Summer

(by Lester Robles O'Connor for JP)

Hours wasted then re-
gained through
tracing and re-
tracing.




(Since I appropriated the poem, it counts as my text for the day. )

There was once a boy who, during his first year in the virtual world, decided not to announce the date of his birthday. He thought it was fake and flimsy and not at all advisable. He felt like the brief moments of these wishes in this strange, un-real world were too ephemeral, that they passed too quickly by, and he questioned the reality of these waves of greetings. He thought and thought and thought and berated the very idea in his head, the emotion and excitement that it would provoke, lamenting the hollowness of it all. When the day of his birthday came that year, there were no phone calls and no one knocked on his door to give him a sweetbread or a can of beans. Not one present arrived. Not even an email made its way across the ocean or from the other side of the country or the city or the street he lived on. The only person to remember was his grandmother who weakly congratulated him, sticking her head through the boy’s doorway after he’d already tucked himself into bed. His inattentive mother called the following day, scolding him for not posting the date in the virtual world. She coughed out a kind of scratchy congratulations, which sounded more like a hack in the throat. His brother forgot too and called a week later with the same reproaches and then had his son sing the traditional birthday song over the speakerphone. In years past, his family and some friends had always remembered, but not with the advent of the new virtual world; it seemed everybody had stopped keeping track of birthdays. Everyone had ceded control to some strange virtual birthday god who would keep track of them himself and inform everyone when it was time to send funny comments and wisecracks on the occasions of friends’ births. As if now, with everyone plugged into the virtual world, his birthday had simply, disastrously ceased to exist.

When the next year’s birthday rolled around, the boy’s entry into the virtual world was complete; in fact, the virtual world had come to take up as much time in his life as his real life, if not more. He would spend hours checking up on his virtual friends, long-lost friends, friends he’d met briefly or spontaneously in some playground or encounter or street corner. So that year, he decided to put his birthday into the virtual world so that the whole wide net of friends would see it there and he would see what happened. The congratulations began to trickle in a few days early, people who were obviously getting it out of the way beforehand just in case they forgot. Then at 12am on the day of his birthday, he was at a festival in the street alone and amazingly a flock of acquaintances and semi-friends all knew about his birthday. They came up with kisses and drinks and good wishes and he wondered how everyone knew and then he remembered that they had found out in the virtual world. The flood of emails began at 12am as the virtual birthday cards and virtual birthday cakes and virtual birthday wishes piled up in astounding wave after wave after wave. Phone calls poured in from across oceans and wide expanses. Midday the next morning, a girl showed up on his porch with a sweetbread. Around noon, another girl put a can of beans on his doorstep after he stepped out to the grocery to buy some fruit. His mother called and his brother called with his son, all on conference call, and they all sang him the traditional birthday song. He even had invitations to go out at night, run around the neighborhood with the cool kids from the virtual world. He said no though. That just wouldn’t feel right.

That night, alone, the boy thought about all this, thought about the virtual god who had made sure to inform everyone in an appropriate and timely way about the anniversary of his birth, thought about all the small notes and birthday wishes, thought about all the moments that all those people took to think of him and to wish him something, something however fleeting and small as a wish that his birthday be happy. The boy just thought and thought and thought. In the end, he thought and thought and smiled.

That night, very late, after he’d unplugged from the virtual world, he sat at his desk wondering what he should do now, feeling empty as he often did after unplugging his brain from the rushing tide of virtual stimuli. He heard the low buzz of the TV his grandmother was watching in the other room and got up to go see her. He told his grandmother everything that had happened and how different this year had been from the year before. Then he sat down on the couch and watched the TV. A few minutes later, his grandmother told him he’d done the right thing. She turned to him and, shutting off the TV and standing up, she wished him a happy birthday.

There was a lot to be afraid of

and then we went and made art.

There is so much to be afraid of

when we go and make art.

When we go and make art

There is so much to be afraid of

and then we went and made art.

There was a lot to be afraid of.

A candy wrapper fluttered across the yard. The girl watched it twist and pull in the wind, as if fighting back against the flow of air delivering it forward. Suddenly, it stuck on a blade of grass. Or, I could say, on the prick of a cactus in the yard, speared by the wind onto the needle’s point. First, the girl watched it and decided this was trash. The wrapper, one side bright colored and wax-papered on the other, flittered in the wind, splayed across the needle, spoiling the paddle-shaped cactus, spoiling the yard. Then the girl was moved, she felt a pang of something in her insides. The trash had a particular value to it. The value of any particle. That the way she’d rejected the trash as just that, trash, was cruel and rash. The wrapper was in fact pierced through the heart, bored through by this unwelcome, unexpected invasion. A wrapper on the side of the yard, away from the noise of the street, protected and yet penetrated through its center. The girl focused on this piece of trash, its intrinsic specialness. Its value found in its unremarkableness. Unremarkable being the clunkiest, most intrusive word possible for saying simple. Simple. The girl was alone on the porch, rubbing the spaces between her toes to dry out the sweat. As the wind picked up, it tore the wrapper from its perch and tumbled it on its way, lifting and dropping in the ever-faster wind. The girl turned away from the wrapper, looked down at the reddish crook of her toes. I have an urge now to send a car barreling across the lawn leveling it all in one fell swoop. A creeping, nagging desire to blanket the lawn, the garden, the porch, the house in a blanket of ash from the refinery next door. Tell me not to do that, please.

My grandmother is dead. The house has been sold. Her table is in my eating area. Her santos have been divided up among the children, remnants in various houses on various shelves. The snails from the backyard are still crawling there. The pebbly driveway as well has held firm. The edging on her lawn has been kept steep and sturdy by the new landscaping crew hired to maintain it. I drive by there sometimes now. Just drive by and look at the outside of the red brick. The tallness of its two stories. I’m told the inside has been completely remodeled. I wouldn’t want to see it. I see pictures of myself as a baby crawling on the clean, cool linoleum floor. It looks like summer, the back kitchen door is propped open in the backyard with a brick. Where is that brick now? It was one of the same bricks used in the backyard on the wavy, uneven patio where we would hunt for those snails. Crawling around on our knees on the moist, mossy bricks hunting for snails and rolie-polies. We’d take salt and shrivel up the snails, imagine them crying out for mercy. The double garage in the back with a small room off to the side for a servant to stay in. My grandmother’s maid would stay there. A tree once fell on the garage. I wonder if Pearlie B was there when it fell. There are pictures of my brother and I with my cousins in the backyard of the house. We are wearing tight, flowery short shorts and wide neck shirts with dainty, too-big cardigans. My mother was going through a phase during which she’d decided to sew our clothes. I have huge John Lennon glasses on. Glasses I lied about my vision to get. I wanted glasses. My eyesight deteriorated and soon I did need them in fact not just in fiction. The windows in the dining room shined they were so clean. My father’s back went out once while we were staying at the house. I remember him screaming as my mother lead him into the bathroom she had used as a child. The books in the study were on built-in shelves and went from mid-level to the ceiling. Below it were cabinets. The attic was dusty and full of mystery, a narrow staircase leading up to it, claustrophobia-inducing smallness opening up at the top into the wonder of this musty space lost the rest of the world. I sat in the study with my grandparents and watched the news with them, the national news with Dan Rather and Robert Macneil. I have the couch that was in my grandfather’s study. It has a spot on one sidearm where the upholstery was almost completely worn through. He would sit on that side and read and he must have grasped that spot and rubbed it quite a bit. The bathroom was full of yellow and orange flowered wallpaper, the glossy, textured kind. The smell of the house is impossible to forget and yet I constantly forget it until, like happened a few years ago, I went over to a friend’s house, a similar home from the same era in Houston, and remarkably the bathroom smelled exactly the same. I sat in the bathroom for a long time and just inhaled, letting in all of the remembrances.

This is where my mind is my mind is crazy all these people around me are my mind is like this like from one thing to another like I can’t get out of it can’t feel any bit of it of what is really going on sometimes I get these spurts of attention like these sudden bolts of suddenly the energy aligns how do i say this like it all makes sense you over there me over here we are all working together on so many things so many all of a sudden things and you in your corner and me in mine suddenly the I that rules my brain it breaks out and I feel like I am suddenly with you somewhere where you are making things out of things or making things out of words or making words out of things and words words words.

I’m not going to write about this. Or that. That thing we did, not that. Or this trip we took over there, yeah, this one, the one all the way over that way. Yes, that one. No, I’m thinking it’s best not to write about this this this or damn this or this one or this motherfucker bent over and did what? Not not going to write about that. You asked me to write about that, or reminded me this would make a great thing to write about, yes this, you said you never lived through that before, so this would make a great, yeah, yeah, that one that whole thing that time the one yeah this one too. I mean, you said this story was just too good, yeah that one, this time it has to end up in print. Poem, story, you should write this up in an article you said, but you know this this this this this all this this this this was not made to be written about. This once written would be something totally different and you know the world doesn’t take kindly to this or this or this. It’s so exotic, so amazing, so cliché goddamnit, I mean really do you really need me to write about this or this or this. Like that wasn’t enough, like all that out there in the papers isn’t enough to tell you all you never really cared to know about that anyone. What? You care about all the trival this and that, bric a brac being told out there? Really? Well, I hate to say this, hate to be repetitive, but no matter how many times you remind me or suggest this to me, I am not going to write about all this that we just lived through this and this and that and oh yeah that, no for real this or that, none of it because we lived through all that. Together.

My Own Personal Grind

There is a writing project called The Grind in which people write together each day for one month. It's mandatory to write every day and email out your pieces.

There is another writing project called the 3:15 Experiment where people write together each day for the month of August at 3:15am.

I've done the 3:15 Experiment a few years. I wanted to do the Grind for the first time or the 3:15 again this year. But instead: for the month of August, I am going to discipline myself and write a text a day. Just one text of any length. With no genre conventions tied to them. And I will post these texts as I write them. As a means of noting what I have done.

It's my own personal grind.

New Format

I am done with Bad Texas. But I am not turning my back on the past. Rather I just changed the web address of what was Bad Texas. The address is now johnpluecker.blogspot.com. And I will probably change the title a lot. For at least a while. I wanted a space where I could just post things I am writing, photos, experiments, meandering, failed texts, issues, a more open format. The title Bad Texas feels small now. Constricting. Definitive. The new name, the current name, the name that will be here for a bit is Bad Friends. Because Texas originally was the word used by the Caddo indigenous people in Texas for friend. The Spanish heard the word and named Texas for it. Bad friends. I like the new openness of the title. But I am sure it will change soon. So be open to the changes. Because Bad Friends will not last.

O wind, rend open the heat,
cut apart the heat,
rend it to tatters.

Fruit cannot drop
through this thick air--
fruit cannot fall into heat
that presses up and blunts
the points of pears
and rounds the grapes.

Cut the heat--
plough through it,
turning it on either side
of your path.

- H.D.

Revising Translations

Spanish: Los programas de igualdad de oportunidades se empezaron a aplicar en el campo laboral debido a que ahí se necesita urgentemente suprimir la discriminación, ya que ésta afecta sobre todo a la población femenina.

First Draft: Equal opportunity programs were first enacted in the workplace since there is an urgent need to do away with discrimination there, as it affects the female population above all.

Revised Sentence: Equal opportunity programs were first put in place on the job, since the elimination of discrimination there was an urgent priority due to its overwhelming impact on women.

Like twenty minutes on the revision of one sentence. But I think it is better now!

Waka Waka

Más info sobre las versiones acá.


And even more history of the Waka Waka here. Some (like Dibussi Tande here) argue this is another in a long line of world artists plundering African music, taking it, passing it off as their own and then unwilling to credit (or pay!) the original creators.

Justice for Anastasio Hernández Rojas

Though Spanish-language press has been talking about the death of Anastasio Hernández Rojas all weekend, news in English is starting to come out about this man who was killed by Border Patrol agents on Friday at the San Ysidro International Port of Entry. The Fresno Bee reports that:

Relatives told the American Friends Service Committee that Hernandez was deported May 25 after being stopped for a traffic violation in San Diego, said Christian Ramirez, national coordinator of the group's Project Voice immigration reform campaign. He then returned to the U.S. illegally through the rugged mountains east of San Diego with his younger brother, who had also been deported, Ramirez said. They were arrested by the Border Patrol on Friday afternoon. Hernandez came to the U.S. when he was 14, followed by four brothers, and all of them work construction jobs, Ramirez said. He has mostly lived in the San Diego area with his wife of 21 years and five U.S.-born children.

News about the death from Nueva Raza is here and from the LA Times is here. More information about the autopsy is here. The San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium is organizing to fight for some kind of justice in this case (and in all similar cases past, present and future).