2006

I don’t know what made me cry when I read this brief account by Heberto Castillo some years ago. Perhaps I saw in him—a young, talented, penniless, just-married, idealistic civil engineer—my father, perhaps I saw myself in his unabashed naiveté.

Here’s my hand-typed transcription of the story, which appeared in his 1988 book Si Te Agarran Te Van a Matar:

This shall be the first of a series of daily (or almost daily) short readings: Joe Haldeman’s None So Blind. It’s a tiny, funny, fascinating sci-fi story from 1995 that won both the Hugo and the Locus award. So tiny it is (just over 4k words) that I’ll say no more. Go read it.

Hot, frothy, cocoa and crusty birote (which is a Mexican bread that, in Guadalajara and in my lonely opinion, tastes a lot like a Manhattan plain bagel).

Nothing is meant with the title, it’s but a wonderful saying.

I’ve been pretty uncomfortable these days with this blog.

I understand that and yet I want a change of cage. It may be foolish, but so what? It may not. I want something more à la Gelernter’s information beams. I want my blog to be a stream-of-consciousness. The textstream to the right of this blog has been one of my favorite and most active sections lately but I’m sure most simply miss it. It feels odd there, buried at the side, violating some deep semantic principle, overcrowding the already overcrowded sidebar.

These days, even pigeons have blogs. They provide them with electronic recording equipment and their output is automatically fed into a blog.  —Wait! Pause for a minute to wonder how profoundly weird that is. Done? Go!—  In a way I’m like that, sometimes I’m but a text pigeon, reporting what I find amid the words. And I’m proud of that.

Or I could tell you about the time Apple released an unbelievably cool, unbelievably wasteful, 3d-rotating user-switching. The best description I read, and it still reads on the feature page: “Because we can.”

Warm beer, cold women. Black coffee, sweet cajeta.

I’m hungry for Japan.

Btw, Children of the Mind is the 4th book in Orson Scott Card’s Ender Saga. Card noticeably risks a whole lot more than in previous books, too much at times and he often fails, but at others, he really shines.

I really don’t know what led me to spin this whole tale from the vaguest of memories when I read this post but it did. (The teacher, btw, is almost surely Dorothy, my Mexican History teacher… or perhaps that cool Spanish teacher whose name I’m forgetting now.) Parece que tengo futuro como redactor de comerciales de Aplijsa.

Today I acquired a newfound respect for journalists and a new reminder of just how easy it is to fool oneself. More details will follow but this note tonight is for me, I don’t want to forget this moment.

“Y mi mente ha parido nostalgia por no verte ya… Hasta en sueños he creído tenerte devorándome, y he mojado mis sábanas blancas recordándote”. Extraña esta cancion de Lalo Rodriguez, Ven devórame otra vez. Es tan burda que es chida in a campy sort of way. De cualquier forma, es destacable por el solo hecho de ser una canción inmensamente popular (hasta yo la conozco) que menciona (aunque algo eufemísticamente) la masturbación y los “sueños húmedos”.