“I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body--flesh and bone--and from the Earth's body--stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.” ― Gloria E. AnzaldĂșa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza

Wednesday, October 8, 2014

56k connections

"What is it? tell me, tell me tell me tell me!" she urged through a screen of smoke created from rolled up shag and zig-zag. The speakers played nostalgia from an era of desktop 56k connections: (dial tone) beep, beep, bop, beep, bop, brreeeezzzZZzzbongbong EEEEeeee!!! kshhhhhhhh  *~ Welcome. America Online: Spice Girls, Porn, Grunge, and check your inbox: you've got spam. The solo ended and the singers voice nasally screeched, "And if you're giving in, then you're giving up."

"C'mon c'mon! let it out!"
But he had nothing to let out; in fact, the silence and lack of words ill-ustrated a void and emptiness of useless consumption and oxygen expenditure. He was tired of words and theories and rationale and explaining and saying things that ended as sounding brass or tinkling cymbals. He then then said something about a ticking clock inside his mind and something about a gun to his head, something melodramatic and stupid. He said something about it being him, referring to his embarrassingly debilitating libido. She said he was a just sad man, a lonely sad and organized book shelve man. A hide from the world man. A not even a man man. A slowly devolving primate man. A man too preoccupied with silly thoughts man.

He wiped his glasses; then, he twiddled his thumbs thinking about words while she pinched and packed tobacco fibers into a nicely rolled cigarette. She saw through him; he had a feeling that she could do this.

Everything quivered in place. The driving of cars on the i10 echoed up to the terrace; a receding siren cried out as it snaked south. The signal tower red light bulb receded in and out of the night canvas, like the phosphorescent searing embers building a mountain of grey ash on the tray.




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