Sitting here on a warm winter's day (long)
I sit in my brother's kitchen. It's 5:18AM. People are getting up to go to work. I've been drinking and smoking. My eyes are tired. I feel like writing something.
Today (well last night, but you catch my drift) my family has Thanksgiving Dinner. My brother had the night off and my mom wanted to do something with the family. So first thing my brother does is tell everyone to start drinking. It was nice and helped to relax the mood. Even my grandmother had a small glass of "Dos XX" beer. None of us drank to the point of drukeness, but we all enjoyed ourselves. All of the tension of miswritten emails and phone messages were thrown out the window. It was strange and weird and I don't think it was all thanks to the alcohol. It seems that everyone was just a little bit more real. No false facades of wealth and class getting in between treating each other as a human being.
My brother might be moving to Boston with his boyfriend. His Boyfriend-Johnathan- is a nice guy and all, but has false notions of hipster-ness. Now, I'm not calling out his hipster-ness or anything (I steadfastly avoid most labels except the insulting ones) but he's trying to be someone he's not. Thinking about it, it's dumb and misinformed of me to criticize someone for trying to be someone they aren't. That overly dramatic sophomoric sack-of-shit known as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that "there are no second acts in American lives." He's wrong. People reinvent and reintroduce themselves all the goddamn time. Richard Nixon is a perfect example. How does a man go from the Checkers Speech, to losing the Presidency (because he looked like shit on the televised debates), to winning the presidency twice on the promise of Vietnam (the first time he got elected, he actually escalated the conflict and dropped more bombs), to finally stepping down, and the final twenty years of his life. I remember watching his funeral on TV. I was a youngin' at the time and I knew that this mad that everybody was talking about had been president and had been forced to step down. Yet he was morned by thousands (maybe even millions). Hunter Thompson had the best thing to say about Nixon. When Nixon died, he wrote (in Rolling Stone)
"It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us."
I once used part of that quote in a Beowulf paper I wrote first semester of college. I was talking about how the Christian author of Beowulf contrasted monster and man. Grendel himself represented the dark, venal, and incurably violent side of Scandinavian culture. In the end though, what's the different between man and beast (one of the best ideas found within the new Beowulf film). In short, I was trying to impress an old man who had already been impressed too many times in his life to be moved. Sure he had favorites like the kid who wrote a fifty page term paper on a Jazz song. Or another student who shared his passion for the Metaphysical poets. I was trying to be someone I'm not. I don't care about John Donne, Homer, Milton and all those dead white dudes. I was trying to adopt high culture and ended up making a bit of a fool of myself. Culture is a shitty word and I refuse it use it from now on.
Back on the topic of my brother moving to Boston because his boyfriend is trying to escape his own past. Supposedly when he was younger in high school, he was overweight and unpopular. Combine his homosexuality with a public school environment, and you have a whole boat load of issues. I talked to my brother about his possible move:
Sergio: If you had no strings, where would you go?
Tiberio: Well probably New Orleans. Since you're there and I know people though work.
Sergio: Would you consider Boston?
Tiberio: Not really. I mean do I want to leave Miami? Part of me wants to go.
It seems almost like an irrational choice. Boston or bust. Tea Bags or Taxes. Chowder or Chappaquiddick (oh yeah, I totally fucking went there). Tell you the truth, most people I've met from Boston are jackasses. Mainly because they take themselves too seriously. A Texan will be half serious when talking about the superiority of their own state. A true Bostonian (and anybody from Massachusetts) will talk about their City on the Hill much in the same way that Aquinas did. Except Bostonians and Aquinas are both too incredibly occupied with their own sense of smug self-satisfaction. This is the same kid who saw "Sicko" and decided that the American health system needed to be torn by brick by brick and that he would study medicine and go for the system abroad somewhere. While I agree with the notion that the American health care system is incredibly fucked up; I am far more concerned with his zealotry with that overweight sophist Moore. It's his support of Hillary Clinton because:
A. She's not Bush
B. Her Husband was awesome. Therefore she must be awesome.
C. She's a woman. That makes her more than qualified to run the country
It's just that I don't want my brother moving somewhere just because of someone else's misguided attentions and issues. Or maybe I would just like if it my brother moved to New Orleans. It would be really nice to have him around. Sorta like having a parent minus all of the attention they require at times ("Well I only talked to you once yesterday. Why didn't you call me another time?"). It's now 5:55 AM. I've been rambling about for the past 40 minutes or so. I think it's time for me to hit publish and I'm not exactly sure how to end this sentence. or why I'm typing this. Maybe this will appear in my crappy novel one day. Because shitty novels are just called memoirs to sell more copies.
Adieu and Adios.
Today (well last night, but you catch my drift) my family has Thanksgiving Dinner. My brother had the night off and my mom wanted to do something with the family. So first thing my brother does is tell everyone to start drinking. It was nice and helped to relax the mood. Even my grandmother had a small glass of "Dos XX" beer. None of us drank to the point of drukeness, but we all enjoyed ourselves. All of the tension of miswritten emails and phone messages were thrown out the window. It was strange and weird and I don't think it was all thanks to the alcohol. It seems that everyone was just a little bit more real. No false facades of wealth and class getting in between treating each other as a human being.
My brother might be moving to Boston with his boyfriend. His Boyfriend-Johnathan- is a nice guy and all, but has false notions of hipster-ness. Now, I'm not calling out his hipster-ness or anything (I steadfastly avoid most labels except the insulting ones) but he's trying to be someone he's not. Thinking about it, it's dumb and misinformed of me to criticize someone for trying to be someone they aren't. That overly dramatic sophomoric sack-of-shit known as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said that "there are no second acts in American lives." He's wrong. People reinvent and reintroduce themselves all the goddamn time. Richard Nixon is a perfect example. How does a man go from the Checkers Speech, to losing the Presidency (because he looked like shit on the televised debates), to winning the presidency twice on the promise of Vietnam (the first time he got elected, he actually escalated the conflict and dropped more bombs), to finally stepping down, and the final twenty years of his life. I remember watching his funeral on TV. I was a youngin' at the time and I knew that this mad that everybody was talking about had been president and had been forced to step down. Yet he was morned by thousands (maybe even millions). Hunter Thompson had the best thing to say about Nixon. When Nixon died, he wrote (in Rolling Stone)
"It is Nixon himself who represents that dark, venal and incurably violent side of the American character that almost every country in the world has learned to fear and despise. Our Barbie-doll president, with his Barbie-doll wife and his boxful of Barbie-doll children is also America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the Werewolf in us."
I once used part of that quote in a Beowulf paper I wrote first semester of college. I was talking about how the Christian author of Beowulf contrasted monster and man. Grendel himself represented the dark, venal, and incurably violent side of Scandinavian culture. In the end though, what's the different between man and beast (one of the best ideas found within the new Beowulf film). In short, I was trying to impress an old man who had already been impressed too many times in his life to be moved. Sure he had favorites like the kid who wrote a fifty page term paper on a Jazz song. Or another student who shared his passion for the Metaphysical poets. I was trying to be someone I'm not. I don't care about John Donne, Homer, Milton and all those dead white dudes. I was trying to adopt high culture and ended up making a bit of a fool of myself. Culture is a shitty word and I refuse it use it from now on.
Back on the topic of my brother moving to Boston because his boyfriend is trying to escape his own past. Supposedly when he was younger in high school, he was overweight and unpopular. Combine his homosexuality with a public school environment, and you have a whole boat load of issues. I talked to my brother about his possible move:
Sergio: If you had no strings, where would you go?
Tiberio: Well probably New Orleans. Since you're there and I know people though work.
Sergio: Would you consider Boston?
Tiberio: Not really. I mean do I want to leave Miami? Part of me wants to go.
It seems almost like an irrational choice. Boston or bust. Tea Bags or Taxes. Chowder or Chappaquiddick (oh yeah, I totally fucking went there). Tell you the truth, most people I've met from Boston are jackasses. Mainly because they take themselves too seriously. A Texan will be half serious when talking about the superiority of their own state. A true Bostonian (and anybody from Massachusetts) will talk about their City on the Hill much in the same way that Aquinas did. Except Bostonians and Aquinas are both too incredibly occupied with their own sense of smug self-satisfaction. This is the same kid who saw "Sicko" and decided that the American health system needed to be torn by brick by brick and that he would study medicine and go for the system abroad somewhere. While I agree with the notion that the American health care system is incredibly fucked up; I am far more concerned with his zealotry with that overweight sophist Moore. It's his support of Hillary Clinton because:
A. She's not Bush
B. Her Husband was awesome. Therefore she must be awesome.
C. She's a woman. That makes her more than qualified to run the country
It's just that I don't want my brother moving somewhere just because of someone else's misguided attentions and issues. Or maybe I would just like if it my brother moved to New Orleans. It would be really nice to have him around. Sorta like having a parent minus all of the attention they require at times ("Well I only talked to you once yesterday. Why didn't you call me another time?"). It's now 5:55 AM. I've been rambling about for the past 40 minutes or so. I think it's time for me to hit publish and I'm not exactly sure how to end this sentence. or why I'm typing this. Maybe this will appear in my crappy novel one day. Because shitty novels are just called memoirs to sell more copies.
Adieu and Adios.