7/31/2007
I called Hillary Clinton, and she said it's a vast right wing conspiracy. I know some of you looked for Immigration Monday! The computer blew up! Then the power went out all afternoon! I'm writing this on the kids' computer. Be back online soon. I guess. Maybe. Come on, Geek Squad!
Wastelander UK, II
7/28/2007
It’s a hard, jet-lagged, hot night.
Bad, bad sleep. Not until I talk to our
all-knowing Caroline-of –the-Arran (as opposed
to Caroline-of-the-QMII) do I realize my own dumbth:
there’s a fan in the armoir that I could have turned on
to sleep like a baby. Duh.
Charming breakfast, though—every accent
in Europe seems to be in the basement eating room;
we’re like a human Noah’s ark. Coffee and tea,
and lovely Brit beauties eat eggs with piles of red
baked beans on them. Huh. I have a banger and some rashers
and some coffee and some eggs. Cindy is unconvinced by all this
and settles for oatmeal. Porridge!
“What’s up with the beans?” she complains.
We step out into the Arran’s tiny garden
in back, everything glistening from the evening’s rains,
the little quiet space somehow more silent
for the relentless roar of lorries and buses and
jackhammers out in the street: a wall of sound that encloses
a wall of stillness.
They have slyly laid old mirrors in among the ivy and bushes
to reflect back from the walls of the garden. It feels like
we are peering through holes in the walls at the feet of people having
a garden party next door.
The King of Pigeons comes to join us.
He is the biggest pigeon I have veer seen, and he sits on a wet table
and watches us calmly. The mirrors
throw back reflections of the King, each one
the size of a turkey.
#
Dear Caroline, bravely plowing through a hangover,
gives us excellent directions, and we step off again and walk.
Antique shops here don’t have Aunt Ida’s 40 year old
plow and wagon wheel: Roman coins, a 2,000 year old
clay pipe, a figurine in clay about six inches tall
of a male torso as handsome as Michelangelo’s David.
Elsewhere, the same turista crap—plastic double-decker buses,
rubber Royal Guards, London t-shirts, tea cups w/ Big Ben
on them—sometimes in fake gold. Of course, I like all this stuff.
We break our embargo on USA chain stores and buy Starbuck’s
as we wander King’s Road until our bus arrives.
How happy can days be?
Perfectly
happy.
Bad, bad sleep. Not until I talk to our
all-knowing Caroline-of –the-Arran (as opposed
to Caroline-of-the-QMII) do I realize my own dumbth:
there’s a fan in the armoir that I could have turned on
to sleep like a baby. Duh.
Charming breakfast, though—every accent
in Europe seems to be in the basement eating room;
we’re like a human Noah’s ark. Coffee and tea,
and lovely Brit beauties eat eggs with piles of red
baked beans on them. Huh. I have a banger and some rashers
and some coffee and some eggs. Cindy is unconvinced by all this
and settles for oatmeal. Porridge!
“What’s up with the beans?” she complains.
We step out into the Arran’s tiny garden
in back, everything glistening from the evening’s rains,
the little quiet space somehow more silent
for the relentless roar of lorries and buses and
jackhammers out in the street: a wall of sound that encloses
a wall of stillness.
They have slyly laid old mirrors in among the ivy and bushes
to reflect back from the walls of the garden. It feels like
we are peering through holes in the walls at the feet of people having
a garden party next door.
The King of Pigeons comes to join us.
He is the biggest pigeon I have veer seen, and he sits on a wet table
and watches us calmly. The mirrors
throw back reflections of the King, each one
the size of a turkey.
#
Dear Caroline, bravely plowing through a hangover,
gives us excellent directions, and we step off again and walk.
Antique shops here don’t have Aunt Ida’s 40 year old
plow and wagon wheel: Roman coins, a 2,000 year old
clay pipe, a figurine in clay about six inches tall
of a male torso as handsome as Michelangelo’s David.
Elsewhere, the same turista crap—plastic double-decker buses,
rubber Royal Guards, London t-shirts, tea cups w/ Big Ben
on them—sometimes in fake gold. Of course, I like all this stuff.
We break our embargo on USA chain stores and buy Starbuck’s
as we wander King’s Road until our bus arrives.
How happy can days be?
Perfectly
happy.
We take our tour all over again, heads thrown back
to see the amazing rooflines—gargoyles and battlements,
roof gardens and statues everywhere.
More insults directed at Joan Collins, Maggie Thatcher,
and Elton John—though this tour guide also has it in
for Rod Stewart!
“Rod and Elton have spats and sue each other.
Then they kiss and make up.
Really. They kiss.”
He seems outraged that there are no pigeons in Trafalgar Square.
The mayor, apparently, has outlawed pigeons.
We wheel over the Tower Bridge, and I am astounded to see
lines of laundry in the Tower of London, shirts and
sheets coming from high windows on clothes lines,
drying in the wind as if Anne Boleyn
had her servants set out her wash, just
this morning.
“To the Tower!” we cry, sure we’ll be tourists in there for
about an hour or two.
Our attention is caught by a street artist with a series of paintings
of Big Ben in the rain—tall ones, on canvas, stretched
on wooden frames—he adds color on request, putting in wobbly red
or sepia reflections on the sidewalks of his rainy paintings.
He looks like Brendan from Dead Can Dance, and he is rather grim.
“Which is your favorite?” Cindy asks.
“They’re all good,” he says, wincing
as if he’s sucked a lemon. Haggling tourists seem to resent
his prices and walk away; he rushes after them,
crying, “All right! All right! Fifteen pounds, then!”
An American woman sidles up to me and says,
“Are you buying one?” I nod. “I love ‘em,” I say.
“Yeah,” she replies. “How much is he charging?”
Texas accent.
“I don’t know,” I say. “He’s haggling down to fifteen,
though.” She gets a ghastly “sly” look on her face and says,
“Let’s team up on him, and we can get two paintings
for twenty!”
I move away from her silently. I don’t want to use any
hard-line American tactics on this skinny scruffy
street maestro.
We pick a thin tall one with two lovers
under an umbrella, walking away from
the viewer. Big Ben’s looking
ghostly in the drizzle, and there’s a red
UK phone box beside them. The artist
scowls at us and squats with his oil paint
and adds red smears and squiggles, making the
London street seem alive around the lovers’ feet.
He has rain sprinkles on his glasses.
“You’re charging fifteen, right?” Cindy says,
smacking him with some hard-line gringo negotiations
of her own. Aghast, he surrenders to her, his haggle stance
stolen from him. He pockets our pounds looking like
we’ve insulted his mother.
“Keep it covered,” he snarls, “till the paint
dries.” Then he leaps upon
the two-for-twenty Costco shopper from Dallas.
His face is set on Full Grim. Ready for battle.
I hold up our new painting.
“That’s us,” I say,
pointing to the thin young lovers.
“Oh yes,” Cindy replies, “that’s exactly how I see us.”
“What!” I demand. “Look—you have on a hot
little mini skirt, and I
have a tight and muscular
ass.”
“Us,” she says,
“after a diet.”
A helicopter drifts over the city
towing a vast square banner
that flutters silently, showing us
the gigantic face of
Bruce Willis
scowling down
upon us.
DIE HARD 4.0.
He’s like an angry
Angel Gabriel
on his way to
Armageddon
to smite
the unrighteous.
We queue up to buy Tower tickets.
And the tickies are expensive, but not that expensive.
Only about the cost of a face lift.
We walk to the gate of the Tower
and fall into a stone hallucination.
A fever dream of history—horror and exaltation
caught like blood and dust
in the concentric rings of time.
The ancient Roman walls, and behind them, the ravens in their
wire houses, haunting the Roman encampment like
obsidian ghosts.
The moats and the medieval battlements.
The Traitor’s Gate, cold arch on the Thames, still scary,
still echoing with the footsteps of the condemned on their way
to the whistling axe on Tower Hill.
The White Tower in the center.
The Bloody Tower in the front left corner.
The pamphlets say you can still hear
screams
from the dungeons. The screams, up the hill,
of Guy Fawkes being tortured.
The green where special cases were beheaded, like Anne Boleyn
and sweet lady Jane Grey, the 16 year old
queen whose head rolled on the grass. Betrayed and scared
and chopped…now
everyone’s tragic girlfriend.
They see her, they say, walking
to the chapel.
#
We don’t hear screams, but we do hear
alarming SHOUTS. Very loud SHOUTS reverberating
off the stone walls. A man’s manly SHOUTS!
We step forward and find ourselves
Before a Yeoman Warder. A Beefeater!
Clearly, this is THE Beefeater! The ur-Warder, master of all
Yeomen! A man with a voice to CRACK STONE!
A man fully in command of trembling tourists!
A man recounting the history of the Tower
AT THE TOP OF HIS LUNGS! In full
red, gold and black regalia! He doffs his hat when he speaks
and holds it out over us, as if we were royal visitors and it’s 1702.
And he SHOUTS the most amazing things I have ever heard.
I must state clearly at this juncture that this Yeoman Warder
becomes my PERSONAL HERO immediately, and I am willing
to enlist in the British army so he can yell at me forever.
I bow to him—
my sensei.
“Yeoman Warders,” he proclaims in the most astounding yawp ever,
“are the oldest serving military unit IN THE WORLD!
Not unlike the Swiss Guards at the Vatican,
ONLY WE ARE OLDER!”
He thrusts a finger at us.
“YES!” he screams.
“I am wearing
A LITTLE DRESS!”
22 years a Sgt. Major in the British army.
That voice that delights me so, no doubt, made life
a living hell for the unlucky recruits
under his tender care.
He’s so damned funny, he must have forced a hundred
troops to do push-ups when they couldn’t help laughing
at his quips.
He marches us double-time down through history,
bellowing as if the ghosts themselves were in boot camp
and he has to get them to do exercises. And he knows the history
so completely that he spins fable after fable without a single pause
or doubt. “Know it?” he hollers. “I live here!
IN THE TOWER! I don’t know history,
I LIVE HISTORY!
But I’ll tell you a secret
About the Beefeaters’ lives
In THE TOWER OF LONDON.
It’s a hard place
to get
a pizza delivered
after dark!”
We are amazed to realize that our Warder is leaning against
Thomas More’s cell wall as he shouts.
When we make our way up toward the chapel,
we stop at the green where the Queens were decapitated.
We imagine poor “Ann Bullen” getting hacked,
and innocent Lady Jane spilling her blood
on this haunted grass.
He tells us of the terrible death of the good lady
who was guilty of no crime and refused to kneel,
bravely telling the axeman to cut her head off where she stood.
And the axeman swung on her then and there, and she
ran screaming around the execution spot while he
struck at her, blow after blow,
27 axe strokes before she finally fell,
butchered at the feet of the appalled witnesses.
“But,” he intones, “perhaps the most
GRISLY of all was the death
of Queen Anne Boleyn on this spot.
YES!
For so SWIFT was the fall of the blade,
so quick was the executioner to
PLUCK her HEAD by its hair from this very GRRROUND
and DISPLAY it
to the gathered ONLOOKERS,
that
YES!
all were horrified to SEE
the Queen’s eyes OPEN and
LOOK ABOUT
while her BLUE LIPS
were seen to
YES!
continue reciting a
SILENT PRAYER!”
At each booming
YES!
someone staggers back in terror,
and the Warder turns to them
and growls,
“Steady!”
He asks:
“Are there any Americans present?”
Timidly, a few of us
raise our hands.
He says,
“Welcome home!”
We all beam, feeling peachy in his love,
but then he says:
“If you lot had paid your taxes,
this would all be your history.”
We gather in the chapel and bask in the radiation
of wraiths—Anne Boleyn tucked in the corner.
Beneath us, in the crypt, vaults holding bones
Of 1,500 mysterious dead. Romans?
The church itself sits atop
the old Roman garrison.
The raised step in the entrance to the church
is said to be haunted by a vengeful Lady ghost,
and she raises it to trip single women—so
the Warder says. And he announces: “I shall place myself
at the entrance to catch any falling women
in my arms. You men—you might trip
as well. It’s going to hurt
because I’m not catching
any of you.”
I suffer separation anxiety when we bid him farewell.
#
NOTE:
We’re not in Illinois Anymore, Item # 199—
Cinderella
uses a toilet
housed in a tower
built in 1240 AD.
Ghosts!
Every pebble
haunted!
We adjourn to the Royal Jewels vault
and join the gold-besotted procession.
There is nothing to say about gold and diamonds that is not
a cliché.
On to the White Tower, the olde central Tower,
the original imposing skyscraper that intimidated
London before the plague and the fire. We climbed to the steps
where the two boy princes were hidden
after being murdered in their sleep.
Saw cells pitch black but scratched with ancient
carved graffiti. I touch the stones in the dark,
half afraid a cold hand will take hold of
my fingers.
Into the armory—great swirls of blunderbusses and
pistols, pikes, spikes, maces and swords. King Henry
VIII’s personal stock of spears. Battle axes not
what I expected, not axes, really, but a kind of hooked
iron hammer, one peen made to crunch a skull
through a helmet, and the hook side designed to snag the meat
in an armpit or neck and drag the enemy off his horse to then
be well-hammered.
King Henry VIII’s personal suit of armor
stands boldly, legs apart, hands out and ready to rumble.
What they didn’t show me in any history books
is the huge metal codpiece poking straight out of his metal pants:
rampant! In excelsis! King Henry had a ham in the can!
No wonder
he had six wives.
From tower to tower, cell to cell.
A royal bedroom with the bed alarmingly mussed,
as if William the Conquerer had just risen
from a nap and walked out to return at any second
and scare us to death.
Probably
to put us to death.
The sad room where the slain princes
had slept and been killed in their beds.
Sir Walter Raleigh’s strange room, where he languished for 13 years,
often ill and despondent, hoping for death. They have
his writing desk set up with a quill pen, some books, the chair
pushed back as if he, too, had just left the cell.
Here, where his heart no doubt broke, at the window they say he favored
when he stared outside, we shuffle and cough. The place
he was most miserable now a Kodak moment. How could he
have ever guessed such a thing would happen?
The floor boards squeal as we move, as perhaps they squealed when he
was locked inside.
History
is not in the past.
History
is not far away.
It is here now, or at least
it is here now when you stand in the man’s bedroom
and look at his ceiling and look
at the Yeoman Warders’ cars parked
incongruously in the alley deep within the Tower complex,
hidden from the street by the walls and towers,
in front of their pleasant apartments with their little pots
of geraniums on the steps.
If we see ghosts, did he see ghosts of us?
Is he sitting there now, head in hand, staring at a blank page,
and sensing strange shadows passing through his room?
Does he think he imagines it? Is he dreaming? Does he fear
he’s going mad?
Thoroughly shaken, we make our way down and out.
We adjourn to the mess hall, where we are greeted by
sandwiches and a bas relief
taking up one whole wall
of rampant war horses and unicorns.
Even the burger stand is
alive with centuries and art.
To the Bloody Tower.
Too awful in its shadows for me.
I feel uneasy, and when we bend to stare
at the rack and the other torture devices
(The Scavenger’s Daughter, terrible metal frame
that crushed you kneeling into a tight
S shape until you couldn’t breathe and
couldn’t move and slowly died in that awful
posture) I just want to get out of there.
In the beauty and the awe of the medieval castle
on the outside walls by the Thames—the King’s chambers and the
old church—we come into St. Anne’s (Anne Askew) cell,
where she was held awaiting her death for refusing
to surrender her faith.
Killed for God.
Oh, that again.
Tight little room. Rough.
I stare at her ceiling, the stones she counted.
They took her to the rack, and they worked the winches
so hard that they destroyed her arms and legs. Still, they say,
she did not cry out, and she did not renounce her religion.
So they cranked her harder.
Her arms and legs were left limp and ruined, and she could not
stand or raise her hands to help herself rise.
So they kindly helped her onto a chair.
They carried her in this chair because she could not walk.
They carried her out to the pyre, where they
laid kindling all about her and set it alight, burning her to death
as the crowds surged to watch her burn.
I whisper things to St. Anne in there.
When we leave, I say,
“What was wrong with these fucking people?”
And we rush to the gift shop to buy
Beefeater teddy bears and fridge magnets.
I have ghosts in my pockets.
I have eldritch breaths
caught in my hair.
Thought we’d be there an hour.
Find we’ve been there all day long.
YES!
Steady!
END, Part II.
7/24/2007
July 2007.
[Invited by Cunard to fly to London and come back across the pond on the Queen Mary II, leading literary discussions of my work. This is hard to believe. But it’s the kind of opportunity you can’t pass up. Cinderella and I packed and headed out. This is the record of some of the journey.]
* * *
Virgin Atlantic, Chicago to London.
O’Hare International Terminal.
Beaten and
battered by
legions of kill-crazy
line-jumping
Europeans.
All knees and elbows
as we struggle to be
1004th in line
so we can take off our shoes and
have the bored TSA agents
ignore the x-rays of our bags, all of them
crammed with ointments, fluids, gels
and creams. Woman toting an ostentatious
“Monaco” shoulder bag fusses and cuts in front of people
using her pout like a snowplow.
No polite Midwestern US just-folks manners
in the international terminal.
Except for the Brits
who are cast off to the edges saying, “Sorry! Dreadfully
sorry!”
Lovely young mum
w/ a baby in a sling
wafting up a miasma
of rancid poo.
6’9” Sikh
w/ a foot-tall turban!
Two old people stop to squint at the departure boards.
Very Important European
Woman snarls at them: “EXCUSE ME—you can see
I am trying to walk here!”
They blink around in fear as she shoves them aside.
Of course,
she pronounces it:
VOKK.
I wait in line for an hour to buy
2 water bottles.
We find we are seated apart.
Cindy does battle at the Virgin kiosk to try to
get us together, until a kind British man
steps up and switches seats w/ her.
Upon hearing he will be seated w/ a group of 3
women, he says, “Are they young
and perky?”
C says, “Well,
they’re perky.”
“Old, then!” he says,
squaring his shoulders manfully for the challenge.
The flight attendant who greets me on the plane
acts like I have worms
coming out of my nose.
We are sitting in the back of the plane
with Warren, the champion
Toyota dealer in Wales.
Warren, Cindy and I are
pressed into a row so narrow
that our blood and lymph
puddles on the floor as we
are compressed into
a sausage patty.
Oddly, we have been placed, again,
next to the toilet. Our traditional plane seats.
The lavvy inspires some businessman
to unload a ton of manure
beside my right ear.
And we haven’t even
taken off.
But
Virgin does have
that TV screen at every seat, and movies all night,
and they serve supper w/ a very civilized
little glass of wine.
The safety video on my li’l screen shows a cartoon
about how apparently flippin’ hilarious it would be
if the plane were to plunge into the ocean
and we got to float around on our seat cushions
being eaten by sharks.
The cartoon characters in each crisis scenario
turn to the camera w/ big goggly eyes and the
music goes: “WAH-WAHHH!”
Rule, Brittannia!
#
Wait. Wait.
We haven’t even started to taxi yet
and a fellow up front barfs
right in front of the stew.
She comes running up the aisle
to get bags and towels in the galley.
One of the gang of evil flight attendants
gathered like crows in the galley shouts,
“WOT!
He frew up!?!”
They parade up and down the aisle,
bearing little sacks of his vomit. Suddenly
the intercom comes to life and warns us
NOT, for any reason, to open
a bag of peanuts! There are
SEVERE allergy issues on the plane!
Man, you never run out
of stuff to write about.
Warren says to Cindy:
“He keeps on
scribblin,
scribblin.”
#
Can’t sleep. Butt hurts. Can’t move in the seat.
The woman in front of me puts her seat back
and shoves the TV screen into my nose, but at least
I can clearly see “The 300” and “Hot Fuzz.”
And unexpectedly, it’s
Over! Heathrow!
Breathe the English air!
#
“I’m in England-o,
The land of I’m all right, Jack.”
--Shawn Phillips
OH NO.
Just when I thought I got away,
there it is again!
I came all the way across the Atlantic,
and the first thing I see when we enter
the immigration salon is a huge sign that says:
UK BORDER.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
#
Nobody gave a damn.
We waltzed right through.
Joined the people in djellabas and burkas
marching past the immigration officials and their dogs,
none of whom ever looked over from their hilarious
morning chats.
This was our arrival in the Elevated Terror Alert
Orange Security Level-High Crime Watch
London.
#
Our driver is from East Africa.
“I been in London fourteen year. Yeah.
Where I come from is hot.
Is too hot.
Very hot. Got nothing there.
Always war. No water.
Nothing to drink.
You got to drink dirty water.
You got to drink mud sometimes.
My kids, they no understand this now,
living here.
They don’t know home.
They don’t know war.
Life?
Is survive!
Is all
about
survive!”
Our epic journey from Heathrow to Gower St.
The delightful carnival-ride effect of cars
going the “wrong” way in the “wrong” lane.
It’s odd that the first ad I see is a London cab with
a full color Corona cerveza bottle on the side.
With a wedge of lime.
“Hecho en Mexico.”
UK BORDER?
You must be kidding.
Memo to American conspiracy theorists:
The globalists have won!
I’m all excited.
I’m seeing things I have wanted to see and thought
I would never see. Things you read about or hear about.
The London Eye. Baker St. Shepherd’s Bush.
The M-1.
Drive thru London
and you will understand Boston.
We arrive at the Arran Hotel
around the corner from ancient and legendary Oxford St.
My wife, Zsa Zsa,
has packed approximately 500 pounds for the trip,
and our room is on the top floor.
No elevator. I mean, “lift.”
I keep hoping they’ll send
Sherpas to bear the Imperial Urrea Luggage
above the treeline, but it’s up to us
to gasp and lunge.
Fortunately,
the stairs are only
10,000 feet tall.
We survive
w/out oxygen bottles.
Somehow, we announce that we will ignore jet lag!
That’s the ticket! We will forge ahead
w/ our plans and take London by storm!
Then we fall in bed and immediately go to sleep.
#
[Invited by Cunard to fly to London and come back across the pond on the Queen Mary II, leading literary discussions of my work. This is hard to believe. But it’s the kind of opportunity you can’t pass up. Cinderella and I packed and headed out. This is the record of some of the journey.]
* * *
Virgin Atlantic, Chicago to London.
O’Hare International Terminal.
Beaten and
battered by
legions of kill-crazy
line-jumping
Europeans.
All knees and elbows
as we struggle to be
1004th in line
so we can take off our shoes and
have the bored TSA agents
ignore the x-rays of our bags, all of them
crammed with ointments, fluids, gels
and creams. Woman toting an ostentatious
“Monaco” shoulder bag fusses and cuts in front of people
using her pout like a snowplow.
No polite Midwestern US just-folks manners
in the international terminal.
Except for the Brits
who are cast off to the edges saying, “Sorry! Dreadfully
sorry!”
Lovely young mum
w/ a baby in a sling
wafting up a miasma
of rancid poo.
6’9” Sikh
w/ a foot-tall turban!
Two old people stop to squint at the departure boards.
Very Important European
Woman snarls at them: “EXCUSE ME—you can see
I am trying to walk here!”
They blink around in fear as she shoves them aside.
Of course,
she pronounces it:
VOKK.
I wait in line for an hour to buy
2 water bottles.
We find we are seated apart.
Cindy does battle at the Virgin kiosk to try to
get us together, until a kind British man
steps up and switches seats w/ her.
Upon hearing he will be seated w/ a group of 3
women, he says, “Are they young
and perky?”
C says, “Well,
they’re perky.”
“Old, then!” he says,
squaring his shoulders manfully for the challenge.
The flight attendant who greets me on the plane
acts like I have worms
coming out of my nose.
We are sitting in the back of the plane
with Warren, the champion
Toyota dealer in Wales.
Warren, Cindy and I are
pressed into a row so narrow
that our blood and lymph
puddles on the floor as we
are compressed into
a sausage patty.
Oddly, we have been placed, again,
next to the toilet. Our traditional plane seats.
The lavvy inspires some businessman
to unload a ton of manure
beside my right ear.
And we haven’t even
taken off.
But
Virgin does have
that TV screen at every seat, and movies all night,
and they serve supper w/ a very civilized
little glass of wine.
The safety video on my li’l screen shows a cartoon
about how apparently flippin’ hilarious it would be
if the plane were to plunge into the ocean
and we got to float around on our seat cushions
being eaten by sharks.
The cartoon characters in each crisis scenario
turn to the camera w/ big goggly eyes and the
music goes: “WAH-WAHHH!”
Rule, Brittannia!
#
Wait. Wait.
We haven’t even started to taxi yet
and a fellow up front barfs
right in front of the stew.
She comes running up the aisle
to get bags and towels in the galley.
One of the gang of evil flight attendants
gathered like crows in the galley shouts,
“WOT!
He frew up!?!”
They parade up and down the aisle,
bearing little sacks of his vomit. Suddenly
the intercom comes to life and warns us
NOT, for any reason, to open
a bag of peanuts! There are
SEVERE allergy issues on the plane!
Man, you never run out
of stuff to write about.
Warren says to Cindy:
“He keeps on
scribblin,
scribblin.”
#
Can’t sleep. Butt hurts. Can’t move in the seat.
The woman in front of me puts her seat back
and shoves the TV screen into my nose, but at least
I can clearly see “The 300” and “Hot Fuzz.”
And unexpectedly, it’s
Over! Heathrow!
Breathe the English air!
#
“I’m in England-o,
The land of I’m all right, Jack.”
--Shawn Phillips
OH NO.
Just when I thought I got away,
there it is again!
I came all the way across the Atlantic,
and the first thing I see when we enter
the immigration salon is a huge sign that says:
UK BORDER.
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
#
Nobody gave a damn.
We waltzed right through.
Joined the people in djellabas and burkas
marching past the immigration officials and their dogs,
none of whom ever looked over from their hilarious
morning chats.
This was our arrival in the Elevated Terror Alert
Orange Security Level-High Crime Watch
London.
#
Our driver is from East Africa.
“I been in London fourteen year. Yeah.
Where I come from is hot.
Is too hot.
Very hot. Got nothing there.
Always war. No water.
Nothing to drink.
You got to drink dirty water.
You got to drink mud sometimes.
My kids, they no understand this now,
living here.
They don’t know home.
They don’t know war.
Life?
Is survive!
Is all
about
survive!”
Our epic journey from Heathrow to Gower St.
The delightful carnival-ride effect of cars
going the “wrong” way in the “wrong” lane.
It’s odd that the first ad I see is a London cab with
a full color Corona cerveza bottle on the side.
With a wedge of lime.
“Hecho en Mexico.”
UK BORDER?
You must be kidding.
Memo to American conspiracy theorists:
The globalists have won!
I’m all excited.
I’m seeing things I have wanted to see and thought
I would never see. Things you read about or hear about.
The London Eye. Baker St. Shepherd’s Bush.
The M-1.
Drive thru London
and you will understand Boston.
We arrive at the Arran Hotel
around the corner from ancient and legendary Oxford St.
My wife, Zsa Zsa,
has packed approximately 500 pounds for the trip,
and our room is on the top floor.
No elevator. I mean, “lift.”
I keep hoping they’ll send
Sherpas to bear the Imperial Urrea Luggage
above the treeline, but it’s up to us
to gasp and lunge.
Fortunately,
the stairs are only
10,000 feet tall.
We survive
w/out oxygen bottles.
Somehow, we announce that we will ignore jet lag!
That’s the ticket! We will forge ahead
w/ our plans and take London by storm!
Then we fall in bed and immediately go to sleep.
#
Soon enough, though, we realize we are in Londinium and
the day is wasting and we can’t just
lounge about in panties and underpants, dreaming
about air conditioning.
We’re off! Out! And about!
We hit the street, hungry.
We walk about Tottenham, gawking, not knowing
which way to turn, really. Aghast at the American
crap-factories in sight: McDonald’s, KFC. No!
NEVER!
Oh, all right,
maybe a Starbuck’s once in a while!
We step into a British burger spot—thinking we ought to be
eating fish and chips or toad-in-the-hole or something,
but the burgers turn out to be slightly Twilight Zone odd
and subtlely un-American in alien biscuits and fries (chips) that come
with mayo. Good enough! Fuel for the walk, I say!
Everyone is nice, everyone is friendly. They look at me
with a slight sense of concentration or even bafflement
until I realize I have the accent, not them.
A two-story gold statue of Freddie Mercury.
We walk down Oxford St., the most popular shopping street
in the world, and we look in every shop—t-shirts say “My Mum
Went to London and all I Got is this Stupid Shirt.”
I see everybody loves George Bush: they have shirts
showing him standing beside Adolf Hitler,
and they say, “Same Shit.”
As a Yank, how do you respond to that?
Keep walkin’.
The streets have helpful stencils at each curb (kerb):
LOOK LEFT one warns,
LOOK RIGHT.
I do whatever the street tells me to do
because I can’t remember which direction
traffic is going to come from.
It won’t do to be flattened by a lorry
because I was looking in the wrong direction,
thinking I was street smart.
Mind the Gap.
Mind Your Head.
Mind the Light.
Strange poetic urban announcements.
Tired, saturated, we board
the double-decker red tourist bus.
To the open top.
Crane and gawk.
We are Goobers,
and we are proud of it!
London
Explodes
In light
Beneath
Colorado
Skies.
Hey—there it is! What is?
Everything!
Red telephone booths! Bobbies with their helmets! London
cabs! Other double-decker buses looking exactly like
our own double-decker bus!
Union Jacks! Pigeons and sparrows and
pubs—The Albert, The Green Man, The Hung
Drawn and Quartered!
A billboard suggests:
PEE YOUR PANTS.
Helicopters restless as dragonflies
endlessly patrol the skies.
Security cameras everywhere. It becomes fun to see if I can find
them and count them all: some MI5 copper at a console must be
watching a progressive series of videos of me
smiling up at him like an idiot. (Later, a chappie will tell me
“All those cameras are good for is
getting a nice film of yourself being robbed.”)
And here it comes.
History.
Big Ben. Westminster. St. Paul’s. Hyde Park.
Fleet Street. Trafalgar Square. The Globe. The Thames.
The Tower Bridge. The Tower of London.
There’s Picadilly Circus.
There’s Buckingham Palace
and there’s Elton John’s house.
The tour guide calls him, “Sir Elton John,
The second Queen of England.”
When he sees anything historical, he says it’s
OLDY-WOLDY.
Victoria Station.
Roman ruins and
the corner house of Joan Collins—
“She sits out there in the morning, drinking her coffee,
and then she goes inside and pulls on the wig.”
There’s Downing Street, and we see Parliament, and we see
Jimi Hendrix’s house where he died, and we see
the balcony where Michael Jackson dangled his baby and
the spot where 60,000 people were hanged in public to picnickers and
frolicking children, and the site where the London Fire
began and the snooty Belgravia where we all peer around
in case Gwyneth Paltrow might be out walking her baby around
and we pause for the tour guide to shout improper things at
Margaret Thatcher’s house: “Maggie, dear, put on the coffee—
I’ll be home in a minute!” Then we see Sean Connery’s house and are thrilled
to hear that right next door lives Roger Moore! “This is the street
where James Bond lives!” he bellows.
Ian Fleming lived right around the corner, to boot.
Who knew that Fleet Street, home of the early printing presses
and all the newspapers
has a river flowing right under
the traffic. The River Fleet, so filthy
it was encased in cobbles and buried, where it
rushes in the dark like a mad oldy-woldy
city secret.
#
The dollar has fallen so brutally that when we go in shops
we spend a car payment for a sandwich or a t-shirt.
Our various UK pals think it’s funny to tell me
“You got pounded,” and it takes me a day to get the joke
as I finger my extremely valuable
two pound coins.
We get off the bus at Tower Hill, in a paroxysm of
oldy-woldy overload: the Roman walls beside the road, the spot
where the axeman lopped off all those heads, and on this side of the street,
the Tower itself. Tower of London! Vast and scary monster—
many towers, really. And down in the moat area, a rock concert
getting ready to launch—The Good, The Bad and The Queen
revving up. I am agog when I see a Beefeater
standing there in full Henry VIII red regalia chatting with
coppers and soldiers in his funky velvet hat. My head’s spinning.
Beyond, the haunted battlements, stands the City—its new tors
like the skyscraper they call The Gherkin, or—
according to our bus pal, The Happy Gherkin due to its phallic
erectness, among the church spires and great ancient stoneworks.
We hop on a river cruise and set sail
down the Thames.
The guide on the boat notes the muddy shores of the river and says,
“Behold the sunny beaches of London, where Londoners
go to sun themselves and picnic on the beach!”
Weirdly, Cindy’s cell phone rings—some soccer mom in Naperville, IL,
not knowing she’s just called Jolly Olde England.
Across the river from the Tate Museum of Modern Art,
our host says, “Do you fancy modern art? You do, eh?
Let me tell you what you’ll find in the Tate to save you a trip.
I went there one day, and d’you know what I saw? I saw
a crushed, wrecked car. I saw a wall with graffiti on it. And I saw
one single blinking light bulb.
I’ll tell you lot something—
you can come down to the neighborhood where I live
and see these things every day of the week.
You don’t have to go to a museum for that!
It’s the Tate Museum
of Modern Rubbish!”
Bagpiper in full regalia on Westminster Bridge.
Cleopatra’s needle on the bank, only
4,000 years old.
#
We walk along Oxford again,
old Roman road built on older
hunting and farmers’ trails.
Seeing where the terrorists
left their bomb-cars hoping to blow up
innocent Londoners and women coming from
ladies night near the Trocadero.
Not knowing until there, in the city,
how small the streets are, how narrow, how the city
echoes 1342 and 1616 to this day, and how
devastating those bastards’ bombs would have been.
Oxford Street!
Where prisoners were brought along to be hanged.
And where citizens came out to watch them go to their doom,
offering them cups of grog or ale or rum
a cup of mercy for their last journey so they would be
feeling less pain at the end—the practice now known as
“One for the road.” And the drivers of the executioner’s wagons,
taking them down that street of doom, not able to drink
since they were driving, were what we call today
“On the wagon.”
Of course, “You’re pulling my leg” came from
those poor souls who drank one for the road
having their legs pulled so the hanging tree’s noose
would choke them to death.
I popped into the HMV record store
and thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to spend
$14,000 US dollars to buy the first
Blodwyn Pig album!
Before tucking in for the night,
We went to the Tottenham pub to eat.
Cindy said she was going to eat steak-and-eels pie.
“WOT!!!” I shrieked. “You’re going to eat
EELS!!!???”
“Ale, sweetie,” she said. “Steak and ale.”
But we settled for fish and chips. We didn’t know what to do with
the frightening green bowls of “mushy peas.”
But we did know exactly what to do
with our big foamy pints
of ale.
END, PART I.
7/23/2007
Ah. Home again, home again, jiggity-jig. Thank you for all the kind messages. Thanks for the email exhortations to get back to the blog. This beast.
Just...not...awake enough yet...to get back to it.
Oh, yeah--Immigration Monday. Will be back. SEND NO MORE MATERIAL! Wait for me to post what I've got. Starting next week.
Writers' meditations. Writers' workshops. Poems. Wastelanders. All that stuff.
Got to get back to work on the new novel, finish the book of poems, and start touring again.
Sounds like going to work. I'm too lazy to work. But I'll be posting the first of my epic UK writings for you...probably today.
I'm back.
Let's play.
Luis "Royal Albert" Urrea
The Perpetual Book Tour Revs Up Again
Just...not...awake enough yet...to get back to it.
Oh, yeah--Immigration Monday. Will be back. SEND NO MORE MATERIAL! Wait for me to post what I've got. Starting next week.
Writers' meditations. Writers' workshops. Poems. Wastelanders. All that stuff.
Got to get back to work on the new novel, finish the book of poems, and start touring again.
Sounds like going to work. I'm too lazy to work. But I'll be posting the first of my epic UK writings for you...probably today.
I'm back.
Let's play.
Luis "Royal Albert" Urrea
7/05/2007
Hope your 4th was great--we rolled to a spot right under the fireworks with our FBI buds and made plans for the apocalypse. Our kids ran around with sparklers. The sky was 3-D above us--layers and layers of opening colors like sea creatures swimming toward us, great cosmic jellyfish.
I must leave again. The Fall's touring is sputtering to life--journeys that will take me to Dallas, Santa Fe, Steamboat Springs, all kinds of interesting places. Goin' to Walla Walla, y'all! Goin' to Idaho! But first, I must go to London. Then back across "The Pond" on the QMII, leading book chats about my books. There's a man on the cruise who says he travels with a female ghost who appears to people she likes. You know me...I'll be dying for her to jump out of my mirror.
So this will all crash to a halt right about now. I have good Immigration Monday materials on hand, and if I have time before the flight on Sunday night, I'll post it early. If not, well, all good things come to those who wait. They have an internet cafe set up on the QM, so if I get some time, I might fire you a cyber post-card from the middle of the Atlantic.
Dude--I'm going to go gawk at Abbey Road.
See you on the rebound--
Sgt. Jalapeno Pepper
Writers Suck
I must leave again. The Fall's touring is sputtering to life--journeys that will take me to Dallas, Santa Fe, Steamboat Springs, all kinds of interesting places. Goin' to Walla Walla, y'all! Goin' to Idaho! But first, I must go to London. Then back across "The Pond" on the QMII, leading book chats about my books. There's a man on the cruise who says he travels with a female ghost who appears to people she likes. You know me...I'll be dying for her to jump out of my mirror.
So this will all crash to a halt right about now. I have good Immigration Monday materials on hand, and if I have time before the flight on Sunday night, I'll post it early. If not, well, all good things come to those who wait. They have an internet cafe set up on the QM, so if I get some time, I might fire you a cyber post-card from the middle of the Atlantic.
Dude--I'm going to go gawk at Abbey Road.
See you on the rebound--
Sgt. Jalapeno Pepper
7/04/2007
Writers, writers, writers. When I first met Cinderella, I warned her that writers were a mangy and creepy bunch. She didn't believe me, but it's generally true. I have been lucky to have known a thousand fellow-travelers; don't get me wrong...many of them are wonderful, remarkable people. But you are like me, and you love the words and you love the writers of the words and you go out and find yourself stunned by the diva who gives orders that her limo driver and her assistants are not to address her directly for any reason. A writer who went to a fine reataurant in Santa Fe and threw a fit because her table was under a light, so that "fans" could spot her--making such a fuss, then leaving, that everyone in the place was sure to notice.
Here's what happens with some writers. You have this turtle-backed blowhard in a western city who feels competition between you. He makes pocket money writing anonymous reviews of books, and he always reviews yours with the same arch put-downs. Every book. That's funny. Kind of sad too, though--you'd like to send him an ant farm or a sea-monkeys set to distract him.
Or you have the former student who asks you to blurb his reasonably interesting book--then contacts you again after you've sent it, vaguely irritated that the blurb didn't contain more praise. He wants you to know it is not going on his book cover! Still, you laugh a little, thinking, wow, what a development. Or you get a request from somebody you haven't seen in ten years who you don't think really cares one way or the other what you think, but needs a "name" blurb on a book. So you agree, and get the thing, and send a praise-filled blurb (remembering the other crabbed small soul who didn't get enough praise)--and get a strange email complaining that you obviously didn't read the thing because you responded too soon. DOH!
Lots of writers hang with plumbers, cowboys, bikers, boxers, drunks, hookers, rock stars--anything but writers. I think we are fallible people, and we give the best we have to the page, and the folks around us get what's left. I don't think lots of writers follow a spiritual path or discipline in writing. Look, I'm an ego-maniac, too. But I subscribe to the madness that something outside, greater than me, is calling. It's no doubt my own vanity, when I want everyone to think it's God.
Trying to do not harm, trying to make something beyond my neuroses.
No writers today: I'm going over to eat hot dogs with the FBI guys. They don't want blurbs. They just want to know what's in my emails.
HAPPY 4TH!!!
The Overworked King of Blurbage
Immigration Monday: Inaugural Issue!
Here's what happens with some writers. You have this turtle-backed blowhard in a western city who feels competition between you. He makes pocket money writing anonymous reviews of books, and he always reviews yours with the same arch put-downs. Every book. That's funny. Kind of sad too, though--you'd like to send him an ant farm or a sea-monkeys set to distract him.
Or you have the former student who asks you to blurb his reasonably interesting book--then contacts you again after you've sent it, vaguely irritated that the blurb didn't contain more praise. He wants you to know it is not going on his book cover! Still, you laugh a little, thinking, wow, what a development. Or you get a request from somebody you haven't seen in ten years who you don't think really cares one way or the other what you think, but needs a "name" blurb on a book. So you agree, and get the thing, and send a praise-filled blurb (remembering the other crabbed small soul who didn't get enough praise)--and get a strange email complaining that you obviously didn't read the thing because you responded too soon. DOH!
Lots of writers hang with plumbers, cowboys, bikers, boxers, drunks, hookers, rock stars--anything but writers. I think we are fallible people, and we give the best we have to the page, and the folks around us get what's left. I don't think lots of writers follow a spiritual path or discipline in writing. Look, I'm an ego-maniac, too. But I subscribe to the madness that something outside, greater than me, is calling. It's no doubt my own vanity, when I want everyone to think it's God.
Trying to do not harm, trying to make something beyond my neuroses.
No writers today: I'm going over to eat hot dogs with the FBI guys. They don't want blurbs. They just want to know what's in my emails.
HAPPY 4TH!!!
The Overworked King of Blurbage
7/02/2007
Volume #1, Monday July 2, 2007.
The foolish reject what they see; the wise reject what they think. –Zen Saying.
I didn’t set out to be any “voice of the border.” I didn’t set out to be an apologist of the Border Patrol, or a pinko agitator for the “illegals”—both things I have been accused of. Perhaps I’ll write to you about my personal border-journey…though, if you have read my books, you already know the story. True, I was born in Tijuana; my mom was American and my dad was Mexican. She was a retired Army Captain (an honorary rank given to Red Cross women in WWII to make sure the Axis would honor Geneva Convention protocols—something, of course, we no longer honor). He was a retired Army Captain, too—Mexican army. He was also a cop—Federal Judicial Police. Both were arch conservatives. I grew up on the border—both sides. I grew up speaking both languages. But I learned to read, did all my education, and voted in the US. I’m an American citizen. And I came into my adulthood working for the missionary crew of Pastor Von in the Tijuana orphanages and garbage dumps.
I have now written four non-fiction border books. I have come to think of them as the Border Project. Maybe, when I die, they’ll make an omnibus of the books under that title. These books are: Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border; By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border; Nobody’s Son: Notes on an American Life; and The Devil’s Highway. They have won some awards and attracted at least fifteen or twenty readers. The last one was a finalist for the Pulitzer—I have never gotten more attention for failing to win something in my life. I’ve been publishing border dispatches since 1990, and books since 1993.
In other words, I’ve been thinking about this problem too much for too long.
I had to learn to accept what I was seeing, and reject what I was thinking.
And I saw there was way too much INFLAMMATION in the media and politics, but precious little INFORMATION.
That made me want to post a little bit of immigration stuff on the blog. So here goes. I have various voices lining up to help me. I am not advocating an argument on either side of the debate. What I hate is hypocrites who know the score feigning outrage to get you pumped up and build ratings so they can buy fleets of Escalades while the middle class suffers and the desperate poor die in the desert. Who is arming you to make your own deci\sions? Nobody. Hence, I toss in my own thoughts, and invite writers, politicians, cops and poets to toss in theirs. Let’s see what happens.
We’ll start small.
Today.
Best, Luis
REDEFINE THE LINE!
#
A Brief History of North American Immigration and the Mexican Border
A Timeline of Events and Legislations, Including Illuminating Diversions.
(By no means complete, or comprehensive—but should give an impression of the flows of population and culture, the historical events, and the political developments that have been features of the development of this country, that country, and their borders, since prehistory. Includes some odd data for comparison and contrast.)
#
Part One: From Pre-History to the Mid-19th Century (American Civil War).
50,000 BC Surf’s up! Neanderthals believed to appear on the west coast.
40,000 BC Great Ice Age ends.
The Bering land-bridge opens between Russia and Alaska.
38, 000 BC Hi, Mom! Homo sapiens appear.
36,000 BC Homo sapiens arrive in southern western hemisphere.
35,000 BC Earliest known (proven) evidence of human habitation of North America.
28,000 BC. Earliest known date for Indian settlements in California.
27,000 BC Earliest known Indian settlements in Alaska.
25,000 BC Sandia, Clovis, Folsom, Plano etc. peoples settle in New Mexico.
12,000 BC Native peoples have settled all unglaciated regions of North and South America.
10,500 BC “Cave men” party hearty in South America, hunting guanaco and native horses—which they hunt to extinction.
10,000 BC Mexico City area is settled.
10,000-7,000 BC The “little” Ice Age.
9,000 BC Mesopotamia founded.
8,000 BC Agriculture begins in Mexico.
5,500 BC Southern California settled by Encinitas Indians.
5,000 BC Corn first cultivated in Mexico.
4,000 BC Permanent settlement at the Koster Site in Illinois.
“Old Copper Culture” established around the Great Lakes.
3,500 BC Babylon founded.
3,372 BC Earliest date on the Mayan calendar.
3000 BC I’ll take a Biggie Fries with that. Potato appears: the Andes.
2,600 BC Great pyramids built in Egypt.
2,000 BC Corn (maize) become the staple crop of Mexico.
Mesoamericans also develop beans, legumes, chiles, avocado, gourds, squash, cocoa( chocolate), and cotton. Farther south, crops developed include sweet potatoes, tapioca, vanilla, peanuts, varieties of pepper.
1,500 BC Mexican crops are introduced to the American southwest.
1,200 BC Olmec culture in Mexico.
753 BC Rome founded.
750 BC Temple mounds built in Ohio Valley.
300 BC Hohokam people bring farming technology to Arizona.
100 BC Serpent Mound built in Ohio.
1 AD Teotihuacan, Mexico, flourishing—50,000 population, pyramids, temples.
100 AD Mesoamericans migrate north; North American tribes migrate south—trade.
292 AD Classical Maya civilization emerges.
400 AD Anasazi culture appears in Four Corners area (AZ, NM, UT, CO).
500 AD Hohokam introduce ball courts (possibly inspired by Mesoamericans) to North America.
600 AD Chichén Itza founded.
650 AD The city of Palenque founded.
700 AD Teotihuacan, Mexico, sixth largest city in the world—pop. 200,000.
900-1250 AD Mississippian culture at its peak. Cahokia (East St. Louis), Illinois.
918 AD Pueblo Indian architects invent the roof-beam.
986 AD Bjarni Herjulfson “discovers” America.
1000 AD Leif Ericson, son of Eric the Red, explores America.
1004 AD Thorvald and Thorstein Ericson explore America.
1010 AD Thorfinn Karlsevni explores America.
1014 AD Freydis, Eric’s daughter, is the last Norse explorer to America.
1225 AD (Approximately). The Mexica (Aztecs) leave their homeland of Aztlán in North America in search of their new home. They seek a place with an eagle eating a serpent upon a cactus. They walk for 100 years.
“Aztlán” (the Place of the Reeds) is thought to be in the American southwest.
1325 AD Founding of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City).
1390 AD Founding of the League of Handenosaunee (The Iroquois Federation).
1478 AD The Inquisition is launched, in Spain.
1492 AD Arawak (Taino) Indians rescue Columbus’s sailors when Santa Maria runs aground.
1492 AD October 12—Christopher Columbus “discovers” America.
1495 AD Disease sweeps the American islands and devastates Indian populations.
1503 AD Abenaki and Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine begin trade with England.
1506 AD Huron and Iroquis in Canada begin trade with French.
1508-1511 AD Carib Indians exterminated in West Indies. Hundreds of thousands of the Arawaks (Tainos) are also killed, effectively erasing their culture.
1511 AD First debates on whether Indians are human or non-human, launched by Fr. Antonio de Montesinos and Fr. Bartolome de las Casas. Spain.
Cortez arrives in Cuba.
Jeronimo de Aguilar, priest, shipwrecked in Mexico.
1516 AD First epidemic recorded in America—small pox from Europe.
1518 AD Cortés (Cortez) in Mexico.
Takes slave/translator, Marina. Known as Malinche.
Their son, Malin, is the first official mestizo, or modern Mexican.
1520 AD Chocolate first arrives in Spain from Mexico.
1523-1841 AD New Spain—territories between and below San Francisco, California, Taos, New Mexico and Charlotte, South Carolina.
1528 AD Myth of Seven Cities of Gold ignites Spanish expeditions into North America.
1531 AD The Virgin of Guadalupe appears to an Indian named Juan Diego in Mexico City.
Yaqui Indians beat the Spanish conquistadors in their first encounter in what is now the border region.
1539 AD De Soto tries to invade Florida (and what would become the American Deep South). Indians defeat him. The attempts to make Florida a Spanish colony have been thwarted repeatedly for years and will continue for
years.
1540 AD Coronado sent by Spain to explore the American southwest in search of the Seven Cities of Gold (Cibola).
1541 AD DeSoto reaches the Mississippi River.
January 18—Melchior Díaz, first white European known to die in the Camino del Diablo region of the Mexico/Arizona border.
The first newspaper in the Americas is published in Mexico City.
1542 AD Cabrillo explores the coast of California.
1551 AD Charles V founds first university in Mexico.
Sacred gold objects from Mexico tour Europe, then are melted down to make money.
1555 AD Tobacco, from the Americas, reaches Europe for the first time.
1562 AD 140 French Huguenot Protestants settle in South Carolina.
1565 AD St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish.
1571 AD Spanish Inquisition arrives in Mexico.
1579 AD Sir Francis Drake arrives in Northern California.
1587 AD The English are first given corn by Indians in North Carolina.
Virginia Dare, first white American born on Roanoke Island.
1590 AD Settlers of Roanoke vanish without a trace.
1596 AD Tomatoes from the Americas first introduced to England.
1600 AD Juan Oñate colonizes New Mexico for Spain.
1603 AD Samuel de Champlain explores Eastern Canada and Maine.
1607 AD Jamestown founded.
1609 AD Santa Fe becomes capital of New Spain.
1619 AD First African slaves arrive in Jamestown, Virginia.
First colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, opens in Jamestown.
1620 AD Mayflower arrives with 120 Pilgrims.
Plymouth founded.
1621-69 AD 40,000 English immigrants arrive in New England.
1630 AD Boston founded.
1638 AD Puritans create first Indian “reservation” in Connecticut.
Finnish and Swedish immigrants found what is to become Wilmington, Delaware.
1641 AD Spanish Civil War in New Mexico.
1650 AD Apache war with Spain.
1654 AD Jewish immigrants arrive from Brazil to New Amsterdam. They are not allowed to build a synagogue, and they are not allowed to worship in public.
1658 AD Jews first arrive in Rhode Island.
1677 AD French Huguenots settle in New York state.
1680 AD Pueblo Indian rebellion throws Spanish out of New Mexico.
1682 AD Welsh, Irish, English Quakers and German Quakers settle Pennsylvania.
1692 AD Spanish re-conquer Pueblos, re-establish Santa Fe.
1699 AD Spain makes Florida a haven for runaway slaves.
1718 AD San Antonio founded.
New Orleans founded.
1731 AD FIRST IMMIGRATION LAW: English factory workers prohibited from emigrating to America.
1755 AD Acadian Expulsion Act: the British order Acadians to leave their adopted homes in Canada. (See 1784.)
1763 AD Sir Jeffrey Amherst, namesake of Amherst, Massachusetts, creates bio-warfare when he intentionally gives smallpox-infected blankets to Indian villages to kill off the populations and open territory.
1768 AD Greek and Minorcan immigrants settle east Florida.
1769 AD First Spanish mission in California—San Diego.
1773 AD American border wars—Kentucky.
1775 AD American Revolution begins.
1776 AD July 4—Declaration of Independence.
San Francisco, CA, founded.
“Most reports state that the very first Rattus norvegicus [brown rat] arrived in America in the first year of the Revolution….” Robert Sullivan, Rats.
1778 AD First Indian treaty signed.
1781 AD Hooray for Hollywood: Los Angeles founded.
1782 AD French visitor de Crevecouer invents the concept of “The Melting Pot”: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”
1784 AD The British deport all Acadians from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Maine and Louisiana. Cajun culture is born.
1786-92 AD Russia conquers Alaska.
1788 AD American constitution ratified.
1789-1850 AD United States takes 450 million acres of land from American Indians.
1790 AD FIRST US CENSUS.
Less than 50% of population is English.
20% African; 15% Irish or Scottish; 7% German. Other ethnicities make up the remainder.
Wars in Europe suppress immigration; still, 300,000 new immigrants arrive between 1790 and 1820.
1791-98 AD Slave rebellion in Haiti.
1793 AD Samuel Slater earns his place in Hell, and sets the course of immigrants’ lives forever, by introducing child labor to America via his cotton mills—“hiring” poor and immigrant children because “their hands are smaller.”
1795 AD Naturalization Act: to join the colonies as a citizen, you must reside in the Americas for five years.
1799 AD Alien and Sedition Acts. Residency is upped to 14 years. The president is given power to deport aliens during peace time.
1801 AD Spain gives Louisiana to France.
1803 AD Napoleon sells Louisiana to US for $15 million: The Louisiana Purchase.
43,000 people join the United States—mostly French. Only 6,000 claim to be Americans. “Assimilation” concerns still evident today gain traction.
1810 AD Mexican War of Independence.
1819 AD 3,000 Irish workers arrive to build the Erie canal.
1820’s The Napoleonic Wars end—immigration spikes from Europe. 150,000 immigrants arrive. Irish, German, English, Scandinavian.
1821 AD Mexico declares independence from Spain on February 24; throws in California and Texas for good measure. Viva Iturbide!
1822 AD NYC: pop. 124,000.
1825 AD First organized Norwegian immigrant group arrives in America .
1829 AD Those bleeding heart liberal communists in Mexico abolish slavery.
1830 AD Mexico passes a law forbidding further immigration to Texas—North American illegal aliens ignore the law.
1833 AD Doing their part to try to lower the planet’s population, Germans invent the diaphragm.
1836 AD 75% of working Americans are engaged in agriculture, a drop (from 83%) since the good ol’ days of 1820.
1849 AD California Gold Rush.
Attracts Chinese immigrants.
1850 AD United States population: 23.5 million; 3.2 million are slaves; 2.2 million are immigrants.
1854 AD 13,000 Chinese emigrate to the United States.
Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political party, aptly named the Know Nothing Party, wins many seats in elections.
1859 AD Juan Cortina leads Mexicans in Texas in a revolt to combat oppression and violence toward his people.
1860 AD Mexican Indian Wars flare up all along the US border.
Lincoln elected president of the United States.
#
Next week: The Timeline, Part Two. And don’t miss the Border Patrol. Ay, Caramba—es la Migra! By Warrior. See you then.
Adios, Amigos!
About the Blog
The foolish reject what they see; the wise reject what they think. –Zen Saying.
I didn’t set out to be any “voice of the border.” I didn’t set out to be an apologist of the Border Patrol, or a pinko agitator for the “illegals”—both things I have been accused of. Perhaps I’ll write to you about my personal border-journey…though, if you have read my books, you already know the story. True, I was born in Tijuana; my mom was American and my dad was Mexican. She was a retired Army Captain (an honorary rank given to Red Cross women in WWII to make sure the Axis would honor Geneva Convention protocols—something, of course, we no longer honor). He was a retired Army Captain, too—Mexican army. He was also a cop—Federal Judicial Police. Both were arch conservatives. I grew up on the border—both sides. I grew up speaking both languages. But I learned to read, did all my education, and voted in the US. I’m an American citizen. And I came into my adulthood working for the missionary crew of Pastor Von in the Tijuana orphanages and garbage dumps.
I have now written four non-fiction border books. I have come to think of them as the Border Project. Maybe, when I die, they’ll make an omnibus of the books under that title. These books are: Across the Wire: Life and Hard Times on the Mexican Border; By the Lake of Sleeping Children: The Secret Life of the Mexican Border; Nobody’s Son: Notes on an American Life; and The Devil’s Highway. They have won some awards and attracted at least fifteen or twenty readers. The last one was a finalist for the Pulitzer—I have never gotten more attention for failing to win something in my life. I’ve been publishing border dispatches since 1990, and books since 1993.
In other words, I’ve been thinking about this problem too much for too long.
I had to learn to accept what I was seeing, and reject what I was thinking.
And I saw there was way too much INFLAMMATION in the media and politics, but precious little INFORMATION.
That made me want to post a little bit of immigration stuff on the blog. So here goes. I have various voices lining up to help me. I am not advocating an argument on either side of the debate. What I hate is hypocrites who know the score feigning outrage to get you pumped up and build ratings so they can buy fleets of Escalades while the middle class suffers and the desperate poor die in the desert. Who is arming you to make your own deci\sions? Nobody. Hence, I toss in my own thoughts, and invite writers, politicians, cops and poets to toss in theirs. Let’s see what happens.
We’ll start small.
Today.
Best, Luis
REDEFINE THE LINE!
#
A Brief History of North American Immigration and the Mexican Border
A Timeline of Events and Legislations, Including Illuminating Diversions.
(By no means complete, or comprehensive—but should give an impression of the flows of population and culture, the historical events, and the political developments that have been features of the development of this country, that country, and their borders, since prehistory. Includes some odd data for comparison and contrast.)
#
Part One: From Pre-History to the Mid-19th Century (American Civil War).
50,000 BC Surf’s up! Neanderthals believed to appear on the west coast.
40,000 BC Great Ice Age ends.
The Bering land-bridge opens between Russia and Alaska.
38, 000 BC Hi, Mom! Homo sapiens appear.
36,000 BC Homo sapiens arrive in southern western hemisphere.
35,000 BC Earliest known (proven) evidence of human habitation of North America.
28,000 BC. Earliest known date for Indian settlements in California.
27,000 BC Earliest known Indian settlements in Alaska.
25,000 BC Sandia, Clovis, Folsom, Plano etc. peoples settle in New Mexico.
12,000 BC Native peoples have settled all unglaciated regions of North and South America.
10,500 BC “Cave men” party hearty in South America, hunting guanaco and native horses—which they hunt to extinction.
10,000 BC Mexico City area is settled.
10,000-7,000 BC The “little” Ice Age.
9,000 BC Mesopotamia founded.
8,000 BC Agriculture begins in Mexico.
5,500 BC Southern California settled by Encinitas Indians.
5,000 BC Corn first cultivated in Mexico.
4,000 BC Permanent settlement at the Koster Site in Illinois.
“Old Copper Culture” established around the Great Lakes.
3,500 BC Babylon founded.
3,372 BC Earliest date on the Mayan calendar.
3000 BC I’ll take a Biggie Fries with that. Potato appears: the Andes.
2,600 BC Great pyramids built in Egypt.
2,000 BC Corn (maize) become the staple crop of Mexico.
Mesoamericans also develop beans, legumes, chiles, avocado, gourds, squash, cocoa( chocolate), and cotton. Farther south, crops developed include sweet potatoes, tapioca, vanilla, peanuts, varieties of pepper.
1,500 BC Mexican crops are introduced to the American southwest.
1,200 BC Olmec culture in Mexico.
753 BC Rome founded.
750 BC Temple mounds built in Ohio Valley.
300 BC Hohokam people bring farming technology to Arizona.
100 BC Serpent Mound built in Ohio.
1 AD Teotihuacan, Mexico, flourishing—50,000 population, pyramids, temples.
100 AD Mesoamericans migrate north; North American tribes migrate south—trade.
292 AD Classical Maya civilization emerges.
400 AD Anasazi culture appears in Four Corners area (AZ, NM, UT, CO).
500 AD Hohokam introduce ball courts (possibly inspired by Mesoamericans) to North America.
600 AD Chichén Itza founded.
650 AD The city of Palenque founded.
700 AD Teotihuacan, Mexico, sixth largest city in the world—pop. 200,000.
900-1250 AD Mississippian culture at its peak. Cahokia (East St. Louis), Illinois.
918 AD Pueblo Indian architects invent the roof-beam.
986 AD Bjarni Herjulfson “discovers” America.
1000 AD Leif Ericson, son of Eric the Red, explores America.
1004 AD Thorvald and Thorstein Ericson explore America.
1010 AD Thorfinn Karlsevni explores America.
1014 AD Freydis, Eric’s daughter, is the last Norse explorer to America.
1225 AD (Approximately). The Mexica (Aztecs) leave their homeland of Aztlán in North America in search of their new home. They seek a place with an eagle eating a serpent upon a cactus. They walk for 100 years.
“Aztlán” (the Place of the Reeds) is thought to be in the American southwest.
1325 AD Founding of Tenochtitlan (Mexico City).
1390 AD Founding of the League of Handenosaunee (The Iroquois Federation).
1478 AD The Inquisition is launched, in Spain.
1492 AD Arawak (Taino) Indians rescue Columbus’s sailors when Santa Maria runs aground.
1492 AD October 12—Christopher Columbus “discovers” America.
1495 AD Disease sweeps the American islands and devastates Indian populations.
1503 AD Abenaki and Passamaquoddy Indians of Maine begin trade with England.
1506 AD Huron and Iroquis in Canada begin trade with French.
1508-1511 AD Carib Indians exterminated in West Indies. Hundreds of thousands of the Arawaks (Tainos) are also killed, effectively erasing their culture.
1511 AD First debates on whether Indians are human or non-human, launched by Fr. Antonio de Montesinos and Fr. Bartolome de las Casas. Spain.
Cortez arrives in Cuba.
Jeronimo de Aguilar, priest, shipwrecked in Mexico.
1516 AD First epidemic recorded in America—small pox from Europe.
1518 AD Cortés (Cortez) in Mexico.
Takes slave/translator, Marina. Known as Malinche.
Their son, Malin, is the first official mestizo, or modern Mexican.
1520 AD Chocolate first arrives in Spain from Mexico.
1523-1841 AD New Spain—territories between and below San Francisco, California, Taos, New Mexico and Charlotte, South Carolina.
1528 AD Myth of Seven Cities of Gold ignites Spanish expeditions into North America.
1531 AD The Virgin of Guadalupe appears to an Indian named Juan Diego in Mexico City.
Yaqui Indians beat the Spanish conquistadors in their first encounter in what is now the border region.
1539 AD De Soto tries to invade Florida (and what would become the American Deep South). Indians defeat him. The attempts to make Florida a Spanish colony have been thwarted repeatedly for years and will continue for
years.
1540 AD Coronado sent by Spain to explore the American southwest in search of the Seven Cities of Gold (Cibola).
1541 AD DeSoto reaches the Mississippi River.
January 18—Melchior Díaz, first white European known to die in the Camino del Diablo region of the Mexico/Arizona border.
The first newspaper in the Americas is published in Mexico City.
1542 AD Cabrillo explores the coast of California.
1551 AD Charles V founds first university in Mexico.
Sacred gold objects from Mexico tour Europe, then are melted down to make money.
1555 AD Tobacco, from the Americas, reaches Europe for the first time.
1562 AD 140 French Huguenot Protestants settle in South Carolina.
1565 AD St. Augustine, Florida, founded by the Spanish.
1571 AD Spanish Inquisition arrives in Mexico.
1579 AD Sir Francis Drake arrives in Northern California.
1587 AD The English are first given corn by Indians in North Carolina.
Virginia Dare, first white American born on Roanoke Island.
1590 AD Settlers of Roanoke vanish without a trace.
1596 AD Tomatoes from the Americas first introduced to England.
1600 AD Juan Oñate colonizes New Mexico for Spain.
1603 AD Samuel de Champlain explores Eastern Canada and Maine.
1607 AD Jamestown founded.
1609 AD Santa Fe becomes capital of New Spain.
1619 AD First African slaves arrive in Jamestown, Virginia.
First colonial legislature, the House of Burgesses, opens in Jamestown.
1620 AD Mayflower arrives with 120 Pilgrims.
Plymouth founded.
1621-69 AD 40,000 English immigrants arrive in New England.
1630 AD Boston founded.
1638 AD Puritans create first Indian “reservation” in Connecticut.
Finnish and Swedish immigrants found what is to become Wilmington, Delaware.
1641 AD Spanish Civil War in New Mexico.
1650 AD Apache war with Spain.
1654 AD Jewish immigrants arrive from Brazil to New Amsterdam. They are not allowed to build a synagogue, and they are not allowed to worship in public.
1658 AD Jews first arrive in Rhode Island.
1677 AD French Huguenots settle in New York state.
1680 AD Pueblo Indian rebellion throws Spanish out of New Mexico.
1682 AD Welsh, Irish, English Quakers and German Quakers settle Pennsylvania.
1692 AD Spanish re-conquer Pueblos, re-establish Santa Fe.
1699 AD Spain makes Florida a haven for runaway slaves.
1718 AD San Antonio founded.
New Orleans founded.
1731 AD FIRST IMMIGRATION LAW: English factory workers prohibited from emigrating to America.
1755 AD Acadian Expulsion Act: the British order Acadians to leave their adopted homes in Canada. (See 1784.)
1763 AD Sir Jeffrey Amherst, namesake of Amherst, Massachusetts, creates bio-warfare when he intentionally gives smallpox-infected blankets to Indian villages to kill off the populations and open territory.
1768 AD Greek and Minorcan immigrants settle east Florida.
1769 AD First Spanish mission in California—San Diego.
1773 AD American border wars—Kentucky.
1775 AD American Revolution begins.
1776 AD July 4—Declaration of Independence.
San Francisco, CA, founded.
“Most reports state that the very first Rattus norvegicus [brown rat] arrived in America in the first year of the Revolution….” Robert Sullivan, Rats.
1778 AD First Indian treaty signed.
1781 AD Hooray for Hollywood: Los Angeles founded.
1782 AD French visitor de Crevecouer invents the concept of “The Melting Pot”: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.”
1784 AD The British deport all Acadians from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick to Maine and Louisiana. Cajun culture is born.
1786-92 AD Russia conquers Alaska.
1788 AD American constitution ratified.
1789-1850 AD United States takes 450 million acres of land from American Indians.
1790 AD FIRST US CENSUS.
Less than 50% of population is English.
20% African; 15% Irish or Scottish; 7% German. Other ethnicities make up the remainder.
Wars in Europe suppress immigration; still, 300,000 new immigrants arrive between 1790 and 1820.
1791-98 AD Slave rebellion in Haiti.
1793 AD Samuel Slater earns his place in Hell, and sets the course of immigrants’ lives forever, by introducing child labor to America via his cotton mills—“hiring” poor and immigrant children because “their hands are smaller.”
1795 AD Naturalization Act: to join the colonies as a citizen, you must reside in the Americas for five years.
1799 AD Alien and Sedition Acts. Residency is upped to 14 years. The president is given power to deport aliens during peace time.
1801 AD Spain gives Louisiana to France.
1803 AD Napoleon sells Louisiana to US for $15 million: The Louisiana Purchase.
43,000 people join the United States—mostly French. Only 6,000 claim to be Americans. “Assimilation” concerns still evident today gain traction.
1810 AD Mexican War of Independence.
1819 AD 3,000 Irish workers arrive to build the Erie canal.
1820’s The Napoleonic Wars end—immigration spikes from Europe. 150,000 immigrants arrive. Irish, German, English, Scandinavian.
1821 AD Mexico declares independence from Spain on February 24; throws in California and Texas for good measure. Viva Iturbide!
1822 AD NYC: pop. 124,000.
1825 AD First organized Norwegian immigrant group arrives in America .
1829 AD Those bleeding heart liberal communists in Mexico abolish slavery.
1830 AD Mexico passes a law forbidding further immigration to Texas—North American illegal aliens ignore the law.
1833 AD Doing their part to try to lower the planet’s population, Germans invent the diaphragm.
1836 AD 75% of working Americans are engaged in agriculture, a drop (from 83%) since the good ol’ days of 1820.
1849 AD California Gold Rush.
Attracts Chinese immigrants.
1850 AD United States population: 23.5 million; 3.2 million are slaves; 2.2 million are immigrants.
1854 AD 13,000 Chinese emigrate to the United States.
Anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic political party, aptly named the Know Nothing Party, wins many seats in elections.
1859 AD Juan Cortina leads Mexicans in Texas in a revolt to combat oppression and violence toward his people.
1860 AD Mexican Indian Wars flare up all along the US border.
Lincoln elected president of the United States.
#
Next week: The Timeline, Part Two. And don’t miss the Border Patrol. Ay, Caramba—es la Migra! By Warrior. See you then.
Adios, Amigos!
It's Monday, first Monday of July. That means IMMIGRATION MONDAY is coming later today. Hope you like it.
My urge is to give you a TIME magazine's worth of info every week, but Cinderella warns me--correctly--that I will burn out and give up at my usual insane pace. And run out of material. (Aside from the fact that I'm trying to write a new novel right now--and putting my book of poems together.) (And writing the intro to two books and blurbing four more.) So we will start small, start slowly. Today's entry, #1, will deal with my timeline of immigration and some readings. Let's set the ground rules for what I see as the history of coming and going in the USA. Next week, part two of the timeline, and a dispatch from our Border Patrol amigo, Warrior. The following weekm we'll begin a two-parter from the Mexican consul general. It ought oto be a real party up in here!
I think I will rely on some Zen widom to see me (us) through whatever we learn in IMMIGRATION MONDAY. Regard this saying as our philosophy, our challenge, and our friendly rebuke as we try to figure out this madness: The foolish reject what they see; the wise reject what they think.
I don't promise a doggone thing, except to offer as much information and divergent opinion as I can. Like I said, it's a humble little blog, and if it starts to turn into something bigger, we'll make it a site of its own. No expectations on my part. And no guarantees--if I get bored with immigration, I'll gladly make it a Haiku Monday!
It is hard for me to tell what kind of traction the website gets--I can track the numbers, and sometimes they're pretty impressive. Sometimes a lot of people read these notes. But the comments posted are usually slim, though sometimes I get emails too. Hard to tell. I got an awesome "What My Hands Rememeber" email from a reader based on the writing workshop blog of a few days ago. I like to hear from you. I like to hear what you think or feel.
Well, let me finish my coffee and force Cinderella to cut and paste Volume 1 of IM MON together (I'm a computer idiot). See you in a couple of hours.
I Feel Good! (I Got You!)--
The Hardest Working Man in the Writing Business,
Mr. Please Please Himself,
The Godfather of Haiku,
The Funky Presidente,
Luigi
A Small Poem
My urge is to give you a TIME magazine's worth of info every week, but Cinderella warns me--correctly--that I will burn out and give up at my usual insane pace. And run out of material. (Aside from the fact that I'm trying to write a new novel right now--and putting my book of poems together.) (And writing the intro to two books and blurbing four more.) So we will start small, start slowly. Today's entry, #1, will deal with my timeline of immigration and some readings. Let's set the ground rules for what I see as the history of coming and going in the USA. Next week, part two of the timeline, and a dispatch from our Border Patrol amigo, Warrior. The following weekm we'll begin a two-parter from the Mexican consul general. It ought oto be a real party up in here!
I think I will rely on some Zen widom to see me (us) through whatever we learn in IMMIGRATION MONDAY. Regard this saying as our philosophy, our challenge, and our friendly rebuke as we try to figure out this madness: The foolish reject what they see; the wise reject what they think.
I don't promise a doggone thing, except to offer as much information and divergent opinion as I can. Like I said, it's a humble little blog, and if it starts to turn into something bigger, we'll make it a site of its own. No expectations on my part. And no guarantees--if I get bored with immigration, I'll gladly make it a Haiku Monday!
It is hard for me to tell what kind of traction the website gets--I can track the numbers, and sometimes they're pretty impressive. Sometimes a lot of people read these notes. But the comments posted are usually slim, though sometimes I get emails too. Hard to tell. I got an awesome "What My Hands Rememeber" email from a reader based on the writing workshop blog of a few days ago. I like to hear from you. I like to hear what you think or feel.
Well, let me finish my coffee and force Cinderella to cut and paste Volume 1 of IM MON together (I'm a computer idiot). See you in a couple of hours.
I Feel Good! (I Got You!)--
The Hardest Working Man in the Writing Business,
Mr. Please Please Himself,
The Godfather of Haiku,
The Funky Presidente,
Luigi
7/01/2007
My Daughter Visits New York City for the First Time
2007
In a paperwad beercan scattered quarter lot
tucked behind rust fences
in the Lower East Side
a rat leaps among skeletons of dead dandelions
in bright morning light
my daughter says: Look,
a little field mouse
running through the flowers.
2007
In a paperwad beercan scattered quarter lot
tucked behind rust fences
in the Lower East Side
a rat leaps among skeletons of dead dandelions
in bright morning light
my daughter says: Look,
a little field mouse
running through the flowers.
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