I'm Sure This is Going to Piss Off Some of You.

Words and phrases that used to be catch-all references are no longer used and often become out of date or even insulting as our perception of the world evolves. 

NAACP - National Association for the Advancement of Colored People founded in 1909 and at the time, the phrase was acceptable in wide use. In the intervening years, now you would never refer to someone as "Colored."  Although POC - People of Color has started to come into the lexicon of our times. 

UNCF - United Negro College Fund was founded in 1944 and has provided tuition to countless minority students. And outside of reference to this group, you would NEVER call a black person "Negro" unless you're planning on catching fists.

And even black is an ever changing term. When I was a child, I remember the term black was acceptable and remained so for the longest time. Then somewhere in the late 80s-early 90s, African-American became the preferred descriptive term. And it stayed that way until I'd say 10-15 years ago when black became acceptable again. Although somebody mentioned that when referring to the color of one's skin, Black should now be capitalized.  I really wish somebody would put together a current guidebook on what's appropriate to use so as to not offend anyone.  

And it's not as though these identity issues are limited to blacks (Blacks?). It's just as convoluted with Spanish-speaking countries and their descendants. 

Currently there's a push by some in the community to adopt Latinx as the descriptive phrase to avoid usage of the gender association of words in the Spanish language.  I can't tell you how much that annoys me to no end.  Zeroing out a language for the differences an "o" or an "a" makes at the end of a word and instead, changing it to "x" which is pronounced...  how?  Because the X in Spanish is either an "H" or "CH" sound.  Oaxaca sounds like an H, like in Mexico.  But the Xolo dog is CH.  So Latinx is what sound?  
To say nothing of the fact that this whole language game has been playing out since the late 60s, early 70s with the rise of Brown Power movements and MEChA student groups.  Since Latin American countries aren't actually Latin.  Latin being the language of ancient Rome.  (But they are Latino.)  Nor are they Hispanic as that implies that they're Spanish descendant and the movement is an attempt to distance itself from its European roots.  So the term Chicano was born.  Which in itself is another issue because that phrase is meant to describe descendants of Mexican ancestry.   And there's the offending O for male, so females become Chicana.  How about Chicanx?  Confused yet?

Speaking of me offending people.  Just recently, the actor Elliot Page came out as transgender late last year.  Good for him.  But I have to be honest, I missed the news cycle when he made his announcement and everyone was talking about Elliot Page...  I kept thinking, Who the fuck is Elliot Page?!  Then all hell broke loose when someone dared to mention Elliot was once Ellen Page.  OHHH!!!  O.k....  But the cancel culture mob was livid talking about how painful it was to bring up someone's "dead name."  New term to me...  Their what?  Some of you might be scratching your heads, too.  

    Dead Name

        noun

        The birth name of a transgender person who has changed their name as part of their gender transition.

        "Ellen is his dead name"

O.k., I get that.  And mentioning somebody's dead name would be offensive if this is someone you maybe have only known them after their transition.  But for someone like Elliot Page, I'm sorry, you've been in the public spotlight for nearly 20 years.  There has to be at least some, I don't want to say grace period but, yeah, a grace period where you give the rest of us time to acclimate to your new (to us) identity.  I mean, I know multiple people who have transitioned and I didn't know them before.  So to me, if someone were to mention their dead name, I would scratch my head trying to figure out who they're talking about.  I know a Millennial Karen and she was ALL UP IN ARMS over someone daring to use Elliot's Dead Name...  on the DAY HE MADE HIS ANNOUNCEMENT.  Hey, Baby Karen, can you maybe wait a few days before you get offended if nobody knows who Elliot is Day 1?  In fact, I'm pretty certain Elliot wasn't as upset as you were over the mention of it.  

Look, I'm trying to keep up with all of these things but like I was saying, everything seems to be changing on an hourly basis.  What was once ok and acceptable can become insulting almost overnight.  You can't, well, you can and some DO get offended the moment something changes and not everyone's on-board with it.  But the entire world doesn't, CAN'T stop and turn on a dime.  How about rather than getting pissed off about somebody for any imagined slight, you turn that energy into making the change, being the change and TEACHING the change.  After all, the more you rant and rave because the world hasn't changed enough is exactly the reason why Boomers are ranting and raving because the world has changed too much.  
Oh...  that stings, doesn't it?  You're more like Boomers than you ever want to admit in this instance. 

There.  Anyone I didn't piss off, raise your hand.  

Don't worry sugar tits, I'll get to you next.  

We can be Royals

No easy way to casually mention this subject so I'm just going to dive right in and figure out how to best express my thoughts on this.  

I've noticed over the years that I tend to use both terms of endearment and honorifics for certain people in my life.  I'm sure most of you are familiar with what a term of endearment is.  Sweetheart, honey, loobie doo, meeps, what have you.  Just a casual, friendly term or phrase that you use with people you're close to.  Or if you're from the south, you use them with everybody.  Darlin', sugar are just a couple that come to mind.  They're generally something you'll use with people you're comfortable with and even on on friendly terms.  
Although I've noticed that there's been a definite generational dividing line between who finds those terms acceptable and who doesn't.  MANY is the time over the past several years where a term I use has suddenly become an issue with people.  As an example, I used to send a good morning message to my lady friends.  Never meant to imply anything other than trying to come up with a new way to say "Good morning!" and to let them know they were on my mind, even if we didn't get a chance to talk much during the day.  The messages started off with Miss or Ma'am, then Fraulein, Mademoiselle, Senorita and those eventually gave way to different candies or sweets, especially around Halloween.  Christmas season brought about "Good morning Sugar Plum!"  You get the idea. 
It was when I started bringing up phrases from pre-WWII that the recipients started to protest a little at the implications.  Doll, toots, and Doll face...  wow, Doll face was a deal breaker for one girl.  She wasn't having it.  Again, not at all what I intended but how it was received makes all the difference.  I even used a lyric to a popular song once and was told in no uncertain terms that it was inappropriate.  
And for some friends, they wanted nothing to do with these terms altogether.  And that's where the generational thing pops in.  These friends all happened to be of the younger generation.  I hate to use the term "Millennials" but, that's exactly the age group that was most offended that I dare use anything other than their name.  I've got another bone to pick with Millennials and their perspective on socializing but that's a whole other issue.  Just because I'm inviting you out for a drink to celebrate your new job or a birthday does NOT mean I'm trying to hook up with you.  Get over yourself.  O.k., mini-vent over. 
What that all meant for me though is that, rather than trying to navigate the minefield of trying to not offend anyone, I just stopped sending out morning messages altogether.  So if you've been curious as to what happened to all of those, now you know.  

But the other thing I do and it didn't even occur to me that I was doing it involved honorifics.  And to save you the Google search if you don't know, an honorific is similar to a title.  Sir, Ma'am are the most common but even Doctor, Professor, Coach, Dean, Reverend, etc. are honorifics.  And of course, there's royalty.  Your Highness, King, Queen, Princess, Duke, Baron, etc. 
I actually started thinking about this the other night when I met a girl named Leia.  Yes, JUST like the Princess General.  Seems her parents were huge fans of Star Wars and she was born in '79 and just named her after the character.  Before the end of the night, I was calling her Princess and she was calling me King.  Now, for those of you who don't know, my nickname/honorific came about as a joke.  I feel like I've told this story countless times over the years and I'm sure I will again at some point.  But for now, a lot of people know me as King Louie and I'm ok with that, even though the nickname started off within just my immediate family.  But then I remembered way back in the day, we're talking the late 70s, before the turn of the century.  Dad had started calling his little girl, my sister, La Reyna.  The Queen.  It took her until her late 20s to really own that distinction and now she'll mention it from time to time.

"You know who La Reyna is." lol
I noticed I had started doing something similar but the titles of royalty had been limited to princesses.  I was subconsciously calling my own nieces Princesses.  Every other young lady was Miss but the two young ladies that were closest to me were reserved as royalty.  And I still do it to this day.  My two nieces are still Princesses and now one of my princesses has a princess of her own that I call her that, as well.  And the daughters of friends whom I'm closest to, I've started referring to as princesses.  
I mean, it makes sense that the king is bestowing these titles.  

People are People

To borrow a line from the song, different people have different needs.  

Something I've noticed I've been doing, and I honestly can't recall how far back I've been doing it but it is a thing, the way I treat certain friends and family.  Not that I ever intend or start out treating each other differently, that's just how I've perceived they prefer to be treated and I oblige.  Allow me to elaborate.  

When I first meet anybody, I treat them exactly how I expect to be treated.  That's just plain courtesy.  And if we get to know one another better, I often pick up subtle hints and clues as to their personality and before long, I treat them as they treat me.  What that means is that I know there are certain people I can joke around with, they totally get my sense of humor and there are often sarcastic replies or digs at one another.  Never mean spirited but to others whom I'm not at that level of comfort, it can come across as cold or even downright rude.  Again, not my intention, that's just the comfort level I've reached with those friends.  

There are friends who truly are more like family and mind you, I've had shouting matches with my family where we can get downright BRUTAL but an hour later we can be sitting around watching TV, "Hey can you pass me the remote?"

"Yeah, I wasn't really watching this anyway, what else is on? And with these friends we can be 'rude' with one another but we also know we can fully trust one another.  We can show up at each other's houses and know we're going to be welcomed in, no questions asked.  

Still there are others whom, while I may love them deeply, I just don't share a lot of my personal life and problems with them.  It's painful to admit this but our friendship just doesn't reach that level.  I can't describe it beyond that.  
Conversely, there are friends, and they're good friends to be sure, but I also don't joke around with them as often or even hardly at all.  That's just not the friendship we've fostered.  Nary a joke is cracked between us even though we may hang out often or exchange messages at all hours of the night.  But the intimacy of even a light-hearted moment rarely comes up.  Either of us are just too closed off to the other.  I used to be friends with a girl for over 20 years. I was practically family, her parents and sisters all loved me like I was a long lost cousin. But the ONE TIME I called her out because she was dating a married man, she never spoke to me again.  Turns out just because you're friends for half your life doesn't mean much to some people. 

But I guess what got me thinking about all this recently is in part the retelling of so many bad dating stories and how some of the friends I've made along the way may not have started off with me wanting them to be friends, I ended up in the friendzone.  
The flipside to that is that I have some friends who started off maybe not wanting to be JUST friends with me.  And I put them in the friendzone.  I'm sure this comes across as a bit of a conceit.  After all, I know I'm not the most handsome guy out there and I have the body of a potato.  I guess some ladies enjoy their French fries more than others.  
Looking back on a lot of my Facebook  "On This Day" posts from years ago, I keep coming across at least a handful of ladies from seven to twelve years ago that were pretty aggressive in trying to get me to commit to seeing them, meeting up with them, what have you.  I mean, there's a couple who called me out on it in some of these older posts.  Was I just totally oblivious? 
Not totally, but at that point in my life, I had honestly given up the idea of dating for a while.  You're familiar with my Adventures in Online Dating stories so you can understand how one can look for a respite from that constant mess.  And that's where I was mentally.  Just not ready to date anyone and it wouldn't have been fair for me to become involved with someone when I wasn't ready for it.  
Do I regret it?  Some of them.  I mean, some of them, I think it would have been worth a shot to see where it went.  Others?  I'm glad nothing happened because I valued their friendship at the time.  Still others, while we may continue to be friends...  oh yeah, don't think some of my current friends started off with me thinking I just wanted to only be friends.  But as I was saying, some of them I prefer we stayed friends.  Because all their quirks and issues would have driven me CRAZY if we had become involved romantically.  

Everything Doesn't Always Bump in the Night

 Despite what television and movies have led you to believe, not all the "spooky" stuff happens in the dark, at night in an old house or abandoned asylum.  Most of the times, at least with me and my personal experiences, they just sort of happen out of the blue.  No foreboding drop in temperatures or chill in the air, no goosebumps or hairs on the back of your neck standing up.  Most of the events I've witnessed, and by witness, I mean SEEN or smelled (yes, that's a thing, too!) have been just random events with little sign of anything out of the ordinary.  And I'm going to mention a few that I've been witness to and share a few that other family members have mentioned that are just too eerie to have any sort of clear explanation.  

The first event that I distinctly recall happening to me, and just me at the time, I was maybe 8 or 9 years old.  We were living in the converted garage I've mentioned before and I woke up in the middle of the night.  No idea what time it was but it was dark.  I don't remember if anything specifically woke me up or if I just happened to be awake when I saw it.  Laying from my bed, I could see out the "door" into the living room and I saw a figure walk from the front door, entry to the garage.  She, and I say she because it looked to be a slim figure, wearing a robe and she looked like she was wearing her wrapped up in a towel.  I've seen mom dress similarly to that countless times, so I just assumed it was mom.  She must have just taken her shower and gotten back.  She walked from the entryway of the garage, across the living room and into the closet on the opposite side.  Then I realized that she didn't bother turning on the light in the closet.  It was just a lightbulb hanging on a string with one of those pull-chains.  And she was back there in the dark for several moments.  Again, no idea how long it was but she couldn't possibly be doing anything back there in the dark for so long, so I called out to her:
"Ama."  Silence.  She must not have heard me.  
"Ama!"  Still no reply and she's still back there in the dark.  What the heck.  Again, I was 8 or 9.  Heck was the strongest swear word I was going to use at the time.  
"AMA!"  Finally dad chimed in from the next room.  
"What is it?  What do you want?"
"Where's mom?"
"She's here sleeping, what do you want, son?"  as I quickly pulled the blankets up over my head and kept thinking, did I see...  was that a...?  I finally fell asleep still holding those blankets over my head hoping they would protect me from whatever it was that walked into the closet and may still be there.  

I've since come to read about shadow people, which I have no doubt that's what I saw that night 40 years ago.  And it wasn't the only time I would see them.  But not at this house, they would be in the first house we moved to in Riverside in the 80s along with several other goings-on happening there.  But for grandma's house, it was barely scratching the surface of all the unusual things to occur there.  

Stories I've heard include one night in the late 80s/early 90s, grandma had a dream that she had died.  On the very same night, one of my uncles had a dream that grandma had been murdered and he was pursuing the killer.  Still another uncle had a dream that he had killed grandma and was being chased for her murder.  
There were countless times you could be sitting in the living room and depending on where you sat, you could clearly see down the hallway that lead to all the bedrooms in the house.  And out of the corner of your eye, you could see somebody moving from room to room, even if there wasn't anybody else at home.  This wasn't just me that would see this but almost everybody that lived there or came to visit.  Once, one of the uncles I mentioned earlier thought he was feeling brave and decided to call out to whatever it was moving around the house to show itself to him, that he wasn't going to be afraid of it.  And as he sat back down on the couch, the entire row of decorative mirrors on the wall behind him fell.  Just the row that was directly behind him.  
Still another time, and this was New Year's Eve 1999, I remember because for Christmas that year, I produced a video montage of family and cut it to music, one of the music tracks being grandpa's song, Ojos Tapatios.  I've mentioned before that grandpa had recorded a record album back in the early 40s in Mexico.  I've never seen this album but my uncle Jorge had a cassette recording of that song.  It was in pretty bad shape, the recording.  Very low and muddy sounding with lots of hiss and pops from the album's quality.  But, being in production like I am, borrowed the tape, uploaded it to my computer and ran it through some filters to clean it up as best as I could 20+ years ago, with the limitations of home recording technology at the time and finally, burned it to CD.  It was probably the best, cleanest sounding version that song has been heard in over 40 years.  And I gave copy to every one of my aunts and uncles for Christmas.  
So, apparently, on New Year's Eve, the family who still lived in the house were having a tiff.  My uncle had gotten into an argument with his wife, my aunt who still lived at home was pissy about something and she was off watching TV in her room, so it was just my uncle Jorge and grandma at midnight watching Zabludovsky in the living room when grandpa's song started to play from the stereo.  Nobody had touched the remote to start playing, it just started up on its own right at midnight.  Both my uncle and grandmother sat in stunned silence as the song played through and as soon as it was over, it stopped and the stereo system turned itself off again.  Naturally my uncle jumped up to look at stereo. It had one of those 5-disc CD changers and grandpa's disc wasn't in the "Now Playing" slot in the tray.  

The house we moved to in Riverside had its own residents in addition to us.  We saw them a few times but more often than not, we still knew they were around.  The first event, if we could even call it that was shortly after we moved in.  I recall us talking about dreams we were all having.  Myself, my brother and even mom mentioned that within a few weeks of moving in, we had all dreamt about dogs or wolves in the front yard, watching the house.  I don't know if they were there to watch us or to watch over us.  But, in Mesoamerican culture, dogs are spirit guides for the recently deceased.  It's interesting that we all saw them shortly after moving in and they re-appeared a few times over the years we lived there.  
That house, we were always misplacing things only to have them turn up exactly where we left them the first time, even though we scoured the area just moments before.  We had a couple of pranksters, for sure.  Lights turning off and on at random, the toilet flushing at odd hours when we were all in the living room.  Not just water running filling the tank back up but an actual flush.  And then the first true sighting we had happened in the middle of summer, late 80s.  
Veronica were on the couch watching TV, middle of the day.  And to give you an idea of the layout, forgive this horribly crude drawing.  

Veronica and I were watching TV in the living room and the couch was this L-shape facing the TV.  Directly behind me and the couch was the dining room table and that led off to the kitchen.  As you can see by the diagram, we were both watching TV when something compelled us both to look back over my shoulder.  We didn't say anything, we both just turned to look at the same time.  Standing there for the briefest of moments was...  What could best be described as a shadowy figure.  It wasn't a clearly defined form other than it was man-sized and shaped.  Head, shoulders, arms.  But also just a dark figure.  And at the moment we both looked and caught it, it was startled, surprised that we both saw it.  It quickly ducked behind the couch.  I  jumped up and went behind the couch to see what or what that was but nobody was there.  As the arrow shows, I went in that direction to what was our kitchen and the sliding glass door leading out.  The door was still closed and locked and there wasn't anybody in the kitchen.  
I slowly came back looking under the dining room table, anywhere anybody could have possibly gone to in the seconds from when we made eye contact with it.  Nothing.  And once I got back to the living room, I asked Veronica if she saw "it?"  
"A man standing there and he ducked behind the couch."  

We weren't scared of it in any way, it was more curiosity.  Especially since we were already familiar with what had been happening at Grandma's house while we lived there.  In fact, with all the other things going on, from things missing and re-appearing, to the toilet and the lights, we, well, at least Veronica and I, started calling them, and we only assumed there was two of them, we started calling them Fred and Wilma.  lol  I laugh just thinking about it now.  Why did we think they were a couple and why Fred and Wilma?  I can't answer either of those other than to say, that's what we thought and felt was appropriate.  
Fred and Wilma kept playing with us off and on over the years but it wasn't until Robert was born that they REALLY stepped up their activities in the house.  

Dad had converted the garage at the Riverside house and while I used it as my room initially, once Cynthia got preggers and moved in, they took over the room and I moved back into my old bedroom.  And once the baby arrived, Fred and Wilma just LOVED Baby Robert and looked out for him in several ways that can't possibly be explained away.  There was a time I was sitting on the couch watching TV when Cynthia had to run to the bathroom.  She had left the door to the garage open and it's funny that I remember, I heard Robert cry just as she was coming out but she was in a hurry.  She told me her side of the story: She knew he was crying because he was hungry but she really had to pee so she'd give him his bottle as soon as she got back.  Mind you, Robert was only a few months old at the time, not strong enough to roll himself over, much less be able to crawl anywhere.  She just left him in the middle of the bed as she went to the bathroom.  When she got back, she paused for a second once she got to the door.  Stepped in for a bit, then came right back out and asked me;
"Louie, did you come in and give Robert his bottle?"
"No, I've been sitting here watching TV the whole time.  Why?"
"When I left to pee, I left the bottle on the edge of the bed and I was going to give it to him once I got back."  And there was little 3-month old Baby Robert still in the middle of the bed sucking on his Enfamil.  Nobody else in the house at the time.  Well, nobody we could see.
Several times when I had Robert in my lap and he was already old enough and strong enough to hold up his head, I'd be playing with him and he would suddenly stop and look at something or someone else in the room and would track his head to follow them, even so much as to look as far over his shoulder as he could and then roll his head to the other side and keep following whatever/whoever he was looking at.  
There was an instance when Rob was in a walker, crashing into things as he hopped around on it and there was a precariously placed wooden rack of some kind, like a cassette tape holder or similar, sitting on top of this large wheeled bar.  Dad was nearby when Rob went crashing into the bar and the rack fell with Rob directly below it.  It should have hit him square on the head, the full weight of that thing would have been bad to an 8 month old.  Yet, it somehow didn't even touch him.  The rack hit the back of the walker, the couch arm and the wheeled bar.  Entirely missing potentially crushing Rob.  But in the moment, dad screamed out and tried to reach for it scaring Rob in the process.  The only reason Rob cried at all was from the scare of dad screaming.  And it was Rob's crying that enraged dad even more that he took the rack, opened the front door and threw it out onto the lawn, cursing its existence.  

We moved out of that house maybe less than a year after that.  But the dreams about dogs and wolves, Fred and Wilma and another couple of appearances of shadow people happened throughout the seven or or so years we lived there.  And these are just a few my recollections.  I'm curious what anyone else experienced while we lived there. The rental we lived in after that didn't have as many interactions  for me.  But there were still things going on, to be sure.  

But it was the Canterbury House that had one of the most unusual for me.  And dad.  It was just the two of us at home at the time.  Veronica had just had surgery done in TJ, as is typical, American doctors couldn't figure out what was going on with her without dozens and dozens of tests but as soon as she consulted with dad's GI doctor in TJ, she was taken in and the work was done.  The hospital was Catholic based in that the nurses also happened to be nuns.  Sanatorio San Francisco.  Dad and I were at home and his bedroom had a couple of double doors that he always kept open that led into the living room.  He was laying out on his bed and I was facing away watching TV in the living room.  He suddenly shot up and asked me if I could smell that perfume?  
"What perfume?  Mom and Veronica are in the hospital in TJ."
"I just smelled this fragrance, it was the most beautiful perfume ever.  I was hoping you caught a whiff of it."
"No, nothing." I shrugged.  
Maybe about 30 seconds to a minute passes by and I react.  Something caught my nose, the faintest aroma of flowers.  Like roses but not as pungent.  Something that to this day I can only repeat what dad called it, the most beautiful perfume I'd ever smelled.  Just caught a whiff and it was gone but, like you often do when you smell something that smells that amazing, you want to breathe it in again, sniffing the air for another hint of it.  I looked back at dad, he just nodded and said,  
"That was it again"  Came to find out a few days later when we drove mom and Veronica back that during the recuperation, Veronica asked about the incense the nuns were lighting and what was it.  
"This is a hospital.  They don't light incense here."  I'm curious who was visiting us that day.  

And finally (for this blog post at least), this one happened shortly after dad passed away back in 2012.  It was about 5 days since he passed, so before the memorial service.  I had been drinking myself into a pretty good stupor for most of that time, and for several months afterward.  But this night, I was toasting every drink to his memory, I was sitting on the floor of my apartment in front of the TV when his scent hit me.  Dad had a very unique scent, body odor for lack of a better term.  It wasn't a scent from his cologne nor aftershave, nor deodorant.  This was his.  The best, closest I can compare it to is it was very similar to olive oil.  Not exactly but close.  I remember that scent from growing up, when he'd come home from work and it permeated his clothes.  And I was sitting on the floor when it hit me.  It was all too brief.  It lingered in the air long enough for me to smell it and when I recognized it, I breathed it in once more then it was gone.  I have no doubt dad was visiting me that night.  I think he came to visit us all in those days after he passed.  Cynthia told me that in that span, she was cleaning Alex's room and he bolted up out of his sleep and just said, "Grandpa!" Veronica told me that Christian had dreams about him as well.  

Not everything that goes bump in the night is something to be feared.  

We Were Poor

 Touching on a subject I've hinted at and oftentimes, outright said how poor we were growing up.  And this is a topic that may make a few people uncomfortable.  I know I never mention the topic of money with anybody because that's a personal matter.  And when people hear about the struggles you faced growing up, it can make people look at you differently, treat you differently.  But this is what I was born into.  

I've said how we were poor growing up but a lot of people say the same, only they say it because maybe they had to wait for a birthday or holiday to get something special, something out of the ordinary.  That was us.  But even the special or out of the ordinary was something that just was a regular thing for many people.  One year for Christmas, our parents had us come up with a "wish list."  We'd write down on little bits of paper different things we wanted.  They were going to take our wishes, put them into a hat and draw out one of them to get us that for Christmas.  I wrote down different roleplaying games and scenario books I wanted, maybe some cartridges for the Atari and, at mom's insistence, some clothes just to round out the list.  So I threw in a couple of Levi's 501s, just because.  What are the odds that mom and dad drew the Levi's rather than the other things I really wanted?  And that was my Christmas gift.  Two pairs of jeans.  And I should have been grateful.  But when you're a kid, you don't usually think in those terms.  

As I drive through these OC cities now as an adult, I drive past certain places and remember not only what used to be there when we first lived here but, I remember the living situations we were in at the time that necessitated why we visited in the first place.  There's a Goodwill store in Santa Ana that I drive past a few times on the corner of Fairview and 5th.  It's a big facility.  I think their business offices are in that location now as well as a shop.  But I remember it when my family would visit it during the 1970s.  In addition to the storefront, where all the "better" merchandise was sold from, there was an outdoor fenced in lot with the hardware, tools, toys, that maybe weren't the best quality.  That's where we shopped for the most part.  Most of my first toys came from that lot.  A few plastic "action" figures of Hulk and Thor.  Literally just a hunk of plastic molded into those characters.  My first board games came from that lot as well.  An incomplete Mouse Trap board game was one.  No rules, no understanding of what the gameplay was supposed to be like.  My cousins and I just rolled the dice, moved the plastic mice around the gameboard and assembled the mouse trap as best we could despite the missing pieces.  We also got a Monopoly type of game from that lot.  I can only assume it was Monopoly because the board layout was what we thought the game was but it wasn't in English.  And it wasn't in Spanish.  That one ended up going with us on a trip to Mexico in the late 70s and we left it with family there.  
One could argue that it was this type of childhood that has pushed me to buy and collect all the toys I didn't have, couldn't afford to get back then.  I suppose there's something to that.  I know my early years on eBay were all about finding Shogun Warriors that I never had as a kid.  The 24" versions.  Dad did buy us, my brother and I, a couple of the 6" die-cast versions from Zody's eventually.  I got Poseidon and Carlos got Raider.  Then several months later, I had saved up (ALMOST) enough money to buy myself a Raider plastic model kit.  Mom chipped in whatever I was short.  Of course, at the time I was too young and inexperienced to build a model kit that wasn't a snap-tite.  Which it wasn't.  

I think of being a passholder at Disneyland, or at least was until they canceled the program for the time being.  And how, as a child, Disneyland was *MAYBE* a once-a-year thing.  Mom and dad would save up like crazy for the year so that when our birthdays would come around, they could take us to the Happiest Place on Earth.  Never mind that mom packed sandwiches for our lunches because there's no way we could afford to eat there, too.  Often times, mom and dad would try to talk me into asking for a bike for my birthday instead of our annual Disneyland trip.  And every year, I would rather have gone to the park than have that bike.  The park was something I could enjoy with my brother and sister, the bike was just going to be something for me.  I didn't want that.  

I think of school lunches and how I had a lunch card because we couldn't afford them otherwise.  It didn't occur to me then what it was or why I was using a card when other kids had pocket money.  It was just another thing I did until maybe 4th grade when I didn't want to eat the school lunches anymore anyway.  Those pizzas were disgusting.  Most of the food come to think of it, although the Sloppy Joes, there was just something about them that the Manwich mixes never equated to.  I wouldn't eat another school lunch until middle school, bringing whatever sandwiches mom would make.  Most often it was just bologna and mayo on white bread, sometimes with a slice of cheese, which I always plucked out.  I don't know what I never cared for sliced cheese as a child.  Oh, and usually a little baggie of Cheetos or Doritos, which I'd often add to the sandwich for crunch.  What, don't roll your eyes at me, you know you tried it at least once as a kid.  But as I was saying, I stopped buying school lunches for the remainder of grade school and wouldn't eat cafeteria food again until middle school.  And that was only because I was getting really hungry, being a growing boy and not wanting to bring a sack lunch on my bike.

As I drive past where we used to live, I think about what it was like, living not only in a multi-generational home but that we were living in a converted garage.  Oh, it wasn't legally converted, it was just a garage that dad put up some walls and a drop ceiling.  Supplies he took from his job at Ace Awning, the patio enclosures.  After caulking the garage door to seal it as best he could from the draft.  Not that Orange County is ever THAT cold but a family of 4 living in what was a 2-car garage wasn't as comfortable as it sounds.  We had cockroaches, we had mice, we eventually had 5 of us when my sister was born in '78.  Mom and dad in a 'bedroom' that was barely bigger than their full size bed, my brother and I in a shared room next to that and then my sister on her own bed out in what we called the living room.  And the only thing that defined these as rooms were the thin particle board walls that sandwiched a thin cardboard honeycomb for any sort of rigidity.  We didn't have doors, just openings in the walls between rooms.  The living room was big enough for my sister's twin size bed, a couch and TV.  Our shared closet was a 3' x 8' space dad made from partitioning the living room and hanging up a curtain in the opening.  Just thinking about it, I can't even imagine how we did it.  I'm sure if I were to look at it now, I would be appalled at the squalor.  But we were kids, we literally didn't know any better.  I didn't get to sleep in a proper bedroom, four actual walls, a ceiling and a real door, until Dad finally bought a house in Riverside when I was 14.  The summer after Freshman year.  

Dad didn't make much money but he had plenty of opportunities.  He just passed them up a LOT out of devotion to his family.  When I say his family, I don't mean us.  I mean his brothers and sisters and mother.  Dad being the oldest son, he took his duties above and beyond trying to make sure his mom and younger siblings were taken care of, to the point where he was negatively affecting the lives of his wife and kids.  I remember mom telling me years later that her brother had offered dad help by getting him a job that paid better and would help him secure a home for us.  Dad passed on it because he didn't want to abandon his mom.  Which struck me as odd since grandma had 8 other kids who could have helped.  But dad had this outsized sense of duty.  

I think back to those days and I just don't see how mom and dad did it.  Raising 3 kids, putting a roof over our heads and food on the table... and mind you, even food was sometimes a bit of a luxury when at breakfast one morning, I asked if there was any bacon to go with my eggs.  No, we don't have any, didn't buy it, couldn't afford it.  They were barely making ends meet on their combined salaries.  I feel almost guilty about how much money I waste on things now, knowing how hard times were for us growing up.  And I spend so much damn money on dust collectors, tchotchkes, random collections of things.  But I guess that's my way of overcompensating for not having much of anything when I was a kid.  I mean, we were poor.  

Baby Universes

I have these recurring dreams...  
Well, I should clarify, they're not necessarily recurring dreams per se, but rather, I have repeated dreams in similar locations.  

About 15 years ago, I started to notice that while I was dreaming, the settings, locales, I was dreaming about started to repeat from dream to dream.  Rather than how some people might have the same dream over and over, I'm having dreams that are occurring at the same locations over and over.  Different areas but the same settings repeatedly.  I'm not sure what it means but so far, I think there's a handful and I can describe them in great detail.  After all, I've visited these places dozens of times over the years.  

They've been so frequent, I just started referring to them as "Baby Universes."  They're entirely stand-alone locations, detached from reality.  Or in my case, my waking reality.  But they're very much real, that is to say, fleshed out and details that repeat each time.  And often, some of these locations are amalgamations of real-world locations I've visited.  And it's not as though I go into the dream state expecting to visit these locations.  I thought I'd finally write down these Baby Universes to give you an idea on what I'm talking about and what might I be dreaming about.  

1) The School - Despite visiting this universe countless times, I can't pin-point whether it's a high school or college.  Or if I'm even a student or working there.  I did work at the Community College for several years.  But it's also unlike any school I've ever attended myself.  There are hallways and classrooms I've been in.  Lecture halls or they could have been theaters used to lecture students in.  There's been flights of stairs and shop classes, an underground or lower level with rows of classes downstairs as well.  I have interacted with people in this space though.  But often as I'm giving them information, the others who are here rarely speak to me.

2) The Farm - The Farm location is always interesting when I drop in because it's the one I visit the least.  But it is definitely someplace out in the country.  There's an old-fashioned barn, pasture or field with crops.  Like wheat crops or something.  I don't recall seeing many animals outside of maybe a horse or mule, some livestock.  But there's never any people out at this site either.  

3) The Mansion -  This location is unusual in that, I've been only a few times and they were always very brief visits.  But what happens here has left me a funky state once I wake up out of it.  The Mansion is exactly that, some big home, not unlike you might see on the BBC or east-coast estates.  Big, dark wood paneling, heavy wooden railing along the stairs but most of the time, it's empty.  Just me, maybe one or two others, often strangers.  And then it's what happens in the Mansion that goes beyond the norm for even my dreams.  I've been able to become lucid in this Baby Universe.  I would come to realize that I'm in the middle of a dream and start to take it over.  I've gained the power of self-flight, which is the most bizarre feeling ever.  What would it be like to fly like a superhero?  I think I felt that within the Mansion.  I was playing around over the bannister and suddenly, I was floating, hovering.  I was only a couple of feet off the ground but within a few moments, I started to become lucid and then I really took over the dream and my flight ability.  And all I can recall from that is the sensation of falling.  In the Mansion, my ability to fly was making me feel as though I was just constantly falling.  A controlled fall, if you will.  But with forward, controlled motion.  That's about as best as I can describe the sensation.  Haven't been back there in a while but I wouldn't be against a return sometime.  

4) The Future World - This is always my most interesting destination and the one I've visited probably the second most.  I feel like I'm in some sort of megalopolis in the distant future.  Like how the 1920s imagined what the future would look like with endless high rises and high-speed rail lines crisscrossing between the buildings.  I've ridden on those subway-type vehicles a few times but there's also a high-speed foot transport, like a moving walkway you might see in an airport but at a much higher rate of speed and you have to step into these harnesses for your feet to hold you in place.  

5} Travel Town - I call this one Travel Town mostly because there's a depot or port (air or maritime) of some sort. I've flown to and from this airport, been in a plane that landed here or taken a bus to this terminal. I've been in the parking structure in cargo vans and limousines. I've taken off from here and landed at some amusement or water park in the Midwest. And I know it was the Midwest because of the grain silos. But the insides were ginormous and had water slides inside them. But again, there's a terminal or airport involved and I'm often coming or going. 

6) The Aquarium - Out of all the Baby Universes I've been to, the Aquarium is the one I've been to most often.  And while I call it an Aquarium, it could also be a water park like SeaWorld because in addition to the fish displays, there are aquatic shows with marine life.  I can practically draw a map of the Aquarium, I've been to it so often and the layout stays about the same every time.  There's always people there, either watching the shows or wandering around the hallways looking at the displays.  There's a show  room upstairs that I've never attended but I have been to the arena for the big show.  It wasn't a killer whale or even dolphin show, they were seals, or walruses. Once, there was an audience filing in and I took a seat next to dad one visit.  It was unusual in that, since he passed away, I've only dreamt of dad maybe 3 or 4 times but he was never in one of my Baby Universes.  And the funny thing is, while I sat next to him, I never once looked at him, didn't see his face at all.  I just knew it was him, that he was there.  I don't think we even spoke.  And with the way time works in a dream, we may have been sitting there for a few seconds to a few hours but afterwards, we just got up and kind of went our separate ways in the dream.  

Race to the Bottom

Ni de aquí, ni de allá. 

Not from here, not from there. 

Not Mexican enough for Mexico and too Mexican to be American. 

La India Maria, dad used to mock mom for being a little indita. Not as refined or cultured as he was. Bear in mind, dad lived in a little shit hole village in central Mexico that to this day, still doesn't have a paved road going through it. But that's the mentality they see all around them. To think you're better than your fellow shit-out-of-luck countrymen. 

During the protests of last summer, I distinctly recall mom telling me that one of her brothers, an uncle of mine, told her how we (Mexicans and Latinos) shouldn't be supporting the cause. Because, in his words, "You think they would support us if it happened to a Mexican?" All I could think when I heard that was, what a disgusting point of view that was. Where the fuck do you get off speaking for an entire group of people against another group when we're ALL in this same shit together?!  That's like dogs deciding a pecking order to see who gets the table scraps. 

This coming from a family where both sides worked as farm laborers until mom was underpaid for her work and when she protested to her supervisor, he told her she can walk if she didn't like it. She did. And many of my aunts and uncles did the same as a show of solidarity. 

I can't help but wonder what life would have been like if she had just put up with it and kept on working. What sort of life would us kids have had to this day if she didn't stand up for herself and if the family hadn't supported her walk off. I follow the United Farm Workers group on social media and see my brothers and sisters of the sun and how working in the fields has become a generational thing. Parents working alongside their children at this back breaking work, "essential" employees but paid mere pennies for hard labor and all but ignored by the general public. Looking down their noses at them. 

And that same family that worked those fields as kids themselves supporting ultra-right-wing politicians and policies.  They don't remember their own father, my grandfather, crossed that line on a map in the dead of night to make his way to this country for a better life for them. It's as though they've forgotten where they came from or think they're somehow better than the same people they worked alongside with a mere 50 years ago. This is the same family that were part of Ballet Folklorico groups before I was born. I remember seeing the costumes and headdresses in the closets at my grandmother's house. What happened to that pride they once had of our gente? 

What's more frustrating among Latinos in general, and don't get me started on the 'Latinx' designation because if you're really going to nitpick to that extreme, even referring to the la raza as being related to Latin is incorrect. Latin being the European language that arose in what was once ancient Rome. But as I was saying, what's more frustrating among Latinos in general is their deep seated racism against themselves. I mentioned earlier the pejorative term for native/indigenous peoples. Inditos. Terms for anyone with a darker complexion; morenita, negrito/negrita. I.e., "whiter is better"  mentality. Since the Spaniards were pale in comparison to the native tribes they conquered. Self-hate and fatalism being a huge thing among Latinos with a Catholic upbringing. 

And hate, baseless hate for other races. I can't begin to count how many times an uncle of mine told racist jokes when he thought I was old enough to "appreciate" them. I can't lie and say I never retold some of those same tasteless 'jokes' to friends in high school and early college by the time I realized how unacceptable they were.  Hell, for years some of my friends and I would emulate one of the coolest people we ever saw grace the big screen, Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winfield in Pulp Fiction. And a bunch of fat Mexican dudes saying some of his lines from the movie...  Not REALLY acceptable at the time. And we knew better but we still did it because we were dumb, ignorant. 

Now however, the only racial-based joke I remember repeating since then is; ”How does every racist joke start?” and then you mime looking to your left and right to make sure there aren't people of color nearby to hear it. You might chuckle at that but it's true. And you've likely heard a racist joke from your friend(s) where they do that exact thing before starting. If you have to look around to make sure your "joke" isn't going to offend somebody at best, or get your ass kicked, then maybe you should consider not ever repeating it again?  

The saying, You can't teach an old dog new tricks" is aptly applied to many of us older generations. We grew up not knowing any better and while some have come to grips with how wrong it was then, the good old days weren't really that good, and made genuine effort to improve it, there are far too many who refuse to accept the fact that the world isn't getting worse, just your view of it isn't holding up to your ideals. 

I take comfort in knowing most of these millennials and Gen Z are not just tolerant but fully embracing what this world could be. Should be. 

Because if this race to the bottom continues, we're all worse off for it.