en esta tumba de lo banal. aquí te esperaré.

(taken from an old blog post.  Tuesday, February 15, 2005. unedited.)

my house doesn’t make any sense.
i pay. i eat. i sleep. i stay.
my house was built before i was born.
i watch. i meddle. i swoon. i don’t pray.

living my time: i grasp. i reach. i tried.
the sun before it rises still is bright somewhere,
out there in outer space.
it burns hot for no one and all.

“Are we fallen angels who didn’t want to believe that nothing is nothing and so we were born to lose our loved ones and dear friends one by one and finally our own life, to see it proved?”

- Jack Kerouac The Dharma Bums

I think I have finally realized why I tend to be rather irked/bothered by most explicitly *CHICANO* :

I tend to think of myself as being rather singular and un-pigeon-hole-able [but of course this is naive]. I’ve grown accustomed to feeling like an Other even amongst those that expouse feeling as an Other too. For instance, being at a MEChA meeting once in my first year of college brought this feeling on in waves. The notion that we should be united soley because of ethnic origin I began to see was dubious; what I later came to realize is that ethnic origin as a source of affilitaion is a false/invalid affiliation.

A much more profound and useful association/affiliation I’ve found is that found in equally angry/agitated people you meet every day. Those connections are found in shared emotion/feeling/experience transcend the alienation that can be found even within one’s ethnic group. So when I see someone extrapolating a certain behaviour or action as being “so Mexican” it can really irk me. For instance, hitting your kids with a chancla. I know that this seems to be common, but I was never hit with a chancla nor was any other sort of corporal punishment hurled my way. Does this reduce my Mexican-ness?

This is a can of worms which I’ll  reprise later…soon…

Hearing the buzzing of June Bugs by my window I remembered that I saw a strange beetle in the parking lot of the Griffith Observatory a week ago. Here it is in all its beguiling glory: