There’s a school at the end of my driveway.

It’s a long, one-story building made of light-brown brick, with windows spaced out evenly across its entire face. If you go inside and down the hall to the right, then left, you’ll eventually come to a set of stairs that go down where the hall continues until it dog-legs to the left again. It’s not so much a second floor as much as a spatial dip in the building. If there were such a thing as a split-level school, this would be it. Along they way a person might notice a plain door set in along the first hall hiding it’s own set of stairs leading up to a small, brightly lit library. Somehow, this space is invisible from the outside.

I actually have no idea if any of this still exists, but it did when I was a student here.

It has been an eventful couple of months, and that’s not including the quickly unraveling bag of cats that is American democracy (though that in itself, oof).

There have been some personal, family oriented upheavals I won’t go into, but it’ll be enough to say things were very intense and confusing for a while. Thankfully, everything has settled, a new normal is in place, and everyone is fine.

So, what’s in the other hand? To paraphrase a joke from Metalocalypse, it’s what you get a nihilist for their birthday — nothiiinnng. And what I mean by that is I’ll no longer have a job in a couple of months (if it even takes that long).

If you keep up with publishing news, you might have noticed a mostly family-owned daily newspaper entered into negotiations to “merge” with a very large media company sometime around the middle of last year. (I can’t remember exactly when and can’t be assed to look it up.) That deal, which was really more of a straight-up purchase, went through and the family-owned paper is now a part of the larger media company.

I’ve just posted from my other newsletter, Great Caesars Post!, and thought I’d share the link here since there isn’t a lot of crossover. If you’re one of the few GCP subscribers, feel free to ignore this post. Thanks, y’all!

Six days from the time I’m writing this, I’ll walk into a hospital, give someone the same information I’ve given to three or four people already, and wait for someone to slit my throat.

Man, it’s hard to resist a dramatic line.

But now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, yes, I will be having surgery, and no, it shouldn’t be anywhere near that high-stakes. Months and months ago, I was diagnosed with hyperparathyroidism, a big word for something caused by a tiny gland.

Here are the basics: The parathyroids are four small glands nestled behind the thyroid, itself a gland that looks like a couple of meaty mittens gripping the trachea. Their main job is to regulate calcium levels in your body.

I got a haircut not too long ago, and not for the first time I looked at my hairline and wondered if I might go bald someday. My dad hadn’t lost his hair by the time he was my age now, but it was starting to look thinner.

I’ll never know if that was because of age, or because he was dying.

Going bald was never really a concern for me growing up, or even now. As far as I know, there isn’t any baldness in my family, but that’s complicated by unknown grandfathers and other twists in the branches of the family tree. But none of my grandmother’s brothers had shiny domes, so I don’t worry about it. Besides, I’m not that vain — the dignity of a shaved head is fine with me.

Dad always had the kind of hair people envy. Black in his youth, it turned a shimmering silver at a young age that contrasted with his dark skin. His hair was also thick, and stayed in whatever shape he combed it into. Somewhere there’s a photo of him in Amsterdam, where he used to visit when he was stationed in Germany during his first tour of duty during the Vietnam War. He was thin, wearing a long, dark coat and a natural pompadour that looked like it weighed more than he did. He looks happy, and a little bemused at where life had taken him.

Hello, all. It’s been a while, ain’t it? Well, life, a new job, and general laziness have kept me busy and/or staring blankly on the couch, so there you go.

So why is this a test? Because people, or more specifically people who run online platforms, can really suck sometimes. When I launched this newsletter, it was on a small platform called Tiny Letter. I liked it because it was simple and did everything I wanted it to do without making me take a class at the annex.

Eventually, a bigger, more marketing-oriented platform called Mailchimp bought Tiny Letter, but swore it was going to leave alone. Eventually, it was announced Tiny Letter would be shut down.

By that time, Elon Musk was making a real mess of Twitter by encouraging anti-semitism, racism, anti-trans sentiment … you name it, Musk loved it. So I was leaving Twitter while another newsletter/social media platform called Substack started gaining in popularity. It hit all my buttons, and I really enjoyed the ease of use combined with very good tools for community and audience building.

I’ve been watching a lot of horror movies lately, naturally given the season. Most of these have been films from the lates 50s through the early 80s, thanks to my general disposition and because that’s what easily available on TV.

A surprising number of these movies have been about cults, which I think probably came from shifts in suburban living, religious thinking and, later, a good dose of Satanic Panic. What’s lurking behind our neighbor’s drawn shades? Does that unfamiliar religious symbol by the doorway have a sinister meaning? When does community degrade into decadence, or worse?

Personally, I’m a fan of cult movies. Something about the combination of scholarship and fraternity appeals to me, just minus the living sacrifices and allegiance to dark forces. Maybe that’s why Lodge 49 is one of my favorite shows, because what is a fraternal organization but a pseudo-cult? Substitute bloodletting and orgies for dollar-beer night and orgies (I assume), and you’re there.

Anyway, this made me think of a friend of mine, who told me once that movies centered around cults give him a particular case of the creeps. I can see it—the mindless devotion and willingness to say or do anything in furtherance of a belief is what pushed me away from religion. But it made me think about what pushes my button, and it’s definitely cannibalism.

So, I’ve been wondering lately if it’s time to give up.

Most of the time, I feel like a failure. It’s tiring and it feels terrible, and what’s worse is that I know most of it is self-inflicted. It’s a feeling I’ve carried a good part of my life, a combination of anxiety, a fear of failure, and a self-consciousness that teeters into self-loathing. Combined with a desire for acceptance and pleasing people, it becomes a homemade toxic stew.

I don’t know where this comes from, other than my head mostly, where small things become Godzilla-sized kaiju, stomping and unleashing radioactive destruction across the Tokyo of my mind.

Acceptance of the way things are, and recognizing what isn’t, can be hard. Here are some of the things I fail at:

As I write this, the House of Representatives are still mired in the GOP-made muck of trying to elect a Speaker of the House. I’m not going to talk about that right now. What could I say? This clown show is fairly obvious in its absurdity and I don’t have anything to add to that discussion.

So instead I’d like to share the first piece of fiction is a really, really long time. It came out of a prompt sent to me by my good friend, Patrick. He originally sent it as a prompt for ChatGPT (and boy, I could talk about those implications all day), and it inspired me to come up with something myself. I don’t remember all the details used as a starting point, but I do remember it included a character named Captain Cosmos, a style in the vein of Grant Morrison, and AI. I completely forgot about the AI bit, and went more for a Morrison-type mood than style, but I’m still happy with how this turned out. I hope you like it, too.

He nearly missed the distress call.

It took almost two weeks before I stopped feeling the urge to check Facebook.

In spite of everything I know about myself and about the way social media is designed to worm its way into the apple cores of our brains, I was still surprised at how strong Facebook’s pull was. I took my “Facebook vacation” for a couple of reasons. First, I was bored with it. I was seeing the same people, the same groups, over and over and over and over again. I like those people, but c’mon. Second, I had a suspicion something was going on. I was looking at my feed out of habit, a FOMO compulsion that was making me psychologically queasy. I didn’t like the way it was making me feel, and knew it was time to cut myself off.

This wouldn’t be a problem, I thought. I’d let my brain reset, and come back with the hope that my algorithm had reset, too. I know social media is designed to tap that addiction button, but I’ve thankfully never been hooked on anything. The temptation to check Facebook would be there, but I’d just delete the app from my phone and let it pass.

I was 18 when I got my first and only perm.

For the last few years I’d been the classic “very smart but doesn’t apply himself” kind of student. But I was also a nerd, so the semester before I’d found myself in an “alternative” school for six weeks because I got busted ditching class to go to the journalism room. There’s no way to know for sure, but I was probably the first yearbook editor to be banished to the campus usually reserved for pregnant girls and kids caught smoking weed. The joke was on them, though, since my GPA went up and I finally learned how to play chess. (Cholos are the best chess teachers.)

This time I landed in a kind of midsemester summer school. Like most people, I thought the subjects I was interested in or good at were fun, and everything else was tedious and a chore. But like trash piling up in the corner, those chores eventually demand to be done no matter how much you might want to ignore them. My garbage was starting to stink and my counselor let me know that either the mess had to go or I did.

Memory gets fuzzy at this point and I think I start to blend different punishments and second-chances, but what I remember was spending eight hours a day every weekend sitting in a stuffy classroom and trying to make geometry stick in the slippery folds of my brain. The girl sitting next to me at the lab table didn’t help.

Oh, hey there. Did you know it's been so long since I've written one of these things that not only did I forget the password, I totally forgot it had it's own email address for logging in. But I can easily remember my Chipotle log-in, apparently.



I don't have anything in particular to talk about, so you'll have to excuse me as I string together some random thoughts in bite-sized chunks. Hey, you know what else I discovered by coming back to this newsletter?

1. I'm a terrible procrastinator. I really should be editing my latest podcast right now, but here we are. Maybe I'm an excellent procrastinator.

2. I really enjoy podcasting, even if no one listens to them. I hate the sound of my own voice, though. Irony!

3. Of the very few subscribers to this newsletter, two people on that list have since died. Not from COVID, but of cancer. The thought of it aches in a way that is uniquely and ineffably sad.

Speaking of COVID and being haunted, the fact all that is still going on is baffling to me. At this point, of course, we can chalk up a lot of it to people who just refuse to take the vaccine or follow any protocols like wearing a mask or staying out of crowded, indoor areas. Sometimes it's understandable, if wrong-headed (a deep-seated and thoroughly earned distrust of governmental medical groups, for instance), but most of it is just dumb. Dumb, willfully ignorant, selfish, and dangerously delusional.

I really don't know how to even talk about it anymore. What's the point? It's either preaching to the choir or to a congregation that would willingly gouge its own ears out. The other day a friend of mine of Facebook was talking about people having a choice, about how people can choose to vaccinate or not, but while also putting quotation marks around "vaccine" and "virus," making it pretty clear what she's choosing. I couldn't help but remember another friend, also on Facebook, who in the early months of the pandemic referred to the then-current death count as "small potatoes."

Maybe I just need to get off Facebook.

Look, it's true, people do have a choice in what they do or don't put in their bodies, and how they will or won't behave in this thing we call society. A person could definitely walk along a beach and see someone drowning, and then refuse to throw them a life preserver or call 911. They could also decide to go into the water and push the person's head under. Those are choices. And before anyone says, "Oh, c'mon, this is totally different," let me just ask: Is it?

Anyway, things are still officially A LOT nowadays. People seem to have forgotten about Haiti, though that's not surprising since the West Coast is on fire, Louisiana and other Gulf states are drowning (again), and everywhere else is scratching their heads and wondering what winter is going to be like this year. Conservatives seem dead-set on setting us back at least 70 years; and the United States finally left Afghanistan, making a mess on our way out. The Cubs inexplicably traded off its World Series winning team. Thank god the Dodgers are still having a good season.

Still, in spite of all this, I'm feeling pretty good. I haven't been doing a whole lot, lately, though I'm doing more than I was when I was at my lowest point in the pandemic. Mostly I've been podcasting (regularly, for a change), trying to keep up with friends (and deciding who really falls into that category has been helpful), reading when I can, and watching lots of TV and movies. I finally got to see my family in Texas after about two years.

 A new hot dog shack opened up on the beach a couple of blocks from our apartment, and the couple running it don't have any restaurant experience so the service can be slow, but the food is delicious. It's called RoPa Cabana (for ROgers PArk, our neighborhood here in Chicago), but we call it Ropa Vieja because we're silly that way. They also have the best chili we've had in the city so far, and something called a "walking taco," which is basically a Frito pie but made with Doritos instead. This and other little victories have been like my own personal life preservers.

I hope you're feeling OK, too.

As I mentioned, I've been trying to read like I did when I was younger, but my concentration is shot and there are a million distractions to catch my magpie's eye. Still, I finished Shirley Jackson's "We Have Always Lived in the Castle," which was, of course, great. Jackson is one of my top three authors (the other two are William Gibson and a tie between Michael Chabon and Luis Alberto Urrea, with Urrea pulling ahead lately).

I started to read "A Wizard of Earthsea," by Ursula K. Le Guin, but had to give it up after it consistently put me to sleep within a few pages. It's a classic, and a book I was looking forward to reading, so I'll give it another shot later. But for now it's back on the stack and replaced by Claudia Gray's "Star Wars: Bloodline," to be followed up with "Mexican Gothic," by Silvia Moreno-Garcia.

On the TV/movies side of things, we most recently finished up "The Chair" on Netflix, with the always excellent Sandra Oh. One of my favorites was "We Are Lady Parts," which is totally worth paying for a month on Peacock (unless you can binge it in the trial period - the first season is a very doable six half-hour episodes). Let's see, what else? We caught up on "The Falcon & Winter Soldier," as well as "Loki," and still need to get to "WandaVision." We finally wrapped up the John Wick and Quiet Place movies, and of course I've been watching a lot of rando stuff on TCM, Movies, and FXM. I'm sure there have been other things, but those are the ones that come to mind.

Oh, wait! "Reservation Dogs"! This is a great show on FX about a group of First Nations kids trying to get off the rez, getting into trouble, and watching each other's backs as "the best thieves town." (As someone on the show points out, "It's a small town.") Highly recommended.

***

That's all I've got for now, which quite frankly is already more than I thought it'd be. I'll catch y'all next time — until then, stay busy. Or not. Whatever works for you.

Once, when I was a kid, I looked up into the night sky.

I don't remember how old I was — maybe 10 or 11 — and I don't remember exactly where I was; sometimes I think it was at my Grandma Adela's in Albuquerque, other times I think it must have been during a camping trip. Sometimes in my mind I simply see my family's front yard, at a time when the neighborhood was still dotted with cotton fields and dim pools of streetlight. The border, less than a half-mile away, wasn't yet flooded with a harsh white light throughout the night. I could look up and see stars and stars and stars.

Of course, it wasn't as if I was discovering the night sky for the first time. My father had pointed out the Big and Little Dippers, and I made a habit of wishing on the first star I saw. I was already toying with the idea of being a scientist of one sort or another, and astronomy was topping the list. (I didn't know yet how much math was involved, or how terrible I would be beyond the most basic arithmetic.)

But this night was the first time I really looked into the night, looked so deeply that I felt how profoundly and how completely insignificant I was in the scheme of things. The sky I was peering into was a tiny slice of something I could never hope to really understand, much less experience in any real way. It was, simply, too big. And I had never felt so small.

The shock of it, the truth of it, made me dizzy. It made me incredibly sad. And it was also sort of a relief.

If I was really this inconsequential, if I was something who didn't even constitute a blip on the grand cosmic scale ... well, that took a lot of the pressure off. Because, when you're talking about those kinds of numbers, what you do or don't do will be forgotten in a generation. Sure, there are some people who are remembered for much longer than that, but it's a statistically small number. Smaller if you're some intelligent plasma a few light years away. Chances can be taken, mistakes can be made, and even in our own, important-to-us time scales, most things fade from our collective and individual memories.

Life, like space, is just too big.

That enormity can be comforting in its vastness, in the great balancing it affords. It can also be terrifying — space is a beautifully but mostly empty place, a dangerous and inhospitable place colder and more merciless than any ocean. Life is a gift, but can be brutal and hard, often marked by cruelty and unfairness, committed by people who figure they can get away with it because no one is paying attention anyway. There's too much going on to catch it all.

I reposted an article on Facebook this morning about the idea of "repopening America" in the face of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic, which at this point has killed more than 200,000 people worldwide. Millions have been infected with the novel coronavirus, the highly infectious virus that causes COVID-19. The point of the article is that there is no point in rushing to "go back to normal" because there is no "normal" anymore. Our lives — not just in the United States, but around the world — have changed irrevocably. The economy, the way we go about our daily lives, the way we interact with each other, all of it is different now. And it will probably be that way from now on, even after a vaccine is developed or a reliable treatment is discovered. In the course of a few months, everything changed, including the course of human history.

A friend of mine commented on the post by asking, "OK, but what CAN we do, though? Because people are suffering out here."

I answered by using a lot of words that boiled down to, "I don't know."

Because it's big. And some days, it feels too big. Some days I feel overwhelmed by the vastness of this crisis. Of the hatred motivating so much of this current administration. The naked greed. The cynical callousness that allows people — people of color, the poor, or almost any minority group  — to needlessly die while the already-wealthy to profit off it. The utter stupidity that has us rushing at full speed over the falls, while clueless or uncaring supporters row faster and faster. It's so much that it often becomes too much.

It can be paralyzing. Some of you have noticed that I haven't been writing these newsletters, even during a time when it'd be easy to have something to say. I haven't been working on podcasts, though I have ample time. I start to read, and then my mind clouds over, drifting back to news alerts and chyrons. I feel adrift in what feels like endless black, floating powerless and without direction of my own.

The night I looked into the night, I almost felt flooded by a sense of meaningless. We were nothing. I was nothing. The emptiness filled me, a deep and cold well I could feel draining the color from my face.

And I saw Orion's Belt.

It was another constellation my dad had pointed out to me, part of the great map stretched across the dark sky. It was marker, something to show me where I was, something that had been noted and documented by people who had also looked up and said, we can understand this. And generations later, that same knowledge was passed down, intact and shared with a young kid standing in his front yard in West Texas. A link, a thread, a rope to hold onto. A connection that defied time and probability and the unwillingness of vast things to be easily understood.

A hope.

In the end, that's all we have. It's all we have. There are times when that hope feels battered, sometimes broken, sometimes pointless. But it's not. It's important. It's strong. It's our landmark in a world, a life, a crisis, that can feel as if it's more than we can handle. It's the hope that comes with looking into endless darkness and seeing a string of stars to which you can anchor yourself. I'm not alone. Neither are you. And in that, I have hope.

And that will be big enough.

Outside, it's raining. It's been raining since late this morning, ranging from a whispering drizzle of mist to a belligerent thwack of cold and fast-moving drops. No matter where it's been in its transition, the rain has been constant. It has not stopped. Even now, it tap-tap-taps against the glass, its wet breath hissing through the fine-mesh screen in uneven gasps, steaming the edges of the window as the chill outside pushes against the warmth within.

Halloween weather.

I used to think Christmas was my favorite holiday. As a child, it's almost impossible not to love Christmas. The ideas of coziness, togetherness, goodwill, and a pile of presents with your name inscribed on festive tags is irresistible. At some point, though, Christmas becomes stressful, full of expectations of others and on yourself. Shopping, wrapping, the constant weight of a budget you try to rationalize past its limits, all of it starts to outweigh the ideals of Christmas. The pressure starts in October now, with stores pushing cards, pushing decorations, pushing sales, pushing us. Remembering a star and a child born beneath it is the real miracle now.

Somewhere along the way, Thanksgiving took the top spot in my personal ranking. The pilgrims always took a back seat to the cornucopia of food the family would make for the day, and I was never one to shy away from a loaded table. When I was younger, the extended family would often stop by on Thanksgiving (we'd later see them at Christmas when it was time to make tamales, and we'd take bets on who would show up to work, and who'd time their arrival late enough that the only thing left to do was eat). It was like a rolling party, where food and laughter poured out of the kitchen in equal servings. Eventually, age caught up to everyone, with some family members getting old enough to have started families of their own to spend the day with, or elderly enough that going from house to house seemed less like fun and more like a chore. Or, like me, people moved away, and holidays became a bargain between desire and budgets, plane schedules and days off from work.

Halloween, though. Halloween is always ready to share its best trick — it doesn't ask anything of you, but gives you everything you want. If you want to work on an elaborate costume, Halloween encourages your work. Feel like going to a party? Halloween will provide. Or maybe you enjoy manning the door, listening for the children's sing-song, "Trick or treat!" — threat and spoken wish combined — and seeing the joy on tiny heroes and wicked witches as they run to show parents what's been added to their bags of candy? That's Halloween's specialty. Staying in, with the porch lights off as a silent signal to would-be bell-ringers, content to scare yourself with a string of horror movies is a perfectly valid choice, too. Halloween doesn't judge.

I love Halloween, I think, because it's a part of me. It was a part of me before I ever wore my first costume. (A sooty-faced hobo, probably, though the first I remember was a Ben Cooper Scooby-Doo costume when I was in kindergarten.) I love the tension of a scary movie. I love the creepiness of a breezy night, unseen hand caressing bare tree limbs and rattling dry leaves. I love imagining Things out in the night, magical creatures of tooth and fang, waiting for us to believe in them like sinister Tinkerbells so they can come to dark unlife.

It's not even necessary to believe in UFOs or vampires or werewolves or hook-handed hitchhikers, not all the time, like some tinfoil-hatted conspiracy theorist. It's enough just to believe for a second. Just enough to entertain the possibility of maybe. The tingle up your spine, or the sudden tightening of goosebumped skin, doesn't need much. It can be measured in a skipped heartbeat, or the quick turn of the head when you see something in the farthest corner of your eye.

When I was a kid, I heard a recording at school of someone acting out Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart. It was the first time I can remember feeling the thrill of being scared. The weak autumn sun filtered through the high library windows, but the overhead lights were turned off and the room and its short rows of books were dusky in the shadowed afternoon. As the narrator grew increasingly wild, and the hidden heart beat more and more loudly under the imagined floorboards, my own heart thumped in my chest. Until finally it was as if I could hear my own voice screaming, "Tear up the planks! Here, here! It is the beating of his hideous heart!"

The memory alone is enough to make the hair on my arms stand up. The old man's pale, clouded eye is perfectly clear in my own mind's eye.

After that, I read any Hitchcock anthology, any wack-a-doo "true" account of the supernatural or paranormal, or spooky story I could get my shaking hands on. I knew I'd be sacrificing sleep on the altar of an overactive imagination, but it was worth it. Today, I still read horror novels and comics, and I follow links about chupacabras and haunted hotels. I watch movies about the possessed, the alien, and the insane. Because after that introduction to Poe, I wanted to have that feeling all the time. I wanted it to be Halloween forever.

And, in my heart, it is.

Halloween is fun. It's got that tinge of the sinister, of the dangerous, giving you permission to be weird, to grin in the dark and its potential for maybe ... but with the knowledge the darkness can be banished with the flick of a light switch. That there's nothing more dangerous in the closet than a shaggy mop. Nothing sinister about that sudden, quiet crack coming from the empty room down the hall. There's reassurance knowing you're never really at risk. Nothing bad is actually going to happen. The gentle, insistent scratching at the rain-speckled window isn't some unexplained thing trying to find it's way out of the wet night and into the single pool of light in this apartment.

Right?
 

MOVING ON

Speaking of the weather, I was talking to Mom the other day and she was telling me how it was supposed to be in the low-80s in El Paso. It made me sad, thinking how it was still basically summer in the middle of October. I know some people love the heat, but man, that ain't me.
 

SCREEN

I think I mentioned it in the last newsletter, but I've been watching a lot of classic (and not-so-classic) horror movies on TV almost since the beginning of the month. It's been great, and I've been able to see movies I never even heard of, much less watched before. One of the highlights has been Tales From the Crypt, a 1972 anthology movie featuring five suitably creepy and surprisingly ruthlessness stories told to a hapless, and ultimately doomed, audience. Plus, a young Joan Collins! Anyone who's seen Creepshow will recognize the format (though Crypt beat it by a good 10 years), and will get just as much enjoyment from this more dour film as from its campy cousin.
 

SOUNDS

I haven't been listening to a lot of music lately, and instead I've been trying to catch up on all the podcasts I've been letting languish in my queue. OH! Which reminds me — I'll be a guest on Rob Kelly's Film and Water Podcast later next week. On Halloween, to be exact. I don't want to spoil it, but I will tell you I had a ton of fun talking with Rob, and I think you'll have fun listening to it, too. OK, one hint: DRIVE-IN DOUBLE FEATURE. You don't want to miss it, so why not subscribe to the Fire and Water Podcast Network now?
 

PAGES

In much the same way I haven't been listening to music lately, I also haven't been reading much more than the news online lately, which isn't great for my mental health so I'm looking forward to getting back to books and comics soon. I do have a lot of books waiting for me, though, and some of the ones I'm looking forward to most include:

• 361, by Donald Westlake

• Saturn Run, by John Sandford and Ctein

• The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls

• Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan

• I Know What I Saw, by Linda S. Godfrey, and

• Infidel, by Pornsak Pichetshote and Aaron Campbell

We'll see if my discipline matches my ambitions. Before all that, I'm planning to read Bram Stoker's classic, Dracula, just to get into that Halloween spirit.
 

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

What the walk home looked like tonight. I don't know what's creepier — the rain-drenched darkness, or that white van.

SHARING IS CARING

My podcasts — PlastiCast and The Mirror Factory — can proudly be found on The Fire and Water Podcast Network. I'm also a semi-frequent guest on other FW podcasts, and a search of my name will turn those up. There are a lot of great shows on the Network, so check 'em out.

On Twitter you can find me at my personal account, the Plastic Man account, and even at this one for The Mirror Factory. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram.

Tell your friends to subscribe to The Beef at www.tinyletter.com/maxromero, and be sure to send me your comments, media recommendations, and virtual high-fives, and we'll talk again soon. Thanks — see you next week.

I've got beef with a spider.

Normally, I'm totally cool with spiders. I think they're amazing creatures, I'm beguiled by the myths and folklore that's sprung up around them, and I'm a big fan of the way they eat other bugs, like those good-for-nothing flies and mosquitos.

I grew up with a healthy respect for our arachnid pals. From the time I was a young kid, my dad would tell me, "Don't kill spiders — they're lucky." It's a nice idea, and as long as they keep to themselves I have no problem letting them hang out in the corners of the ceiling and the dusty nooks beneath cabinets. Dad had a semi-rural upbringing in Albuquerque, which included a largish plot of land we all called a farm, but was probably more like a really, really big garden. He knew all about what helped plants grow, which ones needed more water or less shade, and he knew all about pests. Spiders, as far as he was concerned, were helpers that kept the chiles and squash healthy until picking time, and treated them gently.

(Dad's mercy, of course, was as mercurial as Mother Nature's. When I was five or six years old, he was walking me through the property and telling me how we had to respect the land and the plants growing on it. Then he picked up the biggest, fattest, greenest caterpillar I ever saw, and held it close so I could get a good look at it. Then he casually tossed it to a nearby chicken, which gulped it down like a Chicago Bears fan eating a bratwurst.)

So all my life I've gently shepherded lost spiders from underfoot, scooping them up in paper cups or napkins, making sure they didn't lose a leg, or worse, get squished between my clumsy fingers. Otherwise, they've been welcome to stay, and we live like roommates on different schedules; we acknowledge we're sharing a space, but for the most part we almost never see each other and are happy to avoid any awkward small talk.

But recently, my roommate has been acting as if it owns the whole apartment, and neither one of us is taking this coup attempt very well.

Of course, I haven't done anything wrong. I haven't swept away any webs. I haven't smooshed any of the friends it apparently invites in to squat on an indefinite basis. When a spider dropped down silkily from the kitchen ceiling to hang in front of my face, I moved the thread a few feet to the wall, where the spider could scurry safely behind a painting. I'm the good guy here.

And still, the little shit is biting me! Biting. Me. That's classic bad guy behavior. It's not even passive-aggressive, it's just full-on aggressive. I'm not even sure where these ambushes are happening — while I'm sitting at the kitchen table, or sleeping in the bedroom, or when I normally enjoy the privacy of the bathroom. It's not just one tiny bite, either. I'm not getting bit on a regular basis or anything, but when it does happen, it's been multiple bites. Like two or three at a time. Have you ever had a spider bite? They don't give you amazing abilities or keen insight into the relationship between great power and responsibility — they just itch. They itch a lot. For days, and that's while they swell and feel increasingly hot to the touch. And good luck if you actually scratch it, because now you've spread the venom everywhere and you might as well buy stock in hydrocortisone because you belong to the spider now.

You know how I mentioned getting bit in the bathroom? Do you know what that means?

It doesn't happen every time, but it's happened more than once.

Yes, it's true.

IT BITES ME RIGHT ON THE ASS.

I don't know why the spider thought this was suddenly OK behavior, but man, I don't gotta take that from nobody. I don't know what I'm going to do if I ever see that eight-legged freak, but I know I'll be tempted to give it at least four black eyes. But I know myself, though. I'll probably just let it saunter on its way, safe in the knowledge it's in no danger from me.

So do me a favor. Next time you see a spider, bite it. Bite it right in the ass.
 

MOVING ON

Big thanks to Scott S. and Izzy M. for their very kind notes about the previous edition of The Beef. You guys are great, and I'm gratified by the thoughts you share. Also, the fall season is shuffling into the Chicago area, with average high temperatures hanging somewhere in the low- to mid-70s. I talked to Mom the other day, who told me things were cooling off back in Southwest Texas, with highs "only in the 90s!" I've had other Texas friends tell me the same thing, and I just laugh and laugh.
 

I was four years old when I learned cruelty.

It was late Easter morning, and my younger sister and I were playing under the bright desert sky in my grandparent's backyard. We had already gone to church, candy-filled Easter baskets had been presented, and brightly painted eggs had been hidden and discovered. Still dressed in our Sunday best, my sister and I had been sent outside to play while the adults took care of whatever grown-ups did.

Our Easter baskets were actually deep buckets, the kind you'd give kids to take to the beach (an old El Paso joke: The city's got plenty of beach, it just doesn't have any water). The hard-boiled eggs had already been put in the fridge, and the candy was piled up in a bowl on the kitchen table. The AstroTurf-green plastic grass would've been thrown away if me and my sister hadn't insisted we needed it for something or other. I'm pretty sure my bucket was blue, and my sister's was red, though I might have that backward. I know they both came with small, square shovels.

So when ran around the backyard, carrying our buckets, sitting on them when we got tired, and finally digging holes in the sandy ground because that's how you got to China. Tired out enough to pay attention to our surroundings, we noticed we were surrounded by tiny, delicate butterflies. They were small and white, floating on the warming air with a peacefulness and purity embodying the best values associated with Easter. We chased them, jumping up at them, and they always managed to stay just out of reach. I remember laughing, delighted in the way children are when something wonderful and magical introduces itself.

Then, with our hard plastic shovels in our hands, we started swatting butterflies out of the air.

I don't know why. The cliché is that children are cruel, but it still doesn't explain why we took something beautiful and slammed everything miraculous out of it. It doesn't explain why we pounced on the downed butterflies and pounded them with our shovels, over and over again. It doesn't explain why we thought it was so funny.

Mom came out and asked us what we thought we were doing. She said it in a tone of voice that has stayed with me ever since — a combination of exasperation and disappointment that made my stomach sink and turned the bright sunniness into a harsh, hot spotlight. Somehow, in a way I was capable of expressing, I knew I had done something Wrong. And it was something which couldn't be fixed, something that couldn't be reversed or replaced. I had taken something alive and marvelous, and I destroyed it for no other reason than I could, leaving it broken and dull in the dirt.

I learned cruelty that Easter. I also learned guilt and shame.

I was young, and my sister was even younger. (My sister, who in a lot of ways in much stronger and less angsty than I am, probably doesn't even remember any of this. Besides, she was three.) I understand intellectually how none of this really matters, not in any big picture kind of way. I know I wouldn't hold anyone else responsible for anything they did when they were barely more than toddlers. It's not, by any measure, a big deal.

But I also know what happened that afternoon fundamentally shaped the kind of person I would become, and the kind of person I still try to be. Because I do not understand cruelty. I recognize it. I can see how trauma or bad wiring can lead toward it. But I don't know why anyone would seek it out. I don't know why anyone would want to practice it as a choice, whether for power or money or simple, stupid self-esteem.

Cruelty is awful, not only for the people who suffer it, but also for those who practice it. Or am I wrong about that? Do people like to be cruel? Do they enjoy it? I look at desperate families being separated, I look at kids in cages, I see innocent people being gunned down because of their ethnicity, I see people who live in alleyways and are invisible to the people walking past them ... and I wonder.

A friend of mine, Scott, will point out news articles about things like this and has a simple mantra in response: "The cruelty is the point."

It's hard not to believe it.

For a lot of people, I'm absolutely positive that's true. The cruelty is the point — getting rich, getting a powerful position, whatever — is just the gravy. Hurting people — hurting people — is what gets the adrenaline pumping, what puts a smile across tight, dead faces.

But I don't believe it's true for everybody. I can't believe that, as much as I may want to sometimes. Maybe it's in our nature, something we don't have to be taught — an ashen callous hardwired into our system. But I don't believe our "nature" is something that can't be overcome. It's not something we're born with and doomed to be our entire lives. We can be more than that.

If we try. If we remember. If we learn something better.
 

MOVING ON

Someday I'll write something loose and fun, and believe me I'm looking forward to that as much as you probably are, too. In the meantime, I subscribe to a few other newsletters and one of my favorites is The Signal Watch Planet. The Planet is written by a friend of mine, Ryan, and he casts a wide net of fun — his podcast, noir movies, current events, and generally whatever he's been up to lately is fair game. Do yourself a favor and subscribe here (but don't stop subscribing to The Beef, ya jerks).
 

SCREEN

We haven't been to the movies lately, and for the life of me I can't remember what I've been watching TV-wise. One thing that has stuck, though, is Fleabag. There's been some buzz about this BBC Three/Amazon Original show, and lemme tell you, believe the hype. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is fantastic as the title character, wonderfully brittle and incredibly charming even though she is, honestly, kind of a terrible person. We're only a couple of episodes into the first season, but I can already tell this is a series we're going to burn through.

SOUNDS

OH MAN OH MAN OH MAN. Out of nowhere, Missy Elliott jumped out of a wormhole or descended a heavenly ladder or something and blessed us poor heathens with a new album, her first since her last collection of music released back in 2005. That's 14 years, y'all. No wonder this world is in such a state. Luckily, Dr. Elliott is here to save us, and she has lost none of her power in the last decade-plus. She also released a video for "Throw It Back", the first song off Iconology, and I can't even. I've actually lost count of how many times I've watched it. So go check it out, and then go listen to the five-song collection for free on Spotify.

PAGES

I started reading a couple of books recently — Songs of America, by Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw; and Death of the Planet of the Apes, by Andrew E.C. Gaska. I haven't gotten far enough into either one to have an opinion yet, but I'm looking forward to both. Songs of America traces the music that has been important in this country before it was even a country, and covers everything from rah-rah go-get-'em anthems to protest songs that inspire people to take to the streets. I've been wondering what kind of effect current events are going to have on music, which got me thinking about where "protest" songs have been since the 80s stuff inspired by the Cold War (answer: hip-hop has been, and still is, consistently full of powerful, important protest music). It should be an interesting read.

I make no apologies for my love of genre movies and books, and the Planet of the Apes franchise may very well be my favorite. (Fun fact: The very first playset and action figures I had were from Planet of the Apes; they'd get pushed aside by Star Wars soon enough, but I chalk that up to youthful indiscretion and a love for the pew-pew.) Gaska also wrote Conspiracy of the Planet of the Apes, and like that book, Death of the Planet of the Apes doesn't try to reinvent the classic storyline of the movies as much as fill in the blanks. It picks up with what Taylor's been up to following the end of the original Planet of the Apes film and goes into its sequel, Beneath the Planet of the Apes, with Gaska seeming to show real respect for the source material, which I appreciate. I won't lie — this is probably going to the top of the stack.

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

This is a terrible picture of a great movie house here in Chicago, the Music Box Theatre. The Music Box is celebrating its 90th anniversary, and we were there for its screening of The Fugitive, a film near and dear to me and Sandy. There was also a Q&A with director Andrew Davis after the movie (I think he was sitting in front of me during the screening — he's tall). It was a lot of fun, and I can't wait to go back. If pal and movie aficionado Rob Kelly comes to Chicago for a visit like he's been promising, we'll be sure to bring him here. Oh! And that guy playing the organ at the bottom left? That's Dennis Scott, and he's always there on weekends to play before and after shows!

SHARING IS CARING

My podcasts — PlastiCast and The Mirror Factory — can proudly be found on The Fire and Water Podcast Network. I'm also a semi-frequent guest on other FW podcasts, and a search of my name will turn those up. There are a lot of great shows on the Network, so check 'em out.  
On Twitter you can find me at my personal account, the Plastic Man account, and even at this one for The Mirror Factory. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram.
  Tell your friends to subscribe to The Beef at www.tinyletter.com/maxromero, and be sure to send me your comments, media recommendations, and virtual high-fives, and we'll talk again soon. Thanks. See you next week.

Right now, we don't know anything.

As I write this, the news is still coming out of El Paso, where there's been a mass shooting at one of the busiest malls in my hometown. We don't know how many people have been injured or killed — the latest numbers had the total at 19 dead, 40 wounded. We don't know how many gunmen there were — there have been reports of anywhere from one to three people in custody. We don't know who the shooter is, and we don't know why he did it — and we probably never will. Not in any real way. Nothing that will balance the horror and confusion we face, the chasm we find ourselves tottering over, a hole hungry and deep and never filled, no matter how much grave dirt we throw into it.

This is my home, and someone has robbed it of something indefinable and precious. It will never feel safe in the same way again.

I'm about six years old. My mom is handing me a silver cap gun, the same one she played with as a child. It glints silver and dazzles with its heavy filigree. It won't be my last cap gun, but it will always be my favorite. The hammer is broken, so I concentrate on my gun spinning and quick-draw. This is before toy pistols had to be brightly covered or have safety-orange tips.

Sandy has already cried at least twice while watching the news. I've felt tears well up, but mostly I feel a heaviness in my chest, which slips down into my belly and makes me nauseated. It's not just the death in what has been touted for years as one of the safest cities in the nation. It's the senselessness. I just don't understand it. I didn't understand it when it happened at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in California just six days ago.  I didn't understand it when it happened two days later at another Walmart in Southaven, Mississippi. There have been more mass shootings this year than there have been days, 249 in the last 215 days.

How does that make any sense?

I'm 13, and I'm cradling a Red Ryder BB gun. Inspired by the movie A Christmas Story and his own childhood spent toting a Red Ryder, Dad has gotten me the air rifle as a Christmas gift. I'm thrilled with it, and feel a connection to my father that was more rare in those days. He shows me how to load it, how to cock it, where the safety is nestled behind the trigger. He was a marksman in the Air Force, so he also shows me how to carry it barrel down, and tells me, very seriously, "Never point it at anything you don't plan to shoot. Never point it at a living thing." A few days later I'm shooting cattails with a friend in the ditch near my house. He takes aim at a bird sitting on a phone wire, and goes pale when it cartwheels gracelessly to the ground. He turns to me, tears and guilt in his eyes, and tells me he has to go home.

What is the American fascination with guns? Why is it about them that makes them so hard to give up? Are they props to announce our manhood? Our patriotism? Our superiority over those who would make us feel like less? And how do we feel when, finally, our guns cough out their copper-jacketed argument and the only response to be made is made in blood? I know several people who own guns, and most of them have multiple rifles and pistols squirreled away, ostensibly safe in their safes or shackled by locks. I like these people. I also know many of the mass shooters in the relatively shallow past have raided their parent's and grandparent's armories, skirting weak gun laws to fill in the gaps of their assault plans. And I don't understand how anyone could want a gun in their home.

I'm a teenager, probably around 16, and Dad is showing me the rifle he got from some guy in a bar, and the pistol he keeps hidden in the space under the heater. He's taking me to the desert to do some target shooting, and he doesn't know I've already taken the pistol out and shown it to friends when the house was empty. Once we get there, the rifle feels familiar and comfortable, but the pistol feels heavy and dangerous — like a coiled snake ready to snap back and bite at any moment. I'm good with the rifle, a modest .22, and an obvious amateur with the .38. There's a sickening satisfaction to slamming the clip into the pistol, and I never want to do it again.

One of the things you can say about El Paso — whether as a compliment or as an insult — is it never really changes. It's a large city insisting on acting like a smaller, constantly drowsy city. Even now, I'm not sure this will wake the city up. My hometown has an almost superhuman ability to adhere to the status quo, to keep things "the way they've always been." People like to say El Paso is a diverse, liberal city, but that's a lie. It's about 80 percent Latino, and 80 percent of anything is the opposite of diversity. It's liberal, but only in the ways that suit it — it's highly Catholic, with all the baggage that comes with it, and try to introduce change meant to primarily benefit others, and you'll hear about it. I already know this will make at least half of El Paso finger their safeties nervously. I know ugly rumors will never completely fade. The phantom security blanket will be torn away, and half of the population will try to pretend it never happened, and the rest will consider buying another gun. Whether either side realizes it, they'll all have been exposed.

It's the July after high school graduation, and someone is pointing a pistol at me from their open truck window. It's the tail-end of the Fourth of July, and me and Victor and Hugo have been reduced to throwing Black Cats at each other. There are more than a few duds on the road we're chasing each other across, and when the truck drives by the breeze from its passing must set one of them off. The truck screeches to a stop, and roars back to us in reverse. The man in the truck is faceless in the shadows, but I can see the shine of the barrel of his pistol in the orange glow of the streetlight. "Do you think that's fucking funny? Throwing firecrackers at my truck? You think this is fucking funny?" I hear the hammer go back. We all have our heads down, hands up, murmuring explanations of how we didn't do anything, take it easy man, please. He points the gun at each of us in turn before roaring down the street and out of sight. We get in our car and drive in the opposite direction before he can come back.

It's hard not to flip-flop between feeling an overwhelming sadness and a white-hot fury. El Paso — like any other city or town where this has happened — didn't deserve this. As we watched the news, Sandy and I agreed that even if we didn't know any of the people who were injured or killed, we more than likely know people who will know them. El Paso is just that kind of town. So I sit here and wonder when I'll hear a familiar name, or when my sister will map out how someone I went to high school with has been affected. I try to wrap my head around the enormity of this, the horrific mystery of it, and I dread what the answers will eventually be. I mourn the people who have been lost, and feel pain for the ones who are lying in hospital beds as I type this. I despair at the hate and stunted humanity making something like this possible, and the knowledge none of this will ever make any sense. We will never have an answer for the most fundamental question: Why?

There has been a mass shooting in El Paso. And we don't know anything.

Yesterday I huffed up the stairs, lugging a 20-pound sack of kitty litter to our second-floor apartment. It was something I hadn't done in about four years.

After years of mourning the loss of the last of our original three cats, we finally adopted another one. We've named him Carlitos.

To be honest, I wasn't sure we'd ever have another pet. People who have never had pets — or who have some fundamental thing missing from their souls — don't understand it, but the feeling of loss when a pet dies is real. It's deep and painful. Our love for our cats was profound, and watching the life slowly slip away from them broke my heart. Sandy was beyond sad, with a sense of unearned guilt because, somehow, we couldn't make our cats live forever. Because the 18 and 19 years they gave us just wasn't enough.

It's hard not to be selfish when it comes to the time you have with your loved ones.

Peggy was the first to come to us. Sandy and I were still dating, and I hadn't even moved in yet. My sister called me, saying, "Hey, do you think Sandy wants a cat?" Her friend had found a tiny gray and white kitten lying literally in a gutter. The kitten was sick, my sister said. She thought the cat would probably make it, but ...

Sandy took the kitten anyway, and named the first pet of her own Peggy, after a crazy bird-thing on Mexican TV. Peggy was a fuzzball, a shock of fur with needle-sharp claws and eyes puffed shut with illness, meowing faint but steady protest. It fell to me to give her the medicine she needed, which led to the invention of a method that was half squat, half wrestling move just to keep the bloodshed to a minimum. She bounced back like most youth do — quickly and completely — and with time went from holy terror to queen of the household. I would give her any medicine she needed for the rest of her life, including what she needed to fight the thyroid disease that eventually took her from us at age 18.

Next came Pancho. He came from one of two litters of cats born on the family rancho of a newspaper colleague of ours. His littermates went quickly among folks in the newsroom, and when Charlie brought Pancho to us sight unseen one mid-morning before work, we saw why he'd been the last cat to be picked. Small, golden, and with lunacy shining from his cornflower-blue eyes, Pancho was easily the ugliest cat I'd ever seen. When Sandy came into the bedroom and plopped him on my chest by way of introduction, the first thing I actually said was, "That's the ugliest cat I've ever seen." He was all head, an oversized noggin wobbling on a noodle of a neck, and the first thing he did was attack my face. He was clumsy, thrown off-balance by the gravity his brainpan generated, and he paired this with a natural tendency for non-stop mischief.

In true ugly duckling fashion, Pancho's body caught up to his head and he became, frankly, beautiful. One of the most beautiful cats I've ever known. He was sweet, and loving, and wanted nothing more than to drape you with his affection. Even on his last day, with cancer eating away at his jaw, he meowed, jumped onto my chest so I could cradle him, and purred. He was 19.

Rizzo was the last to join us, the classic story of a young, single mother just looking for a place to stay. We first saw her behind a hedge in the front yard of the house we owned at the time. A black and brown Siamese, she glared at me, cross-eyed, from the leafy shadows. I ignored her (if you want to get a cat's attention, blow them off completely and they won't be able to resist trying to figure out what's wrong with you). I went into the house, found a couple of plastic tubs, and filled one with kibble and the other with water. I took them outside, shook the dry food while clicking my tongue, and put it all down where she could see it. I went back into the house and immediately went to the window to spy on her Peeping Tom-style through the curtains. I kept this up for more than a week, finally getting to the point where Rizzo would come to me when I fed her, meowing and rubbing against my jeans.

Finally, she tried to come into the house, meowfing her demand to become an inside cat. But we'd noticed something — this cat was pregnant. "No," I told her, as she looked at me like a feline Marty Feldman. "Go have your babies and then come back." Rizzo was the smartest of the three, and as if understanding me, she disappeared for a few weeks and then came back, no longer preggo. There were, however, a batch of feral kittens running around the backyard. "OK," I said, because a deal's a deal, and I held the door open for her as she strolled in. Until she died at 18 due to kidney disease, she never showed any interest in going back outside, ever. She was content to lay in your lap for hours instead, if you'd let her. We usually did.

Together, these were our cats, our babies, but no one ever told us about "staggering" your pets, so we lost them all within a year and a half of each other. We took a trip almost immediately because the idea of staying in a markedly empty apartment sounded appalling. When we came back, we told each other we'd get another cat someday. The ache of loss kept "someday" feeling far away, for a long time.

And then we met Carlitos. Originally a part of my mom's barely-in-control backyard colony of strays, Carlitos (called Guerito by Mom, because we love our diminutives) was easily the friendliest, most laid-back stray cat we'd ever met. He'd meow in appreciation (or sometimes impatience) at feeding time, smoothing his body against legs, and accepting head scritches happily. Sandy and I fell in love with him, and decided we'd adopt him.

It took a few months, partly because we had to get through other obligations first, and partly because we live in Chicago and Mom doesn't. Finally, we managed to get to El Paso with the express intent of bringing Carlitos home with us. I'll explain it in the same blurred, whirlwind way it seemed to happen to us:

Grab Carlitos and put him in a carrier. Take him to our old vet on the West Side, across town from Mom's neighborhood. Carlitos, stressed, meows and pants the whole way. The vet declares the cat healthy as a horse, and recommends a CBD tincture to calm him on the flight. Back to the house, where we put him in our bedroom so he can acclimate to us some more. (This works well.) A couple of days later we realize we looked at our flight plans wrong, and our plane leaves late that night instead of the next. Run around town to get an airline-approved carrier, CBD oil, a tag and collar. Administer the CDB oil, which doesn't seem to be working. Get to the airport, where they insist on having me taking Carlitos out of the carrier so they can scan it. We insist on a closed room. Carlitos get through it like a champ — a nervous champ, but still. Onto the airplane, which makes so much damn noise. But the CBD oil seems to be kicking in, and Carlitos only meows a few times during the three-hour flight. At O'Hare we get a Lyft (instead of taking the train/bus combo we usually use to get back and forth from the airport), and once home we keep Carlitos in his carrier while I run to the supermarket on the corner to get food, litter, and a box. Back at home, Carlitos is suspicious, but alternates between affectionate and staying out of sight. And now, it's six days later.

To be honest, we're a little stressed out about the way Carlitos is behaving so far, but we try to remind ourselves he has a lot of new things to get used to right now. He mostly hides away most of the day — first under our pillows, then crammed into a small space between the bed and the wall, and now in a bottom cubby of a wardrobe he figured out how to open — and will only come out for short periods before disappearing again. For the past two days he's refused to come out at all, manifesting only to eat and use his litter box after we've gone to bed, when the house is dark and quiet.

But that's OK. He's been a stray all his life. Hiding and sleeping during the day is a survival method he probably learned early. He had a routine he followed for years, and that's been upended. He had an entire backyard — probably a whole neighborhood — to roam, and now he's living in a small apartment. I'd be a little freaked out, too. Adjusting to change takes time.

So we know we just have to be patient. Eventually he'll poke his head out from behind my shirts and join us on the couch. He'll ignore the various noises that come with his new apartment, and he'll eat and sleep knowing he's safe, and loved. Someday he'll snuggle up to us, demanding scratches under his chin and long strokes over his ribcage. He'll purr, and look at us with his yellow eyes and Pink Panther face, and we'll fall more and more in love with him. And, someday, he'll break our hearts all over again.

But that'll be OK, too. We'll keep loving him anyway.

MOVING ON

If you know me at all, you probably know I think cancer is a real sonofabitch. A few days ago I found out podcasting pal Mike Gillis, co-host of Radio vs. the Martians, just had surgery following a diagnosis of testicular cancer. (If you know me a little better, you know I take testicular cancer personally.) Luckily, Mike's prognosis is good, and everyone moved quickly to get that fucker out and gone. So here's to Mike's continued recovery and good health, and some encouragement to give Radio vs. the Martians a listen if you haven't already — it's honestly one of my favorite podcasts.

It took remarkably little time to get out of the rhythm of writing this newsletter, so Screens/Sounds/Pages and Image of the Week will be back next week. In the meantime, here's another picture of my cat:

Yeah, we moved that dish as soon as we saw Carlitos could find his way to the top of the kitchen cabinets.

SHARING IS CARING

My podcasts — PlastiCast and The Mirror Factory — can proudly be found on The Fire and Water Podcast Network. I'm also a semi-frequent guest on other FW podcasts, and a search of my name will turn those up. There are a lot of great shows on the Network, so check 'em out.
 
On Twitter you can find me at my personal account, the Plastic Man account, and even at this one for The Mirror Factory. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram.

Tell your friends to subscribe to The Beef at www.tinyletter.com/maxromero, and be sure to send me your comments, media recommendations, and virtual high-fives, and we'll talk again soon. Thanks. See you next week.

In a few days, I'll be on a plane headed toward Mexico City.

It's one of my favorite cities to visit, and a place I recommend everyone see at least once. It's everything you might've heard — enormous, vibrant, culturally modern and ancient, a place where the ruins of an uncovered Aztec temple squat in the middle of a busy subway station. It's truly a world-class city. It's also a place that, from the moment I first stepped off after a 24-hour bus ride, felt like home.

I'm a third-generation American, and proud of being from the United States, in spite of the country's flaws and cruelties. But my parents never let me forget a crucial detail — I'm not just an American, I'm a Mexican-American. My family's roots, language, and culture reflects and informs a large part of who I am, and those things come from Mexico.

It isn't always easy, even when you come from a community perpetually hovering around 80 percent Mexican-American and sharing the band of scar tissue that is the El Paso/Juarez border. It's only a cliché because it's true: Being Mexican-American means not being Mexican enough for the Mexicans, and not American enough for the Americans. In El Paso it meant people incessantly complaining about the "ChihMex" and "FrontChihs" (local slurs lifted from Mexican license plates) who didn't know how to drive on freeways, and rooting for the Dallas Cowboys with a desperate fervor because everyone wanted to be a part of "America's Team." Never mind if your grandmother still lived in Juarez — you weren't from there.

In Juarez being an American meant you must be rich, even if your family struggled to pay the bills from month to month, and being called gringo no matter how dark your skin or how good your Spanish. (For the record, my Spanish is embarrassingly bad.) Later, Sandy would assure me being labeled a gringo wasn't a criticism. It's just a matter of being from the United States, not a refutation of my claim to "Mexican-ness." But it still feels like a denial, a pitying, slowly shaking head and a hand firmly on an invisible velvet rope; sorry, not Mexican enough. Go back over the bridge — you aren't from here.

Still, it's easy to take things for granted when you grow up with them, and Juarez never really felt like Mexico, anyway. It didn't have the enormity of another country or the pleasant vertigo of Somewhere Else. It never felt foreign — it was just Juarez. It was the city across the river, where it had always been; the place I could see from the neighborhood park three blocks from my house. The place where we bought cheese and tortillas and cases of Coke in refundable glass bottles. Where we would wait in mile-long lines to buy gas during the 1979 energy crisis. Where Grandpa went to get his boots resoled. Juarez was another part of our larger shared community.

Mexico City was different, and going there for the first time was both exciting and a little intimidating. It is huge, a never-ending city stretching out farther than you can see. People there, I thought, weren't going to be patient with a cafe con leche gringo who could barely fumble through Spanish. After a lifetime of blending in, I was suddenly afraid I was going to stick out like a Big Mac on fire.

But Sandy is from the D.F. (a nickname taken from what, until recently, was its official designation as the Distrito Federal — think of it as Mexico's version of D.C.). I wanted to see her home. I wanted to see the place which had shaped her.

And I also wanted to see it for myself. A part of me had to see it. It was deeper than being born in Southern California or having been raised in Southwest Texas. It was about going to the place where the artifacts of my life — those ephemeral inheritances unknown family members brought with them from some misty, history-bound place — had first been collected. A part of myself longed to see the swampy ground where it had originally taken root, even if it was generations removed. I was a cutting wanting to go back to the tree it had been clipped off from.

When I got there I felt it almost immediately, a sense of being somewhere completely new, yet undeniably familiar. There were whispered echoes of Juarez — or maybe it was the other way around — but on a larger, older scale. Here you could instantly see the prints left by Spain's grasping fingers (and the influence the Moors held over them), and the still-firm grip of the Aztecs. Instead of being overwhelming, all the people and noise and traffic and art, the grand spires and tiny storefronts, the flash of fashion and the slap of sandals, all of it felt — comfortable. It wasn't foreign at all.

It was as recognizable as my own reflection.

My first trip to the D.F. was for our honeymoon, so it's easy to assume part of my fondness comes from the excitement and hopeful expectation of starting a new marriage. I can't deny my feelings at the time are tied up with my memories of Mexico City. But I've been there again since then, and my feelings for Mexico City haven't changed. If anything, they've gotten stronger. Even if I wasn't born or raised in Mexico, and it can never really be home, it's still a part of who I am.

Porque yo soy Mexicano. And I'm an American. And I'm at home with being both.
 

MOVING ON

So my pal Luis is visiting Chicago from Houston, and we've been friends online for so long I would've sworn we had worked together either at the college paper or the local daily. But nope, we met in person for the first time yesterday. How weird and awesome is that?
 

SCREEN

I know without a doubt I've been watching TV all week, but I can't remember a single thing I've seen. Law & Order, probably? I'm almost sure some MAS*H is mixed up in there, along with reruns of Futurama and Bob's Burgers. Oh, wait! The new season of Claws has started! I think I've gone on and on about this show before, so I'll just remind y'all that it's a wonderfully over-the-top show about manicurists who, almost in spite of themselves, are becoming the crime queens of Manatee County, Florida. The all-female lead cast is fantastic, with characters who are multidimensional and all-too human, and who find themselves in situations swinging from hilarious to violently dangerous. The show is three episodes into its third season, and the first two seasons are available for streaming. If you haven't yet, get on board.


 

SOUNDS

I've been indulging my nostalgia again, this time with the 1993 Butthole Surfers album Independent Worm Saloon. Sometimes I like to think of myself as a fan of the Surfers, but the truth is I'm really just a fan of this album. It's got that early-90s fuzz over both vocals and guitars, a sound I've always liked. The songs themselves go from contemplative and surreal ballads to a track titled — appropriately — "The Annoying Song." IWS has the unapologetic, assaultive sound experiments of previous albums without the pointless noodling, and a mature, self-assuredness that invites listeners to take the Butthole Surfers a little more seriously. Also, it'll just rock your nuts off. So, you know, hold onto those.


 

PAGES

I'm still working my way through God Save Texas, but in between I read Lowriders to the Center of the Earth, a sequel to the graphic novel Lowriders in Space. Lowriders is deceptively simple; a graphic novel aimed primarily at young adult readers, with straightforward plots written by author Cathy Camper and illustrated by Raul the Third almost entirely in blue, black, and red ballpoint. But wow, is there so much more to it than that. The characters — anthropomorphic owners of a garage where they do repairs and detailing — are resolutely confident in themselves and each other. They code-switch, flipping from English to Spanish right in the middle of sentences, the way I heard Spanglish spoken growing up. And the artwork has the thinness of a sketch done on notebook paper, but with a depth and detail that is stunning. I hesitate to use words like "important" — especially about a book in which the gang try to rescue their cat from Mictlantecuhtli, the Aztec god of the underworld — but the Lowriders series feels that way, and I'm happy and inspired to know it's out there. And hey, Raul the Third is originally from El Paso, and city landmarks and icons such as the Thunderbird on the Mountain, the Plaza lagartos, and Juan Gabriel all make cameos.


 

IMAGE OF THE WEEK

The rain has been bad enough lately that secrets are being washed up to the surface, like these old brick cobblestones rising from the back alley asphalt they've been buried under.

SHARING IS CARING

My podcasts — PlastiCast and The Mirror Factory — can proudly be found on The Fire and Water Podcast Network. I'm also a semi-frequent guest on other FW podcasts, and a search of my name will turn those up. There are a lot of great shows on the Network, so check 'em out.
 
On Twitter you can find me at my personal account, the Plastic Man account, and even at this one for The Mirror Factory. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram.

Tell your friends to subscribe to The Beef at www.tinyletter.com/maxromero, and be sure to send me your comments, media recommendations, and virtual high-fives, and we'll talk again soon. Thanks. See you next week.

I've never been drunk. I've never been high.

It's not as if I never had the opportunity. I grew up in an era when uncles and older cousins would sneak sips of beer to the kids during family cook-outs. New friends in a new school offered me weed a week into seventh grade. Later that year, we had to walk one of those same friends up and down a ditch when he took too many pills one day. During my junior and senior years of high school I spent almost every weekend in neighboring Juarez, where the legal drinking age was 18. College was dotted with various parties in parent-free homes, apartments, and rented hotel rooms. And so on.

Still, I never drank. Never took drugs. I didn't even start drinking socially until I was in my 40s, and it didn't take. I can't remember the last time I had a beer, and honestly would rather have an Arnie Palmer anyway. Weed, much less anything stronger than that, remains undiscovered country.

None of this is bragging, or some sort of self-righteous stand. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with alcohol, just like there isn't anything inherently wrong with weed. If I get cancer again and have to get chemo, or if I develop glaucoma someday, you'd better believe I'm gonna smoke. No, the only thing I have a problem with is overindulgence, the kind that puts someone, or the people around them, in harm's way. Or the kind that makes you annoying, because man, I am not here to babysit.

People used to ask me, "Why don't you drink?" And I would usually say something along the lines of how I just never developed a taste for it. Which is true.

What's also true is my father was an alcoholic.

Almost from the time I can remember, Dad would take me and my younger sister with him to the bar. Specifically, I remember the Night Gallery, a little neighborhood bar only a few blocks from my grandparent's house. Going to the Night Gallery was a treat, because Dad would get us Shirley Temples and a shot glass filled with maraschino cherries, and it had the air of the forbidden, a dark and empty place echoing with the ghosts of something we couldn't understand.

It was also the stale-smelling cavern home of Tom the Monster. Tom the Monster (never just Tom, never just The Monster) was the owner of the Night Gallery and he lived up to his name. He was, to my eyes, enormous, a living mountain of a man with a tumbleweed beard and a low voice that rumbled like landslide. If seeing two elementary school-age kids in his bar in the middle of the afternoon surprised him, Tom the Monster never showed it. As he made small talk with Dad at the bar, my sister and I were allowed to play with the billiard balls and the shuffleboard table as long as no one else wanted them.

I'd come back to the Night Gallery, and other bars, in the years to come. Then I'd be in the back seat as my mom drove angrily past the parking lot to see if Dad's truck was there. If it was, she'd park and tell us to stay in the car, she'd be right back. More reverberations with echoes I was too young to understand, except that Mom was upset, and it was because of Dad. Soon enough I could figure out it was the drinking, the beer and the way it made my father behave.

It got worse, and it was terrifying. Thankfully, Dad wasn't an angry or abusive drunk. Mostly he was sloppy and affectionate, telling us he loved us before becoming enveloped in a profound sadness, a melancholy he wore like a deep blue mantle. "I never had a father," he'd tell us, a ragged razor of desperation in his voice. He'd met his birth father only once, and was raised by an abusive and unloving stepfather I knew as Grandpa Luis. "You're lucky to have a father," he'd say, jabbing a dusty mahogany finger at us. "I never had a father."

What had been a stable childhood was steadily becoming more and more unpredictable, and I dealt with it the way I think most young kids do — through avoidance. If Dad was drunk, I tried to stay in my room. I didn't talk. I tried not to cry when I saw Mom getting upset. In the morning, I told myself, things would be back to normal.

It was around then I decided I would never put my family through that. About a year later I would have enough understanding to decide I would never put myself through that.

Over time it got worse, as alcoholism tends to do. His drinking became a constant in our lives. He'd sometimes come home, stumbling and reeking of beer, and we'd have to help him undress and get into bed. More than once we'd hear the truck pull up, but when he didn't come in we'd go out to look and he'd be passed out behind the wheel. We'd wonder how he even made it home.

Eventually he got busted at his job with the railroad when he came back positive for marijuana after a random drug test. To this day I'm not sure how it happened, it must have been the result of some sort of evaluation done by the people running the tests, but Dad was officially declared an alcoholic and given a choice; go into a monthlong rehab or lose his job.

Rehab was amazing, and made me a lifelong advocate for therapy and counseling. Dad attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings in the hospital, and the family went to AlAnon. We had individual sessions, and group sessions where I told him how his boozing made me feel and how I felt about him. Dad and I had always had a gap between us, a chasm that yawned with our inability to understand each other. Those counseling sessions bridged the gap, and for maybe the first time, I empathized with my father.

When the month was up, Dad was clean, ready to make a new start, and happy to show off his 1-Month Sober chip.

No. Of course it didn't last.

Dad held on for a year. He tried so hard, and we all really thought he was going to pull it off. I think even he felt he could do it. But other times I think he gave himself a year, 12 months with a finish line ribbon to cross just to prove he could. Then it started off with a beer, just one beer, a day. For an alcoholic, though, a beer might as well be a six-pack, a case, a fridge full of dwindling returns.

This time was different. This time Dad was careful not to get too drunk, careful to not get caught the way he had been before. We could tell, of course, but even we didn't realize, for a long time, that somewhere along the way Dad had become a functioning alcoholic. He didn't stumble around like a drunk much anymore, but that was because, like some sort of pie-eyed Hulk, he was always drunk. He had to drink just to feel normal. When I think about it, this might the second-most tragic part of his disease. His illness was a burglar, a mugger, a pickpocket that had stolen his god-given right to normalcy when none of us were looking, but right in front of us all the same.

Like all good Mexican-American children, I was in my 20s and still living at home. I was working at the newspaper and promising to go back to finish up my degree someday soon. I don't remember exactly how it happened, but Dad came home, obviously drunk that day, and I'd had enough. I said something sarcastic and judgmental and hurtfully true. Dad became angry, and announced I finally thought I could take him. (There had never been violence in our house, so this was as much a surprise to me as it was to him once he sobered up.) He pushed me, and pushed me again, until I was out the door and he told me I didn't live there anymore. Pissed and tearful, I walked to the neighborhood Good Times Store and called Sandy, who was my girlfriend then, and I went to stay with her.

Dad was prideful and could hold grudges like no one else, but I imagine he was haunted by the shadow of his stepfather, and he called me at the apartment a few days afterward. He apologized and said I could come back if I wanted. We talked and cleared up a lot of things, reaching a new understanding of each other once again. I didn't go back.

Years passed, and the family reached as much of a detente with Dad's alcoholism as could be possible. Informally retired thanks to layoffs and no real desire to find another job, Dad made trips to Sam's, doted on his grandchildren, and carried around a big thermal mug filled with wine. He was drinking, but he was functioning. Things were good.

I can't remember where I was when I got the phone call. Was I at work? At home? I know Sandy later had to get a ride from the newsroom to the hospital. What I do remember is being told, "Dad's going to the emergency room. Get there, now. You have to hurry." The freeway was a blur, and I pulled into the parking lot just behind the ambulance. I jumped out in time to see Dad being wheeled in.

Esophogeal varices develop as a result of liver disease, and are essentially enlarged and weakened veins in the throat. At the time I didn't know Dad had been coughing up blood recently. I didn't know that with the wear and tear of regularly drinking, Dad had worn his throat down to the point that one day, that day, the lining of his esophagus would give away. He died that night, bleeding so fast from his ravaged throat the doctors couldn't give him blood fast enough to keep up, his belly distended and swollen with the runoff.

We all said our goodbyes before letting him go. He was heavily sedated, but we poured our hope and whispered our words into his ear anyway. And in that moment, I told him the truth.

I told him how much I loved him. I told him I would always love him. I thanked him for everything he taught me, and everything he tried to teach me. I told him, over and over, what a good father he had been. "I have a father," I told him. "I was lucky that I always had a father."

Because I was. Dad was an alcoholic, but that was his disease. It wasn't who he was. My dad was a compassionate, passionate man. He was unabashedly kind to his family, to friends, and to strangers. He loved art and music, and sci-fi movies, and his heritage. He loved to laugh and give bear hugs, and couldn't help doing either, anyway. He'd call my grandmother every April Fool's Day to prank her, and would cry tears of laughter when she'd get him back. He brought lonely people to Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners because "no one should be by themselves tonight." Every year he made homemade pizza for my birthday.

When I cried because my Spider-Man doll broke, he popped the head off the Starskey & Hutch doll I had, switched clothes and heads, and Spidey was back in action. He told me and my sister to ride our bikes to the Good Times Store by ourselves, even though he knew it would give Mom a heart attack. One Halloween, Dad made me a mask that looked just like the guy on the cover of the Quiet Riot album out of cardboard, gray spray paint, and chain. He made the wooden arch Sandy and I got married under. He could make or fix almost anything.

HIs hands were dry and rough, like the finest sandpaper.

Dad taught me and my sister the thrill and rewards of taking risks. That the world wasn't fair but was still achingly beautiful if you looked. To appreciate what I had, whether it was a little or a lot. He taught me generosity. He also taught me to appreciate the kind of hard work that produced scraped knuckles and hard, yellowed callouses, and the bright desert flowers in the corner rock garden that came later. He taught me that all things were possible through sheer force of will, and if that didn't work, you could always Chicano that chingadero.

I still don't drink, and I still don't do drugs. I've never been drunk. I've never been high. A small part of that is because a small part of me didn't want to be like my father.

I'm lucky that a bigger part of me wants to be just like him.
 

SHARING IS CARING

My podcasts — PlastiCast and The Mirror Factory — can proudly be found on The Fire and Water Podcast Network. I'm also a semi-frequent guest on other FW podcasts, and a search of my name will turn those up. There are a lot of great shows on the Network, so check 'em out.
 
On Twitter you can find me at my personal account, the Plastic Man account, and even at this one for The Mirror Factory. You can also follow me on Facebook and Instagram.

Tell your friends to subscribe to The Beef at www.tinyletter.com/maxromero, and be sure to send me your comments, media recommendations, and virtual high-fives, and we'll talk again soon. Thanks. See you next week.