Got Wood?

With Spring here, everyone is feeling feisty and flirty.

Squirrels chant their love songs as they frolic, while cardinals and ravens chirp and squack as they seduce each other.

There are echoes everywhere ... pant pant wheeze wheeze puf puf aaahhhh!

It is in the air...

cousin vera

In the last hours of the 20th, snow started falling and it was slowly transformed to watery rain. The past two days it has been warmer and people started undressing in public. A friend said you could hear the birds chirping, but the true sound of spring is when the homeless have fled the shelters and invade the streets, calling, asking, pleading for a coin. Please, don’t look away, a coin because I am hungry, have a nice day.

The sun came out. Oh sí. The edigator is catching some rays.

Migraines

Migraines are caused by minuscule zombies who rip and devour pieces of the brain they inhabit. Feverish minds, troubled by headaches and hallucinations are able to draw them into horror stories which flock our eyes in the cinema.

Some activities which the host performs wakes the voracious zombies and as the host tries to survive the unsuspected attack on the head, and believes the vomiting, the repulsion to noise and smells, the semi paralysis and shaking, the fear of light, are all caused by something as trivial and normal as blood rushing to the brain or a huge hangover. So then the host growls grr argh, takes enormous quantities of pills, and tries to sleep.

And the zombies munch away...

Mirror mirror

It does not matter how many fashionable clothes, board meetings, different jobs or excessive money humans have or want, they are still animals. Most of the time, humans try to identify their humanness with non-animal elements. That is, if an animal can do it, the human will negate that and construct s/his identity with the anti-animal notions.

So, if an animal defecates in public, the human will do it hidden in a restroom. If an animal eats another while the delicatessen is still alive; the human will kill, dismember and bake. It does not matter if the second option is more complicated, absurd and requires technicians, engineers, and hours of training in order to achieve it. Any variation turns humans into nasty beasts.

And those cuasi-perfect animals that behave in a non-animalistic way are almost humans: emotional dogs, memorious elephants who suffer painfully when they encounter elephant bones, or parrots that speak.

But when one of these animals behaves as s/his earthbound irremediable nature indicates, humans are astounded. Because they see a mirror of the beast that they are. After so many words... be flabbergasted:

¡Carámbanos!

I like this word. But in Spanish.

It is pronounced with a hard "K" Kah- ram- bah- nose . It rolls on your tongue and whispers out. Carámbanos.

The thing in English is called an antiseptic "icicle", in French it is a nasal "glaçon", in German a barked "Eizsapfen", even in náhuatl it is a sweet "acectli". Melodic insensible words. They do not convey the idea of the criminal water, which refuses to drip, to be liquid and dares to hang.

But in Spanish you holler ¡Carámbanos! which dangle from the window sills, waiting waiting for a walker who will stand, waiting for him to stop and then they fly, and then they break and crack and drop and kill and become weapons and pikes and then shatered carámbanos, fractured carámbanos, and carámbanos destroyed.


I like them like so.