Love in the time of Loquera

She said, "if you write so much, 'man of words,' why don't you write about love?"

After a joke about my "manhood," I said something along the lines that I was not experienced enough in the subject of love. That my mere calling it a subject should illustrate the fact. That the world doesn't allow love and if there is any ounce of love, it's altered into lust. Distorted by neglect. Crushed by socio-economic status. Love seems to be a luxury: over-indulgence and gluttony.

real love? you're either born with a talent for it or not. And, my senses seem too gross: my hands crush when they ought to caress.

"That's bullshit. bullshit defense mechanism. Pre-emptive surrender," she said.

"Then I surrender to love."

"bullshit"

"and these conceptions of yours, of love, are conformity, and delusions"

You want a love story, huh? Momma? Want to hear me voice romanticized ideals encapsulated in pretty words. You want that "priceless" type of love, baby? My honesty and truth and communication? oh! but it's too many words....and your nails, your hair, my clothes, the make-up, the whole gamut of products, split us into "I" and "me," into mere reflections of a conditioned existence  lusting for affection, lusting for connection. We're producers of filtered love and emblematic monoliths of that laissez-faire type of love. Our love is packaged, bought, and sold. You want to know real love? it's ruthless, it's tunnel-vision, it goes all the way, one-way.

"What?"

"I mean that...look, hand me that book on the dresser, here...read this. Karl Marx knew love:

'Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. -- real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms...

Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking' -Marx and Engles, The German Ideology

in other words, our conceptions of love are totally mixed up. We produce 'love' and fix up ourselves for that idea of love: a produced love, amor. By the way, where's your Gucci bag?"

"you and your foreign words. Rhetorical tricks. "

Ok, here we go, I said.....you have no idea of the rosy spells you cast over my blind vision. Of the dream you have become in my memory whenever your perfume or the faint scent of your warm body creeps around corners or lingers like vapor in a coffee shop. The lipstick on a burrito that we chose to share. Blah blah blippity zippidity doo day. Are these words something that you'd like to hear? are you questioning whether they "come from the heart"?

"you talk too much, and too bad its all nonsense"

"Whatever. Love in this time of loquera, it just seems too rare. I told you I wasn't experienced; I don't know how to love; it seems a madness, really. Perhaps a disease I wasn't fortunate enough to catch"

"now you sound like a bitter, sad, lonely man"

"that's what happens when lacking love"

"I'm sorry"

"I don't need pity. But you ought to chant some Hail Mary's at your altar and wish upon a star as if the dying light were angels reaching towards the blue marble floating in space to save you with love. I told you I don't know anything  about love. Love is a word that has been corrupted. What? here is a dictionary definition: an intense feeling of deep affection. Would you like to hear some deep affectionate words about how I looooove running my fingers through your hair yet absolutely not think about your warm, almond bronze legs? That's a dehydrated type of love, mi amor. Like I said, love seems an innate talent. I don't know what love is. I know that there exists a lot of hate and confusion, and that that separates us from one another, and hate and confusion is what corrupts understanding or feeling love. Love is another dimension of reality. A plane(t) of existence in and of itself. One that we, or rather the "I" and "me", are yet figuring out. Love is taking away all the hate and confusion in all of its varying degrees of jealousy, stress, sadness. Love is your brother punching you in the back and you taking it because you can absorb it and make it better. Love is your mother calling you and telling you that your father mistreated her and absorbing that as well. Love is absorbing all of the hate and confusion that the world throws at you and showing the music of the soul through laughter and smiles. love is...love is...."






"shh...ya callate. And, put yer lips to good use"



Then I surrender

Then I surrender

Then I surrender

I surrender

I surrender

I surrender

I

I

I

i

i

!

MeXcal: borderline merger of realites

Gray days make for strange times around Los Angeles. Time seems to slow down and the day is gone before you even get to enjoy the possibility of an onset of gray ennui brought about by the haze of smog and ashy skies: everyone seems to pause in a monochrome daze. But, on sunny days, heat seeps into our skulls and microwaves our brains into varying degrees of lunacy.

And today, like most days in L.A., it's a sunny day. Patches of clouds float like white cotton candy on the backdrop of a massive, overbearing blue canvas. Metal machines in the shape of a cross fly high above the Angeleno smog. On the 710 exit at Valley Blvd, engines emit black smoke and hum vroom! vroom! while the man with the cardboard sign coughs ack! ack! The heat intensifies the more one remains in place, but you move forward, catching a hot breeze here and there. Cars congests and twists and turn as the traffic lights conduct the symphony of traffic like the bellow lungs of an accordion. Push. Pull. Stop, go. Slow down. Speed up. Breath. Go! hurry. Inhaaaallleeee. Exhaleeeee. It's turning! now! wait. halt. honk honk honk~

I'm stuck in traffic, racing to be on time and surrender my energies to higher powers. I'm not speaking figuratively here; I'm talking socio-economix blues (I play my part in the suicidal concerto, pressing the mechanical pedal, accelerating the disengaged clutch: rrrooom moo moo moo moo)

Ads. Commuters. Walkers. Disputers. Computers. Stupider. Smog. Oxygen. Homeless. Homemore...This "modern" world possess' the ability to breed schizo-bodybuilder-narcissistic-anti-cool-consumers children of the future: #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. And these metals and concrete boxes that possess the ability to numb and sleep you to death does not help the barrage of concussions that can slowly grind you into amnesia. I'm just here pressing the "pedal to the metal," and eating cheese crackers.  

My dad used to say, estamos en Califas. Canijo!
Oh yeah, hell yeah.

Me&Califas.
meXcal, a borderline merger of realities.
MexKali: miXture of Time and Death. Kali, "the black one," and Me. 
El meXcalero
"para todo mal, mezcal, y para todo bien también"
aqui, no mas, Nomas aqui. No Mas! Canijo!

Some resemble walking dead amnesiacs, while others are literally killing themselves on the daily grind. It's an assault on life, living everyday in the constant drift of movement away from humanity (destiny? Perhaps it's not that bad. The next evolutionary step might be tech.no.logic.(k)ill, and the "great dying off" will be the consequential shed of the biological skin so to enter the technological hive: OUROBOROUS: twisting and turning and evolving back and forth, like that boomerang Ellison describes)

Still in traffic. This heat. This shinny sun boiling my brain into a soupy stew of soft meats in cerebrospinal fluid. I'm not dead yet though it feels like I am, but how do the dead feel? They feel nothing. It's like going through these motions, in line, honk, me next. Walking under the sun reminded of eventual decay, looking at every step taken to move forward while the grave remains underneath my sole.


A recent Vice report said that "Unemployment is Killing 45, 000 people each year." something about the number of suicides related to unemployment rates.  A Que Canijos! #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. Its either death from no work or death by overwork; the Japanese call it Karoshi, 過労死 (かろし).

The suns been out all day, heating the land. People's soles hot under the Sun, salpicando and dancing the impassioned masquerade! Gimme gimme gimme some o' dat unemployment suicide blues! and Mezcal! Lost souls that could have been. Shoot. Lost causes to a potential workers solidarity movement. What have you got to say on the matter, Marx? Kropotkin? Gramsci? Lukács? Althusser? Deleuze? Guattari? What's that ya'll say? class struggle? that the proles are alienated, and without an identity, or income, living Hell!? And what else? since many people's sense of identity results from their employment, they feel lost?....oh Boy! ooouuuu weeeee!!! I don't know any o' dat nonsense talk! You guys and your special vocabulary with yer subalterns, yer culture, yer ideological state apparati or however ya say it!, and and and and yer yer dissociation, and ancillary culture and all that jazz. Them words be zounds! Gimme gimme gimme some o' dat unemployment suicide blues! and Mezcal!

I've been dazing and daydreaming most of this day, lost in inner space from radioactive intake of one too many doses of gray. I blackout on the drive home. Suddenly, I'm in my room. It's late and when the sun goes down, the 'lectric moon keeps me warm.

It's time to give in.

Catch the Gold Line on Mednik and Beverly into the veins of Kali on the gold train. Cortez, our gold is yet in Boyle Heights! it's in East Los. It's still in the golden thighs of brown and sun-burnt bodies. In the movement of Afrikan Soul.

 

Here it comes. Hop in. Snake through and under the concrete and steel of the sun burned Angeleno metropol. Maybe die of cancer someday. Maybe get run over. Careful, it's too easy to get on the "wrong way" or miss your stop, or maybe you were meant to get lost and meet that "random" person. Fuck you muth'fucka. and you momma and daddy. Shut the fuck up bitch! Keep talking! Thwack! someone just got crunched by the weight of gravity of a 410,000 pound punch from a vato with a loko motive. Remain calm and coherent for as long as you can before possibly "snapping" into reality on the Blue line. I saw it once. 1am--last train to Long Beach. Man mumbling something into the reflection on the window. Spooked out from something he saw. Ran out. Left his bag behind. It smelled bad, like rotted ass flesh gone more than one too many days without a soap and water. People started moving and cursing: hole shit mein! ouuuu weee boy! aw, hellll naww!


Here comes the hustle man and his goods. $10 for the reds and $20 for the blues, but for you amigo, special price. Give me both. Here's 30. Take the change, and tell the vulture organization to stop laundering money from Big Cocaine through these candy pills. Shit! I missed my stop. This is the richlands. Cerros and mountains. The land of swine, and slave profiteers. Imperialist and colonialist. Philanthropists and Humanitarians. Shh, the white folks are sleeping on mountains. Let's go for a hike...express your technicolor feelings by trying to capture them in a moment of still life, and thus adding to the digital pastiche mosaic of 1's and 0's that everyone Oh's and Ah's.

The pill takes its form. Red and blue make purple. Purple people on the gold line. The hustle man was really a medicine man, man. Is this that purple stuff? I'm tripping. And, I'm tripping on the trip. Purple haze vision and mysterious apparitions: Swine. Rats. Snakes. Sheep. Rabbits. Coyotes. The train forks here, careful on the time slippage, it can easily fracture here, and you'll miss your departure/arrival point once again. You might end up "lost" amid the various tiny villages of Los Angeles. Canijo! #whatever #whateverwhatever #ImSoOverIt. I'm losing my grip on reality.

The cliche old man whose suppose to be the "wise" messenger archetype symbolizing a good omen next to me asks, "How are you?"

Fine

There's no connection. He has as much company as I do! hahahaha!! but it feels good. Sharing the diddly-squat is something.

That smelly bag on the train is still there, except there are many more now. There's a man high on patriotism. High on nationalism. He's got a veteran's jacket. He fractured and lost, just like the rest, but he's holding on to his sanity with psychotic fervor. He's yammering something to people on the train about Aguas Blancas. He's drunk blabbering: A yo! tzinapa! Mireles Valverde! Ahua! Tlataya! I can see him from the reflection on my window. Atenco! Atenco! Acteal! In another reality, that could be me.

I've had enough tonight. This is my stop fellas. You can open the doors now. On the L.A. trains I'm Warren Fuckin Buffet! the Wizard! I leave behind me the disoriented Mestizo beside the Afrikana and a medley of brown, black, and bruised bodies. Watch out ladies and gents! Warden Buffet is leaving the fucking building! Off you go now! I'll let some of you sleep in here tonight! All of the trains end up in the same place! don't worry about being lost! Especially you there! looking at the window reflections with the thousand-yard-stare! ou weee boy! snap out of it! Look at me! I've got $20 in my pocket 'till next payday and that's enough. Learn to live like me, fellas. Just live a little, would'ja? Just a little. not a lot. just a little. just. live. a. little. just a little.

I hear sounds of train tracks and whizzing cars and muttering retreats and half deserted streets. At my exit I see J. Alfred Prufrock; he walks toward me, then recedes his steps, then moves left before moving to his right and ends up back in the same spot. On my walk home, years of explosions flicker down tonight as the light pollution diminishes the visibility of starlight. It's all for good; I'm too busy watching my step to look up and wonder about stars.

Illegal legalese esé

You can see drifters gliding to and fro and never quite moving forward since they're not fully grounded, and repeating the gestures of yesterday and going "hua--hua, gluh gluh, eh eh" in pauses and stupors around El Sereno. Depending on their state of mind, their plane of existence must be one of purgatory or hell; either way, the repetition and boredom must be a nightmare.


Then again, these wanderers could be living examples of the manifest and latent functions of restrictive covenants emplaced by the justice system that barred mexican-americans, or rather non-whites, from purchasing homes in El Sereno. Illegal legalese esé.

The struggle is not against flesh and blood (and, yes, it is real, whatever it is). Sometimes, in our blind fits, we seem to learn to direct our energies against one another, sinking together in a boat of injustice, of profanity, of confusion. Yet there seem to be certain powers that bind our pathways and string along our will which do not always make themselves clear. And the pain we feel, which turns into abusive "fuck you's" we spew, only tends to degrade: we curse each other. And, the theater of life turns obscene.

Everyone becomes a clown; the more spectacular the show, the more captivated the spectators.

You might say nothing carries meaning, and the only weight it holds comes from "logic" and meaning-making via words (words which some would call empty).

And life, well, it goes on...

In the end, it seems that all everyone is doing is "trying to get by" and in the process add zest, carpe diem, "live for the day," be positive, and all that high school pep rally stuff, be aggressive, be be aggressive: grab life by the balls and seize the future. Visualize, and be hypnotized--enact observer effect theory and alter the atomized universe and make it yours. "Do you," fuck the "haters," eject the toxic people in your life, et cetera et cetera...


and life, well, it goes on and on and on...

 

But, though it may go on, and on and on, I'm of the disposition that life cannot go "on" when the scales of Fortuna seem tipped in favor of someone that is forcing her wrists. Every time I hear these types of terms expressed in varying degrees of passion or impassioned sentiments, reactionary comments imply that one should be grateful to live in America; that one should be grateful to not be afflicted with any illnesses, bedridden, as if the statements expressed were suggesting that the individual him/herself wasn't appreciative of their privileges.

I'm often caught in between the turmoil of left and right.

The "honest truth," if any, is that sometimes I get sudden waves of sadness, and tears flood the rims of my eyes; the whole matter seems ridiculous. Any film over my iris becomes cleared. A silent howl and weep for the cleansing of the I. Lachrymal lagrimas from LA crimes in these LA times. My eyes start burning as I attempt to stay the flow of salt and water; soon, they become irritated. I start laughing because it's ridiculous, and bittersweet.

No matter what though...the popular ideology is to "keep moving forward" and not be, as my drill sergeant used to call it, an oxygen thief. I'm not a regular subscriber though. I like magazines like Backpacker that sell me romanticized illusions of traveling and getting away: "Call me Ishmael...This is my substitute for pistol and ball. With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."

"we all choose to live life / we confuse how with why"

References:
Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)
John Frusciante, "A Doubt," The Will to Death (2004)