreadful sound and making the dry, dead leaves shake like death rattles. The wind brings to mind graveyards in summer nights, endless deserts and no water or sustenance, haunted houses and funerals. It is unpleasant, and yet it still smells and sounds like a bit of home to me, a bit of LA transferred to this tiny country.

An Exercise

I’ve been researching some writing exercises the past few days and trying to find the time to really work on one. I randomly picked one from a random website – I’ve lost which one it was, or I would post the link – and decided to work on it at work today. I always use the down time between phone calls from customers for scribbling, but more often than not I’m just nattering away about nothing in particular. Today, however, I had a goal.

The writing exercise was simple – there was a picture of a boy sliding down a water slide, and the instructions were to write about the boy: who he is, where he is, what he was doing before and after the picture, etc. I didn’t actually have the picture with me at work, but I could remember it pretty well. For some reason, this ended up being the result – I didn’t follow the instructions very well, but I got an idea and went with it.

A picture frame hangs on a wall, the only ornament in the whole dreary living room. The picture, whose colors are perfectly bright and cheerful in comparison to the gray walls, is a photograph of a boy. The boy is grinning widely, and is featured mid-slide on a wild looking water ride – he’s wearing a bright orange swim-suit and upon closer inspection, you could say that he is laughing more than grinning. In fact, you can almost hear the delightful peals of laughter as you look at the photo.

So the balding man that lived in this room felt – as if the boy in the photograph was constantly laughing at him. So many times the man had tried to take the photo off the wall, and yet, again and again, he could not bring himself to do it.

And so, the man lived out his life, jumping from one hated job to another, never happy with the person that he had become. All his days, the boy laughed in his wooden frame, reminding the man of the boy he had been: so full of hope and happiness. The future had seemed endless then, opportunities just waiting right around the bend. Sometimes, when the man lay in bed late at night, he could admit to himself that the reason he never took that old photograph off the wall was that he needed to remind himself how he had squandered his opportunities, how he had wasted his life. And yet, by day, he never changed a thing, and the laughing boy that he had been shined out of the picture frame forever more, while the man he was dwindled in body and in spirit as the days passed.

Even to himself, the man never managed to explain why he didn’t change a thing. Perhaps he lived in the boy in the picture on the wall rather than in his reality; perhaps he just didn’t know how to change; perhaps he didn’t want to change really; and perhaps, just perhaps, there was no one there who cared enough to help him change. Who knows?

An Introduction to King Gregory

A man was walking through a field. It was sunset, and the tall weeds were waving in the breeze, except where the man had trampled them. He was rather squat, and was making a lot of wheezy noises as he walked, his big rucksack weighing heavily on his back and sweat dripping into his eyes.

The field seemed to whisper around him as he walked, and his movements became increasingly twitchy as the darkness increased. He jumped at small sounds that ended up being crows landing in the field, and he gave an audible gasp when a fox ran past him.

When night had truly fallen, he still had another couple miles of field yet to cross. He seemed, however, to decide against walking in the dark, and settled, with much grunting and swearing, in a space that had been cleared by previous campers in the field.

Another hour later, and the man had succeeded, if rather pitifully, in preparing some form of edible dinner. He sat by the small fire he had managed to coax into being and ate the heated broth he had made with some old bread. He looked deeply unsatisfied and disgruntled, as if not quite used to living like this.

He was, in fact, very used to living this way, as he had been on the run for over two cycles of the moon. The only real reason he was so displeased on this night of all nights was because he had gotten some news, a few hours before entering the field. He had passed a small village, one of those places where everyone was related and Auntie Shay was somehow everyone’s aunt, and while purchasing some well needed supplies at their tiny inn, he had learned that a rider had come four days previously to the town to announce that a new king had risen: King Gregory was killed and his brother, Malcolm, had sorrowfully needed to assume the throne.

Gregory, sitting in a field with some moldy bread and lukewarm broth, was still seething at this unjustified and most disgusting lie.

Miracle Baking

The sky was iron grey all day long, and the wind was sandy and much too warm for a January afternoon. The air was strangely silent as well, as if all the voices in the world were stifled, waiting for something to happen, something to erupt. If this were hurricane or tornado country, or even commonly quaky, I’d say that it was as if everyone was waiting for one of those natural disasters to occur.

And yet, it seemed that the air began to thaw, the sky literally brightened and became blue for a few moments before the sun set and it turned a brilliant pink and red. The reason seemed to be an oven, in an apartment, on the fourth floor of a building. In that oven sat a trey of chocolate chip cookies, baking slowly, spreading warmth and a smell so mouth watering that you could stand a mile away and salivate.

Never underestimate the power of a cookie to make everything seem better – even the weather.

Nightclub

As you enter, you hit not so much a wall, but rather a whole cathedral of sound. There is no escape, no corner where relief from it can be found. If you’re there, you’re not looking for that kind of relief anyway. No, if you’re there, if you’re one of the mass and crush of bodies that fill the place, you’re looking for the kind of relief that can be found only in surrounding and drowning yourself in sound.

Darkness – though punctured by swirling colored lights one moment and a bright flashing white light the next moment – is still the feeling and the living presence that dominates the space. You can feel it in every square inch, the darkness being beckoned and welcomed as a savior, as a necessity, as a living thing to be worshiped. The throng of people treat the darkness as a blessing, a way to keep their anonymity, a way to overcome shyness or fear, a way to live out their wildest sides.

The music is no less important than the darkness. It seems to induce madness, or perhaps levitate towards ecstasy, as people lose themselves in the movement, in the noise, in the never-ending thrum of the bass in their hearts and stomachs. Smoke coils endlessly in the air, the pungent smell of strong alcohol mixing with it, as cigarettes are lit one after another, as drinks pass from hand to hand.

Storm

The wind has been building up for hours – howling and moaning and shaking the trees free of their leaves. A mass of grey clouds, impossible to see in the dark night sky, sits above everything, threatening to release more than the drizzle that has been making the world outside a wet, slippery place.

Then, suddenly, there is that flash. So bright, so sudden, like an enormous camera from up above taking a picture of this glorious, wild scene of winter. The lightning flashes quickly, piercing through eyelids and warning the sleepers in their warm beds and toasty homes of what is to come. The lightning is so quick that no-one’s really sure if it was really lightning or perhaps just a strange light coming from something else outside.

But there is no mistaking what the bright, almost audible crack of light was when the thunder roles in. At first, it rolls in softly, like the tires of a car crunching on a gravelly driveway. Next time the lighting comes though, the rumble of the thunder sounds closer, more threatening. Finally, as the storm reaches its peek, the thunder cracks loudly, as if something were whipping the storm into a wild frenzy, the wind stronger than ever and the rain and hail pounding down on any unlucky souls who happen to be outside.

The sleepers in their warm blankets roll over and smile at the loud noises, feeling secure and peaceful in their beds. Or sometimes they quake with fear, even knowing that they are perfectly safe. The storm outside doesn’t care though for what the people think of it – it will rage and billow and cover the world with wet until it calms, seemingly of its own accord, and goes to sleep itself.

Time Flies When… What?

Some days seem to rush past in a whirl. Mostly, days like that are full of action, of activities, of something fun and exciting that slips through your fingers, hardly giving you a chance to appreciate it. Days that pass quickly usually fit neatly into the pattern of “time flies when you’re having fun.” Usually, the days that are like this are days that you wish you could lengthen, days that you don’t want to finish, days where you go to bed at night with a bitter-sweet sadness of parting.

Some days, though, pass quickly for no reason at all. Those are the weird ones. They’re days of routine, of everything being normal, or mostly normal. Days where you wake up, tired, and go to work as always, days where there’s nothing new, nothing to anticipate, nothing to look forward to particularly. Just normal, everyday sort of days. When a day like that passes quickly, you just feel a bit bewildered by it, not really sure what was different about today that made it so quick.

I had a day like that today. It was odd, but there is something rather nice to knowing that you passed the day only half-aware of the passing of time and that you find yourself ready, at the end of the odd day, to curl up into bed and sleep as deeply as you can.

A Bit Batty

In front of my apartment building, there is a small lawn, and then some hedges and then the sidewalk. On the lawn, there is a rather large palm tree with a thick trunk and large, swaying branches. The tree is very fertile and well-taken care of and so it is always heavy with the small, light-brown fruit that certain palm-trees seem to bear.

As I arrived home from work the other night, I saw the most beautiful thing, and I’ve been thinking about it ever since then. There are always bats around that tree – they like the fruit on palm trees I believe, or at least this type of bat must do. But that night, as I came home from work later than usual, there were a huge group of bats flying around it. There must have been at least thirty or forty of the beautiful, winged beasts, and they were going absolutely crazy, flying up and down and around the tree, weaving through and around each other, always pulling up in time.

They came so close to me that I could see the light through their wings – I could even see the fur that is spread sparsely on their bodies. I could see the tiny claw at the end of each of their wings. I stood and watched them for at least five minutes, my head just swiveling around and around, following their dizzying movements. Ah, but they are marvelous animals!