Tuesday 3.17: Regarding The Sodas / Ferris Bueller Was A Monster
Note: I’m switching the Tuesday newsletter from TinyLetter to Substack. This newsletter was sent out last week, but almost no one received it. Hopefully I’ll have more success with Substack, and for those of you who already read this, I apologize. Keep an eye out for a 3.18 installment soon.
Longer Note: Regarding The Sodas
My grandfather used to keep an endless supply of Coca Cola in his garage, and so the taste of a Coke, specifically from a can, to this day recalls the smell of motor oil and vulcanized rubber, the feel of a particular, worn basketball, probably as old as the same hoop, screwed to the garage's exterior, my father played on.
That house was on the appropriately named Puritan Circle in Springfield, Mass., a cul-de-sac whose terminus yielded immediately to the sort of woods you could get problematically lost in, deep and dense with old growth. There was a trail to a pond where I learned how to ice skate in the winter, but if you put me back there now, I couldn't find it. It was probably a mile or so from the road.
My grandmother fell and split her head open on a walk there once, and I remember my mother going for help while I stayed with grandma. The way back was far, and while we waited I realized there was an arithmetic to this kind of injury and remoteness, a distance at which a bad cut or a sprained ankle was a much more serious issue than in the comparatively accessible poplar stands where I built forts at home, usually within view of a rooftop, if not someone's back porch.
It was in this way that I got to know that element of rural New England. My father's family was big, and because as I kid, I had a lot of similarly aged cousins (we were probably mistaken for a soccer team or a small school, in public), we didn't camp (logistics), but would vacation in these large, remote houses on Cape Cod that were both close enough to the beach to swim daily and also in that same deep, old forest I got to know in Springfield.
The forests were unusual. The earth on the cape was sandy, and the trees were mostly conifers, so the ground was littered with pine cones and dry brown needles. In deep woods in Maine, I've always noticed that as you walk into the forest there's an immediate feeling of cool (it happens in some parks in New York, even), a combination of the shade, the dampness of the air, the effect of trees in general, and some element of the continuous rot on the forest floor (though if you've ever stuck your hand into a compost heap, you know that doesn't make any sense).
But these forests were always hot and dry. Maine's woods had a proper silence, but these always seemed to hum chaotically, they were full of crows and enormous cicadas.
There was something in that garage that felt the same as these particular woods. The way its shapes were indistinct, the way it was ordered, uncluttered, never packed with junk, but also never without that fully functional basketball, or enough hockey sticks tucked away in a corner to play a game, or something like eleven cokes available just to me, despite all 40 of my cousins matching me, can for can.
I grew apart from those grandparents in a lot of ways as I got older. They were conservative in many ways, staunch Catholics in that way that Catholics can be pious and dogmatic and obstinate without actually being spiritual. They once told me they believed Sacco and Vanzetti were guilty, and their takes on certain civil rights issues were understandably of their time.
They loved us all, and they did their best, but there were human parts of them that we'll all always have to reckon with. Which is why I think, when I think of them, I think mostly of these visceral, if indistinct elements of my life there. Not the people or the places or the sounds or smells, but all of it at once. We have a natural tendency to want to regain things, because in doing so means we will have gone back.
Shorter Note: Regarding Ferris Bueller
Ferris Bueller is a monster. His sister is right. The Principal is right. All they want is for him to face some consequences for his actions. He hijacks a parade and makes an entire city dance for his entertainment. He bullies his depressed friend into stealing a car. It's not Cameron's act of conscious, necessary rebellion, it's Ferris' self-serving manipulation because he thinks it's his God-given right to do whatever he wants to do.
It's better to see Ferris Bueller as a figment of Cameron's imagination, a manifestation of a Reagan-80's id, Cameron struggling internally to pursue meaning in his life when everything around him is pressuring him to pursue happiness instead, to not just embrace personal pleasure and material comfort, but to equate them with freedom. It's fucked.