JUST ANOTHER WEIRD SPRING

Each Spring gets weirder. I find myself gritting my teeth while my eyelids twitch. I’ve been expecting some kind of global trauma ever since that day in 2020 when I showed up at work and two supervisors in masks were standing outside the locked gate. I haven't seen anything quite that apocalyptic but we keep getting close.

After all, there’s a war. Another one. How many can we get going at once before we can call it a World War? Do nuclear weapons have to be involved? Do protests, riots, and acts of wholesale death and destruction here at home count?

Here in the Metro Phoenix Area, we’ve skipped Spring and are having a Classic Summer with Excessive Heat Warnings and a superbloom of desert wildflowers while the East is getting buried in snow from a megastorm.

I dreamed of giant alligators living in the desert and a bookstore doing great business at midnight.

Not quite being buried up to our waists in the sand and being eaten by ants, but we’re just getting, er . . . warmed up. 

My monstrous imagination is running wild again.

It’s entertaining if I don't think about how it can destroy . . . everything.  I still get a perverse kick out of the news being like a wacko sci-fi from my youth (the Nixon era, yeah, I know, bizarre . . .) But meanwhile, the far reaches of my brain merrily charge into deranged places of their own making.

Which is fun for me, but what about all of the rest of you?

The best strategy is to keep doing what I always do: Keep making my interior dream channel into stuff I can sell, er, share with you all.

Step right up folks, we have a wild Chicano recently captured in the still smoldering ruins of Aztlán. The poor creature suffers from a ghastly condition–it’s got sci-fi growing in its brain! For just a few newly-minted hundred-dollar coins, we’ll let you look through this device through the hole we’ve drilled through his skull, and wires we’ve plugged into his amygdala, hippocampus, and visual cortex to see it happen!

Yeah, it’s all fun until the world actually does come to an end, but people have been telling me that all my life, and it hasn’t happened yet!

Heh-heh-heh!

CHICANONAUICA ASKS WHATCHACALLUS, ANYWAY?

It's a rasquache word game in Chicanonautica, at La Bloga.

Because words can make you crazy:

Like Chicano:

 And Latinx:

Can AI be defeated by poetry?

FROM THE WRITING FRONT

I hate to start with a cliché, but this year is going by so fast. March already. How did it happen?

Is it World War Three yet? But I digress . . .

I haven’t done all of the ambitious things I wanted to get done before March got here, but I’ve accomplished a few. Doing them all is probably impossible. My to-do list is always trailing out of the frame. Days, hours aren't long enough for me.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve flirted with a silly theory that we die when we run out of things to do. If it’s true, I’ll live forever.

One of those things for me is my writing career. I don’t have to worry about it. It took on a life of its own years ago, and will probably keep on trucking long after I croak. I’ve got stories in a new anthology and will have one in another that will come out soon. I’ve neglected my recently finished novel, but am getting ready to start bugging publishers again. I’ve diddled around with working out the Paco Coen, Mariachi of Mars, novel. Then there are those short stories.

I’ve been expecting short fiction to die for about forty years now and to my surprise it keeps chugging along. It won’t make you much money and the whole business is frustrating, it seems to have a future.

I get fed up, wondering if anybody reads any of these publications, and dreaded sending anything out into the abyss.

Unfortunately, I’ve trained myself during my formative years to react to life by writing stories . . .

And I’ve been spoiled but I’ve sold a lot of stuff in the 21st century as the result of publishers approaching me.

To make matters worse, I consider my writing to be worthless if it doesn’t get read. 

So I’m looking over my recent stories, and the modern markets.

All while the world is . . . well, you know: Is it World War Three yet? I feel like the writers in the “Hey, anybody want to buy a book?” meme. 

To my horror, I found that a lot of these recent pieces were actually unfinished, not in a final form that can be sent to an editor.

So I’m going over them all and will be going over them all at least one more time after that.

Argh!

The thing is, they’re pretty good, and having created them makes me feel better.

I am doomed to forever pursue my dreams of glory.

At least it’s not boring.

And it beats checking to see how the war’s going.

Maybe I'll try looking outside the box, like trying to sell these stories as a book without looking for magazines or anthologies to take them first. When in doubt, break format, I’ve said.

Face it, we’re gonna see a whole lotta breaking going on in the near future.

And maybe, in the insane process, I’ll make some people feel better, in my twisted way.

CHICANONAUTICA DREAMS OF A SURREALISTIC BURRITO WESTERN

 

Chicanonautica exposes my secret mind movie, at La Bloga.

El Topo is my favorite western, so it's not an ordinary burrito:

So why not some outré spaghetti?

Or maybe some acid?

And other weirdness . . .