Spanglish as a Second Language

At the end of the awful weekend……sitting in The Pub with Grant, talking about Dylan Thomas. We had a nice fire going….I had cooked a sweet lunch for a South African bride-to-be, so there was some victory to be saved from 48 hours of dealing with golf/cocaine people…..I was reading the Chron. Such Luxe…..

Israel came in for a pizza, shivering like a heroin addict. He has no heat in his cuarto, and we have had three days of snow….so it wasn’t heroin. Damn, I would have hit him up…the Gruet isn’t doing it for me right now.

Israel doesn’t drink, so I made him some hot chocolate while he waited for pizza….and we all talked about how hard it is to learn to speak English…..in Spanish, of course. Explain: Cough, through, dough, rough……..drive on the Parkway, park on the Driveway…….Grant and I used to both teach ESL for workers. Teacher: what do they mean when they shout: "Fuck you, stupid fucking beaner! Is that a recipe? Why do they fuck the beans.....???"

I have been helping Israel deal with his immigration lawyer. He has been here for six years, and is trying for his green card. He has family here…..kind of like Tony Soprano’s gardener has family here. We were lamenting the fact there are no English tutors in Cachagua…..habla-ing back and forth in Spanglish.

I am no fan of illegal immigration. My white American soccer players can't get jobs or insurance for craft jobs or construction gigs because fucking beaner asswipes will work for ten bucks an hour and won't spring for $40 a month health insurance......they just go to the ER, and charge Uncle Sam...... And the contractor bosses pocket the difference and vote Republican because DipShit is keeping us safe from Terror......And the Migra.....

Israel is different: a good one. I wish I could ship James Johnston, the Jabba-the-Hutt crackhead meth manufacturer with friends in the Monterey County Sheriff's out to Mexico and take his body weight in Israel's relatives in change.......All our lives would be better......

Israel is that close to his green card….And why does he want his green card? So he can legally LEAVE the United States and go back to Guanajuato to be with his family. He feels that his mind is being poisoned by American culture, and he needs to go home to cleanse his mind. But he wants to come back, without a marathon desert ordeal costing thousands......

This is a sweet, hardworking, Catholic, organically intelligent heterosexual man who needs to free himself from our culture long enough to save his soul……. I feel exactly the same way.

I just read about these identical feelings from Al Qaeda and Hamas, in Osama's memoirs……Maybe we should start paying attention.

Or not....