Hispanic Fanatic

Once again, I must take an extended break from my rants, insights, and manifesto-like predictions. I will not be updating this site next week, and possibly for a couple of weeks, because for the first time in over a decade, I am moving.

Yes, soon I will be knee-deep in boxes and awash in dissembled furniture. As such, I will not have time to pop open my laptop and list the 4,891 reasons why you should never vote Republican. That will have to wait a few weeks.

So until I am back online, stay sane, watch out for fascists, and keep on keepin’ everything groovy.

Thanks

So it’s October, and in the spirit of Halloween, I’m going to write something scary.

Ha—you thought I was going to shout, “GOP!” or “MAGA agenda!”

That crossed my mind. But aside from the fact that it’s an obvious setup, I don’t have the time or energy to list all the terrifying ways that Republicans are trying to destroy this country. Also, some of their horrifying ideas are so ludicrous that they veer into black comedy or parody. And believe me, these guys are no laughing matter. 

But the chief reason is because I have to take my monthly break from writing posts to focus on my book, which has a deadline of mere weeks from now.

So instead I present you with this real-life horror show. 

South America is home to the ghost bird, a predator that looks like this:

Again, this is a real animal.

Sleep easy knowing that this flies through the air at night.

I will be back next week with a full post.

I won’t say that I’ve told you a million times.

But I will say that I’ve told you a thousand times.

Yes, this is my 1,000^th post on this website. It’s a milestone that I could not have predicted in 2008, when I grabbed the domain name, set up the site, and began my ceaseless, unending quest to scream into the void of the internet.

To give you an idea of how long ago I started this site, one of my first posts was about a young upstart named Barack Obama and how he was poised to win the Latino vote decisively.

And thus my track record of always being right began.

OK, maybe I haven’t always been correct, but my batting average is pretty good. Then again, I am often ranting about bigotry, conservative lunacy, and Trump. So it’s fairly easy to be proven right over and over again.

By the way, the all-time most popular of my 1,000 articles is this piece I wrote for the Huffington Post. It’s about the difference between Día de los Muertos and Halloween. I’m not sure why it went semi-viral, but it got shared a lot, and I still see it pop up in October. Hell if I know why it resonated, but if you write 1,000 articles, one of them is bound to hit.

As for my least popular post, well, it’s probably this one.

In any case, I thank you for reading. Whether you’ve perused all 1,000 of my articles, scanned through a couple of dozen, or are reading for the first time, I appreciate it.

Just know that I intend to keep going as long as I can.

Of course, the chief difference between today and those naïve days of 2008 is that I can now pepper my posts with random AI-generated images to capture your attention—like this one, which I call “Ethereal Eternal Phantasm Number 3.”

Happy 1,000 indeed.

Thanks again for reading.

I will be on a rare vacation and away from my computer for a little while. But I will return with regular posts soon.

In the meantime, ask yourself the following:

“The video is horrifying, and the testimony is riveting, but will the January 6 committee’s televised hearings be enough to persuade Trump’s supporters that he is a threat to America?” 

Ha, trick question. There is nothing that can convince Trump’s most ardent fans that the man is anything less than God Jr.

So that’s another reason why I need a vacation. 

See you soon.

My old computer is dying. With luck, I can post this quick missive before it succumbs completely.

I’m going to punt on a longer post until I get a new computer (hopefully, this weekend), and I don’t have to fight with crashing programs and timed-out connections and gibberish error messages.

So I’ll see you next week.

Apparently, half of our citizens are bored day-drinkers who are binge watching Tiger King and knitting DIY facemasks.

The other half consists of people working from their houses who have to do everything they always did, but now while homeschooling their kids.

I’m in that second half. As such, I have not written a new post this week. However, like nature, I abhor a vacuum. So I wrote a poem. 

The only problem is that I am not a poet. My solution was to get all post-modern on you and construct a “found” poem from existing sources. Here it is:

“Poem consisting of the headlines of IMDB user reviews, covering the last 10 movies I saw”

Another romanticized, dysfunctional relationship.

A hypnotic fever dream of nightmarish intensity.

Traumatic, surreal, and bizarre.

The magic is gone.

A long journey… for nothing?

I really wanted to love it!

Just kept waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting.

Amazing… but the more I dwell on it the worse it becomes.

What does it mean to be strong?

Finding love amongst all the action, violence, blood, and Japanese gangsters.

[Here are the movies referenced (in order)]

Cold War

Mandy

Midsommer

John Wick: Chapter 3—Parabellum

Ash Is Purest White

It: Chapter 2

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Avengers: Endgame

The Art of Self-Defense

First Love

I’m going to take a rare week off from saving the world one blog post at a time in order to enjoy this Thanksgiving holiday with my family.

So there’s no new article this week. Certainly, I’m not going to say anything about the ongoing shit-show that is the impeachment process… nope, almost got me going there, didn’t you?

Anyway, be sure to take some time this week to give thanks that we live in a country with so much prosperity… even though the richest 1% are currently hording so many resources that it boggles the goddamn mind. I mean, seriously, people! What’s it gonna take to… wait… pull back… not gonna rant. Just gonna give thanks.

As I was saying, we can all be grateful that our country’s leaders are calm, rational people who value facts and expertise over conspiratorial nonsense and never engage in cult-like behavior that…

OK, skip that. It’s a damn lie.

Deep breath.

Let’s settle on this: Happy Thanksgiving.

Yes.

See you next week.

So I took last week off from posting anything, primarily because I was traveling. I rarely skip a week, and in fact, I can’t remember the last time I went more than seven days without throwing out a couple of hundred words about the latest Trump travesty, or kick in the teeth to Latinos, or cultural breakthrough for Hispanics.

My timing was also odd, because during my absence, I hit a major milestone. That’s right. It has now been 10 years since I started this website.

If you know anything about the internet, you know that most blogs don’t last more than 10 weeks, much less 10 years.

And in truth, when I started this project, I figured I would run out of things to rant about after a hundred posts or so, and then I would get back to doing whatever it was I had been doing before I became immersed in racial politics and the subtleties of Latino culture and the history of pupusas.

But I have not run out of rants. If anything, I’ve become backlogged and have had to abandon the occasional article because the pace of our culture is always on to the next big thing.

Still, for 744 posts, totaling more than 320,000 words, I have been privileged to offer you insights, stabs at metaphorical meaning, and stray moments of dark cynical humor (yes, we laugh but we also cry).

And you have kept reading them, for a decade and counting.

And for that, I can only say the following:

Muchas gracias.

We have somehow made it through the first calendar year of the worst president in modern American history (and quite possible the worst of all time).

When it comes down to it, the most positive thing I can say about 2017 is this:

At least Prince and David Bowie didn’t die again this year.

Anyway, I’m taking the rest of the year off. If you need me, I’ll be checking out a matinee of The Last Jedi.

Happy New Year.

As you may have noticed (well, hopefully you noticed), I’ve been on hiatus from this site. I haven’t updated in a while, which is a rare break from my semi-rigorous schedule of writing at least one rant per week.

You see, I’ve been ill — absurdly sick — with an especially nasty cold and/or flu virus.

At least I think it was the flu, as I’m an extremely unlikely person to catch Trump Fever.

In any case, I’m feeling better now, but for a few days there, it was all I could do to stay upright. And waging literary war against the forces of xenophobia and racism wasn’t on my agenda.

Now that I’m feeling almost human, I will get back to that — stay tuned.