Nine Days After
 Eight Days After 
PROLOGUE
Sunday, August 11, 2019
It's Sunday, 8 days after the 2019 El Paso Shooting
(as it is called on Wikipedia).
What I searched for was the date of the El Paso Massacre
(as I call it).
This goes to show that you don't have to let your world or yourself
be defined by the way others define them.

I live in a junkyard.
That's true.
It's a bit of a dramatic statement, but it's true.
I'm trying to sell a duplex in pennsylvania,
and I own an acre plus of land on the edge of Deming NM,
and I own a 24' UHaul truck and a 15' flatbed trailer, and a car.
I'm about $20,000 in debt on credit cards.
I collect less than $1,000 a month social security.
But, I'm homeless here in El Paso where I live in a junkyard.

They're converting it to a parking place for big rigs
and travel trailers, etc.
That's how I got there, because of the 24' UHaul
and trailer and car.

But, I live in a junkyard, and I haven't showered in over two weeks.

I'm at a McDonald's in northeast El Paso
and I was getting ready to shower at the gym,
put on a respectable suit,
and go to church somewhere,
maybe Sacred Heart in downtown El Paso,
the 12 o'clock Spanish mass, because I missed the 10 o'clock bilingual.

But a government security agent came and harassed me and that pissed me off,
so I didn't shower.
I went to my car, got my computer, and went back into McDonalds to write.

I had been eating a snack breakfast and coffee
and sitting close to the tv screen where they have CNN playing.
I watched Fareed Zakaria and then I think something else came on.
Then a commercial came on showing a phone holder for your car.
It is quite a clever, simple idea where the phone holder looks like a coffee cup
and you just put it in the coffee cup holder in your car.
"Clever, Simple, Brilliant," I thought,
and I turned to the guy sitting at the booth behind me
and shared my enthusiasm and respect for that invention,
which could have been thought up by a 10-year-old, and maybe was.

He was nasty,
"i dont watch tv. it rots the brain."
I ignored his nastiness and his comment,
explained my enthusiasm for that invention, and then turned away.
Even though he'd been served at a table to "eat in,"
a moment later I noticed he was gone
My street smarts tell me he was a law agent
(cia/dod/fbi/homeland security/police/whatever).
I had to control my anger,
but I was angry enough to change my plans and sit down and write right away.

They're out to get me, and I don't know why.
It's their bad, not mine.
I continuously try to make sense of it,
and the best explanation is they hate my mind.
"In loyalty to their kind
they cannot tolerate my mind.
In loyalty to my kind,
I cannot tolerate their obstructions!"
(from the song "Crown of Creation" by Jefferson Airplane).

Now, his gratuitously nasty comment that "tv rots the brain,"
and his cop-like, command voice of aggression and bossy hostility
are what tipped me off immediately.
He was insulting me that my brain was rotted or defective or whatever.

That's what pissed me off because I'm like "here we go again.
They'll NEVER stop."
And I mean that.
THEY WILL NEVER STOP.
They apparently have files and files and files and files of narratives about me,
and since they can't understand what I've been through,
they can't understand or tolerate my mind.
They buy into the narrative that this writer is nuts.

And, of course, dangerous.  job security for them
and many of these punks just can't wait to be the one
to take me out, to "drop" me.

In this way, they're just as bad as the El Paso gunman.
Their motivations are mixed, and they don't even understand themselves
and their own motivations,
but hate and of course ANGER are their motivations,
but, above all, the motivation to "be somebody"
to be a big shot,
to be the guy who gunned me down.

This brings us to the question of,
"who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?"
I went through all this 50 years or so ago during the vietnam war.
Ram Das wrote a book about it called
"Be Here Now."
It's endless. It's neverending.  It's life.

No, I'm not SURE that my "take" on what just happened is factually correct.
But these kind of things happen a lot to me,
and almost all of the time, probably, my "take" is correct.

And then, of course, the loneliness of it.
Who to talk to?
I call two guys from high school from 50 years ago.
They're still in the mentality of farting jokes
and they don't like it when I write that truth,
so I'm even cutting myself off from them,
but it's too exhausting to maintain fictions and put up fronts.
They're brats, they're smartass punks,
but the loneliness becomes unbearable, and you reach out to anyone, just to talk.

That's the PROLOGUE.

*********
It's been an eventful and often EXTREMELY tough few years.
I've written about the 2016 events and I have concluded
that certainly they committed crimes (the knife assault for sure)
and stevie wartgo the principal clearly committed the crime
of conspiring to fire me from the getgo and continuous harassment to achieve that end.
The harassment and the knife threat began on day one (go figure)
and the intent to terminate was expressed within a few weeks
(stevie saying "no two week break for you" i.e. he would fire me before Christmas,
and a student saying "the principal's going to fire you!"
and clearly that came from her parents, co-conspirators with stevie).

Some of the past 3 years was good,
like teaching English in Juarez and experiencing the joy
and the liveliness of Catedral Plaza, or "Calle 16 de Septiembre."

But some things have happened and joy doesn't live here right now.

 Recent Sad Events 
I've been bounced around and harassed by trucking employers
(the fbi whispers nasty rumors in their ears)
and in January I took an otr driving job out of chicago.
They were extremely abusive.
I slid off the ice in February and it was a life-changing memory.
And then the bad kept happening.

 I saw a murdered man lying face down in Juarez 3 weeks ago 
My dog was dying of cancer and I kept going to a vet there
to try to extend her life.
One day, traffic was blocked with police tape
and I went around the parallel street and stopped and looked.
There he lay, a block away, face down, motionless.
"It's all over for him," I thought.
"What were his plans and dreams this week?
Doesn't matter now.
What about who killed him?
Who and where are they.
Probably got away."

It gave me pause.
 My Beloved Puppy Dog passed away 2 weeks ago, in my arms 
I was desperately trying to extend her life,
hoping for a couple more months, another year or two.
She had a miserable 2 weeks in a small cage at the vet's in Juarez.
A week later she died as she slipped out of my arms
as I picked her up and tried to put her in the back of the car.
She was too weak to stand.
I drove a short distance to a church to pray for her,
and found that she had passed away.
It was devastating, and within a day or two I had to get a shelter dog
just like her.

 A week ago, on Saturday, The El Paso Massacre occurred 
I had just pulled in to park at this McDonalds and my phone alert went off.
I watched on tv for quite a while with other McDonald customers,
but we had no idea the mortalities would be so many.

 The town is in shock and mourning 
It's not a time here for politics and analysis.
It's a time for the community to
come together and mourn and comfort one another.

I'm one who takes a step back and tries to see the bigger view.
I see it as part of the "Future Shock" the world is experiencing.
"Future Shock" was written by Alvin Toffler in 1980,
almost 40 years ago.
All this craziness we experience in the news more and more
is like the planet is a runaway engine without a governing mechanism
to slow it down.
It just keeps spinning faster and faster and faster
and the increased speed increases the fuel supply
resulting in more and more speed, and so on ...
Eventually, the engine will vibrate, shake, and explode.

That's what planet earth is experiencing ...
more and more events happening more and more quickly
and more and more intensely.

Where will it lead?
Shaking? Vibrating? Nuclear war?
Punk ass national security agents like the ones who harass me
seem hell bent on making that happen.

And what about the boy, or young adult, who did it?
No sympathy for him from me here,
but it would have never happened if he'd ever worked with Mexicans,
if he'd ever danced with a pretty Mexican girl.
His mind would have been consumed the, not with eliminating them,
but with dating and marrying one.

So, there's no joy in El Paso/Juarez now.
Two summers ago I wrote
 There is More Happiness In Juarez 
but there's sadness, shock and fear now.

They've told me they're afraid.
That's why I decided to dress respectably and go to church,
to mourn with them.
I'm sorry I missed the march with Beto in El Paso yesterday.
I don't like to hear Rep. Escobar's angry voice much,
but she's right now, "Leave us alone!"

And I'm afraid too.
Because they are full of all the emotions you would expect,
and anger will be one of them, and they have their hotheaded young men too.
Already, a border patrol boat has been shot at.

I don't want to be dramatic, and add to the
excessively dramatic rhetoric we alway hear,
which is perhaps the cause of these problems,
but I think that, here in El Paso,
this is sort of the equivalent of 9/11.
It's that big of a hurt.

I heard that the planetarium guy in NYC
got scolded for "putting it in perspective"
by citing the statistics for gun and traffic deaths in the U.S.
Truth is that I did the same research the day of the massacre.
It's about 100 a week from guns,
and 110 a week from traffic fatalities, I think, but fact check it.
And, of course, a tsunami or an earthquake or an asteroid
would take many more lives, but they would be acts of God.

Hispnics feel they are being hunted,
and that makes it an unhappier and more dangerous world for all of us.

On a happier note, I want to close with how nice I've found
the people to be here.
In the summer 2017, I fled a nasty, crazy el paso cop
and spend a month or two in Las Cruces.
I took a bus to east El Paso one day and it took all day.
Part of my memory was a bus ride with a little family.
At the bus stop I saw a young child who had a harness on
and her sister was holding her leash, minding her.
It was cute.  Let's say a 4 year old
being walked and minded by an 8 or 10 year old.
We sat in the back and I found a seat in the back row
near them, and I playfully grabbed the loose leash,
and the big sister took it from me right away,
the mother smiling.
So, I enjoyed the whole ride, just observing the family.
There were two older boys near but I don't know if they were with them.
The cutest thing was when the older sister pretended to nod off.
With encouragement from the mother, the younger sister tried to "wake her up."
She did so by trying to pry her eyes open.
The older sister played along, resisting her attempts,
and then finally "woke up," allowing her eyes to be opened.
It's countless experiences like this in my memory banks
that make me squirm at Trump's monotonal negative rhetoric.

I'm afraid too, and I don't seem to be able to find a friend anywhere.
I'm the good guy.
Church-going nitwit punks like slasher riley and stevie wartgo
at the gallup-mckinley school district, gallup nm
and guns-slinging cops who can't wait to be the one to shoot me
are the bad guys.
Was this all based on jealously of my youth, good looks, health and intelligence?
I don't think so, but if so, that's all fading.

I just think it's all based on the hatred in stupid, mean people.
Stupid, mean liberal feminists and liberal white boys.
Stupid, mean-spirited Republicans.
Stupid church-going simpletons.
Stupid cops and national security other wannabe killers.
The people in this country are so full of hate
they'll find a hook to hang it on no matter what, no problem.

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