FROM THE DRAWING BOARD

 

My wife brought in a bookshelf that used to belong to the Bombay Book Club (a family heirloom), and in her ingenious way found space for it in our already crowded house here at Hacienda Hogan.

This meant finding a new place to put my drawing board, and she amazed me again. It now sits in the corner of our laundry room, next to the kitchen. So I can now help out with cooking and clothes washing while creating my art.

It’s actually working out well. 

There’s a shelf above it where I can put art supplies, and I’ve been putting interesting things on the walls. It’s turning into a regular Ernestospace!

And I see it when I do all the walking I do to keep myself moving around at 70. I can check out the sketchbooks I’m juggling, see what I’m working on, realize that something needs to be done, and pick up crayon or pencil and doodle around.

It’s got me drawing more, not as much as I’d like to, but more than I’ve done in years past.

One of my few regrets is that I didn't spend more time making art. I’m a pretty good artist, but more time would have made me a great one. Unfortunately, I’ve got this writing career that demands most of my time, and I need to work for a living . . . 

Que sera, sera.

There’s also been an interesting side-effect. Drawing turns out to be good for my brain! Both my emotions and the neurological taking care of business run smoother, the way exercise keeps my body in tune. Any scientists working on this? 

Above it all, I’ve got this art piling up, and it gets me itching to show it to people. Thank Tezcatliopoca for the webs!

I’m not enough of a snob for fine art and my work is too ugly and messy for commercial art, but there are people who like my stuff. Maybe something will come of it.

CHICANONAUTICA IMMODESTLY PROPOSES A XICANXFUTURIST HOLIDAY

Chicanonautica gets holidazed, at La Bloga.

Suddenly, La Cultura is in flux:

 Can new faces in an ancient tradition help?

 How about the old ball game?

 And the escaramuza!

JUST ANOTHER WEIRD SPRING

Each Spring gets weirder. I find myself gritting my teeth while my eyelids twitch. I’ve been expecting some kind of global trauma ever since that day in 2020 when I showed up at work and two supervisors in masks were standing outside the locked gate. I haven't seen anything quite that apocalyptic but we keep getting close.

After all, there’s a war. Another one. How many can we get going at once before we can call it a World War? Do nuclear weapons have to be involved? Do protests, riots, and acts of wholesale death and destruction here at home count?

Here in the Metro Phoenix Area, we’ve skipped Spring and are having a Classic Summer with Excessive Heat Warnings and a superbloom of desert wildflowers while the East is getting buried in snow from a megastorm.

I dreamed of giant alligators living in the desert and a bookstore doing great business at midnight.

Not quite being buried up to our waists in the sand and being eaten by ants, but we’re just getting, er . . . warmed up. 

My monstrous imagination is running wild again.

It’s entertaining if I don't think about how it can destroy . . . everything.  I still get a perverse kick out of the news being like a wacko sci-fi from my youth (the Nixon era, yeah, I know, bizarre . . .) But meanwhile, the far reaches of my brain merrily charge into deranged places of their own making.

Which is fun for me, but what about all of the rest of you?

The best strategy is to keep doing what I always do: Keep making my interior dream channel into stuff I can sell, er, share with you all.

Step right up folks, we have a wild Chicano recently captured in the still smoldering ruins of Aztlán. The poor creature suffers from a ghastly condition–it’s got sci-fi growing in its brain! For just a few newly-minted hundred-dollar coins, we’ll let you look through this device through the hole we’ve drilled through his skull, and wires we’ve plugged into his amygdala, hippocampus, and visual cortex to see it happen!

Yeah, it’s all fun until the world actually does come to an end, but people have been telling me that all my life, and it hasn’t happened yet!

Heh-heh-heh!

CHICANONAUICA ASKS WHATCHACALLUS, ANYWAY?

It's a rasquache word game in Chicanonautica, at La Bloga.

Because words can make you crazy:

Like Chicano:

 And Latinx:

Can AI be defeated by poetry?

FROM THE WRITING FRONT

I hate to start with a cliché, but this year is going by so fast. March already. How did it happen?

Is it World War Three yet? But I digress . . .

I haven’t done all of the ambitious things I wanted to get done before March got here, but I’ve accomplished a few. Doing them all is probably impossible. My to-do list is always trailing out of the frame. Days, hours aren't long enough for me.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve flirted with a silly theory that we die when we run out of things to do. If it’s true, I’ll live forever.

One of those things for me is my writing career. I don’t have to worry about it. It took on a life of its own years ago, and will probably keep on trucking long after I croak. I’ve got stories in a new anthology and will have one in another that will come out soon. I’ve neglected my recently finished novel, but am getting ready to start bugging publishers again. I’ve diddled around with working out the Paco Coen, Mariachi of Mars, novel. Then there are those short stories.

I’ve been expecting short fiction to die for about forty years now and to my surprise it keeps chugging along. It won’t make you much money and the whole business is frustrating, it seems to have a future.

I get fed up, wondering if anybody reads any of these publications, and dreaded sending anything out into the abyss.

Unfortunately, I’ve trained myself during my formative years to react to life by writing stories . . .

And I’ve been spoiled but I’ve sold a lot of stuff in the 21st century as the result of publishers approaching me.

To make matters worse, I consider my writing to be worthless if it doesn’t get read. 

So I’m looking over my recent stories, and the modern markets.

All while the world is . . . well, you know: Is it World War Three yet? I feel like the writers in the “Hey, anybody want to buy a book?” meme. 

To my horror, I found that a lot of these recent pieces were actually unfinished, not in a final form that can be sent to an editor.

So I’m going over them all and will be going over them all at least one more time after that.

Argh!

The thing is, they’re pretty good, and having created them makes me feel better.

I am doomed to forever pursue my dreams of glory.

At least it’s not boring.

And it beats checking to see how the war’s going.

Maybe I'll try looking outside the box, like trying to sell these stories as a book without looking for magazines or anthologies to take them first. When in doubt, break format, I’ve said.

Face it, we’re gonna see a whole lotta breaking going on in the near future.

And maybe, in the insane process, I’ll make some people feel better, in my twisted way.

CHICANONAUTICA DREAMS OF A SURREALISTIC BURRITO WESTERN

 

Chicanonautica exposes my secret mind movie, at La Bloga.

El Topo is my favorite western, so it's not an ordinary burrito:

So why not some outré spaghetti?

Or maybe some acid?

And other weirdness . . .

CACTUS JUNGLE REVELATIONS

 

The jungles in my life owe more to Max Ernst than Edgar Rice or William S. Burroughs. The pulp/B-movie ambiance is mostly in my head. The brutal, sometimes beautiful surrealism is reality. My sense of beauty gets further warped each time I deal with it.

I hack away at the alien, invasive crab grass. Why do people, mostly from cooler climates that get hotter every year, want grass? Why don’t they appreciate the incredible desert? 

Surviving here is both a struggle and a miracle.

Cacti bite and draw blood as I uncover them. They aren’t pampered potted plants leading lives of luxury indoors or in the manicured gardens of obsessive-compulsives. They bear scars, decaying, cracked skin, still-attached dead limbs. They tilt at awkward angles while new growth reaches for the sky. 

It’s a decaying, struggling, decadent beauty that I wallow in.

What a friend called “cactus porn” I used as a metaphor to illustrate my rants about Arizona politics. Now the fascist mind set has taken over the country, maybe ever the entire planet.

In the war between the cactus and the grass, I’m with the cactus. Over the years, living with these . . . dare I call them beings? I’ve become aware of a kind of cactus intelligence, and there’s nothing artificial about it, though it does hallucinate. My beloved Peruvianus Monstrose taught me a lot during her all too short lifetime. At least her children survived.

I never know what I’ll uncover on these expeditions (there I go to my default pulp sci-fi setting again). There have been disintegrating cactus limbs, avian corpses, ant colonies, lost toys, fallout from fireworks and fast food orgies. Someday I’ll find a lost city. Or be captured by the Amazon guards of a clandestine subterranean civilization. 

Meanwhile, I slash away at the crab grass to keep the lawn police happy. Who knows, with the the way things are going, they may decide to report us to the New Gestapo, and they’ll cart us off to one of the “detention” camps they’re building, confiscate the house and land, and have an excuse to let developers level the entire neighborhood and install more dystopian apartments for workers of not-yet existent industry, or parking lots for the entertainment center that is growing like a cancer around the State Farm Stadium.

They better watch out. We’ve been getting too much rain with the changing climate. The rattlesnake Agua Fria Freddie saw his shadow, so it’s gonna be an early summer (again).  I’ve got that oh-boy-it’s-almost-summer vacation feeling. Mutation is in the air. There’s a new world coming. Heh-heh-heh . . .

So I continue my search and destroy mission, while listening to Venezuelan and Colombian radio stations via radio.garden.

Ice melts fast here. Evaporates.

Gods and cacti need their blood offerings.

 

CHICANONAUTICA SACRIFICES FOR THE AZTEC EMPIRE WITH CHANO AND CANTINFLAS

 

Chicanonautica investigates an old Mexican movie at La Bloga.

It's El Signo de la Muerte from 1939:

Starring Cantinflas:

Directed by Chano Urueta:

Who acted in some American movies: 

DON’T FORGET THAT GUERRILLA MURAL!

I am not trying to predict the future. 

Like Ray Bradbury, I often write to prevent futures. I never expected to live in a world similar to my stories, and I can’t shake the horrible feeling that it’s about to get worse.

Believe me, I understand that need for escapism, but for me it’s often not enough. I enjoy fiction that shows people fighting back, to help me imagine that it’s still possible.

I recommend books like Rudy Rucker’s Juicy Ghosts, and if I can be so bold as to exploit the current predicament for self-promotion, my own work, and not just High Aztech, Smoking Mirror Blues, and Cortez on Jupiter.  

When I read my collection Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song I was shocked by how much anger I was expressing. Yeah, I’ve lived all my life in a society that has been oppressing me, but didn’t realize it was a major theme. Some might call it an obsession.

I’m not the only one who thinks so:

It particularly comes out in  “Uno! Dos! . . . One! Two! Tres-Cuatro!,” “Flying the Under Radar with Paco and Los Freetails,” and “Skin Dragons Talk,” but it’s there in the other stories. 

I guess that’s just who I am.

I can only hope that it provides some insight or at least some amusement to my readers. We all sure need it now.

And let me take this opportunity to remind you that EzkaOne actually did the cover painting as a mural:

Meanwhile, don’t let the pendejos keep you down!

CHICANONAUTICA ASKS "WHO THE HELL IS PACO COHEN?"

Chicanonautica is about my character Paco Cohen, Mariachi of Mars, over at La Bloga.

So here's some of my favorite songs:

My dad had a Charro Avitia album that he played a lot:

 

Then Dr. Doctor Demento introduced me to Lalo Guerrero:

 

And Flaco Jimenez:

 

These days I listen to Cancion Mexicana on KUVO.org on Sunday mornings. They play this a lot: