SHAKY DISPATCH FROM AN APOCALYPTIC AUGUST

I haven't gotten much blogging done this month. That's because too much is happening. I'm overwhelmed while all kinds of apocalyptic events explode around me. I haven't had to deal with massive oil leaks, floods, or decapitations, but my dayjob at the Bookstore of Doom, the disintegration of publishing as we know it, and cars going dead in the Arizona heat, have disrupted my sleep-cycle and left me with little time to write and draw and all that nice stuff.

And the really bizarre thing is, the other half of my problem is that opportunities for writing are coming at me like piranha to fresh meat. Yeah, I know a lot of you wish you had those kind of problems, but what it comes down to is how many hours are there in a day, and how much energy I have to get it all done. After all I'm not a young and crazy as I used to be.

At least, I'm not as young as I used to be.

Still, I can't help it, I trudge on.

So keep checking in here, in between getting several short stories ready to appear in various venues, I'll be reporting about things fantastico and futuristrico, and/or Arizona for La Bloga (I'll link 'em directly into Mondo Ernesto), and continuing with usual explorations of whateverthehell weirdness catches my fancy.

Now, I guess I better get back to work . . .

PART TWO OF THE LA BLOGA INTERVIEW

Part Two Rudy Garcia's interview with me is online at La Bloga. In it I reveal the inside story about what the hell happened to my fabulous career, the influence of drugs on my work, how women react to my masculine heroes, and other things that I'll probably live to regret admitting, but -- why not? -- anything to amuse my fans!

Rudy also wants to know what people think of his interviewing style, so be sure to bombard him with comments.

La Bloga is also holding a contest, the winner of which will receive an autographed copy of my dangerous, mind-altering novel High Aztech. So enter early and often! And do not drive motored vehicles or operate heavy machinery under the influence of this book.

The last few week of this apocalyptic summer have had me distracted, but I will be back here at Mondo Ernesto with our regularly scheduled deprogramming, soon . . .

ANOTHER ERNESTO INTERVIEW

Part One of an interview (or charla) with me in on La Bloga. It's got interesting background on my past, my novels, plus art and photos! And a chance to win a free autographed copy of High Aztech or Cortez on Jupiter. And it's only Part One . . .

ANOTHER ERNESTO STORY SALE!

My story "Radiation is Groovy, Kill the Pigs" has been accepted by Rick Novy for the upcoming anthology, 2020 Visions. Yes, the story is as wild and crazy as the title implies, and features Victor Theremin, radioactive marijuana, and mayhem along the U.S./Mexican border.

My wife, Emily will also have a story, "If the Sun's at Five O'Clock, It Must be Yellow Daisies" in 2020 Visions.

Future Mondo Ernesto postings will have updates and details.

SAN FERMIN: BULLS AND BEYOND

While everybody else seemed to be tooting their vuvuzelas over the World Cup, I was enjoying La Fiesta De San Fermin. This is hard to explain in the Anglo culture of Norteamerica, with its strong Puritan and animalista tendencies. Most folks here see the blood, but not the spirituality. In America, people prefer their spirituality, like their meat, quietly killed in locked rooms far away -- drained of the blood, cut up, sealed in plastic, and frozen.

Bull running and bullfighting are taboo subjects here. Hemingway only scratches the surface in The Sun Also Rises, and apologizes all through Death in the Afternoon. I do not apologize for my interest in this fascinating human tradition, which is about more than bulls.

If a science fiction writer invented San Fermin it would be considered a masterpiece. No imagined “alien” culture is as rich and strange as this. It’s only reasonable that it should thrive on the Internet, where I follow it. Someday there will be a satellite TV channel with 24-hour coverage.

Meanwhile there’s always Sanfermin.com.

This year the bulls kicked ass. Before the fiesta started in Pamplona -- even before PETA’s psuedo-naked protest-that-has-become an opening ceremony -- a young man was gored to death in a bull run in the small town of Fuentesauco in Northern Spain. Yes, they run with bulls in other places. There were no deaths during the fiesta, but plenty of injuries. Like the protests, these are well covered online.

A record was made for the fastest encierro (run) in history. It wasn’t as interesting as the “chaotic” one the next day, when a bull broke away and caused mayhem in the streets like a scene from a monster movie before entering the ring. This is why a non-sports fan like me loves this stuff: Aesthetics are more important than statistics.

But then, this isn’t sport. It’s ritual.

Skyyjohn has not only done his best to break the race barrier, but has called attention to the fact that women are running with the bulls. I hadn’t noticed until I saw his video, then checked others -- and say that yes, not only are gals wearing the white clothes and red scarf, but they're running. One girl got her tank top ripped away by a horn.

There were also men dressed as women. It must take a special kind of courage to run with bulls in drag. And there was a homoerotic theme to their frolicking.

And Mister Testis, the big, blue cartoon bull with the big, blue balls, is there to entertain the kiddies. It’s like Disneyland with tits, ass, blood, guts, and cojones.

It’s human tradition. As Richard Wright said in Pagan Spain: “Somehow the pagan streams of influence flowing from the Goths, the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, the Iberians, the Moors lingered strongly on, and vitally on, flourishing under the draperies of the twentieth century.”

I’m delighted to see them flourishing in the Twenty-First Century.

WESTERCON: BETWEEN MARS AND PASADENA

The day before WesterCon we took a tour of Jet Propulsion Laboratory. It’s Space City, California -- with lots of huge liquid nitrogen tanks and its own police force -- a NASA installation founded by rocketeers that’s becoming more like Disneyland as time goes on. Could a space theme park sponsor its own interplanetary explorations? The clean room where they were building the next Mars Rover with its Chuck Jones/Wile E. Coyote landing system and mission control were part of both history and the future.

After that, I felt ready for a science fiction convention.

The lobby was a Free Wi-Fi pit. There I talked to guest of honor Rudy Rucker. He put the idea in my head of writing a story about SB 1070 in Arizona. It took root and started growing . . .

The Martian jungle-ish Desert Garden of the Huntington Museum was a science fiction experience. “This is like being on Mars!” blurted a young man. Later we went back with Rudy and his wife Sylvia. This time Em brought her camera. Rudy took some pictures of us.

Old Pasadena -- pre-Deco architecture peeks through post-modern pretensions with the occasional boarded-up business reminding us of the decaying economy. The architectural time warp of Colorado Boulevard has plenty of café/bakeries. We found Indian and Mexican food far better than the overpriced snacks at the hotel.

There were not many books in the dealer room, though I did buy some Michael Moorcock and Norman Spinrad paperbacks out of nostalgia for the good old New Wave. I did a lot of reading at this con -- Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (La Fiestia de San Fermin began the day after), and David Hatcher Childress’ Yetis, Sasquatch & Hairy Giants (there are still mysteries to search for).

Later in a nearby antique mall, I bought Ray Bradbury’s essay collection Bradbury Speaks (some of that old excitement), and Roger Corman’s How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (inspiration on how to do my evolving business).

People from India were partying in their colorful ethnic clothes, and dresses from a quinceañra dance dazzled. The fans in steampunk costumes seemed drab by comparison.

A 19-year-old man was killed in a pre-San Fermin bull run in Zamora, Spain. PETA’s opening ceremony this year was to have the now traditional pseudo-naked protesters lie down in the shape of a giant, bleeding bull. Science fiction needs something like that -- rituals to awaken our inner wildness, that we need while exploring the universe

Rudy’s talks were well attended by enthusiastic crowds. He spoke of quantum loops. Later, in a café on Colorado Boulevard, I saw a Latino write, “I can make a quantum loop,” on his laptop. Science and fiction are intruding on reality -- as it should.

Beyond San Bernandino, still under the smog, in the desert, datura blooms alongside I-10, like something out of the story that was growing in my brain . . . science fiction intruding . . . maybe there’s hope . . .

TOURISTING THROUGH MY NATIVE SOCAL

West of Phoenix, there were lots of shredded tires beside the I-10. Did I see condors hovering overhead? or just big-ass vultures? Why were they watching the closed rest areas and abandoned gas stations?

At the first rest area in California there were flies all over the men’s room walls. A Tejano kid smiled big while getting his picture taken by the CAUTION: RATTLESNAKES sign. Welcome to California, may your reptilian dreams come true.

Soon we were cruising down the Sonny Bono Memorial Freeway, and back under the smog where I was born.

West Covina, my hometown, has become comfortably alien. The cramped courtyard of our hotel, with its swimming pool and palm trees peeking over the building, could be used to shoot a scene for a spy movie set in Latin America. West Covina is simultaneously morphing into a franchise megasprawl and a Neo-Latin America.

Later, as we headed for the La Brea Tar Pits, I saw a sign to the Byzantine-Latino Quarter. The Tar Pits Page Museum was a wonderland of Ice Age skeletons. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art offered PreColumbian ball game artifacts, and human skulls -- Aztec and Asian Pacific -- with beautiful decorations. My imagination erupted all over the place as we ate in the Farmer’s Market.

Is it me, or has L.A. -- this place that people from West Covina talk about as a foreign country -- gotten relaxed? The Yuppie Era is over, along with anglo domination. And it’s still the world’s most luxurious disaster area.

My parents took me to the opening of Disneyland while I was still in the womb, and I can’t get away from it. Besides, I need to pay homage to the Animation Gods. I was glad to see that the guy selling shrunken heads in the Jungle Cruise is still there. Waiting in the many lines was a woman in a Goth Virgin of Guadalupe T-shirt -- the halo was a cobweb. Other gals dressed to show off their ample cleavage. An old man didn’t bother to cover the tattoo of a bare-breasted beauty on his arm. Do special demons lurk in the smoking areas of the Magic Kingdom?

Disneyland is a masterpiece of crowd control. And civilization begins and ends with crowd control. But the real fun starts when you break free of both the crowds and the control.

Under the starless, reddish-grey SoCal night sky, I dreamed that I was coughing up tiny bats, lots of them. I wasn’t disturbed. The LACMA had reminded me that bats in Asian and PreColumbian cultures are considered to be symbols of good fortune.

WHO GENETICALLY ENGINEERED THE BANANA?

No one thinks that there is anything mysterious about the banana. Just about everyone likes them. They taste good, and it’s so convenient that they don’t have any seeds.

It did puzzle me though. One afternoon, over forty years ago, I asked my mother, “Where do bananas come from if there’s no banana seeds?”

She explained that you have take a cutting from one plant to make another.

I wasn’t quite satisfied. If people have to make more banana plants, where did they come from in the first place?

It went in my mental file of things to try to find out someday.

Then a few years ago, I was reading David Hatcher Childress’s Lost Cities of Ancient Lemuria & the Pacific, and he discussed the banana, and how they are found all around the world, even on islands:

“They are said to be one of the few foods that mankind can live completely on. Yet, the only other seedless fruits, such as naval oranges and seedless grapes are genetically engineered. Someone, somewhere in the remote past, cultivated bananas into the amazing plant that it is today.”

He stopped short of saying that they came from Lemuria, but I had to take note of the idea of prehistoric genetic engineering. Those who want to avoid “frankenfoods” are a few millennia too late. How many of the plants that make up a proper vegan diet can be found growing in the wild?

It takes one generation for people to consider an innovation to be part of the natural order of things. I thought that way about television, as the current generation does about the Internet. Let this go on for a few thousand -- or a few hundred thousand -- years . . .

And just who did this genetic engineering?

In Ignatius Donnelly’s Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, he also brings up the mysteries of the banana, and how they came to be found in the Americas. First he mentioned a theory by German botanist Otto Kuntze, that the banana was brought there “when the North Pole had a tropical climate.” Donnelly, saw the banana’s source elsewhere:

“Is it not more reasonable to suppose that the plantain, or banana, was cultivated by the people of Atlantis, and carried by their civilized colonies to the east and the west?”

Is Atlantis more reasonable than a forgotten civilization from an age when the poles were tropical? Why is it that the only place I’ve found this subject brought up is in books about Lemuria and Atlantis?

Archaeology keeps finding proof that civilization started earlier than we had thought. Artifacts keep pushing our earliest dates for things past the 12,000 B.C.-ish period that Plato gave Atlantis. The Neanderthals may have navigated over water. People moved around the planet in those times, and did things that turn our notion of prehistoric life upside-down.

We have forgotten, and lost so much. We have so much to recover, and learn.

Do we have any bananas around here?

MY DAD, THE CAPTAIN NEMO OF WEST COVINA

My dad recently died of a heart attack. I like to think he went like a brave bull -- charging the cape, tearing off a chunk of the matador. I owe so much to his heroism.

I was never at a loss for heroes. One lived in my house.

Back in grade school, he once picked me up on a motorcycle. He was all decked out in boots, a leather jacket, sunglasses, and still had hair. All the kids thought I was lucky to have such a cool dad.

I always saw him as the equal of any hero I saw on television or movies. He explained what was fake and what was real in war movies, flew planes, scuba dived, and it was his job to keep those big planes of the Flying Tiger Line working. I would have lived a less interesting life if it weren’t for his bold example.

He was also an intellectual, artist, writer, working-class Renaissance Man who was always educating himself. Many times I saw him decide he needed to know about a subject, gather up a stack of books, and in a short time become an expert. He got his high school diploma the same year I graduated from junior high. He believed in grabbing that knowledge first, and worrying about the documentation later.

This is where I got my we-don’t-need-no-stinking-badges attitude. It’s gotten me into trouble. It’s also taken me places most people don’t get to. Thanks, Dad.

He was pulled up the corporate ladder, kicking and screaming all the way. He always had his own ideas about what he wanted. He was what happened when a guy from East L.A. lived up to his full potential.

He was always a dreamer, a mad genius. Some were disturbed when I compared him to Captain Nemo -- but I consider Nemo to be a hero, not a villain. Dad once described Fu Manchu to me as a “good guy/bad guy.” I guess we see things differently from a lot of other people.

He was a practical, hands-on dreamer. It wasn’t enough to sit around wishing you could do something, someday. He was always rolling up his sleeves and working toward his visions. Sometimes it was like tilting with windmills, but if you can’t dream bigger than reality, you aren’t really alive. And if you don’t take some stabs at the impossible, you haven’t lived.

I cherish the memory of the two of us working on the ferro-cement boat in the backyard. While hanging those pipes, laying that mesh, and twisting those wires, I learned more from him than I did in any school. I found the crazy path my life would take, and I am eternally grateful.

So let us build our sailboats, our submarines, our monsters, our starships, and go on our voyages, our adventures. We may not become as heroic as he was, but if we don’t try, we are lost.

SNEAKING BACK INTO KAFKAZONA THROUGH INDIAN COUNTRY

We left Utah as it was in the process of being transformed from John Wayne’s Texas to Pixar’s Mars. A few days earlier, we saw a red sign pointing to BARSOOM. Myths come to these wise old rocks to transform and regenerate. Santa Claus waited on his motorcycle. Soon tall, four-armed green vatos will be stirring up trouble, and restoring the cosmic balance as datura and cryptobiotic soil grows back.

We crossed into the Navajo Nation, where it overlaps into Arizona, made a pit stop at the Mexican Water Trading Post, then found ourselves in the middle of dust storm. At first, light hazy wisps blew across the road, then it got hairy, blotting out the sun, bringing visibility down to near zero. We had planned to revisit the Painted Desert, instead it flew past us, blasting the windshield.

I’ve got to use that experience in a future story set on Mars.

It was still blowing when we hit Holbrook, but it had calmed down by the next morning.

We weren’t far from the All-American intersection of Florida Street and Navajo Boulevard. An alley hid a lost kachina mural near a giant plastic kachina of the Pow Wow Trading Post. Across the street was Young’s Corral, with its murals of bikers and the ancient car culture.

This is where we saw a Navajo girl jogging down Route 66. She was heading for the future. I wonder what she was listening to on her iPod?

She was the antithesis of the “End of the Trail” drooping Indian that we kept seeing in restaurants, and motels. Originally a statue by James Earle Fraser, you can’t avoid seeing copies in two and three dimensions all over the roads of the Wild West.

A remarkable example was in the America’s Best Value Inn, in Tropic, Utah, painted by Lester Clarke: the Indian seems to be wearing a horned helmet, wonky perspective makes him gigantic, the ribs show on his horse, and they slump before what looks like a pre-historic sea.

But our trail -- or at least our trip -- had not ended. Between Holbrook and Showlow I saw more roadside datura, as a condor flew overhead.

In Show Low, the Maverick Gas Station is an attraction in itself. Slick murals decorate the walls of the luxuriant bathroom area, and are continued into the bathrooms: a panorama of hoodoos, condors, and petroglyphs worthy of a state-of-the-art theme park.

We passed through two Apache reservations on the way back to Phoenix. There I saw more roadside datura than I did in Utah. These were the biggest, healthiest plants I’ve ever seen.

There was a big, healthy plant with a dazzling array of flowers in one of the rest areas that Governor Brewer closed recently. And no fence or National Guard to protect us from this poisonous, hallucinogenic menace. But then, datura is part of this natural environment. It enforces its own laws.

Back home, I think about dystopian trends and have a good laugh.