CACTUS JUNGLE REVELATIONS

 

The jungles in my life owe more to Max Ernst than Edgar Rice or William S. Burroughs. The pulp/B-movie ambiance is mostly in my head. The brutal, sometimes beautiful surrealism is reality. My sense of beauty gets further warped each time I deal with it.

I hack away at the alien, invasive crab grass. Why do people, mostly from cooler climates that get hotter every year, want grass? Why don’t they appreciate the incredible desert? 

Surviving here is both a struggle and a miracle.

Cacti bite and draw blood as I uncover them. They aren’t pampered potted plants leading lives of luxury indoors or in the manicured gardens of obsessive-compulsives. They bear scars, decaying, cracked skin, still-attached dead limbs. They tilt at awkward angles while new growth reaches for the sky. 

It’s a decaying, struggling, decadent beauty that I wallow in.

What a friend called “cactus porn” I used as a metaphor to illustrate my rants about Arizona politics. Now the fascist mind set has taken over the country, maybe ever the entire planet.

In the war between the cactus and the grass, I’m with the cactus. Over the years, living with these . . . dare I call them beings? I’ve become aware of a kind of cactus intelligence, and there’s nothing artificial about it, though it does hallucinate. My beloved Peruvianus Monstrose taught me a lot during her all too short lifetime. At least her children survived.

I never know what I’ll uncover on these expeditions (there I go to my default pulp sci-fi setting again). There have been disintegrating cactus limbs, avian corpses, ant colonies, lost toys, fallout from fireworks and fast food orgies. Someday I’ll find a lost city. Or be captured by the Amazon guards of a clandestine subterranean civilization. 

Meanwhile, I slash away at the crab grass to keep the lawn police happy. Who knows, with the the way things are going, they may decide to report us to the New Gestapo, and they’ll cart us off to one of the “detention” camps they’re building, confiscate the house and land, and have an excuse to let developers level the entire neighborhood and install more dystopian apartments for workers of not-yet existent industry, or parking lots for the entertainment center that is growing like a cancer around the State Farm Stadium.

They better watch out. We’ve been getting too much rain with the changing climate. The rattlesnake Agua Fria Freddie saw his shadow, so it’s gonna be an early summer (again).  I’ve got that oh-boy-it’s-almost-summer vacation feeling. Mutation is in the air. There’s a new world coming. Heh-heh-heh . . .

So I continue my search and destroy mission, while listening to Venezuelan and Colombian radio stations via radio.garden.

Ice melts fast here. Evaporates.

Gods and cacti need their blood offerings.

 

CHICANONAUTICA SACRIFICES FOR THE AZTEC EMPIRE WITH CHANO AND CANTINFLAS

 

Chicanonautica investigates an old Mexican movie at La Bloga.

It's El Signo de la Muerte from 1939:

Starring Cantinflas:

Directed by Chano Urueta:

Who acted in some American movies: 

DON’T FORGET THAT GUERRILLA MURAL!

I am not trying to predict the future. 

Like Ray Bradbury, I often write to prevent futures. I never expected to live in a world similar to my stories, and I can’t shake the horrible feeling that it’s about to get worse.

Believe me, I understand that need for escapism, but for me it’s often not enough. I enjoy fiction that shows people fighting back, to help me imagine that it’s still possible.

I recommend books like Rudy Rucker’s Juicy Ghosts, and if I can be so bold as to exploit the current predicament for self-promotion, my own work, and not just High Aztech, Smoking Mirror Blues, and Cortez on Jupiter.  

When I read my collection Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song I was shocked by how much anger I was expressing. Yeah, I’ve lived all my life in a society that has been oppressing me, but didn’t realize it was a major theme. Some might call it an obsession.

I’m not the only one who thinks so:

It particularly comes out in  “Uno! Dos! . . . One! Two! Tres-Cuatro!,” “Flying the Under Radar with Paco and Los Freetails,” and “Skin Dragons Talk,” but it’s there in the other stories. 

I guess that’s just who I am.

I can only hope that it provides some insight or at least some amusement to my readers. We all sure need it now.

And let me take this opportunity to remind you that EzkaOne actually did the cover painting as a mural:

Meanwhile, don’t let the pendejos keep you down!

CHICANONAUTICA ASKS "WHO THE HELL IS PACO COHEN?"

Chicanonautica is about my character Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, over at La Bloga.

So here's some of my favorite songs:

My dad had a Charro Avitia album that he played a lot:

 

Then Dr. Doctor Demento introduced me to Lalo Guerrero:

 

And Flaco Jimenez:

 

These days I listen to Cancion Mexicana on KUVO.org on Sunday mornings. They play this a lot: