disguised
1.
The war of the fleas continues. So far they are staying outside but
I meanwhile continue to worry about design issues for pages. Pages as internet text. Pages as things you read on computer screen.
A priori the left margin and top margin. A posteriori the right and bottom.
You have your hard left margin on the computer screen. You have your hard top line on the computer screen. You can expand your "page" to the right and downwards but you are then asking the reader to scroll down or scroll right and one should never ask too much from a reader for the reader can always just PUT THE DAMN BOOK DOWN and go somewhere else heh heh heh byeeeeeeee click klik I M outahear.............
Still, after the hard left margin and the hard top margin, you, as an HTML page writer, basically can put anydamthing you want to onto the quote unquote PAGE.
You have two fixed margins (top,left) and two flexible margins (bottom, right) and then you have All Else Between.
You write that All Else Between.
2.
Today is Wednesday because yesterday I went to the radio station with Nina.
Once more I move beyond the TOP/LEFT bottom/right frame idea, I begin thinking about anchoreing images and column forms. Yesterday Michael got it all messed up together. It is better when the bilingual columns stay separate. Human brains have enough problem, even I, the originator, creator (Bullshit) have problems reading him or me. There. Here.
Often, most often, so often, I apply tables formatting to shape the test and image. Who the hell do you think you are anyway? I am the author. I write the songs that make the whole world sing. Ha damn idiot ego. Often so often most often I apply tables formatting shape the text and image but forget to edit out the background noise from my brain. there h e r e add extra spaces for
Often, so often, most often, I apply tables formatting to shape the text and image. Sometimes I will only have one image, sometimes more, sometimes several, many, that only slow down the the t h e loading l o a d i n g process yes there you are get back into the house right now the apocalypse is coming and world will end with a bang not a whimper with a whimper not with a bang stealing poetry from whoever the hell it was said it no no no no stream of consciousness need apply hyar hear here hardly hardiharhar ("carcajadas" en español)
Where was I? I was beginning... well Almost Always I Begin a page here with a table width of 85% to leave a blank area on the right because of the advertisements that appear there in the war of the fleas. So far they are staying outside but in Yahoo free pages at this lovely residential section known as geocities they laugh at me but what the hell I LIKE yahoo so there. Almost hope, yes I do, actually, hope that someone will click on their ads to say hey yes I am okay so there. Go ahead I don't know what it means but it looked nice so I kept it.
In the future I will control the vertical and the horizontal and the advertisement will be
mine, all mine....
--it's alive! IT'S ALIVE!!
Where was I? (Where? On Mars, probably...) Oh yes: Almost Always I Begin with a wable tidth of 85 cerpent serpent pedestrian plaza sidewalk to believe a blank leave it to believer with Jerry Mathers as
The bards deliberately confuse the lyrics to hide hidden meanings. The only hidden meaning here is I aint sayin nothin just lying down on the street like it really was my piece of land to cultivate
so there
3.
Do you write stories? Nina asked me yesterday as we drove down Negrete Avenue, having just descended Fundadores Blvd. from the radio station. Actually what she said was -¿No escribes cuentos?- in Spanish en español por supuesto of course. Sweet ubiquitous dominant everpresent tongue of mother Mexico New Spain. I met a guy Robert yesterday late afternoon who teaches English in the library in the park where I go to study. He doesn't speak it. Spanish. I kept my mouth shut but I'm sure he read my mind. How could you live here and not learn? But that is my prejudice, my desire, my reason for moving here, not his. To learn and understand the culture, the people, the language. My selfish hunger to listen and to speak.
I was reading Carlos Fuentes in the library yesterday. Tiempo Mexicano is the title of the book of essays. I read the essay about Lázaro Cárdenas. Some of my oligarch friends here would be... concerned (ah, that good old bureaucratic word which Jon Dunchack taught me its true inner ugliness) (speaking of wannabe oligarchs heh heh he & I share that pitiful fate except he's done better at achieving its status than I) and now the internet worms will find his name twice in my write ooops I better censor or not nope wont
Where were we? Not back at city hall, no. Oh yes, in the library. Some of my oligarchical friends here would be concerned (ah yes, the
Would be concerned to learn how much I admire that old revolutionary puritan who totally screwed-up Tijuana and the U.S. petroleum power heh and they say he took bribes from Las Vegas gangsters to outlaw gambling in Mexico but we know the timing is all wrong for that accusation Las Vegas didn't even have the electricity yet and
they would say he was just as bad as the rest of them but I think Salinas is a very unfair comparison or Echeverria or I won't say any more only what they would say they would say that they would say and I may not.
We are all sooooooo very ethnocentric. I personally live in this delusion that I can cut across worlds like Rydra Wong in Chip Delany's Babel-17, cut across worlds and classes and societies, seeing them all for what we, they, you, I, are, moving between them free as a bird but like I said that is delusion. We are all social creature shaped, formed and trapped by our own birth, education, family, upbringing, friends, etcetera, except...
Except in so far as we have some power to re-invent ourselves and so
I
am from wasp scotchirish pennsylvaniadeutsch and american indian with just a drop of color from who knows where
but that is nothing compared to the power of language.
Just think if I had gone to city college twenty years ago like I thought about doing and studied arabic then I could be in Mesopotamia right now furthering the power of my very own empire and getting shot and/or blown up BOOM instead of waiting for the icecaps to melt and terror bombs to strike at the fortress that gave me life and where I still
belong
forever born
free
if you dare to pay the price
which
is
that we are all area 51 are all responsible to resonate and react suffer reactions for our ownly actions reactions tractions in the sand
so there uncle
masa
NASA
tortilla
tamal
sí .
4.
I rejoyce that have my particular power of speech to invent and say nothing at all or anything at all you decide what it means.
I meanwhile only drool over this paper first writing scribble longhand in ink and then going to the computer to clickity clack on the QWERTYUIOP keys ah yes the best of both worlds pen & paper and keyboard & screen input output oh look the I/O towers are lighting up again the world is coming back on line to life the Emerald City has been saved and Ozma resurrected ah
heh
it's only a carnival illusion, decadent image reflecting from the west and when will we ever learn to leave other people alone and they learn to leave us alone
what was it Benito Juárez said?
Respect for the rights of the other is peace.
Yep.
You know Jose Angel the neck massage therapist with clients coming all day long asked me last night about that word Yep if it really exists in English. Oh yes I said but I didn't go into a big speech about how my mother said last week that she wants to stop saying it. Yep.
heh
Speaking of Oz makes me remember that the memory of L.Frank Baum is enshrined up the road a bit at the Hotel del Coronado
a little ways up the long beach a long ways up the little beach north of
here there
5.
The border is only six blocks north of the park. In the gray morning light of autumn dawn where I sit in my room scribbling this first draft in ink I can look out the window and see the lights are still shining somewhere beyond the trees and green bushes. They put up the lights to dissuade illegal immigrants from crossing at Tijuana where it used to be easy. You know that, don't you? Don't you study contemporary history like my friend Paul E?
Giant floodlamps on poles every 50 yards or something lighting up the line. I can see maybe a dozen of them in their line a half-mile away from this part of downtown.
I like my window. It looks out over the trees and gardens of the park. I am lying ever so slightly of course so you won't know exactly where I live but there is greenery and I can see the lights and the park is across the street. Actually I want you to figure it out. This is like that book thirty years ago about boiling teawater at high tide for high tea and someone buried a necklace somewhere in Britain and remember? If you find my house I will invite you to lunch around the corner. Heh heh heh it's cheap. Maybe we'll go someplace fancy for dinner. And I'll tell you about the arabs I saw building an atomic bomb in a shack near the dump But OH now THAT is a 100% Lie yes no it aint true at all & if it were you would soon see that I too am, yes, a gringo.
On the other side of my house, my apartment of only two rooms, but enough for me now until I move in with my Maria, well, on the other side of my apartment another window looks out over the neighbors' house. They have more trees and gardens and a swimming pool where all their rich grandchildren yell and scream during the summer and try to forget that won't say any more except they own a big piece of the block and not just their house, no, but businesses on either side and more apartments and such and collect their rent rent rent why they get their rents rent rent same as everywhere in the human world of property and society.
I wonder if the Manahatta thought the twentyfour dollars worth of beads Henry Hudson gave them were only rent instead of the purchase price for New Amsterdam? Speaking of Holland again how curious the coincidence. I wouldn't be you Want to be no. Well we'll never know what the Manahatta thought about their first and only 24 dollars of rent. Meanwhile there's a house for sale in Ensenada for 30,000 dollars right by the ocean but I don't think I want to leave Tijuana. Too much too real to be true here. And Michael and I have friends now. But I looked at the house on the internet. I saw the photograph. I just had to laugh. He blew his mind out in the car etcetera play my Beatles records and listen to the ocean breaking on the rocks and the highway roaring behind the house, probably heh.
No.
It is time for breakfast and then computer. I have already used up both sides of two sheets of paper filled with cramped writing and corrections and this will get even longer when I sit down at the keyboard to type oh yes I know what a babelling son of a bitch I can be once I start going on and on and on and one only one but many oh yes....
I am working my piece of land, like the old puritan revolutionary said we should to live a good life
Primero, trabajar intensamente su propria parcela.
First, intensively work your own parcel of land.
y pues mi parcela my parcel of land is words on paper and then words on screen and then words a thousand words and more that any picture is worth that much at least to turn the cliché backwards upon its own head and find another excuse to write scribble type bla
Such a reasonable creature is man that he can find a reason to do anything he wants to. [Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (from memory....¡watchout!)]
Next diary babel
Gringo : Diary Calendar
Copyright 2003 Daniel Charles Thomas
| 