... and then my mom got covid.

"So my test came back positive. I've got covid."

"What?!?" I must have yelled into the phone at work. My mom's been uncharacteristically fatigued for a week, normally being an 85-year-old senior with the energy of a mid-50s woman, but her symptoms had included no respiratory difficulties nor cough, so I chalked it up to some less pressing flu/cold condition, but apparently Doctor Guillermo was wrong.

"Now, I left a message with my doctor, who's supposed to call me back, but no matter what he says, I'm not going to a hospital."

"Um, you might consider that he's a doctor, but still it's not like your organs are painfully ceasing function and your breathing's entirely okay. Which if that changes you should go to a hospital since that would be the kiss of death."

"No, I won't. If I die, I die."

"Well, I'm glad your affairs are in order. I'll miss you, even if you won't miss you." My sarcasm was angry at her self-disregard, and probably not the best approach, but when emotionally blindsided by potential loss it tends to be my reflexive default. I miss my father, and I'm not ready to lose the parent I have left.

"I won't go to a hospital."

"Mom, you're old enough to know that sometimes what you desire and what you require are by necessity different things. And if you actually haven't learned that, you know what? If I think you need to go to a hospital, I'll fucking tie you up, throw you in the car, and take you to a hospital, because I love you."

After this conversation of forcefully imperative parental love ended, I left work and drove to two different places to get myself tested and neither took walk-ins any longer, so I still don't know if my exposure during my four visits to her last week has given me covid, or maybe an irresponsible custie at my non-essential workplace that shouldn't be open anyhow gave it to me which then got to her, or she got it while going to one grocery store too many for a nickel's savings on produce. I don't know, I'll probably never know exactly, but my test's on Friday, and I'll likely get results on Monday.

In the meantime, my Mom's felt gradually better during the last 72 hours, so I suspect she'll be okay sooner than later, and I won't have to make good on my caretaking abduction threat. But I will if I have to.

[my parents being loving enough to take me to the emergency room in the middle of the night a few years ago. Yes, this is my POV from the ICU gurney.]

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

my dog & I attempt to enter the underworld.

After writing about my cryptid sighting in 2017, my dog & I then decided to take a short hike in 2018 to look at the quarried out pit area on the east side of "A" Mountain. Most nights we'd hear bands of coyotes yipping and howling as though in a red toothed revel over their latest capture of a cat who'd wandered too far from home, imagining them tossing about streamers of feline entrails, celebrating as if they'd somehow reclaimed a natural dominance over the land that will never be theirs again.



As we topped the rise and looked down we saw a startlingly unexpected thing, something displaced from pre-Conquista Mexico, a thing more belonging to the architecture of Tenochtitlán: an Aztec portal into the earth.



What. Is. That?!?, I thought, my mind reeling.



The sun maybe gave us about 15 minutes of light left, and we shuffled circuitously around and down, but then we couldn't locate what we'd seen, somehow finding ourselves in a different pit, as though the mountain itself had folded its atemporal secret up into an extra-spacial pocket to hide it away from us that day. The light guttered out over the mountain, and we decided to come back another time.



Digital homework that night confirmed that the two distinct hollows were quarries and, much later, earmarked for a mountain architectural housing enclave proposal that never got off the ground (which by today would be worth quite the fat stack of cash in the comparatively gentrified Menlo Park/Sentinal Peak area). Now, these two pit-like arenas seemed to be this weird no man's land, the lower North hollow strewn with large rubbish, mattresses, blankets, empty food tins, snack bags, and other signs of regular vagrant occupation, while the upper South hollow shows signs of Thunderdome-like motocross activity, bike treads & donut circles a testament to something larger going on, maybe a local chapter of The Lost Boys daring each other to feel alive again during their long nights of immortality between victims, along with the mysterious Mesoamerican doorway in the northeast wall.

[Of course I read this as a kid.] 

What took us so long to follow up on the weirdness we'd seen those couple years ago, I'm not quite sure (well, actually my Map of Midgard project), but last weekend was when we finally decided to get to the bottom of this strangeness. We'd texted this girl to come with us because who wouldn't want to join Team Handsome at the MSA Annex for slightly overpriced Japanese food served out of a reclaimed train car as a possible last meal, followed by a possibly fatal foray into the unknown depths of the earth? But she proved unresponsive (she's a pretty busy bee, really [though we'd later learn that she didn't actually understand our super-daring but obtusely-worded invitation -- I totally blame my dog's lax editing skills]). And she might've just held us back, or been the restrictive voice of reason and tried to talk us out of it, so maybe that was for the best. Her loss anyhow during a life-less-lived in her journal version of the afternoon because there was no way she or anyone else was doing something so fearlessly bold as we: Buddy & I would return rich with treasure, or crowned with the glory of experience, or be too dead to care, having fought & bit our way into Valhalla together instead!



Armed with my 68-pound American Bully, a cruelly edged tactical flashlight, and an oversized griptape wrapped meat tenderizer I usually keep in the car "just in case", we sallied forth like the true duo of adventurers we are. And again, even approaching the area from the east, nonchalant & uncaringly passing the "no trespassing/24-hour camera surveillance" signs on the way towards that foothill, we still got directionally confused and ended up meandering through the lower northern quarry first anyhow where a young but crazy looking woman stood in a strange pose at the rim, while a half-seen male chopped at a thick palo verde and its undergrowth with a machete, probably making evening shelter for them both. Or maybe a hiding spot for her soon to be dead body. Keeping a watchful eye on each one of them, we came up and out over another lip of the south pit to get our bearings.



Going up another grade, we noticed light dirtbike tracks going forward, and given that's something we'd spotted before, we followed them into the upper southern quarry. And there the doorway that evaded us so long ago appeared:





Like a brightly coloured flower meant to lure insects into a carnivorous mouth of no return, there it was, this thing that defied belonging, or at the very least implied possible Central to North American merchant trade stops half a millennium ago. As we got closer, we saw no ancient pigments but modern spraypaint, yet to select this motif as opposed to the usual artless tags or bubble letters or profanities was still startling. And there was the roundstone:

This sinister Aztec-styled roundstone with a dismembered woman on it is based on an actual archaeological find, the Great Coyolxauhqui Stone, excavated at the base of the Templo Mayor, Tenochtitlan, which was the ground zero for major Aztec sacrifices. The mythology goes thusly: Coyolxauhqui, the moon goddess, rallies 400 of her star brothers to kill their shamefully now-pregnant by unknown means mother, but one of the stars warns the unborn child beforehand. When they show up for the matricide, the unborn child springs to his mother's defense from the womb, the fully grown & armed war god Huitzilopochtli. Huitzilopochtli butchers his siblings, grabs his now decapitated sister's head, and tosses it into the sky where it becomes the moon.

There quite possibly were ceremonial re-enactments of this myth at the temple, complete with human sacrifices to show the bloody triumph of the newborn war god. And the duplicate of this roundstone in front of this portal at a site out of anyone's direct view makes one wonder if it's employed in similar surviving or revived religious circumstances. (Wait ... were the hacking bladed man & posturing woman in the other hollow a priest & priestess of Huitzilopochtli?)

Looking closely at the roundstone, I spotted no blood, nor did Buddy take an interest in the stone, and he probably would've smelled any sanguinary traces which I might not have been able to see, given his 5 million more olfactory receptors at work, plus his bloody martial past as a would-be fighting dog by his first owner. The stone turned out to be a steel banded round of concrete, like a still connected springform cake pan.

And then we finally approached the portal:

I turned on the flashlight, took a firm hold of my hammer, and went inside. The truth of all my above anticipation is that my imagination is usually far more baroque that what I tend to encounter. There was a single room with rough irregular raw black rock walls, a pair of "Dress Code" clothing store stickers on the inside of each doorpost, and the unfortunately common unreadable urban bubble tag at the rear of the room.

Not wanting to give up in the face of general appearances, for twenty minutes I pulled & prodded at black rocks in the walls, gazed hard to see if light or vision made it through the cracks, looked for a secret switch to activate the counterweight inside the rock wall to swing open the secret door, or a pressure plate step to plunge us through a chute into a party of kobolds to fight.

Barring a chthonic encounter, I then took a long second examination of the room for the treasure I'd hoped for. Peering down, a single Lincoln head penny awaited my scooping it up. I figured one copper piece from our adventure beats none, so I took it home to the silver piggy bank retirement horde.

Having gone, I now know what's there. Yet this experience raises some questions.

So our great underworld adventure wasn't there on that day ... but then, if you think about it, blasting out one little 6' x 6' room on the other side of an actual door frame someone bothered installing and decorating in naïve Mexica-revival ... it's alot of trouble to go through, right? For what or whom? Deal is, seeing the site, it feels like a front door, a sort of hideous welcome mat. Maybe through some metaphysical peephole they saw me fearlessly armed with meat mallet and the bully dog and weren't going to open, no sir, no how, that Buddy & I were more trouble than we were worth, that we would've taken the dwarven gold, or charmed away their dark elven princesses, or made off with a priceless magic item that they couldn't afford to lose under any circumstances.

So yes, there's still something suspect about that tucked away portal and the possibilities it implies in tandem with the other underground legends regarding subterranean networks under Tucson. Maybe next weekend we'll find a way in. Stay tuned.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

my Dad's in a jar.

My Mom brought him home, and I went to look.



"My Dad's in a jar," I said aloud.

The horror of that.

My Dad's in a jar!, I thought.

The fascination of that.



It was both at the same time.

It has resolved into the latter in being able to hold the totality of him in my arms, talking to the man he both once was and now is, the trade of human frailty for the strength of bronze & brass, a consolation of permanence, and presence, once again.

[Dad's view. He gets the length & breadth of the valley. He would often look at cars on the freeway and muse as to who they were and where they'd been and where they were going, the fingers of his mind reaching across the miles for their stories. I suspect he now enjoys knowing them all.]

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For my Father.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the where of Neverwhere.

During what was an acceptably charming BBC miniseries in 1996, author Neil Gaiman kept a notebook with him, wherein he decided that all the efforts happening on behalf of his commissioned screenplay deserved a matching novel, and so he wrote Neverwhere.



With the property also being adapted into a graphic novel & BBC radio drama, some half-born rumors that it's going to be movied for the big screen, and Gaiman's announcement in February last year of an in-progress sequel book, such narrative endurance again proves Gaiman is one of our foremost our modern mythographers.


Neverwhere taps into the persistent idea that there's another more fascinating reality below the conscious universe that reflects our unconscious in all its imagination and desire, beneath the skin and bone, the thought under the thought. It's the truth behind that nagging feeling of the apparent world versus the essential.

[Tucked to the side of a vagrant haunted Tucson underpass, this installation was enchanted by a sinister elder-styled script with the key "The Door Opens Inward". Photo credit to myself during a dog walk one very dark night.]

Preceeding Neverwhere in this city below concept is Arthur Machen's The London Adventure (citations from the 1924 Knopf hardback):

"... and that fancy is infinitely more impress than fact, partaking, as it does, not of actuality but reality." p.48 

"But I think something happened; that the doors were opened; that the human spirit came into momentary contact with worlds which it is not meant to visit." p.82-83 

"Strangeness which is the essence of beauty is the essence of truth, and the essence of the world. I have often felt that; when the ascent of a long hill brought me to the summit of an undiscovered height in London; and I looked down on a new land." p.152

Like a master storyteller, it's Gaiman's oh-so-proper English style and completely in-passing delivery that gives the tale its voice. It comes off so easy & winning, which is a testament to the forethought and craft behind the work. The following citations from the pagination of the first U.S. edition hardback prove this:

"He continued, slowly, by a process of osmosis and white knowledge (which is like white noise, only more useful), to comprehend the city". p.9 

"A click: the sound of a switchblade opening, empty and lonely and dark." p.19 

"She looked at him rather sadly, like a mother trying to explain to an infant that yes this flame was hot, too. All flames were hot. Trust her, please." p.75

"Then he flexed his fingers, put the pennywhistle to his lips, and began to play an odd, rollicking tune that leapt and twisted and sang. It made Richard feel as if he were thirteen years old again, listening to the Top Twenty on his best friend's transistor radio at school during lunch hour, back when pop music had mattered as it only can in your early teenage years: the marquis's reel was everything he had ever wanted to hear in a song ..." p.125 

"But now, in her dream, that is not happening. Instead, the weasel is reaching out a forepaw toward her, and she is dropping her throwing stick and taking its paw. And then and there, in the undercity beneath Bangkok, they are dancing together, in one intricate unending dance: and Hunter is watching from outside herself, and she is admiring the elaborate movements they make as they move, tail and legs and arms and fingers and eyes and hair all tumbling and twisting powerfully and strangely into the underneath and out across forever." p.192 

"'How old are you?' asked Door. Richard was pleased she had asked; he never would have dared. 'As old as my tongue,' said Hunter, primly, 'and a little older than my teeth.'" p.201

[The Chair of Mysteries sits at the end of a street. One feels as if someone might materialize there when the planes shift and the worlds touch. Found & photographed by myself during another fearless dog walk into a neighborhood no one should live in.]

Recently I had the pleasure of attending the Tucson Steampunk Society's book club meeting for this urban fantasy favourite, which only liminally has some shared subgenre points with steampunk. I hadn't expected it to be livecast & recorded, but I'm glad the TSS got to show off its literary taste & acumen, myself included.



Watch it here.



I enter off camera at 47:37, get asked about my social credentials & am begged to runway model walk my Dark Librarian apron for the Monster Rangers at 51:00, cite the book's most intense moment 1:00:49 with a clever roller-coaster metaphor, orate my perception of the use of mythic time and parallel ideas at 1:16:11, and questioned if would I go to London Below at 1:19:16, which is yes, obviously.





Looking forward to The Seven Sisters, wherein the tale of Neverwhere is continued. 



[TSS is doing Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age next month, so if you've got serious brilliances to say about this Nanopunk original, do come.]



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11/2018 Addenda: The above pictures have since changed. The Chair of Mysteries has left its nexus point and is missing, and the City of Tucson has misguidedly used our tax dollars to paint over "The Door Opens Inward" label but not the actual graffiti in that same underpass. 

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

the storm drain looked back at us.

Two nights ago, my dog & I walked past a storm drain on 15th St, just southeast of 6th Ave. A pair of oversized burning amber eyes stared out at us set slightly further apart than humanly normal. After going a quarter block away, I thought wait, should I go back and investigate? Then I figured if it reached out and got me, what would happen to the dog? Or if it grabbed the dog instead, then I would have to descend into the tunnels to rescue or avenge him, probably against superior numbers. We kept walking. Heather, veteran of many more horror movies than I, said we definitely made the right choice, but now I'll always wonder about it.



[For more Tucson underground weirdness, check out this longer blog.]

on the imminent Death of My Father.

What we wanted from the second visit to the urologist was a tube camera surprise reveal of a Cracker Jack toy mucking things up inside my Dad's bladder, with its rapid removal, a pat on his back, and a release note saying he could go home and enjoy the next ten years of his life.

What we got was the laparoscope showing nothing wrong, which meant Dad's impassibly enlarged prostate had already taken its toll on his bladder's muscles, stretching it out to the point where it no longer functions, which leaves us with three options:

1. Wear a Foley cathether up your dick for the rest of your life, at the risk of your dementia forgetting what it is every fifteen minutes, and just yanking it out to cause injurious bleeding and risk of infection on top of the usual risk of infection for just having one up in there.

2. Surgery for a suprapublic catheter through the bladder wall for less discomfort, but still run the exact same risks of yanking it out and infection, with the all risks of surgery on top of that.

3. Remove the catheter altogether, let the bladder fill up until the kidneys toxify & fail, and let my Dad mercifully go.

Fuck you, medical science. You're still fraught with barbaric inadequacies, semi-educated too-late guesswork, and certain failure. Fuck. You.

Now it's just a matter of waiting, and while waiting I'm going to write this eulogy:

“Wealth dies. Friends die. One day you too will die. But, the thing that never dies is the judgement on how you have spent your life.”
― Hávamál, stanza 75 - The Sayings of Odin, The High One

[Dad was a Boy Scout.]

William Maytorena Jr was a simple man with simple pleasures. All he needed to be happy was a good comedy film, ice cream, or a bag of hot chicharrónes in one hand and a beer in the other. When I was a kid, I'd ride along with him every week to stop at Nana Mercy's to pick up a little blue enameled speckled olla of his mom's magic beans. Those beans were home in a pot to him.

Beyond this core of winning simplicity, he explored other things. After he got his first & only awesome rack stereo from Gemco, I would rouse in the middle of the night and find him awake well past midnights, sitting on the floor, listening to classical music on KUAT, fingers paused over the cassette deck's recording button to capture some timeless piece of Beethoven, Mozart, Hayden, or Tchaikovsky, a normal bias tape locked & loaded, pencil hovering over the liner notes. He'd compile nearly a hundred of these tapes, even branching out into some jazz selections, fostering a deeper appreciation for these genres, growing & broadening his artistic points of reference. The late night passion was inspiring, and I think I was the only one to ever see it in action.

[First date at the Tucson Hotel, 1968. Que suave!]

This broadness had its roots: The story goes that Bill was headed off to be a priest, and to safeguard this divine vocation he installed a strict three-date rule with the girls he saw -- but he went on a fateful fourth date with his Maria Elena, my mom, and here I am talking to you about not just another reclusive church father, but my father who chose to embrace right action in the broader secular world, and the reward of a loving wife along with it.

[Getting married at the justice courts, 1970.]

In the marriage, he was the more relaxed partner by far, and he knew when to leave the room when the yelling got louder than the sense. His patience, tolerance, and forgiveness were a saintly inheritance from his properly named mother Mercy. In retrospect, Dad tolerated alot of my gifted childhood arrogance, 1980s sarcasm, unnecessary teen attitude, and sophomoric overconfidence in a graceful fashion. He rocked, as fathers go, way more than I knew at the time.



On off days my Mom would call him useless around the house, and sometimes that was actually true. He never taught me to use his tools, not because he hadn't the time, but because he was hiding the fact that he secretly didn't know how to use them himself. A hammer & some duct tape would often mickey mouse it when it probably shouldn't have. But Gods bless him, he would try, which nowadays is surely more than most husbands.

[Dad & Mom loved to dance. It was one of their things. 1986.]

As a family, we had the privilege of travelling alot, and Dad helped show me the value of travel, of fearlessly going over the horizon to see the world in a broader sense. One summer off in my childhood, we hit 26 states, and he was the driver of impossible distances, getting us safely to all the places we enjoyed together pre-GPS. One year we went to D.C. There was a day where Mom was sick and stayed at the hotel. Dad & I got out of the room, and we figured out the city's Metro, and found a Chinese restaurant for lunch. The food was nothing special, but it tasted special to me because it was the first time I really appreciated Chinese food, and that was specifically because of my Dad's company that afternoon, a memory I'll always carry with me.

[Dad always used a double sided yellow comb/brush combo for his hair, and favoured wearing guayaberas of various light colours. He was fairly meticulous about shining his shoes, too. With Mom & I, 1985, at my junior high school graduation.]

Emotionally he showed calm stoicism in the face of a false heart attack, my three scorpion stings, and other maladies that would send normal people into a panic. Perhaps this was military training from the Air National Guard, or let-god prayering from the seminary, but he had faith that things would work out in such situations one way or another.

[Looking good in that guayabera at some event, 1981.]

For years, I didn't get what my Dad did for a living until one day after middle school I sat in his office at the Crippled Childrens' Clinic on Broadway. A weird looking kid who had something wrong with him took a moment to give me the elevator speech to explain his hydrocephalus, about how he would die if my father didn't arrange regular appointments to get his head drained, and find medical coverage to cover the exceptional costs of that. My Dad saved children, he saved families, he saved lives. What he did was that important. It took emotional fortitude & undefeatable optimism.


My Dad knew everybody because he would talk to anybody. He was socially fearless like that. Someone in any store checkout line everywhere knew him, which also meant leaving took an extra 20 minutes. And he'd always talk to babies or toddlers, making that strange elephantine noise with his compressed lips that always got their attention. I repeatedly suggested he should run for mayor, but he was too good a man for politics, and he knew it. At work he'd wear this completely ridiculous sculptured Mickey Mouse head watch with a mouth that moved and spoke the time. He wore it at the cost of any personal dignity because the kids he had appointments with loved it, and the spectacle of it saying the time allowed him to finish talks with their parents, who we're appreciative of this clever ruse.

Sometimes he'd uncharacteristically call himself a "rabble rouser", usually referencing his early days marching with Chicano activists & organizing the brown citizens to get El Rio Community Health Center built in the first place. After this feat he worked there for decades until they forgot who helped get them built & they laid him off.

[Dad doing his daily legwork on the telephone at El Rio. 1974.]

After that, he got an awful job at Child Protective Services working for the county, which was too many cases for any one man, but he soldiered through it better than most. One afternoon I happened to be in the car when he decided he was near enough to a case for a home check. He drove our humble VW bus up this driveway, and he suddenly stopped. "You see that dish?", he said, pointing at the two thousand dollar huge saucer currently following an invisible satellite in orbit. "These people are getting money from us because they told us their kid needed it. They don't if they spend that much on TV. You wait here." He got down, adjusted his belt like a gunfighter, and went inside to have some hard words that the parents in there needed to get told. He didn't shirk that kind of confrontation when it needed doing. He was brave & honest like that.

The trouble started when Dad fell into a hole. There was a dwarf lemon tree at the new house that needed planting and he was moving some rocks in a wheelbarrow past the hole for the tree when the load unbalanced, and he fell in. His back was never the same, and he would never stand straight or tall again. Suddenly looking at the view from a few inches less and down at your feet has to change you, and damaging falls when you're older change you. The memory issues began sooner than later, and, unlike alot of people who get angry, violent, or depressed, Dad didn't fall into those emotional holes. He kept his sense of humour in the face of dementia with Lewy bodies & Parkinsonism because, under the shuffling, bent form he now appeared to be, Dad had the strength of character to remain the man he was: Funny. Lovable. Winning. He flirted with a nurse near the end. "You have pretty eyes," he said like the old smoothie he always was.

One night while at St Mary's Hospital for one of series of medical issues, he raised up his arms and "called a meeting". He told me to be quiet while he talked. For the next hour and a half he elaborated to Michelle & I a plan to take over the city. He called it "The Working Joes' Plan". Tucson would be divided into sectors, each ruled by a "working joe" to keep the people in line and see to their needs. These everymen would meet with him for updates, and he would problem solve with them, and personally see to the defense & control of all Tucson. There was to be a train with orphans & needy children who would be transported, fed, clothed, & cared for somewhere in there. And when he stopped speaking, we were amused, and more than that, amazed.

You see, this 81-year-old's plan was a metaphor for control of the world he could no longer neurologically understand. Mom would by habit put on the news, and on some level he saw things spinning out of control. Against this he came up with his plan for Tucson, the city whose people he loved and cared about all his life, an ultimate plan for municipal succession & protection of the city he grew up in, to safeguard it from rampant criminal elements within and political-economic forces without. Bill Maytorena would wear an iron crown and a velvet gauntlet. His heart was so large, he would've taken care of it all, for us, for you.

“Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself must also die, but he who wins word fame lives forever.”
― Hávamál, stanza 76 - The Sayings of Odin, The High One

[Dad's hesitantly humble grin in front of the room at El Rio that bears his name on the plaque behind him.]

Myself aside, an attentive wife, the countless children he saved & helped, and a room at El Rio Clinic named after him, his legacy is how much he cared & worked at caring with successful results. That was the grandeur of his life, besides knowing how to appreciate creature comforts, laughter, simple times, and priceless moments.

I know you people here won't forget Bill Maytorena Jr. As long as you tell his story and carry forward his nobility, he will be alive, and we will always be better people for knowing him. And he'd want you to have a good time at this thing, so go live it up for him today, and for the rest of your life, with his spirit in mind.





~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



Addenda: A few nights after writing this, my father shushed everyone in the room, asked if "the papers to leave were in order", kissed us on the hands, told us goodbye, and closed his eyes. We thought that was it. My aunts showed up with a priest at my mother's request the next morning, who administered last rites, but my Dad was none too pleased to see him, spat out the host, and grabbed his bowl of oatmeal from his caretaker and fed himself breakfast for a change. There's fight in my old man yet.



Since then we've spent time together playing Crazy Eights, drinking fancy strong beers, and watching some Northern Exposure, which has been priceless because it's all something we both love. Still, I know the other shoe's going to drop, and he's going to swing the other way sooner than later, and die. Mentally, I accept that. Emotionally, I'm going to be a fucking trainwreck, but I'm glad I took the time to write the above so I'll have the right thing to say when that time comes, and "word fame" to give him so he will live forever through those words. Until then, my Dad'll still be beating me at cards, and I'm grateful for every hand he can still deal.



I love you, Dad. This is for you.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

accepting my deification.

Yesterday a man whom I consider locally influential and seriously accomplished emphatically insisted on telling me:



"You're famous in this city. Tucson knows who you are. Accept it." 



Tucson, thank you for confirming my inner superiority complex and giving me the apotheosis to local god I know I've been worthy of. I love you back.

#   #   #

While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him.

Dark Entries meets Ruminations From The Red Room.

A few weeks ago we had the honour of being a guest on Ruminations From The Red Room, a newly launched podcast of my longtime friend Mitch Proctor.



Listen to us here.



While the title implies that Mitch's online project is Twin Peaks-centric, that's merely a context and starting point for a leaping-off into dialogues about what underlies existence, the vagaries of values, and an interpersonal think-tank of ideas, which is broadly ambitious & admirable.



Remember that conversation you had with someone late one night where everything you said made sense and was possibly the most profound thing that ever came out of your mouth? This podcast is an attempt to capture that magic, that essence of conversational synchronicity where speaker and listener learn & build upon each other, and a palace of reason is constructed. Mitch has a slightly more humble explanation of purpose, but we believe he's after something more transcendent in the end.

[A CG update of The Red Room. (from imgur)]

And like Coop & Windom Earle in the room above, we dugpas crossed the threshold into his ritual space studio and a twenty-year-old friendship spellwove a Q & A web about individual inequality, the creative process & impulse, fandom, this blog, garmonbozia, and the endurance of our long connection. Or as Mitch's blurb text puts it:

Mutual respect, youthful idealism, Mr. Lynch, and Mr. Smith ignite a friendship that has two decades under its belt. Here, we touch on some of that origin, and drink deeply of love of art, and expression. Twin Peaks, will modern audiences get it? How does Thor carry his hammer on his back? Will we ever get the follow up to 4:13 Dream?

On a side note, Mitch courteously brewed us a cup of Valhalla Java: Odinforce Blend to fuel the conversation. Not only did it do that, but drinking a single cup at 8pm catapulted me into a wakeful night,

purged & wrung my insides out, and violently penetrated every cell of my body. Would I drink it again? Hel yes! Willingly, and Odin would approve of pursuing such an ecstatic experience.



Elixirs aside, Mitch managed to keep me mostly positive and on the trackless track, like a good host and interviewer. We both had alot of nice & sincere things to say about each other, culture, being genii locorum of Tucson, the feels, and wild shots in the dark at the upcoming mystery that'll be Twin Peaks.



So if you readers have always wondered what I really sound like, and exactly what that blog on the laugh's truly about, give the podcast a listen, and if you like it, do subscribe as there's more Dark Entries meets Ruminations From The Red Room to come.

[It's all about Shelly the Waitress' cherry pie.]

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.

it was a Chupacabra.

With a 13-megapixel camera on my BlackBerry, one might think I'd've gotten a crisper capture than this one that looks like the thousands of questionable blurry paranormal sightings photos where if you squint right you kinda, sorta see it.

And just like those hazy photos of sasquatches, ghosts, and unidentified flying objects, I just barely got this:

I'm not a photographer, I'm a writer. You can definitely tell from this and from most of the other self-provided photos I've posted. So here's the writing to back this up:

On Sunday, March 19th, 2017 at 2:24p, my mother-in-law Joyce and my wife Michelle, beckon me over to the kitchen window at my parents' house. Outside my mother has a rock island xeriscaped garden which includes a very small fountain and pool that the local wildlife comes to nibble and drink at. The house is located on the slope of Tucson's local landmark, "A" Mountain, which puts it near a large area of desert park, so animals wandering through are common enough.

This was not a normal animal.

When I got to the window, a medium-sized hairless quadruped with blue skin, maybe a few shades darker than a painted Hindu god, was lapping up water from the pool. It had a uniform blue skin colour, no birthmark blotches like on most hairless dogs, or random remaining tufts of hair like on dogs with mange.

The other most likely suspect in Tucson would be a coyote, whom often scavenge edibles from suburban trashbins and random litter. I grew up in the northwestern outskirts of Tucson in the 1970s on a 3-acre desert lot, where I saw hundreds of coyotes, and it was many a night their yipping choruses and howls woke a young boy up, so I know a coyote when I spot one. This was not a coyote.

Unlike the photo, my first glimpse was plain as day, through a clear glass window, a mere 35 feet away. Neither Michelle or Joyce had a cameraphone on them, so I turned and went to the other side of the kitchen to get mine. In the short time that took, the chupacabra began to walk away north, our line of sight passing to the screened part of the window, which is the moire/grainy texture you're seeing in the image above. I tried moving to another window to get another shot, but I barely saw it leaving the driveway, so that's the only picture.

The above is fact. What follows from here forward are my thoughts, cryptid comparisons, and my associative speculations.

You may ask if it was a goatsucker, why wasn't it instead busy drinking blood? While my parents might live near a big swatch of desert, they're still in the city not so far from downtown, and rural farm animals aren't common in their neighborhood. Also, it was a rather warm day, and the chupacabra was probably very thirsty from all the sun. They're not undead, despite the hemophagic similarities, so like any living thing, it needs water to live. Other animals do come there to drink, so it may have been stalking before deciding to go for the water.

My sighting & photo capture matches the ones seen by Dr. Phylis Canion, a rancher in Cuero, TX, who had the xenomorphic body in her freezer, and after some inexact DNA testing (semi-concluded as a wolf-coyote hybrid), had the remains taxidermied, which exhibits some distinct anatomical variants upon closer examination.

A long time ago, my sixth-grade teacher, Mr Ramon Martinez, a very wise man, took a moment in class to bring up the 1972 B-film "Gargoyles". The premise included the idea that a winged humanoid species underwent a long-term hibernation under a mountain, emerging long after the accounts of their appearances had been dismissed (which is probably where the "Jeepers Creepers" films got their premise, and possibly inspired "The Descent" films partly as well). Then Ramon said that his mother once witnessed a group of winged humanoids launch themselves from "A" Mountain.

[Sentinel Peak, more commonly known as "A" Mountain.]

This account begs the questions: Why did the University of Arizona stop quarrying rock on conveniently located "A" Mountain? And aren't there tunnels going from the U of A, to Tucson High, to Roskruge Bilingual School, to possibly elsewhere? My wife once went through a tunnel system extending from behind Park Place to the McDonald's east of the mall and across the street, which has many, many branches leading to gods know where.

If there's a little-known subterranean network under the Tucson valley, why couldn't there be a population of chupacabras somewhere under the mountains concealed in a vaulted den? And if what's called the "Texas Blue Dog" variety of chupacabra could live there, why couldn't the related Puerto Riqueno & South American humanoid chupacabra spotted by my teacher's mother in the 1960s share the same Svartalfheimian space?

People have carved out shrines on the hard to reach upper southern face of "A" Mountain, risking life & limb to make small alcoves with statues of the Virgen de Guadalupe. It seems more than a little trouble to show religious dedication on a steep mountainside as opposed to a more easily constructed yard/bathtub shrine, unless there are perhaps other protective/warding reasons to pick this particular mountain.

In 2014, this oddity was captured in Texas. While it doesn't match dimensions or posture of the creature I saw, this curious variation only expands the types of chupacabra.

Many are the accounts of Huldrefolk, the hidden people, living within the hollow hills. Trolls, kobolds, alfar, dwarves, landvættir. There's a persistence to the idea.

If you allow the possibility of species of things yet to be discovered in the rainforest canopies, or in a darker corner of the Mariana Trench, or surviving from prehistoric times on a South American tepui, then anything could be down there underground. Anything. Realize that our credulous perception of the world is a fragile thing, mutable, and subject to change & expansion. 

There's room enough in the world for some, or even many, monsters. You don't have to believe my very real picture. It's grainy, far from definitive, only backed up by three witnesses, but I offer its evident truth to you with these words.

I know what I saw.

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While
a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo
Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals
for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan,
airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a
craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally
interesting endeavours, do contact him.

lensification: the glam of the cam.

My friend Nadine stands trapped behind glass. It's hour 26 of her nonstop shoeshop of just being in a window on the main drag in downtown Tucson. You can see the madness in her eyes, the tight rictus of skin supported by nothing less than fraying enthusiam, nicotine, booze, and the structural integrity of four drywalled coats of yellow Mac base and a greasepaint blue raccoon mask under high birdsnest hair, like some fugitive from NYC's late-1990s clubbery. I watch on the webcam feed from work and laugh at how silly, logging in bits of supportive chat, remembering she was only talking about doing this promotional bit a month ago over drinks at a bar just before she quit work to chase her dream. And, oddly, I'm eating it up, unable to pull away from her ridiculous lure. Hours later, I'm in the window on the other side of her loaner laptop's lens.



"Hey, I brought you a cigar. And I'm sure you're tired of the prop balloon animals you've got so I brought my favourite pair of real Springbok horns I gluegunned on a hairband to play with!" She puts them on, a wide-eyed hallucinatory child, and we proceed to drink these bullets of blueberry ale a fangirl brought her. I usually hate blueberries -- they're the devil's fruit. But in frosted scones or well-crafted microbrew at 8% they get a pass, and while showboating in a window to hundreds of passerbys it's the nectar of goodtimes.



And we're totally showboating. I suddenly find myself not only talking to 'Dini but to the camera, like it's a real person in the room, and not an inanimate apparatus. Before you know it, we throw on the Beastie Boys' "Root Down" and we shake arse, doing the Michael Jackson Woo Crotch Grab and The Shopper. Nadie sprays a Windex knockoff on the inside of the glass, sticking her flyers up with the moisture for people to read, as oggling boys put their lips to the dirty outside and blowfish back at her. Oh, and there's some way cute 20-something girl who got slipped a ruffie passed out on the couch in our little 4'x12' room. But we're live and feeding to the world and being fed in return, heard by the responsive chatroom audience. And some of them even know me. Sure, it's no more than nine voyeurs from cyberland at any one time, but it's the dynamic that counts.



You realize that the webcam, or just cameras in general, make one performative. You know people are watching in realtime, or during some later date in forever future, and even the least bit extroverted will shamelessly amp themselves up. The observer affects the observed. But the phenomenon is even more pronounced on the other end. We watch people everyday whom we don't even know, whether that's just pimping it on the street, on television, or streamed on the internet, and they seem bigger than us in some fashion because the camera refracted through our mind's eye magnifies them. They are the presented examples, the stars of our show, and we've willfully submitted to their presentation. There's an active/passive validation at work and its magick is hellahypnostrong.



As I left an audience member typed in, "Oh, you guys are having the best time!" Nadine and I look at each other and guffaw. "That's what she thinks!"



"But Nadine, from the outside it looks true! Just being up on the screen makes it seem 20 times better than that, so it doesn't matter because the interpretation is what sells it." Then I speak to the laptop. "But you Tucson kids out there are more savvy than that, right? We really do love you all." 



Tonight I got to taste what it was to be both supplicant and deity. It's fun to be a local god again. Thank you for your prayers, and this is my sincerest of gospels.

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While a mostly happy bookstore fixture for over two decades, Guillermo Maytorena IV is currently willing to entertain your serious proposals for employment as a literary/cinema critic, goth journalist, castellan, airship pilot/crewperson, investigative mythologist, or assisting in a craft brewery. Should you be connected to any of the above or equally interesting endeavours, do contact him via LinkedIn or G+.