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Tijuana Gringo | |
Daniel's Journal | by Daniel Charles Thomas |
27 November 2001. Tuesday. |
Spent another weekend with the parents. Only two nights in San Diego but I felt as if I were gone for ages.
Came back yesterday. Walked across. The delicious sensation of returning to Mexico. It always hits me. Always. A Passage to this other side. Today it hit me in the cramped little supermarket at the corner of 2nd and Constitucion. Jammed in the narrow, narrow aisles with the Mexican families, women and men and children. I bought onions, cheese, avocado, potato. Cheese was the most expensive.
Then came home. Spent an hour chatting with Rudi. You don't talk you don't understand, nothing, nothing. Well maybe fifty percent, no, less than that. You do all these things, go everywhere around the city studying us and try to write a little bit here a little bit there but focus on nothing. Why don't you pick one thing and write about it well? You need to be published. After this I won't criticize you any more. I shan't criticize you any more. Ever.
Yeah, and the sun won't come up tomorrow. (It doesn't. The Earth Moves.)
His English is good but we talk more in Spanish these days, he criticizing and critiqueing and sometimes helping, sometimes insulting. Our love-hate relationship continues, our struggle, our personal frontier, our personal confrontation between peoples and worlds.
I pick. I choose what to write, where to focus. I decide what to write about. Me. My life. My experience.
The NEA application package came to the parents' house while I was there. On Saturday. National Endowment for the Arts. I'm still short a couple poems of publishing in order to qualify for applying for a creative writing grant. But with the book from Ciudad Juarez and the booklet published last summer for the poetry reading, I am most of the way there. Need three other spots. Maybe on the web? Maybe with a paper here (in Spanish)?
Then I can compete against the best poets in the nation (United States). Hmm. My project? Travel. Write. Embark on a poetic exploration of....
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