LITHUANIAN ZOOM GIG

  

Facebook comes in handy. Through their Messenger, I heard from an old writer friend, Jaq Greenspon. He’s teaching in Lithuania and wanted to know if I would be willing to talk to his class via Zoom.

A new experience and a chance to talk to Jaq again. I said yes.

I would have to be awake at 2:15 AM Arizona time, but it would be fun, a chance to get knocked out of my comfort zone.

When the day came, I did my usual stuff, but instead of goofing off in the afternoon, I took a nap. When I woke up, I had a cup of tea with caffeine—I no longer abuse the legal drug but indulge now and then because I don’t believe in Puritanism.

Then I watched a couple of silly old sci-fi flicks and some Warner Brothers cartoons until it was time to set up the Hacienda Hogan video studio.

After the obligatory technical difficulties, I was connected to Jaq and about 20 students in Lithuania, on the other side of the planet, next to Russia. Only a few students were in the classroom with Jaq. The rest were at home, watching through Zoom.

 

To make it stranger, the homebodies did not turn on their cameras, so my screen was mostly full of black (and blank) boxes with strange (to me) and fascinating names attached. I was definitely talking to another world, none of the Spanish, Navajo, Hopi, or Mayan I run across in Arizona. To make it more bizarre, the video of me was blurred, jumpy, and delayed.

I might as well have been broadcasting from a spaceship in the middle of a magnetic storm.

We keep forgetting how big the planet—and the universe—is. How do flat-earthers explain the need for time zones? Guess that’s why we need sci-fi.

The first question was, had I heard of Hulk Hogan. The young man also noted that Hulk and I had the same kind of moustache. So, our cultures had some things in common . . .

They were a bit shy, and also English was a second language for them. This gave Jaq and I a chance to reminisce about science fiction conventions in the old days, Marion Zimmerman Bradley’s belief that all humor was immoral, and the time that he, Emily, and I were in a store and brainstormed creative murder techniques inspired by a display of cooking utensils.

There was a shrimp de-veiner that looked downright diabolical . . . 

The questions I got were unusual. I ended up mostly explaining myself, which I don’t enjoy, even though a lot of my writing is dedicated to it. It's what I get for being such an unlikely character.

One young woman asked about writing. I tried to be helpful.

I had to explain what Chicano was. People outside of Aztlán usually don’t know about the reality that I live in. Why do I use Spanish words? I didn’t get into how some of them are other languages they probably haven’t heard of. I hope I did a good job.

They had read a few of my stories that I suggested. This got me onto how I was shocked by the overall angry tone of Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song: 15 Gonzo Science Fiction. That’s me, always at odds with my environment, deconstructing our current predicament, to figure out what to do next. 

It’s always a confrontation. I should have told them how I believe that bullfighting is the mother of all art forms . . .

I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I watched part of another wackazoid movie, drifted off about the time I usually wake up. Didn’t sleep much. The Global Barrio felt different, but it was still there.

And my brain felt fuzzy for a few days after.

CHICANONAUTICA SELLS ANCIENT CHICANO SCI-FI WISDOM AGAIN

 

Chicanonautica is looking for students for my Palabras del Pueblo class, at La Bloga. 

People need to learn and respect their ancient traditions:

 

Gonzo Chicano culture, too:

 

Go stark, raving sci-fi:

 

But I ain't no guru:

 

LOST IN A TRUMP AGE MOON DREAM

  

 

Back in the Sixties, I was a rabid fan of the space program. I watched hours of live coverage and did my first gonzo journalism experiments because I thought I could do better than Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon in Life Magazine.

It’s all so different now. In 1969 the Earth stood still. All the TV and radio stations were talking about space. The whole world was going stark, raving sci-fi.

In 2026 it gets lost in the multimegamedia chatter of our preApocalyptic dystopia. I could probably find someone who didn’t know it was happening within walking distance . . .

Maybe that woman who didn’t believe in planets or dinosaurs is still in town . . .

This planet is in some serious shit with stupid wars and a batshit-crazy president . . . Anyway, I was sliding into my teens, and despite people saying that it was all going to end in about five years, reaching the Moon convinced me that anything was possible. For a couple of weeks the whole mediasphere was all about space!

Now that we’re going back, people are too busy doomscrolling to care. Even I am taking care of business rather than glued to a screen staring at live coverage.

It does make it easy for me to check in, through different outlets to see what’s going on.

Google News let me know that the movie of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary has made David Bowie’s “Starman” popular again. The song was part of the audio-montage intro of KPFK’s Hour 25 (a talk show about science fiction) back in the early Seventies. Put me in a strange timewarp.

Via YouTube I plugged into TV Azteca’s adn Noticias as a bearded intellectual talked about permanent settlements on the moon, while the news gerbils interviewing him treated him like an idiot. Dontcha love progress?

Radio.garden allowed me to hear a NASA rep on Milenio Noticias talk about “America’s not letting go of the moon” as he went on a colonial, jingoistic rant. 

Did he know that even though Commander Reid Wiseman is the traditional white male American astronaut, the Pilot Victor Glover has since become the first black person to travel into deep space, Mission Specialist 1 Christina Hammock Koch is female, and Mission Specialist 2 is Canadian. And what about that European Service Module?

The launch was on April Fool’s Day. Trump babbled about how great the war is. He seemed to be keeping his distance. No comments or cheerleading like Nixon did. Guess the war had him busy, but this was happening because he had originally, the first time he was elected president, asked NASA if they could put an astronaut on Mars while he was still in office. It was explained he would have to settle for the Moon instead.

When re-elected, he promised Mars as a goal for a NASA that would be remade for his agenda. Musk and techi-types were delighted, but we all know how good Trump’s promises are.

I knew a libertarian science fiction writer, Brad Lineaweaver, who went around saying that getting out into space was so important that it would be worth it to give the country to an Adoph Hitler if he could pull that off. I wonder what he would think of this situation?

Then, there’s a technical problem! The zero-gravity toilet went on the fritz. And was heroically solved by Christina Koch. That and her demonstrating the possibilities of hair styles in a weightless environment made her my favorite astronaut.

This was during Holy Week. No escaping the religious implications. Like Apollo 8’s famous Xmas eve whole earth picture restaged in the now famous hi-rez Earthset shot. Victor Glover quipped his quotable “There’s no atheists on top of a rocket.” No mention of Coyolxahqui, Ixchel, Selene, or any other Moon goddesses.

And curiously enough, Trump kept quiet about it all.

On Easter, we got an astounding headline:

Artemis II Mission Progresses Smoothly as Focus Shifts to Frozen Urine Management

We got crystal-clear pictures of the far side of the Moon. Soon there were AI fakes circulating. As an artist, I noticed that the fakes are too perfect—tightly framed, symmetrical compositions. Try getting shots like that from the window of a moving vehicle . . .

Then Trump announced that “A civilization will die tonight” and put the war on hold, but the ceasefire didn’t last long.

Finally, he gave the crew a call, sounding like a kid forced to talk to a relative he didn’t like. He suddenly shut up. The astronauts were left staring into the camera as the microphone floated in front of them.

But everybody seems to like the zero-gravity group hug photo.

I’m still wondering if we’re going to see a Moon landing in the foreseeable future. This mission seemed rushed. And I can’t find much in this Information Age about a lunar lander.

The Apollo Lunar Module was a celebrity. I had a plastic model. 

For the Artemis it isn’t clear if they’ll be using SpaceX’s Starship HLS or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon.  Artemis III is slated to test the lander in 2027, and a landing planned for Artemis IV in 2028–election year!

Meanwhile, we’ve been promised a Moon base, and there has been no mention of Trump’s Space Force. And the chaotic wars charge merrily along.

It all feels weird.

CHICANONAUTICA ON THE MOON, MARS, AND CHICANOS

 

Chicanonautica goes to the Moon and beyond, at La Bloga.

Because of the Artemis II flyby:

 And Chicanos do things poetic:

With our own style:

Coyolxauhqui is proud:

FROM THE DRAWING BOARD

 

My wife brought in a bookshelf that used to belong to the Bombay Book Club (a family heirloom), and in her ingenious way found space for it in our already crowded house here at Hacienda Hogan.

This meant finding a new place to put my drawing board, and she amazed me again. It now sits in the corner of our laundry room, next to the kitchen. So I can now help out with cooking and clothes washing while creating my art.

It’s actually working out well. 

There’s a shelf above it where I can put art supplies, and I’ve been putting interesting things on the walls. It’s turning into a regular Ernestospace!

And I see it when I do all the walking I do to keep myself moving around at 70. I can check out the sketchbooks I’m juggling, see what I’m working on, realize that something needs to be done, and pick up crayon or pencil and doodle around.

It’s got me drawing more, not as much as I’d like to, but more than I’ve done in years past.

One of my few regrets is that I didn't spend more time making art. I’m a pretty good artist, but more time would have made me a great one. Unfortunately, I’ve got this writing career that demands most of my time, and I need to work for a living . . . 

Que sera, sera.

There’s also been an interesting side-effect. Drawing turns out to be good for my brain! Both my emotions and the neurological taking care of business run smoother, the way exercise keeps my body in tune. Any scientists working on this? 

Above it all, I’ve got this art piling up, and it gets me itching to show it to people. Thank Tezcatliopoca for the webs!

I’m not enough of a snob for fine art and my work is too ugly and messy for commercial art, but there are people who like my stuff. Maybe something will come of it.

CHICANONAUTICA IMMODESTLY PROPOSES A XICANXFUTURIST HOLIDAY

Chicanonautica gets holidazed, at La Bloga.

Suddenly, La Cultura is in flux:

 Can new faces in an ancient tradition help?

 How about the old ball game?

 And the escaramuza!

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 . . .