36. Meeting all These Special Parisiens is Depressing Me.
I’m becoming more convinced that I don’t have it, never had it, and never will have it.
Bienvenue to the 36th article in my Medium publication, Inside Me Inside Paris, a work-in-progress memoir about my 2016 deep-dive into Paris & my journey to find my soul amidst the onslaught of depression…
C’est 8 août, 2016.
Tonight, I met my new friend Erica at Little Cafè in Le Marais. Erica was introduced to me by my friend Dean Winters. She is an artist, a photographer and quite the storyteller. And photogenically perfect. Stunning. Like me, Erica’s a travel junkie and likes new people, new places, new experiences.
Erica does as she pleases and doesn’t make a big deal about the major things that have happened in her life, like when she found out she was a donor kid or when her father revealed he was gay when he turned sixty.
Erica is so funny and she had a lot of profound insights about being yourself and how powerful our unconscious thoughts are and that you can be who you want to be if you really want to just do that, with which I agreed in theory, but I think there are some things that physics and circumstances don’t allow us to just be. I think sometimes, you just aren’t meant to be something, like I didn’t have long enough arms to be really good on pommel horse, a physical factor that among other things, definitely prevented me from competing at the Olympic level. It’s easy to see that Erica has lived a charmed life, and as I continue to listen to her, I feel like I’ve been toiling, thinking that sheer effort and passion would get me through to the place I wanted to be in my life and career, but feeling more and more like I’ve been shortchanged by God and given the wrong life lessons by people — namely, my parents — who weren’t very knowledgeable or concerned or conscientious about the life I want to experience. I had been merely drinking the kool-aid. My particular flavor of choice? Meritocracy.
As I am meeting all of these special people all over Paris, I’m becoming more convinced that I haven’t had it and will never have it, and as such, I’m thinking more and more specifically about my exit strategy from this world.
After Little Cafè, Erica and I walked through Le Marais to L’as du Fallafel. Best falafel in Paris and quite popular. The lines are a little long, like Pink’s hot dogs on La Brea Boulevard in LA.
Erica talked about the kinds of energy that our thoughts bring, explaining research that has been done about how good energy affects water. She described a rice experiment that her friend did in which a jar filled with rice turned brown by hateful energy being intended on it and in a second jar, the rice was white when positive energy was intended on it. That’s certainly interesting when you think that our bodies are a high percentage of water. You can imagine what our thoughts bring to our own bodies.
The thing is, I can be positive in certain moments, but to consistently stay positive is another thing. I don’t think my brain functions that way; certainly in part because what my long career as an assistant director in television has done to me. The job calls for being as optimistic as possible, but also having contingency plans in my back pocket, so I’m always planning for the worst, just in case shit goes down. And often, it does, especially in ways you don’t expect; and typically, it’s the human factor one can’t control. So maybe that pessimistic outlook at work has caused me to have a pessimistic lens in life and love and friends, and I really need to fix that.
Île Saint-Louis
After the falafel, Erica and I grabbed a bottle of red wine at L’Etiquette, then sat on a corner along the Seine at Île Saint-Louis. I was far from engaging. Probably quite boring.
Among a few Parisiens scattered about this romantic spot, sitting on blankets, enjoying wine and charcuterie, I was mostly in my head, pontificating. What the hell am I doing with my life? What happened that I didn’t become like Erica?
To me, Erica won the lottery of life. Having an eccentric, artistic and incredibly open-minded and supportive mom and dad was a major factor for her creativity to blossom. My parents did their best with their lack of capabilities, but they could’ve tried harder in self-reflecting and acting conscientiously to nurture their children to be their best possible selves. Even just a spot of this would have made a monumental difference.
Frankly, my parents shouldn’t have been parents. They both didn’t come from a house of love and support either, so consequently, they weren’t equipped to be mature and well-rounded adults who as a unit was built to nurture a human being from birth to become a person ready to take on the world. Neither of them had siblings, so I didn’t have a village of cousins, aunts and uncles to fill the gaps. A critical factor.
Dealt with the cards of having them as my primary example of love and parenting and family, I became not only a shitty adult but also a shitty dad as well. “When you’re not given the things that help you blossom, what’s the point of living,” I thought to myself. So depressing. Despite the backdrop of a beautiful Paris sunset, if there was rice inside me, it was completely brown by now.
A big part of Paris that isn’t present in all the beautiful Instagram accounts about Paris is the amount of homeless people all over, needing a home, wanting a community. The homeless is part of Paris’s personality, like it or not. It is a daily reminder to me that as a kid, even in my home, I felt homeless often.
While there was some creativity in my life growing up, any yearning for exploration beyond the parameters of the parental rules and their narrow-minded points of view were mostly squelched and it was a literal fight to look under rocks and explore or go down rabbit holes for pure curiosity. Curious questions about anything were met with stern backlash because those questions were interpreted as scrutinizing their parenting, being stubbornly resistant or violating God when all I wanted was clearer answers about stuff. I was grew up in a home surrounded by a lot of closed mindedness,
From the womb, I started from scratch and I had to find my own opinions, my own way to deal with problems and solve situations and interact with different kinds of people. I was influenced by my parents in mostly absurd ways so I learned mostly from my teachers and coaches and friends and movies and songs, so when I’d apply the lessons, it often backfired and the outcome wasn’t the same like in the movies, ever.
After my fourth glass of wine and a bit more of Erica, I decided that for the sake of being alive both figuratively and literally, I need to breathe in a circle of open mindedness and creativity and not be suffocated ever again. By anyone.
C’est 9 août 2016:
My friend Thomas Rodier kicked my ass on a clay court at the Arthur Ashe Sports Center in Montreuil, on the outskirts of Paris. I never play on clay and it is quite an adjustment, but nevertheless, Thomas is a superb tennis player and has been playing since he was a kid. As with everything else in my life, I’m a late bloomer, and it adds to my depression that I always feel like I’m trying to catch up with everyone else in anything that I do. I just want to be good at something. Elite level good. Just one thing. Hell, right now I’m just happy that I even got my ass out of bed to even play tennis. Still, I hate losing and one day if I’m still alive I am determined to beat him if it kills me.
Later that night, Momo and I took the metro and headed to Place de la Nation to have a little shisha (hookah) with my grenadine and Perrier. I’d never smoked out of a shisha before. Momo, short for Mohammad, is from Tunisia and lives on my street Rue du Clos. He works as an interior and exterior painter and would like to date a nice girl in Los Angeles. Bon chance, mon ami. Bon chance.
Momo knew maybe ten English words, like “Michael Jackson” and “Golden State Warriors.” It was fun to speak with him, because it forced me to explain things to him in French and thank goodness for Google Translate. It gives me great pleasure to have friendly interaction with people from other countries. especially uncommon countries, which in Paris, Tunisia is not uncommon.
C’est 11 août 2016.
Sonadie invited me to have dinner at Le Coin des Amis, for an authentic French meal in a quaint area of Montmartre, away from the crowds. We sat outside in the terrace area and it was a welcoming place and I had the beef entrecote with the pepper sauce and it was easy to tell that the meal was made with love and soul. The wine was surprisingly inexpensive and still good as French wine is, as opposed to Los Angeles restaurants, where they jack up the price sky-high to make it seem like the wine is rare and amazing.
Subbhas, the owner of Le Coin des Amis, came to Paris from Sri Lanka with only $100 in his pocket and worked at a big restaurant and the dream to run his own restaurant one day came to him while he was a server. Eleven years later, he made his dream come true and opened Le Coin des Amis and voila, his restaurant is now rated on TripAdvisor. I looked into Subbhas’s eyes because I like looking into the eyes of people who accomplish their dreams to see what genuine passion looks like. I wonder how he did it and what he has that I don’t. Sigh. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, I don’t have it and as I am meeting all of these special people all over Paris, I’m becoming more convinced that I haven’t had it and will never have it, and as such, I’m thinking more and more specifically about my exit strategy from this world.
C’est 12 août 2016.
The French word of the day is “serrurier.” It means locksmith. It also means that I locked myself out of the apartment today. Nothing helps you review your level of French than a little crisis that demands precise words that you need to tell a French locksmith (or immigrant speaking French street slang) on the phone: “I’ve locked myself out of the house and I need you to come to my apartment. Please.” I knew how to say, “Je veux aider,” which is, “I want help.” And then I said, “mon key,” — which is not “my key” whatsoever; it’s ma clè in French — est dans mon appartement,” which is obvious. But there’s also the part about matching the modifiers with the gender of the noun, so with all of that, the entire conversation basically translated into “stupid American needs help and is begging to be ripped off.” The whole affair cost me 285 euros ($385 US). France gets shit for being a socialist country, but in no way was that a socialistic gesture at all.
I planned to go to Le Marais and write in my journal at a Starbucks, but because of my morning mishap, my plans went to shit and I was annoyed at myself, but I ran into Didier, Murat and Vahe at the Restaurant Air de Famille on my street and they invited me to go see Didier’s new house in the Paris suburb of Alfortville, so off we went on a new adventure, while Murat tended to the store.
We took the metro and then a bus into Alfortville, a Paris suburb southeast of the main city, to check out Didier’s new house that he’s moving into in a few months. There are many Armenians who live in Alfortville, where we had delicious Armenian pizza.
Four years ago, Vahe, who immigrated from Armenia, went to the hospital after suffering a massive heart attack. He was presumed dead. And then suddenly, he came back to life, much to the surprise of all the doctors who had left him for dead. I was fascinated because I feel like I’m presumed dead and here’s someone who’s come back from the dead. I want to know what he’s seen. And I want to know how he sees life now the second time around.
Murat is in Paris via Turkey. He doesn’t really know how to run his restaurant. These guys come in for a meal everyday and expect to give an IOU as collateral. He doesn’t know much French, and he may not know how to maximize profits, but he has a restaurant, which is significantly more than I can say.
And then there’s Didier, immigrated from Lebanon, knows five languages and in his heart is just a big kid and has a joy for life that doesn’t require posting hashtags, motivational memes or selfies to express this to the world. He is just happy and helpful to others and he loves the ladies like a teenager does. And he rocks the man purse. As I wonder what life is after death, I often wonder what life is as pure, simple joy.
Thank you very much for reading this memoir I’m workshopping. Looking for publishers! I’m a writer/photographer based in Burbank, California. Some of my work is visible on my Instagram.
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