I have always been a person who was interested in stories.  My father was always telling these fantastic stories of his drag racing days.  I learned important lessons from fairy tales read to me; they were scary and meant children needed obedience for survival in the big bad world.  Unless a story was read before bed, I couldn’t go to sleep. 

 My first boyfriend was Portuguese and Scottish, and he used to tell me stories about his family.  His father was a Scottish cab driver who left his family to start a new one which led to these dramatic stories of abandonment and poverty.  He had all these stories about growing up which were very different from my own but similar in some ways. 

It was a revelation to me that I needed to have people in my life that would drop their guard and tell me everything.  I lived for new stories and repeating a story would bore me and I found myself tuning out of those people’s lives.  A person doesn’t need to be handsome, wealthy or intelligent, but if they like to talk, I am there for the long haul if there is a freshness to the fable.

 I take public transportation, and there are always these drug addicts, creeps, and just working-class people who would tell me stories.  I don’t know if it was because I looked interested in what they said, but they felt they could talk to me.  I had this friend named Larry.  He was quite interesting guy because he had a Southern accent, and he used to be in an 80s band.  He told me a story about hurting himself in an unfortunate act.  He had a nickname for himself: “hook.”  I have to say, it just made me laugh.

I am very sensitive to sound.  Sound is extremely important when telling a story.   I like men with soothing voices.  You could tell a story, but it adds to it when you have one of those voices that makes me feel relaxed and calm.  On occasion, I do enjoy the over dramatic poetess whose over-the-top performance is good for a laugh. I am interested in the world, I guess.  I go places that other people probably wouldn’t go; you find better, more interesting stories in the “real world” than in the artificial world where everyone must pretend, they have no story to tell.

The point of this is observation.  The oddness of life makes you curious about how other people love, laugh, live and survive in this indifferent universe.  We must want to know how other people live to write or explain their own unique vision of how our world is as we see it. I am not happy with fakery, snobbishness, or falseness.  I have always strived to surround myself with interesting people who could talk honestly and openly about having faults.  Communication is easy when you have genuine interest and honesty.

Strangely, people with a seemingly higher status have a need to maintain a facade of perfection.  I feel sorry for them because they are never able to yell, cause scenes, or have a meltdown of epic proportions.  I am always challenged in trying to find common ground with people who are overly self-contained in their own fuckery.  I think it’s why there’s interest in rich celebrities behaving badly.  We waver between respect and dismay of people who are different than we perceive ourselves to be.

I wish the men told more stories. I would have more stories and poems to write if they did.