Dead Pharaohs

Every once and a while you find out one little thing and it sets off a cogitating avalanche. The old brain sizzles a couple minutes and all the old ideas about how things ought to happen get fried into a mushy omelet that won’t hold together anymore. It’s a brain blowout.

That happened when I was a little kid and heard what you put where to make babies at recess. Then again when I was in the army and figured out why I was sitting locked up in a tiny trailer listening on a big radio to some other army headquarters talking Russian about their latest girlfriends: so we could drop big, fat A-bombs on them and break up their little patty-cake parties.

It happened again the other day. I was hearing about old Egypt before pharaohs married their sisters and got fancy with tall, pointy pyramids. Back then, really far back B.C., everyone dead just got covered up with a couple feet of dry, hot sand. Then, if someone happened to dig them up after a hundred years or so, they looked fine, just a little wrinkled. Sand dried out those naked hot bodies like three-year-old prunes and the dead folks looked like they might just sit up and talk about the weather or what they had for dinner last night.

But you know how rich guys are never satisfied, even back then. The pharaohs started buying fancy wooden boxes covered with gold paint and cat pictures on the sides. Then when they died, they got packed in their boxes, like a fat old sardine with their wives and servants and then locked up in a old damp cellar way down under their fancy new pyramid. Down where it’s so damp even the bugs get wet feet. So what happens there? After a month or two the dead turn into a nasty box of Pharaoh mush. As smelly and smushy as road-kill rabbits rotting on the road side.

To save the day, Egyptian hot-shot scientists came in and looked up how to make pickles and Egyptian sauerkraut and tried it out on their pharaoh.

That was the little thing I learned. Mummies are just a nostalgia craze. Wanting your body to rise up after you’re dead is just an accident of geography. All history is just a bad experiment in pickling and packing the dead to save them for a rainy day in dead-guys-walking heaven. This risen dead body thing would never have happened if Egypt were down in some jungle and all our followup Western Civ religion ideas dealt with a wet and soggy afterlife.

Anyway, how come you want an old, used dead body to come back to? I’d rather return as a hot looking 55 Chevy or a T-bird spouting flames in the wheelwells and cruise a million, million miles on an empty road-race hi-way running all over heaven.

And even if I got this body back I’m not sure which parts I'd want in it. My muscles peaked about when I was 30, but the brain was not in great shape for a long time after that. And what about those parts the doctor cut out. They can stay out. They are preserved in a jar down in the basement and that’s fine with me.

Un Día Sin Mexicanos

Mi vida es como la película, Un Día Sin Mexicanos. Viví más de veinte años en Half Moon Bay entre muchos mexicanos. Entonces, me mudé de casa a la isla de Alameda hace un año y medio. Todos los mexicanos han desaparecido de mi vida. No hay en Alameda. Cuando hablé de este fenómeno con mis amigos afroamericanos, me dijeron que el racismo en Alameda era muy fuerte hace diez años, cuándo vivían allí muchos miembros de la marina norteamericana. Los padres de mis amigos les mandaban que no manejaran allí porque la policía molestaban los negros. Me imagino que era malo también para los mexicanos. Espero que sea diferente hoy, pero no estoy seguro. Hay afroamericanos en mi barrio (más de 15 por ciento) y muchos chinos (25 por ciento) alrededor de la isla de Alameda, pero todavía no hay muchos mexicanos.

La vida aquí es diferente sin mexicanos. No hay niños jugando en todas partes con sus hermanos y su papá y su mamá y sus abuelos y sus tíos. No hay fútbol en las calles. Sólo hay gringas con un café de Starbucks y un cochecito que envuelve un bebé y que parecen como un tren de aterrizaje de los 747es. Echo de menos las conversaciones con las familias mexicanas. Los gringos no hablan con sus vecinos y los chinos no hablan con los gringos. ¡Qué ciudad!

Sin embargo, se puede encontrar mexicanos al otro lado del puente en Fruitvale. Es como en México, excepto hay chinos y vietnamitas. La vida en las calles de Fruitvale es rica, las familias están allí y las tiendas huelen con sabores de mi memoria en HMB.

A propósito del tema de la tarea, estoy seguro de que va a haber problemas económicos sin mexicanos, problemas para los ricos que buscan trabajadores para sus jardines y niños. Más importante, va a haber problemas en todas partes de la economía, porque los mexicanos trabajan en todas partes de EE.UU.

Estoy seguro también de que este problema no va a ocurrir. Los negocios no van a permitirlo. Ellos no van a pagar mucho para sueldos y por causa de sueldos bajos necesitan inmigrantes pobres para empleados. México satisface sus necesidades. Inmigración y los sueldos bajos son la historia de los EE.UU. desde la guerra civil hace unos 150 años.

No hay otros pobres tan fácilmente explotados como los mexicanos que son vecinos. Me pregunto por que los negocios esperaron muchos años antes de contratarlo. Antes usaban polacos, eslovacos y checos que vivían lejos de los EE.UU. Eran católicos como mexicanos. Pero ellos eran blancos. El racismo, otra vez.

Posiblemente, los negocios van a buscar más inmigrantes blancos, pero es difícil encontrarlos hoy, especialmente cuando el euro tiene valor mucho más grande que el dólar.

Con gracias a Sr. Zermaño por su ayuda

Smart Guy Radio

I remember hiding under the covers at 11PM, looking for rock and roll radio stations transmitting from up north to my one-transistor radio that was clogged with local, twangy country quartets and holy roller music. That radio was special to me because it let me imagine wonderful, far-away Buffalo NY where Dick Biondi played Danny and the Juniors, sending them all the way down into the highlands of North Carolina.

Radio got more interesting when I came back from the Army in Vietnam Days. I remember when the FM DJ’s played “The wicked witch is dead” all day long when J. Edgar Hoover finally died. They gave drug reports for white heart-shaped tabs and pink and blue caps every afternoon at 5. They told us where to go when when we had a rash or something was happening in the city. And there was that guy, Rumpled Foreskin, who was the night DJ and played the Fugs from NY and Quicksilver. We turned it up loud in the incense packing room where I worked making watermelon and mango flavors using Bombay charcoal sticks and Dow Chemical artificial flavors our weird boss hid in the back room.

FM then was like the internet a couple years ago. We owned it. And the money people did not. But the money people finally figured out how to make FM bland as Wonder Bread and weenies with their focus groups and teeny-bop wonders.

It got worse. Yelling old men preached waco politics and got hold of everything on the air. I turned off the radio and never listened again.

Now I´m back, almost. But I’m a geeky downloader type. I looked for interesting stuff on the web and finally found some. I listen in now as smart folks explain the world to me. They tried it once before, when I was in school listening to rock and roll, but this time a lot of it makes more sense.

Here are some of the shows I get now:
Shooting an Elephant: Why Europe Went to War in 1914
Mapping the Brain
Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting
Special Relativity
The Design of Future Things: Cautious Cars and Cantankerous Kitchens

I put them on my IPod and go for a walk about an hour everyday, listening and trying not to bump into stuff when it gets real interesting. OK, I don’t take notes and I forget a lot, but it is sure is better than Geraldo or, even worse, Regis and Kelly. Nice that there are still some smart guys left in the world--broadcasting free on my webcast radio.