2021/03/23

nookie

it seems i won't be getting the third relief check. i got the trump checks, but i won't getting biden's.

so i'm opening another door. i'm opening all the doors. i'm on the other side. 

instinctively when people speak of money, or contributions to funds, charity, philanthropy, when prices are inflated, when heckling happens, i always throw up in my mouth a little. money doesn't mean anything to poverty. food, shelter, literacy, are not money. money has become an excuse to not be happy in life. money is how rude people manage their existence. it makes stupid things and invents horrible jobs. 

steven jobs, a syrian, didn't make apple computers to become rich. he became rich by making apple computers. bill gates didn't make windows, he made security alerts and created suspicion, and became rich by weaponizing doubt. he could have made actual doors, floors, shelves or gates and still been freakishly wealthy. 

windows, HA! micro+soft = an angry wife.

so,  facebook put me back in la carcel for 30 days

i called the chilean president a sudaco.

hello from back in the bloggosphere, where nobody reads you, i'm here for writing the way i talk.

it's not hateful, it's bilingual. 

dear mark zuckerberg, 

you have no community standards because facebook is not community and it's not yours to standardize. 

locking people's freedom out of AI neurology is a freak maneuver that's gonna take you straight back to dobbs ferry, or wherever you and aoc came from, where the chinese kid first shot and killed three people at his school simon's rock. 

nobody wanted nor wants to live in 1984. have you watched depeche mode awkward moments on youtube? do it, you'll comprehend that the last 30 years and the first 30 years we are flat dead center in the middle of, cannot be standardized by words taken out of context that sound hateful, the sum of our working class vocabulary, the slang of the oppressed, isn't yours to fact-check.

because 1984 wasn't anything like the novel 1984, not even remotely. 1984 was cyndilauperville, was big hair rock and roll, was devo cowboy, was queen breaking free. the year 1984 canceled the book 1984 the way the year 2019 canceled the movie bladerunner set in the year 2019. in the real year, pre-covid, it did not rain non-stop over los angeles, there were no flying cars, people hardly smoked and rutger hauer died. even the year 2001 canceled the movie 2001, and we're still under the blue and white thumb of the idiots that plotted to destroy the world trade center, on the same day as chile's 1973 bombing of the govt palace in santiago. in 1984 we saved the starving children of africa, twice, the cold war was an antique peter sellers comedy, the imagery of metropolis was like the ancient titanic at the bottom of a nameless sea. 1984 was the actual opposite of scary and dystopic. it was shiny, and puffy, and all over latin america people were building strong minds, with simple food and hard labor.

shit did not, has not and cannot match up, no matter how many parallels the pundits may draw.  in 1984 we did not wear seat belts, we stayed out all night, there were always four seasons, the amazon forest was still the size of continental europe, tetanus and heroine were the only common injectables, our wheat, oats and corn were real and glyphosate was being developed in secret as a bioweapon in some sinister lab financed by cocacola, cars and war criminals. we still felt protected under the geneva convention, in costa rica we still felt immune to war because we literally had no armed forces and no reguetón. contrary to the somber tone of the novel 1984, the real year's music and fashion, the places we listed and wore things to, were magical. 

all the modernity and luxury big tech worships, have become so boring. they are two gentile douche bags, elon musk and jeff bezos. their cars all look the same, their highways and their traffic lights all feel the same, the same new smell of conditioning, the same undying eventuality, a wife and kids, acid reflux.  

and they tell of making quantum computers that are smarter than me. they is a machine. they objectify themselves. they submit to body mechanics, vaccinations, nanotechnology, piercings, colonoscopies, to precision tweaks invented in medieval torture chambers. but they can never be man and can never be woman, except in the marvel that is their own imaginations.

in a sharp turn of events, i've been released from the facebook word police, my sentence cut short from 30 to only 5 days. it helps to be honest at every moment, most of what you say is what you leave unsaid. the internet belongs to the world's real army, and quantum computing AI cannot even go online until nature has been restored. so always tell the truth and do no harm.


2021/03/16

reasons to be cheerful

Dear Reasons to be Cheerful.

You are a refreshing space for positive news in an ocean of muck; "how opera classes greatly improve covid lung recovery" "how to reinstate the right to repair" "how landlords and tenants can talk it out" are a great beginning to many years of headline galvanization.

I really like this site, it's content and it's editorial objective. So, I got super excited when I saw you're seeking contributing editors and immediately tried to drum up pitch lines for stories from where I live in Costa Rica, in Central America, in all of Latin America. 

I hopped up to scribble on my white board. I waited. I wrote "24 reasons to be cheerful", I waited, then "south of the border". Then I wrote the numbers 1 through 24 as a list, then I lay down for a nap.

Off the top of my head I could not pitch a cheerful recent story. I could pitch "Stories we'd be cheerful about if... ", "Costa Rica the richest...", "Only two nations have beaten the American army back to America, Vietnam and Nicaragua...", "Lets talk about bugs, a visit to the La Salle Museum...", "Who the heck sold us all this razor wire and how much did it cost?...". 

They're all stories of intrigue that could be told in such a manner so as to name the names without placing the blames, but keeping the maths, the maps and the timelines as accurate as possible. 

"Tiny spaces, going places..." "Trams, why steam punk made public transport awesome again..." "Google maps, San José, no pedestrian remote view...". 

As I state in my résume, I am not a fan of cars, generally, and I do not own a phone. I am however, in the close contact with urban information architects that have been seeking somewhere to critique the "pura vida" infrastructure in a luxury based economy that's been rebranded at world trade fairs as "essential".

We don't have a lot of light reading on important subjects down here. Online, we're currently invested in the freedom of memes and the subjects of disclosure all whilst hushed by corporate marketing, which for me, a career journalist of 30 years between Chile and New York,  witness to several attempts at nation branding, is reason to be cheerful.

I'd love the opportunity to amplify your publication in any capacity. I'm a very fast and accurate translator  and could scout for other collaborators across the region. We could key up lists of weekly topics, the conversations, opinions and controversies they address. 

While I've not published in print in many years, this is the link to a memoir I wrote: Catracha