Grande Mesa

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.

http://neoaztlan.muxtape.com

Part I

I grew up in Denver. Growing up, I heard references to Denver as a “cow town.” Local city officials grew tired of it. A transplant from south Texas decided he would do something about it. Federico Pena ran for mayor, won, and built the crown jewel of airports in the United States - Denver International Airport. Pena set the stage for his successor, Wellington Webb, who would go on to rebuild a city left in ruins over the savings and loan scandal of the 80s and would embrace what was then a relatively new concept in the redevelopment of cities: Neo Urbanism.

Webb concentrated on Denver’s downtown area. The neo urbanist planner is concerned with mixed use development. My alma mater, the University of Colorado at Denver, was on a large downtown campus that was fairly isolated from the surrounding high rises around it because it was not a mixed use area. At the time, people did what everyone else in the country did: they commuted in 5 to 10 miles, filed into their offices and they went home. The core downtown area was primarily concerned with those people. Federico Pena had begun the process of transforming the downtown area with the unveiling of a mall called 16th Street which effectively closed down 16th Street in downtown Denver for a mile and the high rises and large buildings became homes to retail along with work spaces.

Webb took it one step farther when he introduced residential living to the downtown area. It wasn’t merely about mimicking New York City’s “loft” living, it was about solidly introducing the concept of Neo Urbanism to a sleeping downtown Denver.

It worked. Now Denver, along with other cities such as Seattle and Portland, is a model of Neo Urbanism.

But that hasn’t stopped less visionary cities from continuing urban sprawl. I currently live in one of those cities: San Antonio.

San Antonio is beginning to understand the need to revisit its ideas about development, but it’s come at a pretty high price. The city is effectively divided into sectors that operate pretty much independently of one another. That’s beginning to change slowly.

The city has not taken on an aggressive mixed use plan for the downtown area as many other progressive cities have. There’s been a lot of rhetoric, but I don’t get the sense that city officials quite understand how to implement a plan despite the fact that they’ve had speakers such as noted architect Andrés Duany (founder of Congress for the New Urbanism) travel to San Antonio as far back as 1991 to speak to local officials about the idea of neo urbanism development.

It hasn’t been an aggressive plan (I suspect it’s because of the ongoing culture change within city government), but I have seen signs of it - piecemeal signs.

Part II later…

After a short conversation last night about Obama, I’m convinced now more than ever that he’s only a variation on a consistent theme. Now, after a trip to Afghanistan, Obama is now trying to instill confidence in the constituency that considered his foreign relations experience nil. In a bid to become President, Obama calls the situation there ‘precarious’ and he is committing to sending troops there.

What happened to the ‘Yes, we can!’ Obama?

Obama is a master politician and, I’ll say it again, one that this country has never seen regardless of his race. Someone remarked last night that the only other iconic figure in American politics was Kennedy and they both have youth on their side. Nothing instills confidence in change like youth. Youth is synonymous with it.

Despite all this, Obama is beginning to alienate the very people who brought him to the forefront of the race. The left-leaning hopers are crying foul right now at Obama’s bait and switch. He’s a political used car salesman. You’re on the lot. You know exactly what you want, but you get bamboozled into believing you want something else. You leave the lot feeling violated.

I’m a skeptic by nature, but I believed in Obama’s bullsh*t for about a week and yes, I was feeling good about the future of the country.

Now, I’m feeling even worse. Obama’s inexperience leaves a giant hole where my confidence in the future would normally reside. This guy is shooting from the hip with only his revised Manual of American Politics guiding him.

It’s like the parents always used to say, “If it seems too good to be true, it probably is.”

Totally random thought, but Obama reminds of the character Greg Stillson in Stephen King’s “Dead Zone”. I hope to God I’m wrong.

And before I get any nasty comments or e-mails from the Obamaphiles, I don’t support McCain. I think American politics sucks.

One Day As A Lion featuring Zack de la Rocha and Mars Volta’s Jon Theodore release their debut record July 22. De la Rocha returns as strong as ever complemented by Theodore’s crazy energy.

One Day has a single on their MySpace page.

Oh, and since the major media outlets aren’t doing it, let’s give credit where credit is due:

“The [One Day As A Lion] name [is] taken from the infamous 1970 black and white, captured by legendary Chicano photographer George Rodriguez featuring a center framed tag on a white wall in an unspecified section of Boyle Heights. It reads: ‘It’s better to live one day as a lion, than a thousand years as a lamb.’ This record is a stripped down attempt to realize this sentiment in sound.”

Mars Volta (for those in the south Texas area) are going to play at the Austin City Limits Music Fest in Sept.

Don’t remember who turned me on to a restaurant in NYC called Florencia 13. Haven’t actually been there, but it’s a “Chicano” restaurant on Sullivan between Bleecker and Houston in the Village.

[I put Chicano in quotes because I haven't been there yet and I have a fairly rigid definition of the word. My thoughts are that it's probably one of the more misused words in the cultural lexicon.]

Anyway, so this dude from L.A., a former Florencia 13 gang member apparently, decides he’s going to move to NYC and start a restaurant. It’s a big assertion to make about his membership with *the largest and arguably most violent gang in L.A. County with solid ties to Mexican organized crime* but I wouldn’t be naming my business after something with which I didn’t have a strong tie. Matter of fact, I have a business called Elati Street that is named after the street I grew up on. I didn’t pull it out of thin air. It’s rare that these things are pulled out of thin air.

SO, yes, this f*cker was F13. No doubt about it my mind. He moves to NYC and opens a restaurant and he calls it Florencia 13 and now he’s the toast of Greenwich Village and the goofy ignorant hipster bastards that live there are none the wiser. They have no clue that even setting foot in a place called Florencia 13 is by proxy supporting the murder of lots of people every year and the sale of lots of drugs.

Back to my point about the use of the word “Chicano.” It’s something that I’ve written extensively about, but not very recently. The crux of my position centers around the term and self-affirmation. It was created for empowerment and to encourage solidarity. That empowerment and solidarity was through self-affirmation. I am Steve and I am Chicano. As a Chicano, I uphold certain tenets of Chicanismo. Those tenets involve at their most basic level helping to empower other people in whatever way possible *regardless* of nationality, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc. etc.

Some people who call themselves “Chicano” would have you believe that it’s an insular or socio-political term that only applies to a certain way of thinking where Chicanos are on one side and everybody else is on another. This is f*cking bullsh*t.

Let me bring it round, though. Florencia 13 is not a Chicano gang. They’re just a gang and I’m very interested in how a former F13 could justify calling himself Chicano in 2008.

So, I’m making it a point to visit his restaurant this year and ask him personally.

SAN ANTONIO - On the heels of AT&T’s announcement last week that it is relocating its headquarters from San Antonio to “The Big D,” as they idiotically like to call it here, Toyota today announced that they will shutter the brand spanking new production plant in San Antonio that went online barely eight months ago. The plant will go offline for three months.

Toyota jettisoned all of its temporary employees before the announcement. “Permanent” employees will spend the next three months with their thumbs up their *sses and GET PAID FOR IT… Apparently it’s a new Japanese way to keep costs down: Pay people for doing nothing. I know, they’re supposed to be going through “training” on “production efficiency” or something like that, but when the plant is brand new, I would think that efficiency is near its peak.

Anyway, I’m not advocating for anyone losing their job, but clearly Toyota made a wrong move here that they couldn’t really foresee.

The circus began later today when local city mafioso Nelson Wolff (who is some sort of county judge or something) issued a press conference trying to ease the doubts of local citizens about Toyota’s commitment to San Antonio.

To this I say: “Business is business.”

The local politicos know it. Toyota has about as much commitment to San Antonio as A-Rod has to his wife.

Nothing more sad than a hardworking taxpayer trusting the words of a vetted politician. Well, there’s one thing more sad: A vetted politician trusting the words of a greedy CEO.

Sometimes it’s good to step back and look at yourself from the outside. Been doing a lot of it myself lately in the form of therapy. Did some of it last weekend while on a weekend trip to Portland when I decided to escape myself for a little while and be the person that I want to be - you know, the outgoing, friendly, funny guy with nothing, but nice and sincere things to say and do who still carries baggage, but has completely come to terms with it. I gotta say, it was fun for those three days and I felt extremely good…

But then I came home to that little thing in the pit of my stomach - that anger that I’ve been carrying around with me since I was a kid. I told my therapist recently that the anger is like an old roommate that you’re just sick of living with, but that you’ll be sad to see go when he finally leaves.

The anger is one of the reasons I left Denver. I thought maybe I could escape it. Couldn’t really do that. The only way to get rid of the roommate that doesn’t want to leave is to pack his bags for him and send him on his way.

Got into a disagreement earlier today with a friend who’s doing some work for us. He was clearly angry about something else and saying a lot of things that in a different time I would have been extremely upset about. New rule lately for me though is to try my best to not do or say something that I will regret.

It’s easy to point these things out: “your mom is a wh*re” and “you f*cking dumb*ss” are generally not feel good things to say.

The other day, some really crazy dude told everyone at the BBQ we were at to raise a toast to the fact that Jesse Helms is dead. “May he burn in Hell,” he said.

That sh*t I just do not understand wishing for someone to burn in Hell. The degree of blackness you have to have in your heart for those words to even come out of your mouth is too much for even me to bear.

But, I digress…

The point of this whole post is to say that the “teenage cracker punk” that I made reference to in my previous post took a giant step toward manhood today when he sent me an honest e-mail apologizing for what he did. He mentioned some other things that shed some light on why he did what he did in the first place. And, despite his apology, he still expected to face the consequences for what he did.

Well, the apology would have probably been enough, but the way he framed it was definitely enough to leave the impression on me that maybe the younger generation isn’t as jacked up as we might think.

I’m not a very religious person although I do believe in a higher power. The cosmic order of things is too perfect for there not to be, in my view.

Having said that, I would say that God usually allows us to make mistakes every once in awhile, but what He won’t allow us to do is to not take responsibility for them.

My apologies for calling you a “cracker punk,” Ryan.

Good luck.

Some little redhead teenage cracker punk crossed the line today when he posted my son’s personal (ergo MY personal information) on some forum for PSP nerds.

I’ve got all I need on my local machine and have already begun the process of reporting it as a denial of service attack. The Web host, the board moderator where the information was posted, the appropriate authorities are all being informed of this breach.

Let’s be clear about this because little teenage boys can’t wipe their own asses much less understand the gravity of making a 10-year-old child’s information public: This is a punishable CRIMINAL offense. Each state has its own jurisdiction over this type of behavior.

You’ve already been banned from the board on which you posted the information thanks to the cooperation of the board moderators there. There will be more to come. I expect your full cooperation. I suggest you tell your parents what you did because they’re going to find out one way or another.

And I expect your full cooperation.

E-mail me at nascent_2004@yahoo.com.

Sincerely,

One Extremely Pissed Off Parent

I cut my teeth on the post-punk, “industrial” (as coined by Genesis P-Orridge of Throbbing Gristle) movement because it appealed to my anti-establishment, anarchist leanings. Punk was a little simplistic for me although I was a big fan. The Exploited and the Crucif*cks were hardcore in their day, but their message was drowned out by the sound. So I migrated to people who these days have made names for themselves in the contemporary art scene: Cosey Fanni Tutti, John Duncan, Lustmord, Richard Kirk, etc.

Now here were people with the message, but who also presented a bit of criticality in their work. These were true pioneers, in my mind.

Anyway, I knew early on I hated the status quo. I didn’t learn until late in life that the status quo serves a purpose, namely paying bills and putting food in the mouths of your kids. This notwithstanding, I still hold a bit of contempt for most institutions in this country because of the sort of hypocrisy they represent.

But who am I really to argue about it. It’s probably going to be something I try to emphasize to the kids.

“Don’t argue.”