For this week, a song for my Tío Frank. You can listen to it here, and read a little about it here.

Shit is pretty bad in America right now, but look to the brave people of Minnesota, their sacrifice, and learn how to act for when the horrors come to you. It’s easy to fall into a doom spiral, but the best way out is to keep up, look for the beauty in anti-fascist camaraderie, and learn how you can help. Rest in power to Renee Good and Alex Pretti, undeserving of death but noble to their ends.

Some links:

• Margaret Killjoy wrote an excellent piece about her time on the ground in the Twin Cities, observing dual-powered mutual aid networks and the callousness of the police and federal agents. You can read that here, or listen to her and James Stout break it down on It Could Happen Here. It gave me some hope.

• If watching is more your speed, you can watch Ben Hanson (of MinnMax)’s seven-minute breakdown of the movements and illegal actions of ICE in the Twin Cities here.

• You can donate directly to fund PPE for Twin Cities legal observers here. May be a good idea to find some of your own as well.

• This comprehensive guide on How to Help put out by Naomi Kritzer last week is greatly beneficial, a bunch more reporters to follow and links to donate can be found there.

They want us to despair. It’s okay to be afraid, especially at the horror unchecked federal agents are inflicting on innocent people, but let the brave people of the Twin Cities be a beacon of hope over the horizon and an instruction manual against fascism as it continues to descend and accelerate. We need immigrants, we need immigration, I love immigrants, and immigration is a net good for society. Don’t let any xenophobe try to ratchet you away from that. Talk about what happened to Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Talk about families, documented and undocumented, who are afraid to leave their homes for food and supplies, and the people who are getting that food and those supplies to them. Strive to be like them. Try to open as many eyes as you can.

cw: death

I always pictured it like this massive iron ring. The house I used to live in stands completely alone among a ceaseless plain of grass, I’m alone in the center of it, sitting in the kitchen. It’s not night or day. A few miles out in every direction is this giant circle of an extremely heavy metal. Every few years, I hear its horrible squeak way off in the distance, growing slightly closer. My old drama club director Mrs. Davis passes away, and as I waited in line to see her at the wake, the far-off shrieking of metal bounced about the back of my brain. My tia Elba passes away and I hold my grandfather as he cries, and I feel the earth shake. My dog Rico passes away, and I can start to see it on the horizon, the glint of a sunless sky blinds me. It was stayed, a little, because I got to say goodbye to him. I knew that one day, there wouldn’t be a squeak and squeal anymore, no more quiet rumbles, no smooth metal in the distance to dread. This giant ring that’s seemingly a world wide would suddenly, with one phone call, shrink to less than the circumference of my pinky, completely obliterating my house, squeezing me and the grass and wood and drywall and every nail in its path to a little pin.

I got that call about two weeks ago. My godfather Francisco died, suddenly and unexpectedly, of a heart attack. He had a new heart condition he told almost no one about, not even his wife, because he didn’t want to worry anyone.

I know this ‘grief’ thing is pretty much unavoidable unless you get lucky and die first. But I had all these grand plans. I was talking pretty candidly about death with my Papito, with us all preparing for its inevitability. I still somehow, at age 32, have all four of my grandparents, which feels pretty improbable at this point. A genetic disposition toward longevity and unkillability. I was coming to terms with my own thoughts of post-death, the peace of eternal darkness, what that final dopamine hit is like, the questions I’d have for God if it turned out I was wrong and he was real.

Among the most foolish of my grand plans was manufacturing distance. Keeping a wide berth from my family, hiding my more authentic self in favor of silence and agreeability, and only showing up at a couple of family events a year, if that. The occasional text, the occasional ‘I love you.’ Some harebrained scheme to protect myself, the inverse of my godfather. I was hiding my heart to protect myself, unlike him, hiding his heart because he thought he was protecting everyone else.

It didn’t work.

It didn’t work!

Stubborn, obstinate, this piece of me was still there, the piece of me that knew and loved my godfather Francisco, all of his stories of inadvertent injury, his silliness, his looking for the best in everyone he knew, his passion for work and for his family and for his faith. Him loving my grandmother, being an absolute momma’s boy for his whole life. The way he would drive, a performed recklessness to try and get a rise out of sullen teenage me whenever we were in the car together, just like his father would do when he could still drive.

He told me this story so many times, but I never stopped thinking it was great, and would sit and listen to the whole thing so many times:

Outside of knocking out his front teeth diving into a shallow pool or splitting his own forehead open with nunchaku, my uncle had one big accident that he shared with me because I was a guitarist, and he was a pyromaniac.

One day he was playing with aerosols and matches, making mini flamethrowers, as a kid was wont to do when it was the 70’s and there wasn’t even the NES yet. After getting bored of normal fire, he saw his guitar hanging on the wall and a devilish grin crept across his face. Chuckling all the while, he put a can of hairspray up to the body of the guitar and filled it right up. He lit the match. He held it up. His onomatopoeia, that I am hearing as I type this:

ping ping ping ping ping ping!

All six guitar strings snapped in sequence as a massive fireball flew out of the guitar’s body and completely engulfed his hand. As a kid is wont to do, he wraps his hand in a towel and hides his injury for an entire day, more afraid of his Dominican immigrant parents than the severe burns covering his hand, on their way to an infection. Eventually, the pain eclipses the fear of discipline, and he screams:

MOOOOOOM!

When I visited my grandma the day after he died, she was enshrouded in a kind of numbness I may never be able to imagine. The kind of numbness not only of losing a son, but history repeating itself. Losing another son. It’s been over thirty years since my Uncle Paul was murdered. I never got to meet him, but that pall has never lifted from my mother’s side of the family.

Some small reprieve came to her in retelling this story about her accident-prone son, I saw her smile for just a few moments. A story I’d heard so many times, but this time from the perspective of the person who had to care for him (and probably gave him an ass-whooping) in the aftermath.

I’ve been feeling all sorts of regret about not calling my uncle more, about the family events I missed out on because of my stupid obligations and my stupid overstimulation and my stupid manufactured distance that I had to learn the hard way was never going to work. About not being in the vast majority of photos at the wake’s photo slideshow. But even now, grappling with this, it’s hard to think of the times I wasn’t there without thinking of the times I did get over my shit and manage to be there, and my uncle Frank telling me not only that he loved me, but that he loved me unconditionally.

He loved big. He loved with his whole heart, and everyone loved him. I didn’t know a funeral mass could be as packed as his was. I didn’t know the way my mother’s and grandfather’s voices would break in their prayers and speeches. But despite the quivering voice delivering bible verse, despite the croak of a funeral song sung and broken, I knew and they knew that he loved us.

I found a lot of solace in laying on my uncle and Titi Melissa’s bed with my cousins Samantha and Frankie, just shooting the shit. Staring at the ceiling together. I smiled a little when my father told me not to cry in front of Em, tickled by the humor of exactly the wrong advice. I have cried in front of Em, a lot, and they have held me tightly each time. I found a lot of comfort in hugging my little brother Leo and big sister Victoria and weeping in a circle over the past few weeks. My body is squeezed to a pin, everything reminds me of him, I’m shredded by the shrapnel of this sucker punch of a loss. A piece of all of us is missing. But I’m not feeling the cold metal touch of grief alone.

Rest in peace to my Tío Frank, who loved unconditionally.

-your godson, Will