OK, get ready for a depressing blog entry. Hopefully it’s interesting. Maybe it’ll just be boring, I don’t know. I’ve been wanting to write this for a while but I”ve been really busy. The other day, I had this bad dream. I was at my mom’s house in Houston. I was standing in her bedroom talking on the phone to my granmother. And she sounded really tired. She sounded so exhausted. I told her that I was going to come visit her, and all she would say was, “OK, Panchito, whatever you say. I’ll be right here.” In the dream, her voice really worried me. I became convinced that she was preparing to die, and her fatigue was a sign that she had quit and was giving in to death. I got real alarmed and I started sobbing; really, really, really crying. It was the first time that I’ve ever cried in a dream. It was very interesting. I truly was experiencing the sensation of crying. I was running around the house looking for my mom because I was going to tell her that her mother, my granma, was about to die. I couldn’t find her though. I remember in the dream, it was daytime and there was lots of sunlight coming in through the windows, but there was nobody there. And then, I stopped right in the middle of the living room, and I was just standing there in the middle of the room, and that’s when I stopped and realized that it was all just a dream, but you know how sometimes when you realize that you’re dreaming, it makes you wake up? Well, that didn’t happen. I just remained there standing in that living room of my childhood. And then, I began to wonder: “Wait, I thought my grandmother was already dead. Didn’t she already die, Tomatoes?” “Tomatoes, you gotta stop and think this over. Why don’t you remember whether or not our granma’s dead or not?” “OK, OK, OK, now I remember. She died in October. Remember?” And then I woke up and all day and even up until now, obviously, this whole mentality has gotten me wondering. You see, I moved to California from Texas about 5 years ago. At first, I made it a point to go back to visit twice a year and then each visit, I would stay at least a month. I would talk for hours on the phone with my friends back in Houston and Austin. I remained very connected to Texas and my friends and family there for a good three years. In the first year that I was here, I was working as a cashier in a book store, and my girlfriend at the time got the news from my mother that my grandfather had died. She called me at work and told me. At first, I took it with no emotion. I went back behind the cash register and began ringing people up, but after 15 minutes or so, out of the middle of nowhere, I began weeping violently. I was ringing up a customer but I suddenly dropped the book and the scanner, looked at the customer’s bewildered face, said, “Excuse me,” and then stormed off to the boss’s office to announce that I was going home for the day. I went and got drunk and sunsequently, got over it. After all, my grandfather was very ill, so it wasn’t any big deal, but it still hurt. Last October, I woke up one morning and I went to work like I always do. After an hour or so, I took a break to go to the bathroom. As I was sitting there on the toilet, it dawned on me that my granma would probably die soon, so I should send her a nice letter telling her how much I loved her and everything. I never got around to it. I had lots of work to do, so I couldn’t stop to write a letter. Then, a couple of hours later, over the loudspeaker at work, they called me to tell me that I had a call. It was Sarah Anne, a very close friend of mine here in LA, and she was calling to tell me that my mom had called and said that my granma had died. She sounded so concerned for me, but I was completey unmoved. It had been three years since I had seen my granma and she was already a little dead to me, so I couldn’t get too upset about it. But, still though it’s weird because my granma raised me almost as much as my own mother did. The last time that I talked to her in person, it went a little bit like the phone call in the dream. I kept on begging her not to die: “to let me come and visit at least once more”, but she was very scary and she kept on telling me that her days were numbered. She had this very scary look in her eyes. It was like out of a horror movie or something. Somehow the word had spread amongst friends of mine and I got phone calls and e-mails, everybody acting all concerned, but me still not caring. So, after she died, a couple of weeks later, I went to visit family in Houston, and I went to see my grandparents house before they sold it off. Now, I expected that it was going to be really hard on me and that it would at last finally make me cry about the death of my granma. I spent a large portion of my childhood in that house. Half of my dreams take place in that house. My grandparents had lived there since the early sixties, but when I went, still no feelings. My mother, aunts, and uncles had already gotten rid of most of their belongings, but there were still a couple of sentimental things there: a little green and yellow salt shaker that my granma would always have on the dinner table, this piano that I used to bang on when I was a little kid. I went into the bedroom that I used to always stay in, and there was still this ugly painting on the wall that one of my aunts had done when she was a teenager. I guess they couldn’t get rid of that. I went out in the back yard and there was this tree that I used to always climb when I was little. I climbed it one last time. I came down and I remembered how my granpa had tied a swing to one of the branches for his grandchildren to swing from. But, I felt nothing. Well at least not in my head. I definitely felt the humidity and the boredom and the dreariness of the suburbs of Houston, but not a lot more. We went and visited one of my uncles. We had dinner, and then afterwards, me and him took a long walk. He was telling me about how he hadn’t gone by a single day without crying since her death. I still felt nothing. Other people that I know have died, young people that got killed or overdosed or suicided. I’m not going to go into their stories here; more is discussed in my book, but the same thing applies to their stories: I can’t bring myself to give a shit. I think death is cool.
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