Chicanonautica: Running with Dangerous Beasts in the Summer of WTF

by Ernest Hogan

By the time this post goes up, the Fiesta de San Fermín will have started, PETA will have protested the running of the bulls, and bullfights will be going on. I will be properly distracted. Good. I'll need it.

The presumptive election has more than just record heat and the usual heat-island zombie-brain effect adding an extra level of surrealism to the Phoenix Metro area. Lots of vehicles are flying huge American flags as they rush down the mural-festooned streets. There's a tension, not unlike that in outlying towns like Payson. 

You don't have to go searching for America these days. Instead, modern easy riders are likely to find their desperate country tracking them down. And in Arizona, it's well-armed.

And the summer sun makes it look and feel like a spaghetti western. Is that Ennio Morricone music I hear?

Donald Trump has damnear nabbed the Republican presidential nomination with the same kind of campaign that has won a few businessmen the governorship of Arizona. “Get a businessman in there!” the voters say. “Get the state making a profit!” Maybe his plan is to make the country one big Arizona. There's even buzz about him wanting Jan Brewer for Vice-President. I wonder if he knows that in the past, the businessman/governor ends up impeached and imprisoned?

But now it doesn't look like Donald will be doing a slam dunk. The Republicans are in turmoil. It's been said that Trump is basically the guy in a bar who will say anything to get laid, only this time he's trying to screw the entire country. I'm reminded of the words of that great Republican, Abraham Lincoln, “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

It's hard to predict. November is still a ways off. All kinds of bizarre shit can happen. I'm keeping my overdeveloped imagination on a short chain.

What I can say is that there's going to be a lot of unhappy people after Election Day.

That triggers a flashback, to the night before the election in 2008. I was working at Borders. I guy was stomping through the shelves, talking into his cell phone: “You know if he gets elected the Rapture is happening in a couple of weeks!”

I wonder what life has been like for that guy? I wonder how he feels now?

Better go to San Fermin.com or a site with live TV feed from Pamplona. Concentrate on something more civilized, like bullfighting.

After, we can get back to the Summer of WTF, and as Hunter Thompson said, “watch the real beasts perform.”

Ernest Hogan's High Aztech will be available in a softcover edition soon, and his story “Flying Under the Texas Radar with Paco and Los Freetails” will be in Latin@ Rising next year. Meanwhile, he's contemplating unfinished novels and getting new ideas.