So let us say that after a long, distinguished life of toasting faithfully and well for many years, my toaster has finally shuffled off the electric coil that gave it purpose and is now bound on that last of all the quests to the undiscovered country. I refused to cry, for we cry not for the dead but for the living, self-pity spent for all lost chances—but they shan’t ever come back to us. Not knowing the nature of the ritual it might have chosen for itself, I forsake a Christian burial and chose instead to think of what comes next.
Where do toasters go when they die?
Let us consider this was a good toaster—a faithful toaster. Having lived such a life, would the toaster go to a heaven where it would simply toast for eternity? Is the continuation of its purpose a just reward for having served that purpose well? Or does it go to a place where it can suck to its sweet heart's content—if that is what it wishes? Does the final chance to apply a new purpose to an old life make it a reward? Or, can it possibly be? Can it be the final prize for so much effort is nothing but oblivion? How is that fair? Who says life is fair? And if life isn’t, what kind of fool expects death will be?
Or maybe I am wrong in searching for a parallel between this plane and that one. Perhaps the nature of existence in toaster heaven is so vastly different from the one I know that I cannot even imagine what it might be. I should not worry so.
Reward or no reward, it’s still coming for all of them, all the toasters, and no amount of worry on my part makes it faster—or slower. It is just what it is. Asking if toasters go to heaven is perhaps like asking if androids dream of electric sheep—a mere article of faith, never, ever “mere”.
Godspeed, my dear toaster!
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Recurring Dream: Canto El Segundo
Location: US & Mexico, both at run-down latino neighborhoods.
City: unknown
Participants: various (unnamed) and me
The houses are old and need paint and general repairs—the kind of care people who care can give. But the families here care about other things, it seems. They are warm and friendly, welcoming and sweet, and though they will at whim add a room to a house, they have the hardest time maintaining the houses; they’d rather spend that energy on the fruit gardens they have planted on what once were large front yards. They speak loudly, their voices mixing into a melody of Mexican songs, and jokes, and conversations all at once, easily followed in the many ways they go. They keep chickens and dogs, both loud and neither caged nor chained—and song birds to keep them company, and they play their radios way too loud. They work on their cars in front of their houses, taking half the street. Most back yards have hardly any divisions at all—and never anything that might be called a fence. It is messy; it is loud; totally different from anything I have ever really known, it is home.
I am a child of five or seven, running wild like the many other creatures God has wrought, making friends and playing games, and only coming home when the sun sets.
Time goes by.
Now I am older and I help one of the neighbors who fixes broken cars in his garage. He works late into the night, and because my parents know him, it’s ok that I stay late with him and help him. I am learning. He cooks, too—after a fashion. He makes tacos and burritos and whatever else he feels like making and I really like his cooking. He shares with his customers, too, when they come to get their cars. After some time, word has spread that his cooking is better than his car-fixing and people just come by to buy his food. Eventually, he stops working on cars altogether and now just cooks, selling tacos out of his garage.
About a hundred steps towards the sunset, there is a bar. It’s a small, neighborhood bar. The kind where everyone knows everybody’s name—the first place wives send their kids to find their missing husbands. People there have heard about the tacos. Soon, there’s a constant line of traffic between the bar and the garage. Some eat and then go drink; some drink and then go eat. Most go back and forth, walking one off and then rewarding their hard work with the other. I still help the neighbor, but now I help him make his tacos. Everybody says hello.
More time goes by.
Now I am eleven and I can make tacos myself. And I can fix a car, just not as well. Often, I take shifts for the neighbor, for he too takes his nights out at the bar. He has no wife, no children, no dog and no garden. He had his cars and now has his tacos. And he had me. And I had him. But never did I do more than help him. We do not chat.
One evening, late in the day but not so late the sun had yet set, I got ready and walked over to his house, to help—just like always. But this time was different. As I got closer to his house, I noticed smoke. I ran to the house as fast as I could, but there was nothing I could do. The flames were twice as high as the roof. Not knowing what to do, I ran over to the bar and asked them to help. They called the fire fighters. A group of men ran with me to the house. We all started trying to put the fire out. By now, the neighbors were out, too, and they had their water hoses and buckets and everybody helped. But it was too late. Soon, the house burnt to the ground. The man whom I had helped for many years was not there. I never knew where he went. As we all finally gave up—when there was nothing more to burn and it seemed safe the fire would put itself out anyway, the firefighters and the police showed up.
Just as they arrive, the dream ends and I am awake again—oddly at peace but a little sad.
My neighbor, my teacher, my friend is gone. Not dead—not for sure. He’s simply gone.
I never knew his name.
I’ve had this dream once per month every month for the last year. Unlike my other recurring dream, this one varies in details. It happens sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. It happens in the US or sometimes in Mexico—though I am not Mexican.
What does it all mean?
City: unknown
Participants: various (unnamed) and me
The houses are old and need paint and general repairs—the kind of care people who care can give. But the families here care about other things, it seems. They are warm and friendly, welcoming and sweet, and though they will at whim add a room to a house, they have the hardest time maintaining the houses; they’d rather spend that energy on the fruit gardens they have planted on what once were large front yards. They speak loudly, their voices mixing into a melody of Mexican songs, and jokes, and conversations all at once, easily followed in the many ways they go. They keep chickens and dogs, both loud and neither caged nor chained—and song birds to keep them company, and they play their radios way too loud. They work on their cars in front of their houses, taking half the street. Most back yards have hardly any divisions at all—and never anything that might be called a fence. It is messy; it is loud; totally different from anything I have ever really known, it is home.
I am a child of five or seven, running wild like the many other creatures God has wrought, making friends and playing games, and only coming home when the sun sets.
Time goes by.
Now I am older and I help one of the neighbors who fixes broken cars in his garage. He works late into the night, and because my parents know him, it’s ok that I stay late with him and help him. I am learning. He cooks, too—after a fashion. He makes tacos and burritos and whatever else he feels like making and I really like his cooking. He shares with his customers, too, when they come to get their cars. After some time, word has spread that his cooking is better than his car-fixing and people just come by to buy his food. Eventually, he stops working on cars altogether and now just cooks, selling tacos out of his garage.
About a hundred steps towards the sunset, there is a bar. It’s a small, neighborhood bar. The kind where everyone knows everybody’s name—the first place wives send their kids to find their missing husbands. People there have heard about the tacos. Soon, there’s a constant line of traffic between the bar and the garage. Some eat and then go drink; some drink and then go eat. Most go back and forth, walking one off and then rewarding their hard work with the other. I still help the neighbor, but now I help him make his tacos. Everybody says hello.
More time goes by.
Now I am eleven and I can make tacos myself. And I can fix a car, just not as well. Often, I take shifts for the neighbor, for he too takes his nights out at the bar. He has no wife, no children, no dog and no garden. He had his cars and now has his tacos. And he had me. And I had him. But never did I do more than help him. We do not chat.
One evening, late in the day but not so late the sun had yet set, I got ready and walked over to his house, to help—just like always. But this time was different. As I got closer to his house, I noticed smoke. I ran to the house as fast as I could, but there was nothing I could do. The flames were twice as high as the roof. Not knowing what to do, I ran over to the bar and asked them to help. They called the fire fighters. A group of men ran with me to the house. We all started trying to put the fire out. By now, the neighbors were out, too, and they had their water hoses and buckets and everybody helped. But it was too late. Soon, the house burnt to the ground. The man whom I had helped for many years was not there. I never knew where he went. As we all finally gave up—when there was nothing more to burn and it seemed safe the fire would put itself out anyway, the firefighters and the police showed up.
Just as they arrive, the dream ends and I am awake again—oddly at peace but a little sad.
My neighbor, my teacher, my friend is gone. Not dead—not for sure. He’s simply gone.
I never knew his name.
I’ve had this dream once per month every month for the last year. Unlike my other recurring dream, this one varies in details. It happens sometimes in English, sometimes in Spanish. It happens in the US or sometimes in Mexico—though I am not Mexican.
What does it all mean?
Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Recurring Dream: Canto El Primero
Location: beneath the old water tower at the Nickelodeon “old-west town”
City: Colton, CA
Participants: my brother and me
I am eleven years old, hiding behind the posts that hold up the water tower in this fake western town built around the old pizza joint that went under the name of Nickelodeon, and though I only started going when I was fourteen, in the dream I am eleven, and my brother is twelve, and he is the cowboy chasing me, the Indian who’s invaded his town, playing with me in such a typical way that was so atypical of our childhood together. This goes on for a while, and while we’re playing I notice we’re getting older—slowly, perhaps, for the dream, but considerably fast as we reach our teens and beyond as we continue playing.
There is no one else in town. The place was boarded up long before the dreams started and in my dream it was already locked behind the temporary fencing one rents to surround construction zones. But people have forgotten about this construction zone and it is, for once, exactly what it always purported to be: an abandoned, or at least declining western town. The pizza was never very good.
But the pizza’s not why we’re here. We are playing. Cowboys and Indians. Oddly enough, neither of us has a gun. We stay a while under the tower and then we start straying, just a little farther every time around the base—and that’s when we hear it. At first, it is a faint and distant sound, like a quick buzz going by our heads, followed by a hard slap onto the dusty ground a little farther down. I identify it first. I don’t know how old I am now, but I am considerably older than the eleven I was when this got started.
I tell my brother to run, that there’s someone shooting at us with a silencer. I have no idea why. It sounds almost ridiculous telling the story now, but someone’s playing target practice with us and we have to run. We begin to run away from the water tower, towards the arcade right next to the pizza place, but we don’t make it.
I don't know what happened to my brother, but as I’m running, I feel the aging process accelerating, though I don’t really notice it then; I remember it later. Suddenly, as I run away, I feel a sharp slap on the back of my head, and the warm sensation of blood running down my back. The force knocks me forward and I fall and bounce and fall again. My body now lies sideways, my face looking back towards the tower, and as I see the dust gently settle back down to the ground, I think “I am too young to die; I am only thirty-five.”
And as the dust settles, I die.
This is the only dream in which I have ever died. I had it semi-regularly, every few months, for years (about five in total) prior to my thirty-fifth birthday. On my birthday, I went alone at dusk, and then again with my best friend around eleven at night, to walk the lot. The buildings had been demolished; there was no sign of anything I remembered, except a couple of partial concrete slabs on which the building perhaps rested once. But I walked around; and I called out in my head for whatever it was that had summoned me there.
But nothing came.
Other than my best friend, I was alone with the moon and the stars and the wind. Not even a black cat crossed my path. The spell, now broken, I never had the dream again.
Three months after my birthday, my brother, only thirty-six at the time, died of a heart attack while playing basketball with the kids in the neighborhood. He was dead before he reached the hospital. When I reached the hospital, I had them call the local Catholic Church to ask that they send a priest to pray with us over his body. The priest sent word along these lines: “What’s the point? He’s dead already, and we only perform the last rites on the dying.”
He never came.
What does it all mean?
City: Colton, CA
Participants: my brother and me
I am eleven years old, hiding behind the posts that hold up the water tower in this fake western town built around the old pizza joint that went under the name of Nickelodeon, and though I only started going when I was fourteen, in the dream I am eleven, and my brother is twelve, and he is the cowboy chasing me, the Indian who’s invaded his town, playing with me in such a typical way that was so atypical of our childhood together. This goes on for a while, and while we’re playing I notice we’re getting older—slowly, perhaps, for the dream, but considerably fast as we reach our teens and beyond as we continue playing.
There is no one else in town. The place was boarded up long before the dreams started and in my dream it was already locked behind the temporary fencing one rents to surround construction zones. But people have forgotten about this construction zone and it is, for once, exactly what it always purported to be: an abandoned, or at least declining western town. The pizza was never very good.
But the pizza’s not why we’re here. We are playing. Cowboys and Indians. Oddly enough, neither of us has a gun. We stay a while under the tower and then we start straying, just a little farther every time around the base—and that’s when we hear it. At first, it is a faint and distant sound, like a quick buzz going by our heads, followed by a hard slap onto the dusty ground a little farther down. I identify it first. I don’t know how old I am now, but I am considerably older than the eleven I was when this got started.
I tell my brother to run, that there’s someone shooting at us with a silencer. I have no idea why. It sounds almost ridiculous telling the story now, but someone’s playing target practice with us and we have to run. We begin to run away from the water tower, towards the arcade right next to the pizza place, but we don’t make it.
I don't know what happened to my brother, but as I’m running, I feel the aging process accelerating, though I don’t really notice it then; I remember it later. Suddenly, as I run away, I feel a sharp slap on the back of my head, and the warm sensation of blood running down my back. The force knocks me forward and I fall and bounce and fall again. My body now lies sideways, my face looking back towards the tower, and as I see the dust gently settle back down to the ground, I think “I am too young to die; I am only thirty-five.”
And as the dust settles, I die.
This is the only dream in which I have ever died. I had it semi-regularly, every few months, for years (about five in total) prior to my thirty-fifth birthday. On my birthday, I went alone at dusk, and then again with my best friend around eleven at night, to walk the lot. The buildings had been demolished; there was no sign of anything I remembered, except a couple of partial concrete slabs on which the building perhaps rested once. But I walked around; and I called out in my head for whatever it was that had summoned me there.
But nothing came.
Other than my best friend, I was alone with the moon and the stars and the wind. Not even a black cat crossed my path. The spell, now broken, I never had the dream again.
Three months after my birthday, my brother, only thirty-six at the time, died of a heart attack while playing basketball with the kids in the neighborhood. He was dead before he reached the hospital. When I reached the hospital, I had them call the local Catholic Church to ask that they send a priest to pray with us over his body. The priest sent word along these lines: “What’s the point? He’s dead already, and we only perform the last rites on the dying.”
He never came.
What does it all mean?
Monday, April 02, 2007
No longer a hero...
There are few things one can hold in one’s hand that are more significant—at once more precious and more dangerous—than blood. There is nothing more tangible that means more to life—no! life itself!—or with more connotation of such significance. It is pure, holy or blue; it is utterly unclean, in traditions more ancient even than the language we might use to tell it and in the most modern sense of “bio-hazard.” From the time when one brother’s blood called out from the earth to its maker for justice to this morning’s blood sample I gave at the doctor’s, this life-force-fluid is all that keeps us from being a mere pile of ashes. To simpler minds it might have been the breath of God.Looking at the little vial of my blood as the nurse took it away, I wondered what might become of it. Oh, I’m sure someone will try to grow things in it, look at it through a microscope, maybe even apply a little heat to it to see if it jumps out of the petrie dish. They’ll find it clean, I’m sure, but they won’t return it. It is gone forever, sacrificed for the sake of peace of mind, for the knowledge that the rest of me will be fine, well, good even. I wonder if they’ll put a purple stamp on my butt declaring me “CLEAN.” It is a sacrifice, like many made before—to the greater powers, seeking absolution yet again.
The greatest of all gifts we could give to God—the one thing we couldn’t take back—life. As is common with humans, the Aztecs took it to the extreme and we revile them for it. Medicine men who did not understand its power sought to find a balance in the body by drawing it, spilling it, hoping to take with it what ailed their patients.
I hate needles—deeply, madly, truly—ever since my father would drive me, a sickly child, to a doctor’s office every week to get a multi-vitamin complex shot that left my butt numb and my leg weak the rest of the day. Many years later, when I got married, my wife and I decided to give blood as our little contribution to the bettering of the world. It started when a kid at our high school got in a car accident and they asked us to give blood. We gave. We never stopped. In as brief an interval as was permitted by the blood-bank, we gave again, and again, and kept doing it past our divorce, still going together though we were not together, because some things ought to be done regardless, and that was a good thing. But then, I had to stop.
Men who have had sex with men since 1977 are not permitted to give blood—no exceptions.
My blood was clean. I could prove it. They were going to test it anyway. Still, it was unclean, unwanted. It was my mark of shame—and I, unwilling to lie for their benefit, simply stopped. A gift so rudely questioned is undeserved. Statistically speaking, they might have been right—but I am not a statistic. Responsible and clean, I still felt I had the mark of Cain on my forehead and resented it—hated it—and would not compound it by lying.
The greatest of all gifts we could receive from God—a chalice-full of holiest sharing—a promise of eternal life, given to us from His own hand one day soon to be celebrated all over the world:
this is my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, that will be shed for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.
And though I still prayed, the church told me that I was more unclean than all the other sinners who prayed with me, and I stopped going. It is their right, their private club, their rule to make and I shall respect it. I disagree—my God, my Father, for reasons I’ve explained elsewhere ever-forgiving, can see past this “flaw” if such it be and see my heart is clean and my love no less pure than any other man’s—my blood just as red. There are many like me, seeking this God. One day, we will find him, at work, at school, on the bus on the way to a bar, eating a sandwich at Subway’s—there He will be, arms wide open, wounds healed, promising to love me like He asked my fellow men to love me but they failed.
And while I could not lie to keep giving the gift I thought I was giving, others have lied, continue to lie, and continue to give the same gift. Many—perhaps braver—men like me are at this very moment engaged in combat of one kind or another, fighting for a right denied us. It is odd how society in general accepts the product of our labor but denies the laborer behind such fruits. It reminds me of many such fights in the past and saddens me that this is one battle that needs to be fought over and over again on many fronts.
And now our fathers, our brothers, our children go forth into the desert out of which Abraham once came, to spill their blood as the price we pay for liberty. No nobler gift was ever given me, and though they don’t know my name, I shall forever be grateful to each and every single one of them. God bless them. God bless them all: black and white, Latinos and Asians, male and female, citizens and not, straight and gay, left-handed and not; God bless the short and the fat, the tall and the skinny. Their blood is just a precious to me, their gift the greatest I could ever want: the hope that one day my children’s lives will be peaceful. God bless their families.
Politics aside, I can see into their eyes and see their sincerity and their pride, to be the hands—most proud and direct part of all that we as a body do.
But just like one brother’s blood called out of that same sand to its creator clamoring for justice, so shall theirs—justice for their kind, justice for the man, justice for their country and the poor people all around them who suffer the hatred of the intolerant and powerful. Such justice is beyond any man’s power to grant.
May God grant us all the wisdom to recognize it when He sends it our way.
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