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Sunday, June 27, 2010

Diet

Menu—September 3, 1987


Breakfast: 3 white-powder doughnuts; tall glass of milk.

Lunch: Cafeteria food, Santa Lucia Elementary School (Chocolate milk was surely involved)

After school snack: hot-dog franks with ketchup, cooked over the stove flame, burned, and cut into pieces for dipping in ketchup.

Dinner: beans and tortillas with Tapatio sauce while watching tv in the living-room, waiting for my dad to come inside the house; he’ll be out until the beer runs out or he gets hungry.

I was thinking about this last night because I’ve come to the conclusion that I have horrible eating habits. I blame my chilldhood. But I would’ve starved without this menu. It’s not that my mom was neglectful; we were just poor. We had nothing. The powdered-doughnuts were a luxury, but they were still cheaper than cereal. I was lucky I went to school—at least there I would get to eat a stale hamburger with soggy fries and green jell-o. My mother would try to make with what she had, but she only had what we could afford, and hot-dog franks were cheap and, if I ate a bunch of them, very filling. Sometimes, when we had eggs, she’d mix them in to the franks—delicious! Other times, she'd mix them in with nopales (which is a slimy green cactus plant), which I hated and never ate. On these occassions, I coocked my own and drowned them in ketchup and had a feast.

I’m trying to eat better these days, but everything is harder and less tasty than hot-dog franks with ketchup.

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Cauliflower!

Cauliflower is beautiful to look at. It tastes great, too. If you boil it, cut it to pieces and put some salt, lemon, and chili powder all over it, you have a great snack—tons of fiber and absolutely delicious! You can also eat it raw. My father taught us how to eat the stem raw. Just peel off the thick, green, skin and sink your teeth into a sweet tasting vitamin bomb. He said that if we only ate the stem, everyday, we’d live to be 200. And we had a lot of it. Our house, the Gashouse, sat in the middle of a hundred acres of cauliflower fields. My dad was the guy who watered it. It greened up the world. I saw nothing but green from my window. And on windy days, all you smelled was green—it even ate the gas leaking from our stove.


Before the “flower” blossoms, the bugs are killed off. My father would drive around the fields putting up signs with a skull and cross bones that said: Peligro! This meant that we were not allowed to go into the field. A helicopter would wake us before sunrise: I could see the guy’s goatee from my window. He would spray the Peligro over the green. The Peligro was a white mist that smelled like….it smelled like meth! After a few days, my father would take down the skeletons and we were free to roam the fields and cut stems.

As soon as the white head of the plant grows bigger than a fist, it is wrapped up in its own leaves. A rubber band keeps the head inside its leafy cocoon. Illegals do that part of nature’s work. Bees are overly qualified. Days later, another crew of unwanteds comes and cuts the head off, wraps it in a plastic bag, and sends it to your kitchen. After all the heads are gone, a tractor comes and razes whatever is left. The next day the sun cooks whatever is laying on the ground. The air smells like rotting flesh. But it is not overbearing. It is a comfortable smell of death. It became familiar to us, like the Peligro and the green.

Those fields are our killing fields. I’ll tell you how later, even though it matters little to question the methodologies of death.

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Landmines?

Fences. Rivers. Minutemen. Deserts. Guns. Deceit. Arizona. And now Landmines. I don’t know what to say about this. A patriotic American in New Mexico wants to put landmines on the border to keep "illegals" out and American greatness in. Obviously, this guy lacks the imagination, creativity, and entrepreneurship of those he's trying to blow up. I'm sure there's a guy in Tlazazalca, Michoacan, right now working on a teletransporter.

Sunday, June 13, 2010

Anchor Babies?

So now Arizona is aiming to pass a law against “anchor babies.” These are the children born to undocumented aliens in US soil. They are called anchor babies because they are used by the undocumented alien as an “anchor” which ties her to the US—it is also argued that those with anchors “have hijacked the 14th amendment.” Anchor babies would—if this law passes, which I’m confident it will—inherit their parents crimes, and as illegal, would be born felons.

It is a matter of time before Meg Whitman, Sarah Palin, Glen Beck and the rest start the propaganda mill about anchor babies. If life begins at conception, as some believe, then these same people should call for the immediate forced abortion of all anchor embryos; immigrant illegals should be kicked in the stomach if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they’re carrying along anchors. They should put something stronger in the pesticides that are already killing and deforming children of immigrants—the hijackers should be gassed.

The logic of subjectivity is tricky. How do I navigate this new designation? I am one of these “anchors,” but I’ve always thought I was a citizen, and I tried to behave as such. How do we define ourselves when we have no “place” of birth? Or when our birth-place is no place at all, but a prohibited zone? What if we are born while our mother’s are trespassing? Don’t we belong to the master of the plantation at that point? Are we not “his” property? A strange anonymity shows up as a possibility of self-definition. Without a place of birth, things are not born. Are we, then, unborn? Yeah, it’s best to gas these vampires before they contribute to the prison population or the educated elite.

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