Day of Mourning

 

In the summer of 2019, I spent two weeks in rural northeastern Wyoming for an artist residency. The Ucross Foundation was located on a 20,000-acre ranch for cattle. The foundation’s verdant grounds were carefully manicured and mowed every weekday with a hulking riding lawn mower driven by their groundskeeper.
 
On my first morning there, the newly-arrived residents were provided an orientation. The vast grounds included hills where we could hike. One trail had Tipi rings. Mentioning this provided their staff member with the opportunity to inform us that these lands were once inhabited by a number of Native American tribes, including the Arapaho, Blackfeet, Crow, Shoshone, and Sioux.

Octavia Butler’s Predictions for 2027 from Parable of the Sower

I recently reread the second half of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, which was published in 1993. I scrutinized this part of her book since I’m writing my own near-future novel set in Northern California. I thought it’d be worthwhile to share some thoughts I have on what she predicted.

Letter to My Son

 

Mi querido hijo, over the past few months you’ve often seen me looking at our iPad. Sometimes you’ve sat next to me on the couch while I’ve stared at our tablet. Sometimes you’ve cuddled next to me and asked for a hug so I could pay attention to you. One time, you came over and stood next to me while I sat on our rug, trying to watch a video of two Palestinian children as they lay dead and bloodied, their mouths open, their limbs contorted. I snapped at you and said, Go over there!, and pointed toward the other end of our living room.

Notes After an Artist Residency

 

Summer Lake, February 2024

 

Over a week ago, I was lodging in a cabin that overlooked Summer Lake in remote southeastern Oregon. For ten full days, the only noises I typically heard outside was the howling wind over the high desert basin, a pair of Canadian geese squawking by day or night, the chirping of robins or other birds, muskrats splashing in the pond at the back of my cabin, coyotes yipping and barking, or an occasional vehicle zipping by along Highway 31. On the drive to PLAYA through the Oregon Outback, I may have passed more cows than humans.

Some Thoughts on the Warriors Roster

 

Dang, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve written a sports-related blog post. The last time I wrote about my beloved Warriors, I correctly predicted that they would beat the Celtics in six games in the 2022 NBA Finals.

It feels like we’re at a critical juncture for this franchise. The dynasty is over, and what a run we had: four chips and six Finals appearances in eight years; nine playoff appearances in the past eleven NBA seasons, and since the Steve Kerr era began in 2015, last season was the first time they failed to make it out of the Western Conference in the playoffs.

20 Things I’ve Learned Over the Past Four Years

 (My perspective is from living in the United States, the premier capitalist hellscape on Planet Earth):

 

1.    Most people are really selfish.
 

2.    Most people don’t care about others, including family, friends, and colleagues.
 

3.    Most parents don’t actually love and care for their children as much as they feign over social media. When people say they’ll do anything for their children, that’s bullshit.

Biggest Regret

 

The pride of Castro Valley: Cliff Burton

I have my regrets from this one life I will live; things I’ve done and said that I wish I could rewind and undo so they never happened. In this, the year of the Lord 2023, I feel like the biggest regret in my life is that I never really played in a band. Man, what a miss—and I feel like it’s too late at this point to aspire for, and playing in a band just isn’t the same thing it was in the Before Times (before, you know, that virus no one wants to talk about came into our lives).

Today's Generation

Photo by alex yosifov

Born in 1979, I am a proud member of the Xennials—or the Oregon Trail Generation—a micro-generation born between 1977 to 1983 that had “an analog childhood and digital young adulthood,” according to its Wikipedia entry. Since last year, I have periodically wondered what my son’s micro-generation will be dubbed. He was born less than three years before the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic started in late 2019. He and other children born before or just after 2015 fleetingly experienced life without a Biosafety Level 3 virus actively circulating throughout the planet; they briefly inhabited a planet before catastrophes and weather anomalies resulting from climate change became a regular occurrence.

Generation Doomed?

Generation Fucked?

Or, The Final Generation?

Kindergarten Graduation

Yesterday my six-year-old son graduated from kindergarten during the Age of SARS-CoV-2. Oh, man, what a school year. I can’t believe we made it through unscathed and evaded the virus practically everyone pretends doesn’t exist or affect us anymore.

Life-altering Moments at Artist Residencies

northern New Mexico, 2011

In June 2010, three months after a PET scan showed no cancerous activity in my body, The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico awarded me with my first artist residency. Then, on January 27, 2011, bulky luggage in hand, a guitar bag strapped around my shoulder, snowflakes fluttering through the night sky, I set foot in Taos for a six-week residency. I was living in San Francisco at the time, sharing a flat with three roommates. After ridding my body of Hodgkin lymphoma with over half a year of chemotherapy and radiation treatment, it was my first adventure away from the city where my body had manifested a blood cancer.

The Wurlitzer Foundation provided me with a home: Casita 9n on quiet Burch Street. The tiny adobe home was nestled beneath cottonwood trees. The casita’s backdoor opened to a snow-covered field. Every day, scores of crows and magpies squawked and flew about the trees that had sprouted from this land. Albeit fleeting, it was the first home of my own. I was thirty-one years old.

End-of-the-Year Blues

 

Winter chills by dbolan_wir

During the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, the last full week of the year is when I struggle the most as I naturally reflect on what happened and what may be coming. In 2020, a survey of the American Nurses Association—the largest such association in the United States—provided demoralizing results in regards to their “nurses’ knowledge of and attitude toward COVID-19 vaccine development.” Only 34% of their nurses said they would voluntarily vaccinate themselves against COVID-19. Around that time, similar polls with disheartening results for long-term care facility workers were also being reported. A few articles had already been written about how we have never been able to gain durable immunity against a coronavirus. Then, on December 30, 2020, a then-record 125,220 hospitalizations and 3,903 COVID-19 deaths had been reported in the United States. Meanwhile, on my Instagram feed, many of my friends and family members were outwardly pumped and looking forward to getting past 2020 but I thought, for what? This coronavirus pandemic wouldn’t magically end at the turning of the calendar. Instead of optimism for the year to come, all these pandemic-related metrics just made me downright depressed.

My Pandemic Experience as a Lymphoma Survivor

11th chemotherapy infusion, November 2009

October 29, 2022

As I write this, my mother is far away in our homeland of Perú, visiting family for the first time since the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic began. I felt emotional when I hugged her goodbye before her trip. I wish I could’ve gone with her. Since 2020, I have ached to return to my ancestral homeland. I want to see my extended family before it might be too late.

Through social media and personal anecdotes, I can see that most of my family—my immediate family and the vast one in Perú—are exercising less precaution now from getting infected with this virus. I imagine many of them think I am excessive with my preventative behavior—if they knew about it. (i.e., not dining indoors; not hitting up the bars; avoiding air travel; avoiding elevators when possible; wearing high-quality respirator masks in any public indoor space; pissing outdoors to avoid public restrooms; utilizing a carbon dioxide monitor to assess indoor air quality.) I know my own mother thinks I am too extreme with my precaution—that I’m reading too much about SARS-CoV-2 and the multitude of effects it has caused in our societies.

Today's Distressful Thought - November 20, 2022

My wife and I bought a new microwave today. Previous one lasted us ten years. Not sure which one's gonna last longer: us, or the microwave.

That's where I'm at as this year comes to a close and our American society, by and large, has decided we liked the way of life we lived in 2019 so much that we are unwilling to adapt to this virus and we will accept all the consequences which we don't want to hear about because we want to pretend this pandemic is over.

Today’s Distressful Thought — July 7, 2022 edition

Went to Food Maxx today. On my way to the entrance, I walked past an employee: a tall, stocky, light-skinned Latino in his teens. Looked like he was going to fetch errant shopping carts in the parking lot. Figured it might be his first job, or definitely one of his first jobs. Made me think of my son and when he’d have his first job. For the life of me, I can’t imagine it. Simply can’t. Not sure if it’s because I can’t imagine him making it to that age or that I can’t imagine myself being alive to see him at that age. Or maybe both of us won’t make it to that year? I don’t know.

Perrito

I was asleep in my son’s bed when you started pawing at our gate. I heard the lock rattle and clang against the gate latch. At first, in my fuzzy-headed state, I thought it was a cat prowling along our fence, but the rattling was too loud, so I got out of bed and stumbled through our dark bedroom. It was two-thirty in the morning. Was someone trying to break into our backyard? I grabbed a flashlight, then tiptoed past our kitchen to the backdoor. A window by the door was cracked open and that’s when I heard you, panting on the other side of the door. Oh, shit, I said aloud as my eyes flung open like a pair of roller blinds. I immediately knew it was you. I knew you had snuck into our backyard.

Warriors-Celtics NBA Finals Preview (and Prediction)

Well, holy shit: my beloved Warriors are back in the Finals, four wins away from winning another chip. It’s wild. We’ve been so unbelievably spoiled: 6 Finals appearances in 8 seasons! We may never see an NBA team go on a run like this again.

At the beginning of the season, I was cautiously optimistic about my Warriors. I thought our ceiling was nabbing a #3 to #6 seed in the depleted Western Conference with the Nuggets and Clippers both mired with injuries to a few of their star players. After we beat the Lakers in the season opener, I was all smiles because it never ever gets old beating the fucking Lakers or LeBron. At the time, most of us thought the Lakers would be title contenders, so I thought, one freaking game into the season, that finishing with a #3 to #6 seed was totally plausible. Back then, I thought a Western Conference Finals run, if lots of things went right, was in play, but I realistically didn’t think we’d be back in the Finals this season. I guess I wasn’t sure if we’d ever make it back to the Finals with Steph and Draymond aging and Klay coming back from two catastrophic injuries on the wrong side of thirty.

So making it back is unbelievably sweet. Reminds me of that charmed feeling I felt when this championship core made their first Finals appearance back in 2015.

The Warriors are a different team now. Back then, Steph, Klay, and Draymond were the youngsters trying to prove to themselves that they could be champions. Now we’re like the last Spurs title teams: the cagey, veteran team with abundant experience and championship poise you can’t fake. Now we’re trying to reclaim title glory, perhaps for a final time, while desperately trying to fend off a young, hungry, battle-tested, and supremely talented team.

What a matchup.

A Fan’s Notes: Two Games into the Warriors 2022 Playoff Run

This season has been such a wild ride with exalted highs and depressing lows and it feels like this team might be cresting to its peak, good lord. After cruising to a dominant 126-106 win in Game 2 of our series against the depleted Nuggets, us Warriors fans are riding high again. The 2022 iteration of our hallowed Death Lineup is running the hapless Nuggets off the court. Before this series began, I, like many others, cautiously but pragmatically picked the Dubs to win in 6, but right now it’s looking like a gentleman’s sweep at most. There’s no reason we can’t whip out the brooms on the Nuggets. When Steph, Poole, Klay, Wiggins, and Draymond hit the court and go Voltron against Denver, poor Nikola Jokić—probable two-time NBA MVP Nikola Jokić!—looks like Timofey Mozgov in the 2015 NBA Finals.

The Nuggets are done. They have no counter. With injuries to their second and third-best players, they lack the personnel to make a move to stymie these 2022 Warriors. Our path to a fourth championship with our aging core is to play the least number of playoff games possible so we’re not putting any additional and unnecessary mileage on Steph, Klay, Draymond, and Iggy so we need to not fuck around and finish these Nuggets off.

After a 33-32 first quarter against the Timberwolves, the Memphis Grizzlies took command and responded in Game 2 after stunningly losing their home opener. The Grizzlies are still the only team in the Western Conference I fear. I’ve seen Steph, Poole, Klay, Wiggins, and Draymond lay waste to the undermanned Nuggets, but I badly want to see that lineup pitted against stronger opposition, like the Grizz and the Suns. In 11 minutes of action, they have a preposterous offensive rating of 204.3 (meaning they would score 204 points in 100 possessions) with a defensive rating of 75.0:

With Klay’s shooting basically back to classic Klay form, Steph already looking like himself in his second game back from injury (32 points in just 23 minutes in Game 2!), Draymond being Draymond, Jordan Poole looking like Monta Ellis if Steph had mentored him, and Wiggins—a former #1 overall pick—capably filling into the last spot, any team in the league is gonna have big problems trying to stop this five-man lineup. Memphis and Phoenix have the depth and talent to try to counter, but no team has had the unenviable task of trying to cover Steph, a Steph-like clone (in Poole), and one of the greatest NBA shooters of all time. Yeah, good fucking luck with that.

The 64-win Suns just dropped Game 2 to the Pelicans, who squeaked into the playoffs courtesy of the NBA’s still-new play-in format, and a realistic path back to the Finals is looking better and better for the Dubs. I think the Grizz will prevail against the Wolves, and I think there’s no way the Warriors lose to the Suns if we get past the Grizzlies. Before the playoffs started, I had no fear of the Suns; less so now. If we’re mostly healthy, I think we can knock them off in a gentleman’s sweep. No disrespect meant to the Suns, but we’re a bad matchup for them. And man, it would be outrageously sweet to send CP3 packing so deep into the playoffs! Might very well be the last time he comes so close to winning a chip.

I don’t want to get ahead of myself and look east to see how the playoff action might turn out there. We’ve still got a lot of games to play.

But we’ve got 14 more wins to go.

My Top Ten Favorite Children's Books

In 2017, my wife, Maria and I welcomed our rainbow baby, Miguel, into this world. It would also serve as an introduction into the world of children’s books, particularly board books and picture books.

Maria and I are lifelong readers. Not surprisingly, we’re picky about our reading material, including children’s books. I have found that we’re both sensitive to language and a book’s illustration style. We’ll pass on a book if either element is lackluster.

As a parent, especially when your child becomes attached to a book, you will read it over and over and over and over again so my favorite children’s books have to be ones that are not nauseating to read. (It’s okay if one or two parts of a book are a bit cheesy, if you’re asking me.) They must also be aesthetically pleasing. And since you’ll read them, night after night after night, my favoritest children’s books tend to provide teeny visual details to point out and remark upon to enrich the reading experience, or have a number of characters that lends itself to reading them in playful voices. For me, it’s all about finding different wrinkles to keep the readings from becoming stale.

Without further ado, here’s my top-10 list in chronological order from Miguelito’s infanthood to his present surly toddlerdom:

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part Three

December 2020

December 2, 2020, the U.S. reported 2,760 COVID-19 deaths.

 

Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist and a Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington DC tweeted this image:

Pandemic Recap (Thus Far) - Part Two

June 2020

Before the pandemic, my three-year-old son and I had time to ourselves during our weekly grocery store trips. That was our thing, our dedicated time together. And I missed it terribly.

 

Before the pandemic descended upon us, our son was already far more attached to my wife. But his attachment to her became more extreme during the pandemic. If she wanted to run an errand, she would have to sneak out of her parents’ house without him noticing because he would otherwise cry and wail if he knew she was gone.

 

During his early years, I saw my son cry on many, many occasions. Early in the pandemic, when my wife would try to leave the house to go to the store, he would wail with what felt like fearful despair. He would stop as soon as she stepped back into the house. It was a different type of crying. If we had tried to explain the pandemic to him then, he couldn’t have comprehended what was happening, but he knew something was terribly wrong. I have no doubt.