To those of you who say war can solve problems, even as a last resort, I say war, the build up to it, the preparation for it, and the psychological issues that motivate it  ARE the problem.  There is no solution that war can provide that peace can't and there is no level of peace that is unreachable without war.

My lonely motorcycle

My motorcycle scooter has a really good motor, 22,000 miles and it's still going strong.  It's a Honda, of course it's still working.  The plastic front is broken and would be falling off it weren't for the twisty ties holding it on to the dashboard. It's got the classic Honda Elite scooter look with the flat front that makes the dashboard look like someone holding their arms up to cover their face in shame. The tail lights and the rear break lights are out.  I don't know why and I've been meaning to fix them. It's hurting but knows it can still run and it just keeps going even though it needs help.  I just hope it doesn't crash and burn some day or, if it does, that it'll get rebuilt and will live the rest of it's life in better shape.
Last night I had a dream that I was sitting on an unfamiliar couch with my Mom who was curled up fast asleep in a sitting position with her feet propped up on the cushions.  Somehow she woke up and was slurring her speech not making much sense.  I told myself she was just groggy from being woken up in order to stifle the thought that she had been drinking again.  She claimed to be sober for almost 34 years even though I caught her in another dream which in this dream seemed like reality so i guess this was a continuation or recurrence of the same nightmare.  As she slurred her speech and couldn't really focus on me or anything the fear became stronger.  I thought, at 45 years old and her at 75 that this is just like when I was ten, when the person I loved and needed the most would trick me by having her physical self there right in front of me while completely disappearing.  I grabbed her water bottle and took a sip. It tasted like vodka.  How could you do this I said as I walked to the other side of the long still unfamiliar house to dump it out in the kitchen sink on the opposite side of the room some 40 ft away.  She realized what was going on and was making a failing, flailing attempt with her long skinny arms to defend and justify.  "How could it be that you're drinking again? This is the second time I've seen it and I don't even live with you."  I said crying from a distance.  Her head shook conveying the drunken "this is all fucked up" message and she bowed her head as her arms went up to cover her face and I looked at her as she turned into my lonely motorcycle.

Fabricating scaricty and generating violence

Why is that weeding is an endless job?  I have a garden that is growing and I can't keep up with the weeds, the invasives.  I need help, I recruit volunteers, we weed and it looks great for a while.  I'm happy cause the garden looks good, all clean, no weeds.  I tend to my garden and catch one of those nasty weeds popping up and get'em.  Then I leave for a couple weeks and come back and their all back even worse than before I recruited my volunteers, so I recruit some more.  One day, several years ago, I climbed to the top of the highest hill in Tijuana, El Cerro Colorado.  There were no people around and I looked at the plants, they were all native plants, no weeds.  How is that possible, I thought, no one weeds here?  How is that we spend hours and hours weeding my garden and never finish and yet here, there are no weeders and no weeds?

Why is it that stopping terrorists is a never ending job? If we have helicopteres and border walls and jet skis and armed guards with flack jackets and helmets and guns in vehicles that are stationed and roaming back and forth along a high speed corridor that cuts through the contours of a borderless sacred land.  Why is it that as the war on terror has created ever more sophisticated equipment to find and route out terrorists has increased so has terrorism?  Why is it that when I go to Mexico, they don't have this protection that hovers around open lands vigilant to any danger and yet there are no Islamic extremists or anyone wanting to bomb their sky scrapers?  Why are the only so-called terrorists in Mexico the ones who fight against the armed militia trained at the institute of the americas?  Why is it that the only time people terrorize other people in Mexico is when plan Mérida is implemented to create war machines to protect its people?


Why is it that when I plant brocoli, it grows and grows and when it's all out the leaves continue to grow and no matter how much a lady harvests for her children the leaves keep coming back, in fact the more she harvests, the more they come back?  Why is it that when there are fields of monoculture it some how is finite and runs out at the grocery store?  Could it be that we fabricate scaricty and generate violence?

Beach thought

If I had a ladder, I would lean it on the light of the stars, climb over the sea, and hang from the moon, glimmering in the night.

If I had a rope I would lasso the sun and climb up through an opening in the clouds to lay on the songs of birds.

If I were an indigenous plant, I would grow dark green in the shadow of a menacing barrier and reach through the lines of sunlit cracks to bloom yellow petals and a brown stigma on the other side.

If I were a kite, I would tie my string down to my mother's womb and soar above the divide to find myself in the sky.

If I could live as long as a rock, I would tell the story of how I burst out of middle earth in a fiery passion that lasted a human lifetime only to cool down, solidify, and observe millions of years of experiences that could only be explained in irrational dreams.

The dream that woke me up after the Trump election

The  first night trump was elected, I didn’t sleep at all and then I was in shock for two days. That 3rd night, I stayed at a friends house, Jim Hornsby.  He's a close left wing liberal friend and poet who lets me stay at his house in City Heights when I need it.  He was the first American I talked to about the election.  It was a relief to vent everything I was feeling and listen to someone with similar feelings.  I crashed sound asleep and woke up with back pain after a while like I often do.  I stretched and moved around for a bit and laid back down.  I closed my eyes and assimilated some of the days events that began to mix with symbols of my subconscious, the conversation with Jim, the election, street protests... riding my bicycle to a bar and having to fish something out from a space in the wall behind the bartender.  I met a girl and was just going along with whatever she wanted.  She was showing me up to her room on the ninth floor and as we turned off the stairs on the seventh floor for some kind of detour, I saw an old and well-known activist friend who I haven’t been able to communicate with lately round the stairs with two others helping him.  He turned his head and his face was pale, sickly, yellow-green and his eyes were unfocused.

The people rushed him up the stairs so fast I couldn’t say anything to him but I gasped, “What’s wrong with him?!?”  I chased after him but couldn’t find him.  I saw some of the people who were with him who said he had been driven away so I caught some type of public transportation van to follow him.  The van turned into a transport to take me and a young man to a particular destination.  We got there and it was exactly like somewhere I’d been before in Baja on the ocean but we were in California on the same ocean, standing on a brick balcony.  I looked out at the ocean and noticed it was quite tumultuous and a big black wave splashed up about 7 or 800 feet  off shore.  “What a weird storm.”  I commented to my young friend who was also starting notice and as I finished my sentence we both noticed these white clumsy mechanical boxes with tentacles flying around… “DRONES!” we both shouted as we realized they were dropping bombs and ran to opposite sides of the porch deck to take cover.  I was crouched down in an opening in the brick floor that had cover around it but not on top thinking I wasn't quite doing it right but strangely not caring too much.  I was thinking, not scared at all, ‘this is normal for a lot of people in countries that we bomb.’  After a long while the bombing stopped and we both came out unscathed and a group of young people walked up.  They were all people of color in their upper twenties early thirties.  They were as american as me or anyone in their speech and mannerisms but none were white.  They were asking each other what the bombing was about, why it happened and one of them asked, “Do you think it was because Trump just got elected?”
“Of course it was,” I butted in, “The world is reacting.”  
We walked over to a docking ramp made of the same brick the patio in general was made of and a very white man in camouflage military garb drove up the ramp from a cargo ship and started to speak to us in a language that sounded like Russian but was just a little different.  One of the youngsters knew the language and translated.  The soldier was nice and courteous and said we needed to follow him.  We walked along the brick board walk until we got to this really nice place.  It was like a resort but nicer and it seemed like people lived there, like they never left.  There was a young girl talking with some others standing by an olympic size pool, putting on her goggles and behind them was a huge sectioned off by glass walls dance club where people around the same age were having a great time.  I remember a guy who seemed kind of separated and a little nervous asking a girl to dance and her accepting and them having fun and thanking each other at the end.  I didn’t have much feeling or judgement about the place and was just kind of hanging out.  Some Asian women came up to me and one of them started massaging my foot where I have an old injury that bugs me sometimes.  It felt really good and after a few minutes she stopped and showed me a piece of paper with a list of time periods how much each costs and then it hit me, this is a scam.  “No I don’t want this…” I told her in an almost offended tone.  I walked away and leaned over to grab something from a couch and felt this sharp needle in my butt.  I stood and turned and saw a guy with the needle in his hand.  I started to feel woozy and thought I was about to pass out but still had my wits about me somewhat.  
I can’t remember what I said or if I just gave him an annoyed look.
“Here is the list of what each dosis costs,” showing me a list similar to the one the foot masseuse showed me.
“Get out of here, what the hell are you doing?”  my adrenaline overpowering the drowsiness, my tone, my attitude, and even my accent going back to my New York roots.
“Well, you don’t have to buy any if you don’t want to.”
I got the same feeling I get when I deal with Border Patrol how they manipulate the situation to try to paint me as the aggressor.
“What do you mean I don’t have to, you just shot me in the ass…” I turned my back and waved him away, “Get the fuck outta here.”  

Light came in the window and woke me from the dream.

My Aunt B - Home is where your hat is from

Aunt B with her traditional Colombian sombrero vueltiao

“I think it's possible, why not?! Todos dicen que estoy loca pero yo digo que es cierto.” she continues to insist the mountains surrounding us on the patio of her home in Southern California are some how the same mountain range where she grew up in Bucaramanga, Colombia.

Beatriz Bedoya, or Aunt B, was born the youngest of six siblings. Her father was probably 1/2 black but none of the children knew how much African blood they had in them because it was shunned on to be black and common to make racist jokes about black people at the house. These days, my Aunt B is proud of the fact that she's black and often boasts about it. She doesn't bother to specify how much black blood she has in her, just makes sure to let everyone know she's black and how ridiculous it is for anyone to deny it, raising her forearm to show you her skin color or pointing at her face widening her eyes while looking straight at you.

She met Kevin McCarten, my uncle, an intelligent business man, great father, and one of the most generous people I know through her sister in 1969 who worked in the local Peace Corps offices in a nearby town to Bucaramanga. Uncle Kevin had been recruited from the business school at San José State University in a new Peace Corps recruitment campaign to diversify the peace corp mixing in some finance oriented majors with the liberal arts/peace-nic types. She was 21 years old and vaguely aware of anything outside of Bucaramanga. In 1971, they were married and moved to the states. She tells me she made this decision with out really deciding. It didn't completely sink in what she had done until she was here. For the first time in her life, she was surrounded by people speaking fluently in English, the first time she had seen snow and the first time her black heritage was surrounded by all white faces that embodied what her father had been ashamed of and tried to hide while she grew up. Even after living in the states several years, when she walked outside with her kids, people in the neighborhood would ask her if she was the maid which really ticked her off. She returned home at least once a year up until her first child was born at which point her father stopped telling her “I told you so” about her decision to leave her homeland and, more accepting and supporting of her decision, started saying, “No turning back now.”

I didn't know my Aunt too well growing up, just vague memories of her seemingly very happy and always showing off her “Latina” side. She livened up one of our traditional big Thanks Giving family get togethers (my Mom has 7 brothers and sisters including Uncle Kevin plus all their kids) by singing “La Bamba” and banging together some salt shakers.

When my Aunt B first came to the US, instead of going to the English class Uncle Kevin thought she was taking during the day, she took Esperanto, an artificial language that was a failed attempt at creating a universal second language for the world to communicate across cultural and language barriers. “Kiel vi fartas?” she greeted when he came home from work one day. They both tell this story and laugh about it now. She also told my uncle that “Yak Jerk called” once because she confuses her ys and js and one time called “gun shot” in order to get the front seat in the car. Despite these and other funny English mistake anecdotes, Aunt B has been fully bilingual for many years and has a masters degree in education from the states.

Her two kids, my cousins Ian and Alex, who have a blue-eyed blond haired Irish father, and grew up in their later childhood years in a predominately white middle-upper class lifestyle in Orange County, estimate that they are about 1/8 black and call themselves Octaroons (a real word they learned in the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy).

After living on the East Coast for a few years, My Uncle Kevin, followed several jobs in the airline business in different cities in California until buying a house in Fresno in 1976 and then settling in San Clemente in the early eighties when he started a shipping business.

When Alex was 2 yrs old she only spoke Spanish. I remember, when I was about 10 years old taking a trip with her, my Mom, my baby sitter, and my sister. Alex's favorite word was popó. My Aunt B told me recently that her and Uncle Kevin only spoke Spanish to her as a toddler and how she regrets that they listened to her kindergarten teacher who told them she was speaking too much Spanish and it would get in the way of her learning English. Alex grew up speaking English and later relearned Spanish as a second language.

I became very interested in the Spanish language in my young adult years too, which led me to being active in and working in Tijuana and Ensenada to learn. By the time I finished my masters in Spanish linguistics at San Diego State and started a career as a Spanish teacher in San Diego, my cousin Ian (Alex's younger brother) was now a teenage skater and living in their beautiful home on the cliffs of San Clemente. I would often go up and visit. Aunt B is a retired middle school math teacher. She loved teaching and always tried to help latino immigrant children in any way she could. She's always been athletic and liked the outdoors and her and I would hit the beach with a local body surfing club once a week. I would drive up from home in Tijuana where I was doing my final socio-linguistic thesis study. Aunt B and I would talk about the comforting chaos of Latino countries and compare and contrast how a Mexican says something and how a Colombian says something. I was as passionate as someone could be about the Spanish language or anything and Aunt B ate up the opportunity to speak Spanish with me and started to claim me as her Latino son.

I remember a conversation with her and my Uncle Kev about how she missed the fact that in Colombia you could walk outside at 10p and there would be a neighbor to talk to and how that's how it was in Tijuana, but here it's super quiet, and you can't hear or see anyone outside after dark. My Uncle Kev actually enjoys this peace and quiet. Aunt B and I saw eye to eye on a lot of things and started to become good friends.

I remember at my Grandpa's funeral her saying to me, not trying to give grand advice but just as a general comment between good friends and to express how we were both feeling, “Nunca sabes cuándo se van a acabar las cosas. La vida es más corta de lo que uno piensa.”

For some reason my visits kind of dwindled down to mainly only visiting during family get togethers. At one point during this time, I heard that Aunt B wasn't very happy. My cousins Alex and Ian had both grown up and moved out. I went up on New Year's eve one year and hung out with Uncle Kevin. Aunt B had gone to Colombia for a while. “I hope she feels better after getting the chance to go home after so many years” Uncle Kevin told me on our way down to the local pub to ring in the new year.

“Yeah, I sometimes feel like a part of her never left Colombia.”

My visits dwindled even more which I regret. I feel like I gained a real confidant in my Aunt B. We were buds and I wasn't able to share some of the new things happening in my life. I did continue to go up for the annual Super Bowl Party which my uncle calls his “Favorite holiday“ and always makes sure it's a great party. It's recently become the McCarten family get together to the point where even relatives from the East Coast came out for it last year and I've taken friends from San Diego and Tijuana including my professional guitar friend Delfino from Tijuana, who would put on a show after the game for those who wanted to keep partying.  "I love this fucking gringo", I remember her saying one time after a few drinks, jumping into a conversation with her arm around Uncle Kev kind of showing him off to me and a couple of friends I had brought one year.

A few years after the News Year’s eve visit, I did go up just to visit and Aunt B and I took a walk on the beach. I noticed her asking me a question and then sometimes as little as 10 min later asking me the same question. We had dinner a little later with Uncle Kev and when she wasn't there he told me she's been having some memory problems.

My Mom has recently come down to visit on a couple occasions and both times we went to visit Aunt B and Uncle Kev so I've been able to visit and talk with them in the last year more often than the past few years. I live in Tijuana still and despite my attachment there, I have to admit that it feels good to stay in the US sometimes and sleep in a nice quiet suburban neighborhood like the one I grew up in.

“Mira, mira...” my Aunt B kept saying to urge me over again to the sliding glass door to see the little sparrows eating some bread crumbs she left out on the patio. I arrive and see the last one catching a morsel as they fly over the horizon, the trail of bread crumbs leads toward the hills.

“Yo no soy tan loca. Yo digo que sí es posible...” she repeats to me later as we sit together on the back porch, pointing to the mountain range surrounding their new home in San Juan Capistrano insisting once again that it is connected to the range that runs around her home town on the Mesita de Bucaramanga, Colombia.

Advice from a Jojoba

"Just wait" says the Jojoba plant, a 6 inch tall baby with sprouting roots. I see her recently planted inside the cactus garden in a circle with the white sage trickling through the other patient souls clumped together crowding around the towering 20 ft high border wall. "Just wait. Don't plant freeways and "cubre suelos" used to cover the earth at their medians. I only ask your patience. I don't need you to pipe out treated water through a rubber hose as I get my water from the skies. I don't need you to create any conditions as I am native to this land and it is my home. All I need is your breath and your patience. If you give me this, I promise we will not be estranged. I promise to become one with the earth swaping nutrients with the soil. If you just exhale the anxiety to build isolation chambers on to me, I will convert it into your oxygen and we will heal. If you just exhale the soot of SUVs and the black plague of war that is made to protect it, we will grow and my roots will reach deeper than the height of this wall and hold our common ground firm when the first torrential downpour comes and the white sage trickling through becomes a river that washes away the freeways and divisions made by the decorative cubre suelos that smother us.