The men and women huddled around the kitchen table clutching mugs of coffee and tea. They hunched forward and talked nervously in muffled whispers, afraid hostile ears lurked nearby.
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The girl wore her father’s old belt, lined with his first tools. She liked the weight of it as she walked and let her hand hover over the drill at her waist, imagining herself as an old time cowboy waiting for a duel. As she passed through the arcade, the jingle of coins in the cargo shorts of the boys all around her became the sound of her own spurs as she walked down a dusty road, lined by the wood-porched storefronts of an old western town. She could smell the mud and the horeshit, see the drunkards sprawled out in alleys, hear yelling all around, even gunshots, and she wondered to herself how the hell she’d come to sheriff such a shit show.
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Six months ago, I graduated with a philosophy degree from Texas State University in San Marcos, TX. What was promised to be a day of jubilation for my family, as I am a first-generation Colombian and the first in my family to ever attend an American institute of higher education, was instead welcomed with a reluctant sigh of relief.
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Wheel of Fortune. Every day. Every damn day that’s what she watches. It’s like she has to watch it or else she’s miserable and we can’t watch anything else. If I want to watch something else, she, like, freaks out and says that I have my own television in my room. She knows how small that TV is and she wouldn’t watch it if she was forced to either.
“Did you know this song is about heroin?” My friend Chris asked.
“Huh?” I said as I approached a stop sign.
We just left a party where my gay friend made out with a girl for the first time and I got vomited on.
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As my friend and colleague, Rudy Martinez, wrote in his much-discussed essay, Your DNA is an Abomination, “You are both the dominant apparatus on the planet and the void in which all cultures, upon meeting you, die” (2017). In context, You stands for Whiteness, as in the extremely limiting, extremely violent, and extremely oppressive force that has come to dominate the world, but Whiteness is only the latest mask worn by something nameless that dates back to the agricultural revolution, that is to say, to the dawn of civilization. Behind the mask is whatever spirit drives humanity to conquer itself.
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