Actual e-mail exchange between me and my sisters

By Steve Peralta
September 15, 2008 – 8:04 pm (Read 20 times)

From: Chris Torrez
Subject: ARE YOU OK ??
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Date: Monday, September 15, 2008, 11:49 AM

Brother

Just checking to see if all is good in TX.. haven’t heard from ya

—–

From: Alejandra Peralta
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 11:54 AM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

yeah; no email in a few days.

—–

From: Raquel Castaneda
Sent: 9/15/2008 at 11:58 AM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

The power is out in Galveston, I wonder if it reached up into SanAnto…..??

—–

From: Chris Torrez [mailto:ctorrez@mountaincitymeat.com]
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 11:58 AM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: RE: ARE YOU OK ??

yikes!! I don’t have his number to check on him

—–

From: Raquel Castaneda
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008, 12:08 PM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

I just tried all 3 #’s I have for him, all went to voice mail….

—–

From: Alejandra Peralta
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 12:10 PM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

Uh oh; whens the last time anybody talked to him????? He was emailin last week right?

—–

From: Steve Peralta
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 1:29 PM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

Dear Family:

I died and went to Heaven.

Everything is okay, but St. Peter said when I got here that you all have to deposit some money into my bank account back on Earth to pay off some sins that I committed just before I died. I have to pay or they’re going to boot me into Purgatory.

So, anyway, there’s e-mail up here in Heaven. Just e-mail me back and let me know when you can deposit that money.

Love,

Your dead brother

—–

From: Raquel Castaneda
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008, 2:32 PM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

Dear Dead Brother:

I’m sorry to hear you’re dead…..and unfortunately I’m flat broke, and won’t be able to send God any money on your behalf. I hear purgatory isn’t all that bad. Haven’t you ever seen the movie “The Haunting”? One of the characters spent 7 years there, so you’ll be fine. Tell Jeebus I said “WUDDUP?”

See ya soon,

Your still alive sister Rachel. :P

——

From: Steve Peralta
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 2:34 PM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

I told St. Peter you were all broke ass Mexicans, but he didn’t care. He said he wants the money by Oct. 1 or else he’s going to boot me out.

I think he just doesn’t like Mexicans.

——

From: Raquel Castaneda
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008, 2:36 PM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

Well that ain’t right!!! I’mma write a very stern letter to the Man in charge…..would that be the Pope err the Lord…???

——

From: Steve Peralta
Sent: Monday, September 15, 2008 2:40 PM
To: “FAMILY E-MAIL LIST”
Subject: Re: ARE YOU OK ??

Send the letter to The Pope, The Lord and CC Satan on it.


Media responds like lightning to Palin’s line in the sand

By Steve Peralta
September 4, 2008 – 4:19 am (Read 23 times)

Sarah Palin gave her debut speech in front of millions of viewers tonight. The speech callously ripped Obama and his campaign ridiculing and diminishing his public service while showing a general lack of respect for the Democratic nominee.

The speech was written by Bush’s speechwriter, Matthew Scully, who met Palin for the first time last week.

It was an ugly, fear mongering speech filled with lies and a direct reference to the media and their treatment of at least two issues surrounding Palin at present.

“Here’s a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I’m not going to Washington to seek their good opinion. I’m going to Washington to serve the people of this country,” said Palin in her speech.

Well, the media didn’t like that too much. Within an hour, there was news about e-mails sent by Palin that implicate her in the improper firing of an Alaskan state trooper. She is, for those who don’t know, Alaska’s sitting Governor.

There’s also the recent report (albeit by the liberal New York Times) that Palin, while Mayor of the small town of Wasilla, Alaska, brought up the idea of a proposed the ban of several books from the local library. She never said which books would be banned and the proposal was never formally presented, but the born-again Christian upset some local residents with the idea including the town’s librarian, Mary Ellen Emmons, who was very vocal in her opposition to Palin. Emmons vowed to “resist all efforts at censorship.” Despite the fact that the proposal never made it to the table, Palin fired Emmons anyway for threatening to oppose the phantom proposal. There was a mutiny in the town and Emmons was reinstated, but her taste for a career under Palin soured and she quit as librarian two years later.

The Republicans are good at campaigning. They know how to talk sh*t. It’s ugly and crude, but it’s effective and Obama, in order to win, needs to stick to his game plan.


On the heels of the “Cell Phone” post

By Steve Peralta
September 1, 2008 – 4:14 am (Read 21 times)

Got some very positive e-mail from people who read my cell phone piece in the local alternative weekly. Thanks to those people. I’m planning on writing some more in the near future.

Next piece will be on 30-something friendships. Starting and maintaining friendships in your 30s seems to be extremely hard for at least all of the people I know and I have a couple of theories on it that I need to research.

Anyway, here’s my facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/people/Steve_Peralta/1190499792

Feel free to add me.


Overkill

By Steve Peralta
August 25, 2008 – 2:39 am (Read 31 times)


Why cell phones and Twitter suck

By Steve Peralta
August 14, 2008 – 4:02 pm (Read 32 times)

I don’t own a cell phone and I work in the IT field. Odd, but true. There are several reasons I don’t own a cell phone that range from practical to personal. Here are a few:

They’re modern era tracking devices. I’m big on conspiracy theories and people really are not aware of just exactly how their privacy is being violated just because of their use of a cell phone. The Patriot Act has made it possible for everyone’s conversations to be recorded, but not only this, people’s movements are also recorded with the help of latent signals that their phone puts out. It’s ingenius really. Never in modern history has the public been so willing to compromise their civil liberties just for ability to babble on a cell phone whenever they want and pay out of their own pockets to do it.

Yesterday, as I sat inside Chipotle eating a taco, I watched an old woman about my mother’s age drive up, park her car, come inside, order, wait for her order, leave, get back in her car, and drive away all while having a bullsh*t conversation about nothing on her cell phone that she was happy to share with everyone she came in contact with. At various points in the conversation she had her cell phone at her ear, then she had it on speaker, then she had Bluetooth on, then she put it back at her ear… The amount of effort this woman was spending to talk on a phone was absurd, but she was tickled pink. She couldn’t have been happier. She was loving every second of her absurd existence and she didn’t give a shit how ridiculous she looked.

It’s the same thing everywhere I look. Kids as young as 8 or 9 staring at their cell phones texting away while the real world is happening all around them; 20-something college kids with iPhones and disdainful looks on their faces; tables of two or three people at resturants where everyone is talking, just not to each other. (They’re interesting enough to each other to travel to the restaurant together, but not interesting enough to talk to each other when they’re there.)

We don’t need cell phones, but somehow we’ve been convinced that we do. I gave up my cell phone about two years ago because I was trimming expenses. Now that I’m in a better spot financially, I won’t get one on principle. People tell me, “Steve, you need a cell phone.” “No. No, I don’t,” I tell them. “YOU need a cell phone.”

I can count on one hand the times over the past couple of years when I felt like a cell phone would have been nice, but I don’t remember a time when I felt as if I really NEEDED a cell phone.

The modern era is producing entire generations of incessant communicators. It’s communication for communication’s sake. And it’s not even quality communication. We’ve condensed communications into meaningless little chunks of information that have morphed lately into ghastly sound bites: “LMFAO”, “LOL”, “OMG”. People are actually beginning to SAY the acronyms in place of the actual terms themselves and, even worse, it makes sense and, even worse than that, it’s made its way into pop culture.

I have a Twitter account. My first reaction to Twitter was, “God, how useless.” Twitter allows modern communicators to post their drivel and they’ve made it even more convenient by imposing a 140 character limit on the bullshit. The neat thing is, you can post to your Twitter account FROM YOUR CELL PHONE. Isn’t it great? When you don’t have anyone to text directly, text EVERYONE. It makes good and efficient use of that $150 a month cell phone plan.

The entire thing is utterly Orwellian. Our civil liberties are for sale, literally and figuratively. We’ve been convinced that it’s okay to spend $50 or more a month to carry around a tracking and recording device with us everywhere we go. They don’t have to be planted in our house behind a picture or under our cars. We’ll just carry them around with us and we’ll pay YOU to carry YOUR spying device. Also, Twitter, we don’t mind the 140 character limit. We acknowledge what you already believe: We have nothing to say of any substance anyway. Never mind that real dialogue can’t be confined to 140 characters. We’re modern communicators. We never engage in real dialogue anyway. LOL.

If you’ve read this far into this post, congratulations. Your attention span is greater than the average modern communicator’s attention span which hovers currently around 3 or 4 seconds by some reports. I commend you.

Now all I need to do is figure out a way to condense this entire post to 140 characters or less.


Gotta love the racist Spaniards

By Steve Peralta
August 13, 2008 – 1:28 am (Read 33 times)

Picture of the Spanish national basketball team ahead of their participation in the Beijing Olympics.


I f*cking love my new bike

By Steve Peralta
August 13, 2008 – 1:02 am (Read 36 times)

My bike got jacked from my garage about 6 weeks ago. Was looking for an excuse to upgrade anyway. Got the new one today and I f*cking love it.

trek 4300

My previous one was a Trek hardtail as well, but on the entry level end. I’m a novice rider, but this is just the bike to get me on the path to serious riding.


Contemplating Zapata

By Steve Peralta
August 11, 2008 – 4:12 am (Read 34 times)

Things make sense when your own role in the grand scheme of things makes sense.

I preach to my children that their legacies are their children and the footprint they leave on humanity.

Wondering if I’ve been doing myself justice.

I have this recurring dream where I make it all the way through college, got my degree, and somehow it has been overlooked by everyone that I never graduated high school. So I go back to high school three or four semesters to go and I’m completely unable to get back into it.

For all intents and purposes, I’m a made man. I have the college degree, the good job, everything, but I’m just incomplete without the high school diploma.

I wake up in the middle of the night after having these dreams feeling like I’ve cheated. Like I owe a huge debt to someone or something. It’s inexplicable.

I began having the dream tonight as I lay in bed in that state between consciousness and unconsciousness.

I had to get it documented because I’ve never even talked about it before and I had to try and make sense of it. Somehow still doesn’t make sense.


Earthquake!

By Steve Peralta
July 30, 2008 – 4:35 am (Read 35 times)

There have been three sizable earthquakes in the L.A. area in the past 15 years, one of them serious, yet people are still paying upwards of $750,000 for a small single-family home in that area.

I just don’t f*cking get it.


One year later…

By Steve Peralta
July 25, 2008 – 8:57 pm (Read 42 times)

One year later…

In about two or three days, it will be a year since I broke my leg. These things are pretty traumatic when they happen although they register only slightly on the Big Picture screen. It’s the things that happen outside of yourself that really take over the picture.

Nine days after I broke my leg, I lost my best friend to suicide. I have difficulty to this day expressing how important Mario was to me perhaps because I’m still coming to terms with what happened, how it happened, and with the impact he had on my life.

Mario and were also cousins, but we grew up together as brothers spending almost every free moment we had together during our early childhood. As we entered our teen years, other forces came into play, but we still maintained strong presences in each other’s lives. He had relationships with the people I knew and vice versa. I watch my two sons today and I’m reminded constantly of my bond with Mario. We really were brothers.

My wife and sons would come together as family with his wife and daughter one last time in 2002 when they came to San Antonio to visit. The weeklong visit was routine, but I didn’t realize that it would be one of the last times I would talk to him.

Months after his visit, my wife and I would separate and a year or so later we divorced. The event sent shockwaves through the extended families. Divorces do that. My ex-wife and I were the cornerstone of the family for the nearly 9 years that we were married. We represented stability and we tried as much as we could to emulate that, but it wasn’t to be. Our split left people disillusioned - no one more so than Mario, I think.

I would call him repeatedly during the divorce process. He never returned my calls. His wife had said he was extremely angry and disappointed in me. It left me lost. I felt abandoned.

In hindsight, he probably felt abandoned too. Not only did I move away from Denver, I punched him in the gut with my news. It was “Steve fucking a good thing up, yet again.” He had probably had had enough.

I would never speak to him again after his visit to San Antonio. Five years later, I would receive a phone call from a mutual friend that he was dead.

It was a mid-morning call on August 7 - the day after his death. Kate hands me the phone, she says it’s Aaron. I’m in bed recuperating from surgery on my leg only days before.

“Hello?”

“Steve.”

“What’s going on?”

“Have you talked to your family?”

{I knew here that something was wrong. My heart began to sink.)

“No. Why?”

Aaron searches for the words and he begins fumbling not quite knowing how to say it.

“Mario’s dead.”

Things are a blur at this point. I’m hysterical. It had been 5 years since I spoke to Mario, but the 30 or so years before that were suddenly upon me. In seconds, I would relive every single memory I had about Mario and then millions of gallons of despair would suddenly rush in and begin drowning me.

I managed to force out questions. When? Where? How? Why? The answers would stun me.

Mario had been going through a divorce of his own. It was a longtime in the making as divorces usually are. Psychologists might say that they can spot a divorce from years away.

Toward the end, Mario was in jail for a weekend over a domestic dispute. I had never known Mario to physically harm anyone, so I figured in the heat of a chaotic moment, he grabbed Kelly - maybe pushed her, but I would never see Mario striking her. Besides, an earlier bad relationship would leave Kelly resolved about never letting anyone hurt her the way she had been hurt before. My knowledge of Mario had him overreacting and making threatening overtures toward her and she, based on previous experience, was resolved to nip it in the bud. Mario goes to jail and she tells him she’s filing for divorce.

“What a f*cking cruel turn of events,” I think, when I hear about the impending divorce. “What an ironic and f*cking cruel turn of events.”

Mario leaves his house and his small son and daughter and moves in with a mutual friend. He begins to unravel. He secretly tapes a conversation with Kelly on the advice of a sh*t-for-brains lawyer that used to date his mother. He plays that conversation and some other audio for friends during a camping trip. He is seemingly unstable.

And on the monring of August 6, he tells the friend he’s staying with that he going to go see Kelly. No one close to him would know what happened to him until later when they see the report on TV detailing a murder-suicide. It’s his white work van and it’s parked in front of his two-story suburban home.

Other details are too painful to go into, but what the day amounts to is Mario leaving his life and taking Kelly with him leaving behind two little human beings and devastated family and friends.

I’m still stunned even as I type.

As I delivered the eulogy, I had two thoughts that haven’t left my mind since. One is about all of it somehow not seeming real. The other is about never having been so acutely conscious in my entire life. It seems poetic enough. Some people call it magic realism.

I don’t know what to call it. It defies reason for me. Most of the time nothing seems to matter and at the same time everything matters. It’s a little tug of war that I’m always playing out inside my head…

In September, I travel home to Denver. My sister is getting married.