Chicanonautica: Rant for the End of 2024

 by Ernest Hogan

 

This’ll go up the day after Christmas. I’ll be back in California, SoCal, that place where I was born. My mom is having her 90th birthday. 

It’s always a little disturbing going there. It’s great to see my family, but everything keeps changing. Like the rest of the world, only faster.

California has always had one foot stuck in the future. It gets more futuristic every day. What’s a wandering, native son sci-fi writing Chicano to do? What I usually do: keep my eyes open and my sketchbook handy, jot and sketch what I encounter and the visions that it gives me. 

No time off for me, especially since the flow of the universe keeps kicking me out of my usual environment lately. Everything’s a-changing. Cue the Nobel prize-winning rock star. Can you say future shock? It’s not just this year. It seems every year is trying to outdo the last. 2024 really knocked me around, and here comes 2025 . . .

It’s not just the election. All kinds of things are happening. 

Everything is all fluxed-up. By next December, we may not recognize the world we are living in.

There’s a Latinoid renaissance going. I can’t keep up with all the books and other Cultura manifestations. It’s not making anybody rich, but Western Civilization still hasn’t figured us out yet. They’re not even sure if we exist. 

Maybe we’re just a weird rumor--a hallucination brought on by some bad mescaline that Hunter S. Thompson bought on L. A. and that article for Rolling Stone. Maybe if they imagine hard enough we’ll all disappear, and they’ll be back in a safely Anglo America again . . .

Naw, they're going to have to do mass deportations, even though they don’t have a clue how. Just try to go into the barrio and check everybody’s ID. Where is the barrio, anyway? It extends far beyond the traditional borders of Aztlán. I've seen signs of Chicanoization near the Canadian border.

Maybe the barrio, like Hollywood, is more of a state of mind, rather than a location. But what state? What mind? What location?

And I just realized that I made over a thousand dollars from writing this year, even though I didn’t submit anything. An experiment in aggressive marketing is in order.

Anybody want to publish some crazy novels and stories?

I’m in the final year of my sixties. Might as well have fun in a gonzo, Chicanonautic way.

Heh-heh-heh . .  .

Ernest Hogan will keep on being the Father of Chicano Science Fiction . . .