What people who’ve never lived in Texas, don’t particular­ly realize is the reason why that part of Texas is so shitty is mainly because of the gross ignorance, bible-thum­ping and racism that still persists there. The Valley has that, too (everywher­e in America is racist). I can concede, however, that I never have had a difficult time fitting in with whites or Hispanics in the area. It is not a lucrative area because the Valley lacks a lot of resources that the bigger cities in Texas have (such as Houston, San Antonio, Austin, etc), and the general antagonism legislator­s in Austin have had toward the Democratic leanings of the area for years.

My composer friend, Peter Garland, said to me that the Valley is timeless because it exists in a place free from cultural stagnation­. Where there are borders, there is movement. Cultural movement, linguistic movement, moral movement.T­he Valley is what America used to be. And for that reason in particular­, I still hold a special place for it. .
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

As for myself, the last two months have been rough, emotionally. This past Saturday I shut down all of my online accounts, deleted my Gmail, and ended my Skype account for good. Why am I doing this? I really don’t know. Compared to the last few years my overall online presence has diminished greatly. Which I am totally glad about, it really gives me an opportunity to focus on moving out of Texas and getting my real life together, rather than placing a lot of hype and emotional investment on the online one, the image I have so carefully crafted for the last ten years. But it makes life harder. I don’t get phone calls or emails from a lot of people, and mainly spend a lot of time talking to my friends and my family, and to my boyfriend. I really never valued those previous relationships much in the first place, since they were crafted to solely benefit the other person involved. I am beginning to see that things with my friends have not worked out as they intended them to. Shawn desperately wanted to witness to me as a bible-believing Christian, but his efforts at proselytizing failed when he realized that I cannot change what I am, i.e., a homosexual man. My relationship with my friend Luís fell apart when he dumped my friend Julie for another girl who essentially emasculated him and forced him to move away from Tech for good (and also, I think, partly because of Texas Tech’s positions on race and diversity). And then, my own relationship with Julie ended when I could no longer put any faith into hanging out with her, because she prefers to do things that hags do, such as go out with twinks to bars to pick up boys. I don’t hate her, I don’t at all, but I felt a little disrespected when she said that instead of having dinner at my house one night she’d prefer to go to the local gay bar with one of her friends. I can’t really listen to Dr. Mariani or Dr. Smith’s endlessly banal banter about professor-ish things or about their cat or about Celtic music. I respect them and their authority and scholarship, but I have learned why you don’t add your professors to Facebook. I have said to them: I wish you well. Please don’t hate me, because I know you don’t. But I also know that you hate my politics and you hate it when I rant on Facebook. So goodbye to Facebook, as well.

Dr. Jocoy is not responding to my emails anymore. I assume she has moved onto other things. I will see and learn the truth when she returns from holiday break later on this month. And as for Dr. Cimarusti, I will continue to see him, because he and Dr. Jocoy are the only two teachers I can really respect, because they understand me. Amelia has moved away, Austin is dead, Frank is living with a rich man in Chicago, Marissa and Melissa got married and became lawyers, Kelli is heading up a class in Memphis and is beset by the rain, Art is moving back to California, Herschel is living in Seattle and waiting for me to move up to Portland, Doug graduated, Amanda stopped talking to me because of my leftist political beliefs (which I was oh-so-fucking happy about), Steven and Katerina might be living together next year, Jacob Rose is living in California in a rented house by the sea, and Ben hung himself in a garage in 2010, a victim of legal prosecution and despair (Jacob Rose told me this as I was arriving late for my Anthropology class on a frigid day in February). Soen (or Martin? or Kogen?) is working in LA for a major television company and has a new beau. And Pete and Jon are still together, still together after four years, and Pete has mellowed out significantly and I like it. I am somewhat terrified of Jon, not for Jon’s sake for the specter of Jon I guess –– a big hulking football playerish kid who quotes from Grey Gardens. I am terrified because he is me, a physically different me, a doppelgänger of me in an all-gay city. I rarely talk to Pete (I talked to him this weekend), because he is so busy, much less to Soen (who I’m OK about, just OK), much less to Kelli (who is just plain busy). And Bruno’s mother passed away and he needed to start over anew. I feel like I’m beginning to lose Frank now, because we both have boyfriends we love very much and we don’t want to hurt them. But yet, we still love each other like old lovers and good friends. I can’t get my mind around that. I am so troubled by these constant abandonments. But something deep inside tells me this is all for the best, that after Lubbock will come Portland and things will be better. My story does not end in the dust and decay of this one-time hub marred by tornadoes and endless despair. It will go on, onward and outward, it will set down roots in a place blessed by the rain and the fog, in a city of pines and roses.

I keep on revisiting the past. I go over the mistakes I’ve made and the things I should have said, the truths I should have told, the things I should have held back. I should have gone to class more, I should have taken better care of myself, I should have not clenched my teeth when I was masturbating so much, or I wouldn’t have had to deal with having my wisdom teeth taken out. That, and of course candy and soda (my two weaknesses). I should have lived more. I should have taken more walks. I should have cried when I had the chance. I should have asked for a raise. I should have pulled my own weight. I should have not given up hope so much. Really, was it that hard? I mean, really?

And of course these are all very pathological things. They stem from very pathological leanings, very distinct problems inside me that haven’t been resolved. Why do I hate myself so much? Why do I feel so terribly inadequate? Why do I have these turbulent relationships with my friends and the people I love? It would be so easy to say, “Joe, you are fucking crazy.” Because I do crazy things. And yet, I don’t want to take medication because medication is a cop-out and the pills would make me fat. Therapy can only help so much. We are here, and we have no choice being here. But we can move. We can do things. We can choose to make the right decisions. We always get what we deserve.

Just the other day my boyfriend’s friend says to my boyfriend when he mentions that I’m going to Tech, “I feel sorry for him.” He is sorry not for me specifically, but for the bullshit I have to put with, bullshit I should have known about, bullshit I should have learned how to deal with when I was younger, when I was a hot young gay. Bullshit, frankly, that is not my fault. I happen to live in the shittiest, ugliest, most god-forsaken state in the Union. Not my fault! I happen to go to school and work in a place that is not only hostile to homosexuals, but to Hispanics, to Catholics, to liberals and to creatives. Not my fault. I happen to suffer at the idiocy of some policymakers who feel I’m a liability to their political ideologies. Not my fault. It is not my fault, and I acknowledge this before You, O Lord God, that I am myself. It is not my fault I am a different. It is not my fault that I can’t “fit in”, because in most cases I do, but in other places, in other lives.

I also confess to You, Lord God, that I take full responsibility for my problems here, problems that I caused for myself. Problems, I might add, that I later whined about. I played with fire and I got burned. And I hurt people’s feelings in the process. And then I had to deal with the guilt, the remorse, the feeling suicidal for weeks and weeks, the actual remorse over the failed suicide attempts, especially after I got sick. The money I spent, practically pissed away for things that I shouldn’t have bought. The jarred spaghetti sauce instead of the canned. The golden mushroom soup for 78¢ instead of the white cream of mushroom for ¢68. Now I am having to deal with all the little remorse-filled moments of life, the not eating and the remorse arising from my mother having to send a package in the mail with pancake mix and syrup to assuage my constant hunger pangs. And it’s not the hunger that makes me suicidal, it’s the lack of socializing, its the watching the day go down, it’s the  banging my head on my desk and crying out to God for assistance, its the lack of living on a standard compared to other people I know other people my age are living on, because of my poor life choices. It’s the asking for care packages, and it’s the crying at night in the shower when nothing can be done. It’s the sense that nothing will change, despite the circumstances, it’s the sense that things and people seem so far away. It’s the sense of futility at attempting to commit suicide because I know better. And it’s the sense of remorse and shame that inevitably keeps me from taking a handful of Vicodin in the bathroom. It’s also the sense –– and this is the weird part –– that the songs which used to make me cry don’t make me cry anymore. That scares me and saddens me immensely.

What hurts the most is the part when someone says to you: we can’t be friends because things have changed for me. We can’t be friends because you are not the person I want. I want the other Joe, the Joe I liked so much before I got to know the real Joe. The real Joe can’t offer anything interesting or good aside from good intellectual conversation, because all I can relate to is what Joe talks about. That hurts the most. I am a good conversationalist because I am an intellectual. For the first two months people are fascinated with me, intrigued. But it all fades away when they realize I have these problems, problems which I can’t fix or can’t solve on my own, and then they say, “I can’t be around this person, because he doesn’t know who he is.”

That is completely different from being the sexual being Joe, the sexually selfish Joe. That Joe is solely concerned with getting sexual attention, in a crude effort to reproduce the mysterious things called love and affection.

A long, long time ago, someone said to me that I continued doing the things I’m doing, I would only end up perpetuating my isolation and self-imposed exile even longer. He was right. I am, after months of pushing everybody and everything away, finally alone. The despair is overwhelming. Like the film Groundhog Day, every day is the same. The hot sun rises in the east, in the parking lot, runs over the pines and through the blinds of my room, into my face, onto my skin. I take a bath and I go to work. I take lunch or no lunch, depending on whichever time of the month it is. And then I work some more, go to the gym, take a walk home in the hot sun, bathe, eat (or not eat), then jack off and sleep. On the weekends it’s the same, only except working (unless it’s one of those cases and I have to be there), the eating, the watching Golden Girls on the big screen until the sun lowers at an agreeable angle, the eating again, the bath, the jacking off and the sleeping. I don’t go to parties, rarely go to the bars. I am myself. These are the things I do. I mainly talk to my boyfriend on the warm evenings when the sun goes down and the sprinklers have started watering the landscaping.

Please let me tell you, Lord God, how much I hate myself. Please let me tell You how much I hate the world I live in, the endless dry yellowed wind-ravaged parts of it. Please let me tell You how emotionless and hollow my life is. Please let me tell You how much I want to be dead or at least in some place, some place that isn’t home, some place where no one knows me and no one cares about whatever the fuck it is I’m doing. A place where I don’t have to put on airs and condescend and spout bullshit about how dedicated I am to being a lawyer when the plain truth is I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing. I don’t know what I am doing, God. I know You are listening and I know You want to help. I don’t know how to communicate to You what I want.  You see, I have made these mistakes, God. You see, these mistakes are slowly killing me on the outside now. I feel like I’m already dead inside. And I want to have these good relationships with people, but I don’t know what I am going to do. I would like to be able to have a normal, good life. But I don’t know what normal is. I would have liked to have lived a life that had positive repercussions. I would also like to have nice clothes and good hair and good skin. I would like to have given my mother peace-of-mind instead of endless fears and worry over my wellbeing and a $400 trip to get me when I was sick and needed help. I would like her to know that I am finally doing the things necessary so that she doesn’t have to worry or cry when I am in trouble.

I would like to have those things which I have always wanted. But there is no perfection in the world. So I will place my hopes elsewhere in it, to get a close approximation to what I want.

Some people tell me I’ve got it easy, but then I always have had it easy. I just have a way with making things happen that make things easier for me. I am not sure if I am good at storming the gates of Heaven or just being really good with people. Some people might accuse me of being cunning or dishonest (maybe, but not necessarily so). Maybe I am just a good person and am good with people. I really don’t know. But one thing I do know is that I have a knack for making difficult situations easy, because I have had such a difficult life (really, a cheap apartment with air conditioning and food will always make up for a poor wood-frame house baking in the South Texas heat). My mother says I am just good at breaking bad situations. Or maybe just getting away from them, entirely.

Lennard ferried me up here in August. We left on the feast of the Assumption in an old blue pickup truck. Prior to that, many eventful things happened in the summer. First, and foremostly, I had to deal with actually getting the apartment –– that was tough for the first three months or so, right up until the last day of my vacation in Harlingen, when Paul and I had to storm the library for internet access so I could find a place. There I found Will, my old best friend, my old junkie best friend, and his wife, Sarah. I love Sarah and Will because they’re the last link I have in my old Valley-based family, a family that included Javier and many other people whose names have been left in the dust of almost ten years. But he hugged me and was glad to see me again. The news is that he is still together with Sarah, still working menial jobs, apparently still doing lots of hard drugs, but still interested in music, still horribly unkempt, still horribly interesting. Paul and Sarah always flirt and act outrageously. While we were there some kid apparently from high school recognized me and I said hi back. Funny how these things happen, reunions.

The next day I was driving across the vast expanse of Texas, some 14 hours progressively away from home and with each passing mile even more afraid of the future. I had no money, no idea of when my first rent payment would become effective, but had lots of faith that I would be seen through with income and lots of good times ahead. About four hours out of Lubbock we hit a flat, and there in the black darkness of a practically moonless Texas night, with 18-wheelers passing by, Lennard changed the tire and was in terrible spirits afterwards. When we got to Lubbock it was close to four in the morning and he was almost on the verge of not speaking to me for the rest of the trip.

After Lennard left things began to change. Within a week I had to go to the hospital because I got sick with my wisdom teeth (terrible abcesses), a resurgence of the horrible pericoronitis I got earlier that year, which almost sent me to the hospital. I have never experienced pain that horrible, neither in my own athletic performance nor in any injury I have yet sustained. To compound my destitution, I was taken via ambulance to the triage, where I was given a strong dose of ibuprofen and told to stay off of my feet, and there had to ask my friend John (who miraculously was out of bed and about to retire) for a ride home. I made it up to him by buying him dinner, and later, Shawn came by to enquire about how I was doing, and to return certain items I had left for him when I went home in the spring of 2010.

And then, something interesting happened. Once I was in school again, I stopped going. I didn’t care about going to school anymore because for the first time in my life, I realized how futile school was. I didn’t care because it was ridiculous to care, with all those personalities, all those incredibly different things to be involved in, all those pretensions which now seemed to me just problematic. And the loneliness ate me up inside. I wanted to talk to anyone and everyone in the world. I wanted to travel. I wanted to focus on just me. I fell in love with loneliness. It’s such a lovely feeling because it’s so invasive and yet, so not invasive. You have everything you want, if you can pay for it. A trip out to the mall (I live just a few blocks from the mall in a well-to-do neighborhood) offers a little luxe when one wants a new book. Paying for my first cell phone in years (wow! responsibility). And all the while, thinking (or pretending) someone is there with me, holding my hand, or talking to me about how their day is, or what sort of thing they remember. I remember feeling so alone and so blissfully at ease walking through Dillard’s, searching for a new pair of shoes. I liked that I had class, that I had anonymity. I liked the fact that I was alone, and that I was being looked at by handsome men, who wanted my money more than my attention, who wanted my time more than just me. I liked telling them, “I’m paying with credit.” It felt good to say that.

Life is so odd. The people we love, all so varied. I have had many many loves over the course of my life, some authentic, some not so authentic, some hysterical, some really, genuinely based from the soul. I can only think of the three men I love in my life with certain credulity: Cameron Davis, Frank Newmyer, Jr., and Scott Stallings. These three men are all different from one another, all with their own lives and worries. Out of these three I’d have to say the prima inter pares, the first among equals, is that little love, that budding, incipient love, that I have for Cameron. I have never loved someone as much I as have loved him, even if it’s from far away. I can only say that it’s because of that long, listless, endlessly torturous love that I’ve been able to survive in some way emotionally, even now. I cried over how far apart we were. Someone like that, someone with class, with verve, with all these talents greater than yours –– makes the world a difficult place in which to live. Someone like that makes you want to be someone else entirely. Someone like that makes you suffer. Frank is the great love of my artistic life because he makes me want to set fire to the whole world. Also someone who has a great many talents, who uses these talents to give meaning and bravely lives out what he wants, what he believes. How can I do that? Sometimes, I have trouble even getting up out of bed. How do you do that, honestly. How does all that fit together. And of course Scott, the great moral love of my life, who wants me to be me, like everyone does. But I am still learning –– I do not even know who or what I am. I’ve gotten lost in the loves of these three men, and I don’t know what to do.

So now, more than a year later, I am a little better off in the world, yet still beset by problems. I am facing an uncertain three months (June’s rent having been paid, I am officially out of groceries AGAIN). I am writing a new novel, the first serious work of long fiction in a while. I am trying to finish school once and for all so that I can move to Portland, Ore., where I will reinvent myself anew. And I am depressed. I pray to God, now, Help me finish what I have started. I am not a quitter. I will see this out and make everyone astonished as to what I have accomplished.

Texas Tech and all of my problems there are once again a vague and distant memory, left in the dust and the desolation of the West Texas plains. This will probably be the last time I will write favorably of such a region, as all it represents to me now is just another place I didn’t fit into. As much as I want to belong to the people and the things there, I just don’t. I came to these sad and desolate places five years before, and left, wondering if I’d ever see it again, and I wonder now, again, if it will be the same. I know, after all the things that have happened there, with graduation now come and gone without any clear prospect of success on the horizon, that things from here on out will never be the same. I don’t know what to expect, maybe I should just pack and leave. I have a couple of job offers: Santa Fe, San Francisco, Mexico, Brazil, Oxford. All of these places beckon to me like distant lovers (because I’ve fallen in love with all of these places). At home, my mother sits and laughs. “You’re crazy, son,” she’ll say, in that wonderfully mocking way, “There’s no way I’m allowing you to go to Brazil with my blessing.” But she knows I’ll go anyway, because essentially I’ll go for what I want when I know that it’ll work for me. After all, everything else has –– education first, then working out (making progress), then a job. My priorities are all mixed up. A boy like me is made of all will but no substance. I’m like a well-built ship on the waters of the sea, but without a sail. But even sail-less ships can arrive at peaceful and tropical ports, on islands far away.

As I write this my computer is slowly dying, the result of a nasty spill it took when I dropped it on a wooden floor in a haste to put on my morning clothes. My own experiences with this beloved little MacBook Air have taught me enough about being grateful for what you have. This computer has been my steady and faithful companion, through the storms of life, ethnolinguisitcs papers, and a thesis. As I write this now I see little brown legs and faces mixing about me. Brown, happy faces, Inland South accents, talk of Tex-Mex for lunch. My people. And even if I really don’t look like them or even share some of the same ideals, I feel bound to them, as if my fortunes are mixed in their livelihoods, and theirs in mine. I have an obligation –– not based on compadrismo (not to be achingly chauvinistic for once), but rather based on a desperate desire to succeed. I keep on being reminded from a passage in John, 1, 42-46, in which a bewildered Nathanael asks the disciple Philip about Jesus. I feel a little like Jesus: not wanted anywhere, and suspected of being just another country bumpkin with an agenda. If my own cynicism about Texas will permit me, I can only say that in those places where I have been rejected –– in the vast expanses of the Desolate Plain, or here, in the Paradise at the Edge of Sanity –– I am motivated by a desire to do as much I as I can to defy everyone’s expectations. I don’t want to be what they expect me to be, because I am nothing of what anyone expects. I am myself. He is, without a doubt, my own worst enemy, and a stranger. I am called to the mirror-lake of self-concept. I do not recognize the face in the reflection. He doesn’t appear to be the successful person I know he is. And when I run my hand against the waters, the image changes. I don’t know who I am anymore.

My thesis’ official title reads: La Madera de Antes, La Madera de Hoy: folk-saints, aging, and the culture of time-keeping and calendar customs in the regional Mexican-American folk religion of the Lower Border. The cover is white, tall Helvetica letters in red and black, with a fat black accent over the a of my last name. There are three little squares featuring pictures I took of a ritual ceremony in Los Fresnos two summers ago (right after the hurricane), and of course, my own little book of Spanish prayers I picked up in a botánica six years ago, when I was a young, hot gay.

When the thesis was done it was, cover-to-cover, 135 pages with citations, notes and a thorough, if not overdone, bibliography. Within weeks of its publication by the University I got at least 40 e-mails from people who were anxious to question its results. One of them, a professor from Missouri State, a frankly obnoxious old fart with two degrees in Linguistics and a abiding interest in Afro-Cuban folk religion, wrote me this:

Just how are you to explain, for example, the prevalence of Afr0-Cuban deities existing without clear evidence of a population of devotées? This would be like saying that there are Indians in Cowboy Country holding pow-wows and that the Indians aren’t being preached to, aren’t having their lands taken away, or being proselytized. Clearly I find a small discrepancy in your way of treating your consultants and questioning the way their religious beliefs are motivated by local forces, especially the drug trade. In Chiapas I have not found any sort of evidence for the veneration of “folk saints” that are clearly not of Mexican origin…

I need not explain, however, that because of the influx of the drug-trade in northern Mexico and the border, the constant confluence of Afro-Cuban, Haitian, and Afro-Brazilian folk religious traditions abide. Where the money and the drugs go, there go the beliefs of the people as well. And Chiapas, I might add, is full of Kich’è Maya people who have their own gods. Of course, the Indians still have pow-wows in White Man’s country, they still sell goods on the side of the roads that the White Man has built. These things have survived and will survived, inasmuch as the Church outlaws its practices and suppresses cults it has objections to. The Senhor do Bonfim will still be prayed to and His church in Bahia will be washed down with rose and jasmine water the local women, clad in garments reminiscent of slave liveries with much devotion prepare.

But for the most part the responses to my thesis were long, deliberate, and sometimes, very hurtful. My two advisors tore the entire thing apart, mercilessly exposing its flaws,  especially in regards to one of my professors, of whom I thought I could confide in her friendship and general amiability. She said that my work was “poorly thought out” and that I needed to “return to the drawing board” when it came to talking about things that I’ve known about all my life. I tried to write this great work with as much objectivity and passion as possible. I removed personal thoughts and whims. I tried to stay as reasoned and as open as possible. But, it seems, like all the other things I’ve tried to do well, it made people more upset then I intended it to be.

CJ and Paul, my little brother and his wife, are not even speaking to one another anymore: she left in a torrent of tears and curses, and then, one night, ran her brand new Camaro into a telephone pole. The weekend before last (a very bad, hot weekend), she disappeared into the South Texas night after her grandfather and grandmother (horrible people, apparently) found her doing things she oughtn’t (namely, doing lines of coke in their garage). She ran off with the guy she’s been sleeping with (also named Paul) into some godforsaken orange grove off of Highway 281, with the intention of evading responsibilities for one blessed weekend. Alarmed, and apparently with the idea in his head that she was in danger, my little brother spent his gas money on one weekend driving back and forth between city, looking high and low for this crazy woman. And when he did indeed find her, in hot Venusian embraces of the other man, she got mad at him! It turned out the entire thing was a ruse to get Paul to have her move into our house again. We were all furious. Paul, predictably, was hurt, and I don’t think he’ll be talking to her for some time now. You know, it still hurts. He hurts every time he thinks of her. I hope I never get to that point in a relationship with someone I love.

I’m thinking of doing a little bit of traveling: first to Santa Fe for an interview, then maybe to visit Scott-Scott in the fall, finally. I bought a couple of nice things for him down here and am hoping he will love them. I think the time is now I need to make my life, as it looks like neither South Texas nor West Texas may be the best idea for my sustenance.

I dreaded flying back. The flights were almost full, end to end, row to row, from Harlingen to Houston to here. My resentment of flying was only made worse by seeing row after row of self-important, self-aggrandizing business travelers with their quaint cell phones and their PDAs, and their attitudes, and their condescensions. I didn’t want to go back. I kept on imagining my mother, waiting there, her brown purse on her white sweatered arm. I just wanted to run back down the stairs of separating the boarding area and the waiting area and hug her again. I kept on looking back over my shoulder to see where she was. But after twenty minutes standing in line in the security queue she left, and I could see her walk out, and the tears started welling up and stinging my eyes. I remember when I was five years old and I could run to her for everything, whether it scared or fascinated me. And after all this time growing up and getting big and being an adult, I still want to run to her and fold myself into her.

On the plane my hands shook. I don’t like flying on planes, and unfamiliar people scare me. I tend to sit towards the very back so I don’t bother anyone with my presence. Every time I fly, I think about updating this journal, but in recent months I haven’t been able to. So many things have happened, both good and bad. I cannot count them on my fingers or on my toes. I can only count them in vague remembrances that my mental life consists of. So many names! So many faces! So many passing occurrences, now remembered, now forgotten.

It has been more than a year now since I first arrived here to this city on the Plain. I remember first arriving to it in the dark five years ago, when it was just a mass of amber colored light against the West Texas darkness. In that time, my heart has been broken many times, people have died, or moved away, or moved on. I have seen things, I have been to places. Even now, more than a month after my life-changing trip to Santa Fe, I feel as if more is stored up for me. I have rode this raft on an ocean of tears, and it has taken me far and wide to distant and exotic shores. I have withstood the blows of this world; I have survived now. And now it seems that Lubbock –even Texas in general– no longer seem suitable for fostering the spiritual and intellectual growth I have so far wanted in my life.

In that hotel room off of Cerrillos Road in Santa Fe — it was dim and cold and it was snowing — I wrung out the last of my frustrations in a tear stained rant against everything I was. I hate my body. I hate my poverty. I hate my arrogance, my pride. I hate that thing which makes me hate others. I hate the loneliness, the dejection, the outright misunderstanding. I have pushed everyone I know away, and the stragglers just linger on with curiosity. Some watch and wait until I produce my own demise, others hang on knowing better. I am like a bomb going off in the desert; I consume everything in my path, and become a spectacle. My poisonous influence hangs on for a long time, and I am like the dust of the field.

Who knows where I’ll be this time next year? I don’t know. I wish I could foretell the future. But I can’t. I just wait for things to happen, and then act reflexively. Schoolwork has lost alot of its meaning. I began taking the last bits of my cultural anthropology classes with a certain Dr. Harris. She’s a good teacher but she is cold. She’s cold because that’s what she’s learned. She’s not cold to me when I talk to her outside of class. I have her now for my Ethnography course. But everything I have learned in that class is not really of note — sure, it bears theoretical importance, Malinowski and Boas and Geertz — but I feel like the theory is the most important thing for her, not the people one works with. Last semester I worked with a real son-of-a-bitch in Ethnomusicology, who bullied me into doing my work. I know this sounds unfair, but he did. Too often professors do these things to their students. There was one day I was so overwhelmed with work and school I literally collapsed outside of my door. I just didn’t have enough strength in me to continue doing what I needed to complete. And it wasn’t like my roommate, Steven, would do anything to help. Living with him has become so tedious, so annoying that there are times where I literally cannot complete my schoolwork because he is here, in this room. Twice he has brought in his atrocious girlfriend (she is from Belarus) and they have taken the pleasures of Venus in my presence. I feel like I can’t criticize or say anything, because he usually tends to attack me by asking circular questions, things like “how can you expect me to respect you when you can’t even respect yourself?” or “why do you have to lack integrity? if you had more integrity we’d be able to get along more”. And I honestly don’t care. He’s lonely and he wants to have friends. I can’t blame him for that. But we are two different people. We have differing interests. We couldn’t possibly, if ever, have anything in common except for our place here within this dwelling. I can’t stand him. All the while on the plane I dreaded seeing him, or his girlfriend, the messy room. This has been the source of all my worries, because if I can’t sleep I can’t make good grades and if I can’t make good grades I can’t graduate. I’d love to throw my things in a huge suitcase and just leave. That’s all I want to do, come back and take care of my family and work and have my old bed again. But I know that this is acceding to defeat and that is not what I originally intended when I came to this great institution.

I realize now that I’ve made changes in my life that it’s so much better just to be yourself. Compared to other people I am just a normal person with normal problems. Things haven’t gone disastrously. No great catastrophes yet, as my old friend Seth used to say. I still want to be the bodybuilder I’ve always wanted to be. And I want to be a better human being. I want to escape this death march of college, and get out before it consumes me alive. I don’t want to be another drone in an office complex somewhere. I want to taste of the ambrosia of a living culture, to breathe its air, to drink its waters and suck on its sweet nectars. I want the air to be filled with foreign constellations and the smell of clove and jackfruit. I want to visit Brazil and do my fieldwork. No more Steven Gateses, no more Chris Mielkes, nothing like that. I will finally exorcize the demon of the American insular persepective (“me, me, me; I want, I want, I want”) forever, and it will never darken my doorway again.

I will live. I will seek out those fountains, like I sought out waters and earth in Chimayó, and in empty square of Mesilla, New Mexico. I will find myself in my body, once I remove all this bullshit existence, and reclaim the glories and crowns that are awaiting me.

Leaving Texas was the best thing I have ever done. I felt, for the first time, finally at home somewhere other than Harlingen or any of the other places I’ve been to. I’m tearing up right now because of how special it feels; to not worry about people that hate you or situations you keep on remembering or assignments or professors or even just having to be in school. There are some times I wanted to escape: to just pack everything up in a suitcase, and leave, and never look back, because of all the trouble I had found myself in. At least in New Mexico I could be myself with Shawn, and I wouldn’t have to be ashamed, or lie, or make things up. In New Mexico, I discovered, I could be more myself than ever, because no one really knew me, and for the first time, I could be myself and not have to worry about getting funny looks for speaking Spanish with an accent, because everyone does it there. For the first time in a long time I was just Joe, and not MeJoe, I wasn’t a student; I was a tourist, I was anonymous and ethereal.

Now that the façades are gone –– dispelled in a torrent of tears in Room 234 at Travelodge off Cerrillos Road –- I can start thinking about where my life is going. No more pain, no more worries, no more suffering at the hands of others or myself. No more wasted days, no more tear-stained nights, no more anguish, no more guilt, no more pity.

The last time I had written was in August. The day I arrived in Lubbock I was met by Shawn, my good friend from last semester, whom I had asked to keep some things for me (namely two pillows and a blanket) in his car since I couldn’t take them home on the plane. I cannot tell you the sense of exhaustion and foreboding that the heat of that summer afternoon held–the apprehension, the sense that things somehow weren’t going right. A couple of days later I had had a dream of a terrible thunderstorm breaking over my house, the kind endemic to South Texas in the summertime. I took that for an omen that I had serious karmic debts to repay. And it was true, everything that has now culminated to this moment of reflection has been one great path of suffering, each step filled with agonizing decisions and conclusions, but ultimately good for my soul, and the eventual completion of the Great Work appointed to me.

The first couple of weeks were relatively hurried. Collegium is now just a medieval improvisation workshop, since the majority of the members have now either graduated or moved away to other institutions (Lauren, the disgruntled graduate student who never really bothered to get to know me, moved off to Tennessee, Dann went to Yale), leaving Kelly, Austin, Nate and myself at the helm, with Dr. Mariani teaching the rudiments of organum, teaching out of the very treatise on the discipline. I was sort of disappointed in learning that we wouldn’t have a performance date this semester. I had brought my concert shoes up for nothing! But I did find other ways of performing music, and staying in the loop. Before I left Harlingen I finished up writing film scores for two directors who had commissioned me–one of them a documentary on a forest ranger and his crumbling marriage, the other a love story. Sérgio played three of these when I came to see him in Brownsville. I never thought–not even for a second–that I would ever find myself writing out music this tonal. I never thought I had it in me, but these things come with hard work and dedication to form, to harmony, and to counterpoint. I am proud that I was able to accomplish something this small but so overwhelmingly meaningful. It perhaps was one of those sweet moments that rarely arose throughout this difficult season, some sort of balm of Gilead that has made the wounds of this present time a little less painful.

There have been many, many, interpersonal disasters. To begin with, my assigned roommate, Glen, turned out not liking homosexuals (“I have to tell you, I’m not really comfortable with that.”). Then he complained (I heard this through other sources) that he didn’t feel comfortable talking about racial matters, being that I happen to be of Hispanic descent. And to make matters worse, his friend, whom he had wanted to live with all along, began to make complaints about his roommate, who via Glen’s somewhat skewed telling of the story said that he slept all day, did little work, and did not like African-Americans (Glen and his friend are Black). Finally Glen said to me, “I’m moving out” one fine day, and he did, and in walked Steven Gates.

He is 24 years old, from Houston. What struck me immediately about his character was his generally friendly, if not anxiety addled demeanor. He tends to be phreatic, gesturing wildly and fluctuating his intonation according to the various emotionally volatile states that he tends to find himself. He has been on anti-anxiety medication for a couple of months now, resulting, as he has told me, from a particularly nasty breakup with an ex girlfriend he loved. I don’t know exactly what to make of him, as there are days when he can be particularly childish and insistent, as a spoiled child, in getting his way. And there are some days where I am perfectly at ease with him, free from misunderstandings or very often the arguments that preclude any sense of peace or seclusion in our room.

I am too old now, for these childish diversions. What originally seemed like a wonderful, fantastic getaway (I told Scott once, “a vacation of learning”), has now lost the lustre it used to possess. Out there, outlying beyond the banalities of campus existence, is Texas. It used to be that just the mere thought of the open road would send chills down my spine, and now I long for that sort of consummate philosophical experience. I crave the corporeality of it. I desire so much from the world, and I fail both myself and the world fails me. I look to it for so many rewarding experiences, but I am so disappointed in them. I try constantly to set myself free from the bonds of forced responsibility, but my conscience prevents me from leaving a job before I can finish it. My age calls me to complete it as soon as I can. And my overreaching disgust for that pseudo-intellectual farce known as the American insular perspective is so palpable, so embittering, that all I can think of is just packing up, moving on, up, and away from people, what one arrogant ass called “perpetuating my isolation”.

This is the biggest I have ever been. I am now 30 pounds overweight, and I am not doing anything, aside from the usual routine at the gym, about it. It’s not that I don’t want to try, it’s because I have no time in my schedule now. This is unforgivable to me. I have always found time to do the things I like to do. And, as surprising as it might sound, working out happens to be a passion of mine. I used to wake up in the morning feeling the exhilaration of being able to lift a 60 pound weight all by myself, and now all I can think of is how overweight I am, how nothing I have really fits well anymore, how many pairs of shoes (being, you know, gay and all) I would like to buy. I question what I am doing in my physical body. I used to know it so well, but now it seems so foreign–so alien, so not me–that all I want to do is be someone else, be like someone else, look like someone else. Something other than what people really love. Mejoe in the summer rain. Mejoe at the piano, extemporizing. Mejoe hogging the pizza. Mejoe singing opera. Mejoe not being anyone else but Mejoe. I don’t know, I guess I want to be whiter, richer, more in control of my life. But then one has to concede it comes with limitations. For one, everyone knows me as Mr. Culture. That’s all I talk about. Somewhere, if I were to be someone else entirely–to become somehow a less cultured person–it would involve me giving up everything I know. I’m not proud of where I come from. I think of my poor mother and how much she suffered on account of my silly lifestyle choices. I wish I hadn’t run away from home so early to pursue fame and then almost kill myself when things didn’t work out. I wish I hadn’t made those horrible lifestyle decisions that made me what I am now. I wish every day I didn’t do the things I did to make her cry at night in fear, terror, desperation, anger or sadness, because it’s shortened not only her life but that of my grandfather, and I feel already complicit in his passing as a result of my disrespectful and dishonest treatment of him. These things I think about all the time. They can, and never will, go away. They are like keloids after burns–raised against the surface of the skin, scar tissue, thick and numb and stubby. The memories never go away, and during times like these they lay open fresh and bloody.

I am convinced there are people–people I know and have known–who used to like me but do not. I brought these things on myself and I completely take responsibility. I am tormented by their torments. I wish I didn’t have these thoughts or images. Instead, I wish to liberate myself from them. Suicide would be so wonderfully easy, so effortless. It would just be transitioning states. It would be the only thing to rid from me these thoughts of inadequacy, pain, suffering, silence, discontinuity. But I would rather have it the hard way–since I like doing everything the hard way–and no matter what might happen or who might say what, I would be a liar to not say that somewhere I mean something to someone. I just have to push through and be the person I need to be. Oh, how much I need to be there. I need to be bigger, stronger, faster, more built. I need to love myself. I need to die to the world. I need to go far away, where people will never ever use me, or hurt me, or make me feel unloved or unhappy. I will and must cut off all of my connections to toxic people. Shortly after this semester began, I blocked a former good friend of mine on AIM because he was just so annoying, so confrontational, so absolutely shallow and vain and maniacal about body image and sex that it drove me literally insane. The only reason why he did this was to get under my skin, to make me feel bad for not being one of his fans. Even though I had liked him I had to say that I wasn’t interested in him, that for my own sanity’s sake I had to abandon these false hopes and plans and visions of how I might change the scenario for him, how I might make him a better person. But he is consigned to himself and to his desires, and I mine, and there is nothing I can do, nor he, to change that.

I can only think of the good people now who love me consummately. I am a good, decent, loveable person. I drive people insane with my inability to feel good about myself but what I lack in self-esteem I make up for in intelligence. But I am by no means W.H. Auden. I need to be alive physically. I need to be active. I need to explore myself and my sexuality in a way that no longer demonizes the stereotype of gay culture for its inherent inabilities to be self-critical. I don’t want to die an unhappy, unhealthy, sick, brilliant person. I want die with a huge body, with a developed, active mind, with an amazing sense of purpose, morality, and the love of cultures, languages, traditions, and folkways, but most of all, with a love of self and a determination to make things work. I fumble in the dark sometimes. I cannot find my lantern or my keys. But I so desperately want so much to live, to live as none has ever lived before, that I am going to die if I don’t. I am stifled by the façades I have placed for people’s approval. And all I want, is to leave the physical body and its fetters aside, and ascend to the higher forms I am meant for.

This must happen.

It turned out that my wonderful mother had been harboring several large gallstones–including two that were the size of baseballs–for years. This had come from years of bad nutrition, smoking, high blood pressure, diabetes, and stressful living conditions. The ensuing infection that came about from this was so widespread most of the fluid (a dark greenish, bilious, pyotic fluid) had invaded the cavities inbetween the gallbladder and her stomach, and caused gastrointestinal distress. For three nights she suffered with little water to drink, as water would just aggravate the motions to vomit again, nor any comfort whatsoever, but instead she sat up through the night, hour after hour heaving nothing but that fluid, which had the unmistakable smell of burnt, rotten almonds. The doctors said they could do little while her vocal chords were burnt by pint after pint of stomach acid. And there I was, not sure of what to do myself, since the little medical training I had had were of little use in the situation. All I could do was sit by her side, run the palm of my hand over her hair, and hold her hand. It was horrible.

For the first time in my life, I was confronted with the future spectre of what will inevitably happen to my mother. She will die, and I will be left without her. That feeling is the scariest, most unhappy feeling in the world for me right now–knowing that the only person who can really understand you, at least objectively, will no longer be there to understand you. Then what happens? Well, if one is truly lucky, one can be grateful for her life, and move on completely happy and vouchsafed in the knowledge of her positive influence. But for me, I can only think of the immense maw that would be left with her absence, the knowledge that she had indeed gone forever, never to return, not to reciprocate an embrace or a smile over food. It will be the most horrible, trying time of my life–as if it could not get any more trying as it is.

i think I cried for several nights after that. I had been looking forward to more positive aspects; my birthday was in a couple a weeks, and all I could think about was an excursion to the seaside with my friends whom I hadn’t seen for a while. The weather gave no consolation. It has been hot since the day I arrived in Harlingen, and was so when I left, now two weeks ago. Day after day the same scenario prevailed, as it often does in the plains of South Texas: the hot and intemperate sun, rising furiously out of a bank of night clouds, its face bright and unwavering in its brilliance, making the ground too hot for bare feet and eyes. And night would come, a stinking, festering humid mass of air that came down after the sunlight had faded into blue and then deep blue and then purple, and with it big junebugs, soldier beetles and gnats. I slept the majority of the summer without air conditioning, in an overcrowded room that my brother and his girlfriend used as storage. Night after night I had to get up around two because it would be too hot to sleep, and I’d only be in underwear or maybe just a sheet, and then I would shower just to cool off. And it seemed then the heat was too intense even for sleeping, as neither comfort nor consolation could cause me to rest, just knowing how much my mother was suffering in the hospital.

Originally the doctors had planned for the gallbladder to be removed rather quickly, as the nature of the severity of her infection caused concern for the rest of her body, but during a test procedure anesthesia was improperly administered, and through shrieks of pain my mother said she was being disemboweled. Her heart rate and blood pressure went up, and when it was deemed that she could not endure the test procedure, she was sent to the Critical Care Unit of the hospital for evaluation. I had been not even a couple of minutes at home after a stressful move with my cousin before I had to go back to the hospital, and rushed the fastest I have ever rushed to see how she was. She was and would be fine, we were told, my aunts and my little brother and me; there had been a mistake and they would correct it. However the inept doctor decided that, in order to be careful, a catherization was necessary. After my mother was sent home from the hospital (on my birthday, the day my little brother and his wife were married rather unceremoniously in the hall of the Justice of the Peace), she told me she was afraid of what might happen to her during the catherization. Immediately she began to talk about her death as if it had been written on marble, and the undertaker was coming to recieve her body–how I needed to reconcile with my brother, how I needed to assume control, being that I was the only son who was trying to make something of himself–and I wanted nothing to do with it. At least, not at this age. I’m too young to be the executor of a will, better yet, of a small amount of money and a cheese-holed insurance policy that probably wouldn’t even cover funeral expenses. My little brother said he would make sure to take my share and make it so that he and his wife were well off, but everything that belonged to me was suddenly not mine, my name not even worth the paper it will be printed on.

Typical afternoons in South Texas are spent under the shade of the outside sunporch, where the breeze from the Gulf comes around three and sends refreshing air to stir up the still and unbearable morning heat, which is always somehow worse than the afternoon heat, because of its intense humidity. We had to buy another air conditioning unit from my cousin who had sold hers upon entering her new apartment, and this one suited my mother’s old room just fine, making it a delectable prison for her to lounge about in. Because that is exactly what it was–a prison. For five weeks my Mother was not allowed to do anything–no lifting of anything heavy, no washing the dishes, no attending to the laundry, no driving (which she was not happy about either). My good-for-nothing brother, having quit his job, refused to do any housework, delegating it to his new wife, who refused to do so as well. So I attended to the washing, the mopping, the cooking and cleaning, the daily duties I have been so well accustomed to, and which I have to do, because no one else will. I have the hard work ethic in me as much as I do a gene that allows for good muscle growth.

No one can say now that I am a bad soon, because I have made so many sacrifices for my family’s sake, and for my own. If anyone wishes to call me a martyr then, so be it–better a triumphant martyr, who bears his sufferings quietly and patiently, rather than a person who shies from responsibility. This, therefore, is my cross. I embrace it, I love it; I will endure what I need to endure in order to be on a higher plane than those who would so easily give into baser aspirations. I will do whatever I have to do–whatever comes forth from the power that I can will–to make myself and the world a better place, regardless of whatever ideologies I may not necessarily agree with. This is actual power–that is, actualizing in its unique nature. It comes from great distress, great suffering–the image is of a massive release of energy during an earthquake. People are moved. Buildings, moved. Environments, disrupted. To move through this world being sure of oneself absolutely is a responsibility that few people have. It comes with great trials. These trials make us who we are, or they break us. I have been broken so many times that I do not know if I will even be alive at the end of the day but I keep doing it because I know something better has to come.

I have to admit, I’m not an altogether sort of person yet. There are social façades, and these run deep, cutting deep into self-esteem and self-concept, making everything from picking out good shoes to making lasting friendships difficult. I know I am not destined for a life of quiet acceptance–it’s too easy when too many people have saved you to do that. But something has to be better than this life of repugnance, of desperation, of constant and finite suffering. Desperation has moved me hurriedly on a plane to a city of the Plains, to school and back again, from nightmare to dream to reality to fading and incipient visions. It has run me through painful relationship to painful relationship, from the anger and confusion of misunderstood lives and opinions to the unending sense of inner self-conflict, the the kind that ravages the conscience deep at night, when one is supposed to feel good about what one has accomplished. I feel like I have such a long way to go; so much to get over. And it would seem so easy as to just forget about what people think–but I am a type of person who does things the hard way, and I can’t say I don’t like people to like me for being a good person. I am a good person, I keep on telling myself I am; no matter what I look like or say or think. I just want to be in a good place with everyone, because I hate having to play emotional catch-up, or even worse, cutting them off when it seems that they might not just be interested anymore.

Someone once said to me that I would just end up perpetuating my isolation by not really being myself. How is it possible to not be yourself and be yourself at the same time? It happens all the time. We put on masks that hide our identity and intentions from others, and our selective choices fit the context of the people we want to be in good standing with. Would you dream of showing your stash of gay porn to your friends at a Christmas party? Would you confess to your spouse or significant other about coveting that which is not yours to begin with? I could go on, but it is a uniquely human trait to be multifaceted, and this definitely applies in social situations, as well. To some people with the confidence and inner emotional strength, it is easy, but with me it is like trying to light damp matches. It starts up, but takes much nurturing. The fire is incipient, barely there almost, but it can grow to be ardent and defiant, even against the darkness and the damp of the world.

My soul. What is it to have a soul? It is a vital essence. It cannot be overcome; yet it feels overwhelmed, smothered by societal expectations, the ennui of day-to-day experience, the horrible little tragdies of day-to-day business, the catastrophes of rejection and dis-alliance. And yet people like me continue, burned beyond recognition, like those who self-immolate themselves in protests, breathing and bleeding, burned and broken, but still alive. I am alive, I will be. My life doesn’t end on the side of a road, or under the base of a tree or a supporting beam of a house, or in the incarnadine residue of a gunshot blast. Whatever pushes me to the Upper World, and to the continuance of the Great Work, pushes me on, to the point of exhaustion; the pain is exhilirating and completely sublime.

No one has been through what I have been through. My experiences are my own. I want to share with the world a sense of appreciation, of love; but through this much suffering must come about, weight must be lost and gained, weights lifted, things to be done, books read, papers written, diplomas handed out, then doctorates, people invited over for weekends, impressions made, meals cooked. Tears must be shed, blood spilt, the cross carried up and over and finally to Calvary, the last stampede and push towards something limitless and invisible. But now I can depend on myself for my own sustenance. I am a big, well-built man. I have spent many years depreciating myself, but I am now at a point where the crucible has been made, and I am ready for purifications and sacrifices. I am ready.

Most of the day I spend working here at the house, or working out. I am eating lighter now, as the season and as the almanac suggests, and less fare that might otherwise be too heavy or too hot to make in a kitchen without the benefit of air-conditioning. I learned the hard way: three days of Hamburger Helper did not bode neither healthy nor appetizing. So now I am just sticking to light meals at lunch, the colazione or light midday meal, a snack in the middle of the afternoon (something like fruit), and then a palatable yet restrained, supper. I don’t get the opportunity to really eat as healthily as I should here, since our rations are restrained by price and therefore we buy what we can afford. My mother has said she knows the less we eat altogether, the better it will last for the month, but already I can think of my little brother’s girlfriend making an absolute mess of something in the kitchen, besides wasting food for special occasions, which I am completely against. If there is anything I hate more in the world, it is waste, and me and my mother have had to suffer with wastefulness for almost a year now, while both my little brother and his girlfriend run through milk, bread, eggs, sugar, coffee, orange juice and meat at the rate of some great establishment.

People, I know, stand in bewilderment at our exception. A former friend of mine said to me that he couldn’t understand how people could live the way we do. It seems that most of the people I have spoken to have never been in the situation that we now call normal–no one has ever had to go without, but then again, inasmuch as we are in debt, it cannot be more than those who live so extravagantly and then make off-the-cuff judgments about the way we live. Then again, those people have had little life experience as it is, dealing only with the environment they’ve been raised in. It doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, though. Those people are off in a world where their lives are seemingly determined by issues of control, desire, and affordability. It isn’t really “authentic” if your entire world is dominated by people who believe the same things you do, or enjoined by the same social causes, or even belief in a higher power or not. These things were ordered by people for the sake of conserving social power among a people ordered for it, not necessarily open to new or different entities. What’s uniquely horrible about my own experience in this world is that I have been both repelled and attracted by it–repelled that people can make value judgments and say audacious lies and assassinations of character, and attracted by the false sense of eqanimity it seems to promise, an absolution of shame from the lesser world I come from. I realize my own problems come from a denial of the culture of where I come from, a shame in knowing that the same people I’ve idolized all my life are the ones I don’t want to acknowledge because I would be rocking the boat of white mass-culture identity. But I know that is failing both myself as an individual and the many different and varied cultures that I have been priveleged to have been raised in. So many people don’t want to face their own selves because of this shame–the shame of being raised poor, or even in the middle class suburbs, or in a strictly religious family, or one in which a careless agnosticism seemed to reign supreme. Then there is this sense of emotional denial–denial that, since the prevailing psychological demand, at least institutionally speaking, is that we have to be calm and detached from situations we believe to be emotionally distressing, we take this home and apply it to one another. Someone said to me, “I don’t care how people feel. Never has crossed my mind.” Why would someone feel this way? And then of course I discovered why–because people suffer from immense emotional cowardice. They cannot cope with these emotions I and many people feel because they themselves have never experienced it, or are otherwise dismissive of it. It is a double tragedy–a sense of failure at not recognizing someone or something worthy or beautiful, and the actual act of rejection. A corollary tragedy to this is thinking that we can never enjoy something beautiful ever again because of past traumas. And then, as if to perpetuate these things, we force our own issues on other people, belittling them in the process, and making them feel wholly unloved, unwanted and socially leprous.

I realize now that I am destined to live my life outside of social influence–it is not just a requirement for my own happiness, it is a social mandate in itself. It is not that I do not want to mingle with people, or enjoy being around them, it is a feeling of permanent and pervasive seperation from the idle trivialities of human existence. I have lived apart from standard social norms for most of my life–beginning life without a father, then never finding social acceptance for that and other things, then moving on to a life physiologically seperated from normative social reality, then the questions of sexual, racial and cultural identity. I realize I am going to be on my own for a long time, and I am not afraid of it. I was able to eke out an existence of purely private means, all by myself in Lubbock. I will do so again. The wonderful thing about all of this is that a life apart is full of not only independence, but interdependence. Peter Garland once said to me, “I’d rather live as a little fish in a big ocean than as a big fish in a little pond.” And that’s the best part, being completely anonymous and detached from the insanity of the world, from its depravity, from its ceaseless and meaningless noise and outcry. I don’t want to belong not because the world rejects me, but because I openly reject it and refuse to let it consume me alive.

Part of my own personal desire for betterment is not only emotional stability, but strength to keep fighting for what I believe to be the right and proper things. I have to keep myself healthy and fit because I know I am on the right track and that I’m not going to end up as a just a big blob of goo like everyone else. I’m not going to die of complications from diabetes, like most of my family. I’m not going to contract HIV and die of AIDS, like some of my friends and family have. I’m not going to be so apathetic as to sink into a life of self-contentedness and shut myself up in some fortress of a house, worth more than my entire assets put together and impossible to pay for. And I’m not going to give my heart to someone who doesn’t appreciate me, who can’t appreciate me for the things I have spent most of life here on Earth studying and appreciating. Most importantly, I will never, ever again give into the completely wrong opinions of people who have never known me, never heard of what I am talking about, never bothered thinking of others, and never bothered to even discover what I have discovered. One of my friends told me a story as to why he quit college: simply stated, he hated the fact that so many people affirmed one particular music theory over another. He got tired of being told what to do, and what to think. I never ever want to be oppressed by people who don’t know what I’m good at to tell me I’m not good at what I’m doing. I will never sacrifice my own integrity for someone else’s useless opinions. And I will never, ever quit doing is good enough for me–whether that might be bodybuilding (because it IS a reality, I’m not just some guy doing it for the lulz), or ethnomusicology, or cultural studies, or living in South Texas, at the end of the state, or living the way I do, on my own terms. I may be angry but it is that anger which perpetuates me to work for the benefit of others, to do more for myself and society in general, and the betterment of the world.

The flight itself was agreeable. The morning in Lubbock had been cloudy and dismal and foggy, very much like what I had arrived to when I first came to Lubbock all those months ago, back in January. So it seemed like a fitting end to my first semester in Lubbock. To my knowledge, I passed all my classes, excepting the one Personal Financial Planning course, from which I withdrew because it is a useless and stupid course, and too expensive withal, and definitely a big mistake on my part for even choosing to involve myself with all the money. The atmosphere in that classroom was particularly tense and somewhat full of revulsion, as the current economic crisis seemed only to underscore the futility, experienced on the part by some of my younger colleagues, to save for a future now all but blasted by their parents’ greediness and disillusion. But on the whole the instructor was friendly and had a most agreeable comportment, and in the future I might take more classes, as time and interest permits.

Dann is now gone. He left about two or three days ago, by my reckoning, just as the rain was beginning to fall the way it does this time of year, in the warm and hazy afternoon. He sent me a short text message saying that he hadn’t seen anything in his in folder outside his office (meaning the gift book I bought him as a parting gift), and wishing me a good summer. I am pretty confident in the future I will be able to see him again in Connecticut, where he will be for some time now. He was a good teacher to me and he has been such a good friend. I only hope now that I can continue to apply what I have learned to future endeavours and my own personal and artistic progression.

As for everyone else–on campus, that is–I met with Dr. Jocoy for a bit just before I left and made plans that upon my return in the fall I would pursue a course in independent studies in musicology with her, with a focus on “non-western Baroque”, or, more credibly, Baroque music in Latin America. What I do not wish to do is to conduct research on music already present in the musicological record; what I am looking for is discovering new music and writing about it. I am looking at two very distinct musicological fields–research and analysis. There has been much written about Latin American traditions of the Baroque in colonial New Spain, in particular that in Mesoamerica, but little has been written about music from specific areas of that part of the world (I am looking at Afro-Hispanic music from Veracruz, Oaxaca, Michoacán) and mission music from early Alta California (modern day Southern California), and native syncretism with Baroque elements (such as the oft-written connection with Baroque violin techinque and the development of folk music). I am expecting, hopefully, to be able to introduce possibly playable music that has never been heard or played before, or, even more hopefully, to produce a body of work that will be the first work written about a musical subject in the record.

I have finally returned to Calendar studies after a time away researching folkloristics and culturally bound illnesses. The latter culminated in something of a renascence of an interest in traditional folk medicine and healing, and I hope by 2012 to have at least a primer for medical professionals in dealing with an increasing problem among non-English speakers in dealing with real medical problems simply labelled as a culturally bound syndrome. What I am now interested is not so much computus as martyrologies, particularly the doubtful ones (I am called to think of Sts. Barlaam and Josaphat, simply a coverup for a story about the Buddha and his disciple). I hope I can conduct more research into that field as well, which will probaby include getting a copy of Butler’s Lives, which is probably the most substantive book about the saints ever compiled, but which I have never been able to afford. With all of these things I hope I can gain a clearer understanding of the nature of cultural intelligence.

Toward the end of the semester, there were contingencies that have now presented some very interesting situations. For one, I know have a $264.00 bill for food, the result of running out of “dining bucks” for my meal plan (already flawed enough as it is), which has prevented me from registering for fall classes and getting my grades. The good news is I can go back anytime I want to, so things will definitely be looking for me in the long run. I do hope this summer passes by quickly, as I cannot even begin to think about staying down here. I love my education and want to continue it, and now I am just beginning to taste the success that awaits me.

I am not sure of where my life will take me now. However, this is the happiest I think I have ever been, and I hope now that I have some serious considerations for a life-encompassing passion that I think I can claim as my own. What will happen now is anyone’s guess. But I do hope that I can keep on physically, morally, psychologically, spiritually and educationally growing. I just hope everything works out for me.

South Texas has not changed. It is still the perennially tropical, mosquito ridden paradise it has always been. Arriving at the terminal in the fullest of the afternoon sunlight I was hit pratically in the face by the hot humid air of home. Paul and his girlfriend CJ were practically unrecognizeable. Paul is now heavier than he has ever been, overweight by some 60 or 70 pounds and unable to close the zipper on pants that are twice too small for him; CJ is dumpy and pockmarked, her dark hair stringy and crinkled from a life of abuse. When Mother got home she hugged me, though I could tell from her eyes she is tired and weary of her situation. I cried when I said she looked so and told her I missed her for the short time I was away from home. To celebrate, she went down to the bakery and fetched some sweet bread for us, and we all sat down and she informed me of the recent developments at the house. For one, CJ has come into a sizeable amount of income resulting from a structured settlement she will be recieving upon completion of her 17th year–the sum of which is an estimated $21,000. This means that she and Paul will be moving hence from the house we all live in, and perhaps giving to my mother some $1200 for the fees incurred from her coming to live here after the terrible hurricane we experienced summer last, and that we all will therefore move from that house–them to their own, my mother and I to a new residence–hopefully very soon. This news, however tentative, comes as welcome news to us, who are now having to contend with a house falling apart from the years of decay and weathering it has had from its very shoddy construction, relatives who do not approve of the current living situation (my own return from college included) and a host of other financial and situational problems stemming from my brother’s arrest and detention last year, which all of us are frankly tired of.

I miss all my friends. I never get tired of thinking about them and do miss being able to talk to them. However I think at the same time after all the trouble I had with making new friends this past semester and all the terrible choices I made in making those friends, a break from social interaction and its perils is most welcome after a season of highs and lows. I talk to a few people now on the telephone, in particular Jeff, and my friend Frank, and my ex-boyfriend Ryan, who is always busy now, working for American Airlines. I think things will be much better friend-wise now that I have cut off the majority of a friend base wholly unattractive to me. I am glad to be rid of them all, and the distractions they sometimes offer.