23 Mayo: Brother Cockroach
Days & Days
A sketchbook study of handmade signs I've seen near our house in Guanajuato: in stone, from wood, on tile, by wheatpaste, by spraypaint. Looks better when not photographed by my crappy phone. Plus a mailbox. Pencil, pen, watercolor. . 23 Mayo Brother Cockroach Sister Scorpion Sometimes fraternal language is hard. . 12 Mayo AI is coming first for “the creatives,” a phrase that might as well be AI, and one I associate with a real estate agent who used it to describe me and Neex. No thanks! I like the man who plays a can. I like the two blind singers, and the way she gets extra gummy worms on her dorilocos, kinda gross. I like the baby-faced zapatapper tap-dancing cowboy boots on a box, his glory in a red pressed guayabera & a violet scarf. I like the skeleton lady, the catrina, who sits, bejeweled, with her skeleton dog. The two-parts water to one-part flour late-night wheat pasters. The unicyclist who removes his underwear while unicycling, a civic hero. For the viejito wearing a portable mini-karaoke machine with a microphone, I swan. “Cielito Lindo,” he leans against the wall, sings. When the profiteering mime harassed me I was happy, happy for the Xalapan puppeteer to give me a look that meant if you’re a bird, you better put down your phone. “In the bowels of thy love,” goes an old shape-note song. Then there’s Aretha, in this documentary, L.A., 1972, and damn but the whole room and its people are her pulse. . 5 Marzo Perhaps my work as a mother is done now that we have spent an entire day in a library. I dream of house arrest, here, in San Miguel de Allende, in this library with its birds & fountains, its unfussy chandeliers, water damage, and substantial book stands. We arrive when the doors open, leave when they close. Our luggage in a pile & no one cares. A pigeon poops on Lucy’s book. Arte everywhere. I find a white person thing, a muffin. I read about Information: how (wo)man the food gatherer becomes (wo)man the information gatherer. Bits are both abstract & binary. Now try to imagine the talking drums, the fire beacons for news from a distance, an oral culture, “the wine-dark sea,” where no one has ever looked up anything. .
P.S. N. read this poem aloud by Emma Lazarus to the girls the other night, at dinner, when we were talking about The Statue of Liberty, for some reason. Read it again, guys. Read it out loud. It’s not Civics. It’s kidnapping innocent humans, depriving them of their legal rights, and shipping them to hellish prisons. But this was the hope, the best of us: “Mother of Exiles,” “From her beacon-hand / Glows world-wide welcome.”