Santa in the hood

‘Twas the night before Christmas and all through the hood
not a homeboy was stirring or up to no good.
No gunshots were fired, no cops could be seen,
the streets were deserted except for one thing:
A fat guy in red was delivering some stuff,
it wasn’t a pizza or anything rough.
He wore a broad smile beneath his white beard
despite all the presents he looked pretty weird.
He went to each house to deliver his shit
and when he was done he took a bong hit.
Then he jumped in his ride, which wasn’t a Chevy
but a sleigh pulled by reindeer, it looked kinda heavy.
“Now Chuy, now Beto, you there Ontavo,
c’mon mi amigos, let’s leave here pronto!”
He soared through the air and shouted with all of his might,
“Merry Christmas, y’all, and to y’all a good night!”

The Power of Power Tools

Watching my wife wield a power tool is sort of like having Jason jump out of a bush at you with a butcher knife on some dark Halloween night on Elm Street.

Scary. Disturbing.

I don’t mean she-doesn’t-know-what-she-is-doing scary. I’m sure that after she reads the little instruction booklet a couple of times she gets the gist of it.

I mean scary in the way that something that is out of the ordinary can be scary.

What’s the word. Abnormal?

She likes to say, “Power tools are empowering.”  Like she’s doing a do-it-yourself home improvement segment on Oprah.

This is her power tool, btw, not mine. It’s not as if I’m talking out of some male chauvinist don’t-touch-my-shit kind of thing. I’m not all that great with power tools myself, so I don’t actually own any. I’m strictly a socket-and-wrench kind of guy.

No, this power tool is all hers.

Anyway, I remember exactly when she got into power tools — power hand drills to be exact. She bought a Black & Decker Fire Storm a few years back after seeing something on TV.

“Why do we need a drill?” I said after discovering it in the garage.

“Because,” she said, “you never know when you’ll need one.”

I couldn’t argue with logic like that.

But the need never seemed to arise, so the drill stayed in its handy dandy carrying case, unopened and unused.

Then one day, sure enough, I found a need, so I opened the handy dandy carrying case and charged the battery pack. When it was fully charged, I slammed the battery pack into the drill’s handle.

I was ready for some drilling.

“Where’re the drill bits?” I asked.

“The what?”

“The drill bits,” I said. “You know, the shit you put in the drill so you can drill shit?”

“Oh,” she said. “The woman who sold me the drill never said anything about drill bits.”

I tried not to roll my eyes, but I guess I didn’t try hard enough.

Since I wasn’t about to go out and buy drill bits just to drill two crappy holes, I put the drill back into its carrying case, where it stayed never to be opened again.

About a year later, I spotted a big box from QVC in the garage.

“Whatdja get?” I asked.

“Oh, I meant to tell you,” my wife said. “A power drill.”

“Uh, why do we need another power drill?” I said.

“Because,” she said, “this one has a lot of neat attachments–five of them. It even has a sander. Plus it has more voltage than the other one.”

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by that.

“But does it have drill bits”? I said.

“Oh yeah,” she said with a knowing smirk. “I made sure of that.”

Growing up in Atzlan

The most famous person to graduate from my junior high school was the actor Anthony Quinn. Of course, he wasn’t famous in junior high nor was he even Anthony Quinn yet. But his picture was on the wall in the administration building, one of those group photos of his class. If you studied it long enough you could spot him among all the shiny faces, looking pretty much like Zorba the Greek. If you could imagine Zorba the Greek as an eighth grader.

I saw my first dead body when I was eight or nine, some vato lying face down in the gutter with a knife sticking out of his back. “I think we can safely rule out suicide,” a cop said. The cop was wearing a Joe Friday haircut and a wrinkled gray suit. The tips of his black shoes were scuffed, as if he’d spent a lifetime on the eastside prodding dead bodies in the gutter.

Amazingly, the hood has remained pretty much the same — still the same working-class barrio that always seems to be on the brink of total urban decay. Police helicopters still hover above at night, shinning their spotlights bright and cold as gamma death rays. The city did put in a nice jogging path along the perimeter of Evergreen Cemetery, where crowds of middle-aged Latinas in multi-colored swap meet sweatsuits burn off calories and perhaps life’s little frustrations. It’s quite a sight.

I worked at a Jack in the Box during high school, Jack in the Box 240 to be exact, on what used to be known as Brooklyn Avenue, now known as Cesar Chavez Avenue. At one point, it was under surveillance by the narcs, but it was never raided and no one ever got busted. On special occasions — like New Year’s Eve — we’d take turns going into the walk-in cooler to smoke a joint. Every once in awhile the crew from the McDonalds by the junior college on the other end of the eastside would stop by to shoot the shit and boast about how many burgers they sold. On a good night, we’d do maybe a thousand dollars, but the McDonalds would be doing that much in an hour. On the other hand, you could drive up to our window and order a cheese burger, fries, soft drink and a lid of mary jane.

I was in the fifth or sixth grade when my class went on a field trip to the newspaper building downtown. It was mid-afternoon as we gawked our way through the newsroom. Two guys dressed in short-sleeve white shirts and ties sat at their desks in the back, throwing paper airplanes at us and cackling. I remember thinking, “That’s the kind of job I want when I grow up.” Little did I know that I’d be working there myself one day. I have to admit, though, I haven’t thrown any paper airplanes at any of the little kids who still tour the building. I don’t want to give those little fuckers any big ideas.

Ballad of a stray shopping cart

It was on a cold winter’s day when the shopping cart appeared on the lawn in front of my house. It appeared as if by magic, but of course no magic was involved. It was simply abandoned there by an asshole. I know it was an asshole because who but an asshole would abandon a shopping cart in front of someone’s house?

I noticed the shopping cart that evening as I rounded the corner on my drive home from the train station. I didn’t think much about it, though, because how much time do you usually devote to thinking about shopping carts when you’re not, you know, out shopping?

The next morning, when I went to get the paper off the front stoop, I noticed that the shopping cart was still there. It had not moved during the night. Not one inch.

It was still there that evening as I returned home, and the following morning as I got the newspaper again. By then I suppose I was harboring a naive notion that the asshole who had abandoned it on the lawn in front of my house might come back and get it for some inexplicable reason. Or that some shopping cart bounty hunter might spot it and haul it away in the back of his pickup truck along with other shopping carts abandoned by other assholes. Or that some juvenile delinquent ditching school might take it for a joy ride or something.

After a few days it became apparent that the shopping cart wasn’t going anywhere. It began to gnaw at me, to taunt me. Suddenly, it was no longer just an abandoned shopping cart on the lawn in front of my house, it was a metaphor for all that had gone wrong with this country — the breakdown of civic responsibility, the promotion of personal convenience over the greater good, assholism over humanism.

I thought about sneaking out late at night and abandoning it on the lawn in front of someone else’s house. But then I would be no better than the asshole who abandoned it in front of my house. I thought about moving it into the alley because scavengers in beat-up trucks frequently drive through there and pick up all manner of discarded things. But that was no better than leaving it in front of somebody’s house.

Early one Saturday morning about a week later I decided I couldn’t take it anymore, so I put on some grubby sweats. I was going to push that fucking shopping cart back to the supermarket where it belonged.

In the pantheon of all human activity I reckon returning shopping carts is very low on the priority list. I mean, just look around the parking lot of a shopping center, how people just leave their shopping carts all over the damn place. On busy days it’s like driving through an obstacle course. Of course, I’m not saying that returning shopping carts would solve anything. But it seems to me that if we can’t even do the small shit, how are we going to solve the big shit?

Anyway, I set off with the shopping cart for the supermarket about a mile away. I hopped on the back of it and rode it down a little hill to a normally busy boulevard which was practically deserted because it was so early on a Saturday morning. With the hood of my sweatshirt pulled over my head, I might’ve been the Unabomber pushing a shopping cart along the street. The only sound was its rattle. Along the way, I came across a couple more abandoned shopping carts, so I pushed them all together and took them back too.

I have to admit that when I finally dumped those shopping carts off at the supermarket, I didn’t feel like I had accomplished anything. A shopping cart was returned, big deal. I doubt my standing as a human, or even a citizen, rose one iota. I suppose there was a possibility that someone in the neighborhood noticed that the shopping cart was gone — that it had disappeared as if by magic. But, of course, no magic was involved.

Where have all the blogsters gone?

Ever wonder what’s happened to certain blogsters, you know, the ones who post something one day then seemingly vanish off the face of the Earth, except you don’t realize they’re among the disappeareds until a few weeks later when you notice that their blog is as rusty and abandoned as the carcass of a stripped-down car in the Mojave Desert? Did they die? Did they get abducted by space aliens? Chances are they got caught up in the vagaries of life in the Real World or, if they are like me, got bored or tired of hearing themselves think or just plain ran out of shit to say. It happens; the cybersphere has got to be littered with countless dead blogs floating around like the space debris orbiting Earth.

Thinking on this reminds me of the time I sat at the induction center in Los Angeles along with dozens of other similar and not so similar guys, waiting to get shipped out to boot camp. As we cooled our heels all fucking day in that stuffy, uncomfortable place, one of the guys related that his grandfather had advised him the night before not to make any friends. “They’ll just get killed or get shipped out,” gramps had told him. Ha ha ha. We all laughed at that. But then gramps was kind of right — we all shipped out eventually, going our separate ways. Some of us maybe even got killed. Oh sure, a few of us made feeble attempts to keep in touch, but being young men with our futures supposedly somewhere ahead of us, we lost contact almost immediately.

Sometimes, in those rare moments of nostalgia, I wonder what happened to all those guys, just like I wonder about all those vanished bloggers. Then the feeling passes. It’s a fact of life, in the Real World and elsewhere. People come, people go.

David Foster Wallace

If you’re a DFW-head, you might be interested in a series in the books section of New York magazine that examines “Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace” by David Lipsky.

Time has come today

It’s been nearly six years or something since I quit wearing a wristwatch. It was my way of sticking it to the man: hey Ol Man Time, fuck you, you’re not the boss of me.

Of course, it was just an illusion. You can’t stop the passage of time by simply ignoring it.

Still, it’s been rather liberating. I only pay attention to time now when I really need to know it, like when it’s time to go to lunch or when it’s time to go home.

Not having a watch strapped to your wrist makes you feel more balanced. Literally. The ebb and flow of the day changes when you’re no longer constantly measuring it. Theoretically, I suppose, it lasts exactly the same as when you are wearing a watch. But losing track of time is more than just a cliché now, it’s a reality. Events occur when they occur and not when you expect them to occur as dictated by what your wristwatch says. I used to catch myself looking at my wrist where my watch used to be, but that’s a thing of the past now.

One of the first things you notice when you’re no longer wearing a watch is how many other people are not wearing one either. It’s not because all of a sudden your powers of observation have become more acute. It’s because on the occasion when you ask people who are not wearing a watch what time it is they are compelled to hold up their wrists to show you that they are watchless too. It’s as though they’re giving you the secret handshake.

When I stopped wearing my watch, I left it on the kitchen counter. My wife never said anything about it because 1) she never noticed (unlikely); 2) she didn’t really care (likely); or 3) she saw it as a manifestation of a developing eccentricity that she didn’t want to confront by asking me what my watch was doing on the counter instead of on my wrist (most likely).

At least these days she no longer rolls her eyes when I ask her the time.

A lack of imagination

I plodded through Russell Baker’s review of the late Gerald Boyd’s account of his rise and fall at the New York Times. Toward the bottom of the review, there’s this musing by Baker:

• Throughout Boyd’s version of events, one cannot help wondering whether the Blair story would have amounted to more than a light entertainment if Jayson Blair had been white. In that case might his journalistic derelictions and drug-and-whiskey-inspired antics have passed through the media as a circus sideshow, amusing because he got away with it at such a notorious institution, a delicious little New York tale of no consequence whatever, in a class with the French tightrope walker dancing between the twin towers of the World Trade Center?

The reference to the “French tightrope walker” and the trivialization of his endeavor caught my attention because 1) I’m in the mdist of reading “Let the Great World Spin,” a novel which uses as a backdrop Philippe Petit’s  wirewalk between the Twin Towers on Aug. 7, 1974; I’d seen the documentary, “Man on Wire”; and read Petit’s book.

I guess what struck me most about Baker’s casual dismissal was the lack of its imagination. It’s true that Petit’s feat was not as world-shattering as, say, Neil Armstrong’s walk on the moon. On the other hand, the moon walk was repeated, what, a dozen times? Whereas Phillipe Petit’s walk was never ever replicated. And never will be. That fact alone makes it extraordinary.

Who says I’m a Luddite…

I got it in my head the other day that I needed an e-book reader, so I broke down and bought a Nook at Barnes & Noble.  Since I haven’t actually downloaded a book on it yet, I’ll have to get back to you on whether I really like it or not. I can already tell you, though, that it won’t be replacing the other kind of books, the real ones, on account of I have too much of a book fetish for that.

In a nutshell, I settled on a Nook vs. a Kindle because the Nook has a few more features. For one, it has a little touch screen down at the bottom. It’s kinda cheesy, but it works well enough. It has an expandable memory slot for storage; the battery IS REPLACEABLE; B&N supposedly has twice the amount of e-book selections as Amazon;  you can “loan” certain books to someone for up to two weeks; and finally because basically I think Jeff Bezos is an asshole.

You can read the comparison here.

ADDENDUM

I downloaded Let the Great World Spin by Collum McCann. (Did I mention the Nook offers both free 3G AND WiFi?) The download was fast and easy. The reading experience is very much like reading a regular book. Highlighting words or passages is a little clunky, but it’s nice to have a dictionary at your fingertips.

All in all, I have to say I’m pretty damn happy with the Nook.

1st book of crap

Since the chances of me getting published are less than zilch, I decided to make my own damn books. Funny what you can do with a pair of scissors and a stick of glue. The only thing is, now what do I do?

I figure I’ve got enough crap for two more books. I say books, but in reality these barely qualify as pamphlets. More like some zine from back in the day. On the other hand, they’re handcrafted and one of a kind. Best of all, you don’t have to download them from some e-book site to your tablet-like thingy.

If I could ever get my pirated version of Quark to work, I could print off a limited edition and send them as gifts. More likely, they’ll just go into a drawer and wait to be unearthed by some future archeologist who will declare them works of primitive art.