it is too tempting to write in tiny illegible words to fit more into the lines of my pocket notebook but then I got to go back and read it huh! My grandmother in San Diego (not yesterday's in San Francisco) my mother's mother, I mean, not fathers, was a girl who grew up in Kansas and moved out to California before the first world war. Her aunt had come out and married some few years before, my great-grandmother's sister Mary Gandy. She lived in a trailer park when I knew her, an old, old lady even older than my grandmother got later. I was twelve when she died. I was twenty before I remembered her husband had been county tax collector and accused of stealing the county money after his assistant disappeared with it all.

Before that, they had lived in a series of houses in Mission Hills, that my grandmother had snapshots from the years before our Roaring Twenties made Hollywood and Tijuana into wicked stepsisters who fell in love with life and hard work, long hours, parties on the floor, and silver. My great great grandfather brought his younger kids west in the boom of the 1880s, after his first wife died. He married a woman from a catalog who was later accused of faith healing, in 1910 San Diego with an electric machine, but it turned out she had never actually quote-unquote promised anyone to be healed so the charge was dismissed or something.

That was before the great flood of 1916 came and washed away the city from before time, Tejuas Diego, where Cortes met another Moctezuma and gave up his ghost to poverty.

The brain is non-sequitur sometimes only half of that was fiction and the other half not sans segue you can hear newcasters on TV say it sounds like SAY-GWAY so very hip communications to slip it in like recursive et cetera. That is why I think about my grandmothers when I write about Tijuana. Because the elections are on and people are getting shot in the streets. And completely disconnected events bounce off each other. They killed the editor of Zeta yesterday and this morning I want to weep on my grandmother's knees and parents usually get all the blame while grammas and grampas can spoil i f t h e y w a n t

The ancient city disappeared when electric lights went on.

It had been around since the first attack by pirates in 1599.

Made that up, they did, an image of crystal palaces and knights in shining armor who went out to make war against the moslem saracen. Cortes and all those mighty men of Spain who conquered the new world. He thought he might find another empire, like the Azteks, or at least a closer road to China. What kind of bridge do they have going to Hawaii, we tricked the salesman into crossing over today at the book factory. Of course he knew better but the computer was telling us rate-figuring messages until you clicked the button to process and (there are five thousand buttons to click, by the way, and twenty of them absolutely necessary) then it said that ground service was not available to Hawaii overnight.

I came home only a few minutes late and began to type. Maria came from the doctors' at eight, then went out to have a tequila with Veronica. We fought because I had smoked on the porch and the smell came in the house. Now she has driven off with V. I am trying Tere. I am trying, Tere. It pains me too to see how I try you.

A choice for life is like a choice to stop smoking, stop smoking every day. I must make it, or hurt her. That is the raw truth. I must stop smoking, at least, every day. This everyday pain must stop.

Even saying it hurts. Imagine how she must feel after all these weeks together I am still choosing to hurt myself and her.

Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Come up, come all the way up, to the taste of Kool cigarettes. Let your fingers do the walking. Go ahead, have another.

No. Write something else instead.

We got off in time yesterday and maybe I mentioned that last night you were on the bus that climbs up onto Otay Mesa from Iris Avenue leaving the coast for another great prairie a picture of this continent in miniature the entire county and Tijuana a map that echoes great turtle land where there is no strait path across so you must walk all the way through the continent this metaphor is awakened by a drive up the road from foggy bay shore to open sun land mesa before the hills another great flat space this is the larger flat mesa above rivers water where the cattle bred and ate spring grass in winter before climbing to the mountain valleys until fall . ...one does hear so many awful things that I do not know why that should have been so shocking but it was and there is no doubt about it one's country is one's country and that kind of harm seems to be so far away from our country. It is queer the world is so small and so knocked about. To-night we expected to have Germans come into the house again.... [- Gertrude Stein, Wars I Have Seen, 1944 -]

Her French and Alice B. Toklas' French was both so good that the boche never caught on heh heh heh... the pen Is mightier than the sword. Or, at least, HER (their) pen(s) was/were....

Where was I? Oh yes, the notes I scribbled this morning on the way to work.

no apo strophe re member

okei bai         okay bye