YOU GUESSED IT RIGHT: A POST ABOUT THE INFLUENZA IN MEXICO

SOME SAY I have bad luck. And when I say have it's not the way one has a hat on top of their head, or the way one has a nickel in their pocket. I have it he way one has talent, or sympathy, as a part of my very self, just like my Sonoran accent, mixed with the nerdy, douchebag accent of a guy who listens Opera music and eats tofu with mushroom sauce while in his house in the slums of Mexico his family eats carne asada in the patio.

Others say that not only I have bad luck: they take it up a notch and avoid me, so they are not crushed to death by an elephant engulfed in flames, casually falling from the sky, or as for their genitalia not to spontaneously, miserably wither and fall off.

This is why two persons have already blamed me for the influenza virus that this weekend took Mexico by surprise. The thing is, the day I arrived in Mexico for my monthly visit to my parents in Hermosillo was exactly the same day when the shit hit the fan, and the news started spreading their sqwauking and fear-mongering day and night, assuring our asses that we were going to be oh so very very dead, all of us and very soon.

Being rational, I don't think I caused the influenza, simply because I'm not literally a pig, and more importantly, because I don't have any kind of cold-like illnes yet.

But if I just said that I believe in bad luck, that pretty much means that I am not a very rational guy.

But, you know? I prefer to say: "I, Carlos Mal, hereby declare that I am responsible for the epidemic" than to start listening to the conspiracy theories. Because all of us start looking for a scapegoat. Let's debunk this pile of bullshit:

Theory 1: Novus Ordo Seculorum: The fucking gringos created the mutant strain in a laboratory and they will release it on the poorest countries as if it was a rabid pitbull made of poison.

No. Why bother. What's in it for them. Mexico is not the poorest country in Latin America. It is in fact the second richest just after Brazil. If they wanted to fuck up the poorest, there they have Haiti, where some have had to resort to eating mud.

Theory 2: Panis et circenses: The Government of Mexico released the virus in order to distract us from all the bad things that are happening.

Narcos don't give a flying dick if today's Abad's birthday: yesterday three men were executed in Sonora. Yes, indeed it is possible that the hitmen had surgical masks on, just as a precaution. It is true that the media has ignored these three murders because they're too busy trying to scare us with the fact that the virus will fuck us in the ass. But no, oooooh, no: to say that Mexicans require something so elaborate and serious in order to be distracted is to overestimate our intelligence: we Mexicas are distracted simply by our favorite team's football match, Galilea Montijo spewing idiocy all around, "la guerra de chistes" and the showbiz gossip. We are very easy to tame.

Theory 3: Lacrimosa dies illa: The virus will bring forth the Zombie Apocalypse.

No. The world is not that cool. Supernatural catastrophes will never happen. The world is sad and bitter and its catastrophes are real and close, and sad, and when they happen we're not allowed to run around wielding twin katanas and to anally and savagely copulate with big-breasted heroins whom we save with our heroic, able, muscular arms.

Furthermore, we all know that Z-Day will be caused (if ever) by nanotechnology, not by a virus.

Theory 4: Dies Irae: The influenza virus is a punishment from God because Mexico city is a cesspool of evil (translation: God is finally killing all those fucking guacho shitfaces).

No. God is not an agent of punishment. Your parents are. This pissed-off, psycho God exists solely in the pages of the Old Testament, which is already way too obsolete after the Jesus Christ upgrade. If you're Christian, the idea of a pissed-off Yahweh sending hurricanes, reggaeton singers, and virus into our world shouldn't fit in your faith. If you're an atheist what the hell are you doing in this paragraph, skip to the next.

The people of Mexico City aren't that bad, and even though they have a horrible accent (they speak like if everything was a question), and even though they tend to be real small and ugly compared to the many Brad Pitts and George Clooneys that we have here in Northern Mexico, they're only guilty of having more stuff than we have, better weather, more dynamic urban settlings, better gastronomy, art, culture, better libraries, an identity and history.

Hermosillo (1850) vs Mexico City (1828), click to see a bigger image.

This is why we hate them: because we are a bunch of hillbilly pissed-off closet racists who vote Bours and whine because we were abandoned by the Jesuits in the middle of the fucking desert. That's why we're so happy they're all dying like miserable, soulless rats. We are so grand and bad-ass here in the North. Long live the North, motherfuckers!

Finis: Conclusión

Sadly, a 99% of the conspiracy theories are dead wrong (see Holocaust deniers). Occam's Razor pretty much cuts through their bellies and leaves then all gutted on the floor asking for a priest in the middle of their blood-soaked death rattles. Personally, I love to belive in conspiracy theories and when someone talks about them I like to add some wood to the fire and I bring forth even more paranoid, nonsensical data. UFOs, the assassination of JFK, the staging and filming of the moon landing by Stanley Kubrick, etcetera.

But well, things are sadder than this. The Twin Towers were destroyed by Al-Qaeda, not by Bush. The Amero doesn't exist and never will. The Government will never stick a secret microchip up our asses. What fell on the dunes of Roswell was indeed a measly weather balloon. The Chupacabra doesn't exist. Bigfoot doesn't exist. Nessie doesn't exist. Canada doesn't exist.
The truth is out there. And it's very boring.

Nonetheless, Salinas did kill Colosio, that is not a theory, it is an open secret.

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MI ADVENTURE IN TUCSON

The meaning of the word Aztlán is "place of herons" (from the Nahuatl "azta" (white bird, heron) and "tlan" (place of origin).

It was a normal day. I taught a Spanish class and I was going home on Hermes, my faithful mountain bike. I would normally get home and prepare some sandwiches or spaghetti, two quarts of juice drink, I would play me a movie and I'd continue writing my dissertation.But something unusual happened.

A couple of gringos were pointing at something in the artificial lake that-s in the West corner of the University of Arizona. I turned and saw a surprise:

I had never seen a heron up close before in my life. Some time my mother told me that the white flocks flying up in the sky were "ducks or herons", but they were flying so high that they could have been giant white macaws.

A heron and a lake immediately triggered my ancestral instincts and, like a pitifully demented bastard I asked my bike: "So, it-s time to go looking for an adventure, right?" My bike didn't answer, because we are not in the universe in which Kino's Journey takes place.

When I stopped seeing familiar streets and buildings I started asking myself constantly when to stop and turn back. I had only two slices of pizza in my tummy and I wasn't terribly hydrated. But the day was sunny and windy, which is my favourite weather. Furthermore, Hermes continued without asking for my permission.

At a curve I found this Grand Canyon in the times of cholera:

And even though it looks real cool and majestic it really is (Alas!, woeful reality) an artificial wall, created for an exclusive neighborhood.

When I took this path I started pondering the possibility of being lost. "At least I got lost at a rich neighborhood" I told Hermes. My shameful ans classist cowardice were left unanswered. I didn't know if after the curve I would find stores or people or a way back home.

So I decided to shoot myself. With my camera, that is.

In the end I did find a street that would directly take me to my place..It was getting dark, so I decided to stop at a Wal*Mart; I smoked a fag and went in. I saw some thing that I wanted to buy, but naaaah, I despise Wal*Mart so I went and buy only the thing I needed: a headlight for my bike. I knew that my wife wouldn't be so happy to know that I wandered strange and far away streets without any lighting and wearing my black blazer.

By the way, taking photos is not allowed at Wal*Marts, so this photo is evidence of my bad-assness.

Because my trip had ornithological-epic beginnings I thought that I was going to find some mythical Pascua Yaqui guru who would reveal my indigenous origins. Or some mystic sign about my plan in the Universe. But I only found a fake Grand Canyon and a toothless woman who asked me for a cigarette. I gave her two and went back home.

I-m not a person who travels. I don-t like leaving the security of my house. But, ladies, how to resist when the symbols are calling? I felt a minuscule fraction of the passion for wandering that the ancient ones felt. The fascination of the Achaeans when they saw lizards fighting snakes on the battlefield, that of the Aztecs who followed the prophecy of a priest wearing the tiny heads of hundreds of hummingbirds. That of Bill Adama and Laura Roslin... oops... too nerdy...

So long, suckas.

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PAGAN FIRE - GOD

I definitively believe in God, since I come to Him when I'm in trouble. You'll never hear me say: "Please, Nature, help my mom's liver to get better" or "Causality, please find me a job..." No: I call to a higher conscience which I consider to be good and for which I feel a deep respect, friendliness and fondness.

During my adolescence I was in the entertaining adventure of being an atheist. It was a stage that a few years ago I was ashamed of, but now I appreciate it as an important step in my path as a person who likes thinking for himself.

My teen-atheism was turned away because what I really wanted to be was anti-church and anti-religion. Fortunately today, as an echo of those years of acne and blinding masturbation, I preserve my scorn for the Catholic bureaucracy and my sarcasm, derision and scorn for the pomp and circumstance of organized religions.

Now, many years later, facing the metaphorical firing squad of my scientific rationality, a blindfolded Christ hopes, with a cigarette in His mouth, that my brain should fill Him full of lead and that my heart comes to his corpse and puts that shot of grace on His forehead.

But that probably is not going to happen. My motives for excusing Christ and leaving Him as the sole inhabitant in the religious desert of my reason are very complex to be explained in this Pagan Fire, and even I do not know them completely myself, so, to another thing.

My point is that, even if we think that Christ is God, the nature of God Father is (as it must be) a mystery. But inside a mystery everything fits, as long as the imagination is free to roam the paths of blasphemy: for example, Willliam Blake thought God was a Satan, constantly cheating our senses to avoid our learning of the Truth; the real God is farther from us than we imagine. His idea neither was new nor was his, it belonged to the Gnostics and Jewish Cabbalists.

Today we have a new mythology in science. Isn't a lot of faith needed to believe in the Big Bang? Perhaps it is possible to argue that "the Big Bang is a projection based on atomic physics that we know as having palpable veracity." But naaaaaah... A word for youse: neutrinos. Neutrinos do not have mass, as the physical models that gave us atomic energy demands. There is something that is not within reach of modern physics and mathematics. There is when and where faith comes in.

Do not misinterpret me: I believe that it is more convenient for the future of humankindto believe in science as well as I think that it is completely impossible and absurd to suppose that it is possible to eliminate religion from the human psyche. But this neither is new nor is mine, my ancestor Averroes, the Moor said that "there are two realities: one is scientifically verified, the other one is divinely revealed".

The sun, babies, is the cause of everything what we see, we touch and think. Look at your right . Use your imagination and reduce the object that you see to its raw material. If such object is a person you can reduce it to a little mound of coal with transparent gases around it. The light of the stars, the so-called cosmic beams that they express and the mysterious photons they arranged themselves in such a way that they gave place to the elements that form all of us and everything.

When someone says: "We are nothing but stardust" they're not being cheesy: they're being scientifically correct.

Now let's imagine this. Many religions, almost all of them, have a panorama of the end of the world. Restricted to the planet Earth and to the homo sapiens, they assume that God has a plan of evacuation for everybody and after this, a perennial afterlife will have effect. But my question is: Has god no plans for the stars, the comets and other planets without life? When we all are drinking rye liquor in Walhalla or sadly diluting in the gray waters of Hades: what will be of the rest of the Universe? Was it really only some sort of decoration?

Religious or not we must believe in this: The Earth will be undoubtedly destroyed. By the sun. In seven billion years (short scale billions) it is sure that there will not be sustainability for life in what we call today the Solar System.

What if humanity is miraculously capable of surviving seven billion years? Perhaps we find a way of producing clean and free energy, cure all the diseases, move to Mars, Venus and many other moons; perhaps we find a way of creating virtual space, perhaps we learned to feed living cells with solar energy, perhaps a progression of cataclysms keeps us demographically controlled by trillions of years... It can happen... What will happen then when the sun begins to shine ten times brighter and hotter and life is impossible in the planet?

The sun made this planet and the sun is going to destroy it. That is for sure, completely inevitable: it is dogma. The first registered religions are solar worships, interesting, ain't it?

The images that decorate this text are by one of my favorites, the British painter Joseph Mallord William Turner. Look at them carefully. What is the constant? The sea or the water, yes. But for him there was a colossal force that not only made forms and colors possible, it was also a force of creation and transformation. It is this element of his best paintings which appears almost always as a solemn seed of meaning: the sun. Big part of the merit of Joseph Mallord William Turner, to me, is to have had the balls to paint the sun.

Ah, yes, which brings me to why I wrote all this. The last words of Joseph Mallord William Turner: " The sun is God".

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THERE IS A CLEARING IN THE AMAZON JUNGLE

In the middle of the most cluttered part of the Amazon jungle there is a clearing, a tapestry made of leaves and a tree stump engulfed in vines and moss.

Over this green, dead trunk there is a red bird that shrieks like a stupid lizard. If we get closer to it we can notice that the bird is in fact a little parrot, a small blood-red parrot with black near the wings.

This birdie has been there, on the same tree stump for countless centuries, since the Amazon river's infancy. It doesn't know it is immortal, that fire hasn't consumed it, that predators flee it and that the hand of men will never cut its life. He doesn't remember anything of its own glorious past; it is a very pretty , very small little bird that doesn't know anything about anything and that just shrieks stupidly from time to time.

It's Satan.

Carlos Mal Pacheco & Fugo Medina.

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FLAG OF MEXICO, LEGACY OF OUR HEROES...

It seems weird to me, and sometimes cute, how countries like Japan and Mexico are not so sensitive about the Holocaust. Europe and the United States have definitely a lot of reasons to be so, mainly because there are lots and lots of Jews living there, many of them survivors or people directly or indirectly affected by the Shoah.

In Japan is not too rare to find young people who are into Hitler and Nazi paraphernalia; in Europe, to go to a costume party dressed an an SS official can land you in a world of trouble, like some imbecile prince can attest. Let us remember that in the Old Continent this was lived very intimately and very recently, and nobody there finds the matter funny.

In Mexico we could put Hitler's face on an ad for Tia Rosa tortillas and nobody will think it's the end of the world.

When I was in elementary school a professor, with the aide of a megaphone, gave all the children a set of instructions. Now that I remember this I get goosebumps, because I'm sure that in 1940's Berlin, a crowd of ten year olds heard the same speech in the recruitment plaza of the Hitlerjugend.

"Okay, kids, we're going to honor the Flag: Stand up properly and raise your right arm with your hand extended and with your palm facing the ground..."

...

Don't you find a little bit disturbing that we Mexicans do the Nazi salute (the Hitlergruß) during the "juramento a la bandera" (Allegiance to the Flag)? You never thought of that, right?

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MY BROTHA

If someone kills Barack Obama tomorrow, I'm done with this shit: I will bid this country motherfucking adieu.

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