Ciudad Juárez - revision history

Dank at 22:34, 18 January 2025

2025-01-18T22:34:31Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:34, 18 January 2025
Line 1:		Line 1:
	Ray kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, his chest patched up with surgical tape, 3M Steri-Strip antimicrobial skin closures, with pressure-sensitive adhesive containing an ~~iodopher~~ germicide, diatomic iodine complexed with an ordinary amphiphilic surfactant, and a nonwoven backing, reinforced with filaments of polyethylene terephthalate, for tensile strength and energy absorption, and finer wound-edge approximation; the deep wounds over his heart and lungs had been neatly mattress-stitched, though not as we might have hoped, with Ethibond Excel green-braided polyester, but with Ethicon Monocryl monofilament sutures, and covered with a DuoDERM hydrocolloid dressing, an opaque, biodegradable, and nonbreathable admixture of carboxymethylcellulose gelatin, elastomers, and pectin, which turns into a gel when exudate is absorbed, promoting a natural debridement, whatever the hell that is, if you have to look it up, etc., etc., you probably, deep down, just don’t want to know, unless of course the wound tissue has already gone wildly necrotic, and they’ve started suggesting maggot therapy as a logical alternative; and his head was resting comfortably on basically plain old pillows, the sort of thing you rest your head on, when you can barely lift your head. He was back once again in the land of the free, in trademark-registered name-brand-equity Patent-Pending America, no doubt barely viable, and with his X-marks-the-spot X on his chest, probably unaware of some possible copyright infringements, but glad to be resting in a comfortable bed, just happy to be alive and in possession of his selfhood.		Ray kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, his chest patched up with surgical tape, 3M Steri-Strip antimicrobial skin closures, with pressure-sensitive adhesive containing an iodophor germicide, diatomic iodine complexed with an ordinary amphiphilic surfactant, and a nonwoven backing, reinforced with filaments of polyethylene terephthalate, for tensile strength and energy absorption, and finer wound-edge approximation; the deep wounds over his heart and lungs had been neatly mattress-stitched, though not as we might have hoped, with Ethibond Excel green-braided polyester, but with Ethicon Monocryl monofilament sutures, and covered with a DuoDERM hydrocolloid dressing, an opaque, biodegradable, and nonbreathable admixture of carboxymethylcellulose gelatin, elastomers, and pectin, which turns into a gel when exudate is absorbed, promoting a natural debridement, whatever the hell that is, if you have to look it up, etc., etc., you probably, deep down, just don’t want to know, unless of course the wound tissue has already gone wildly necrotic, and they’ve started suggesting maggot therapy as a logical alternative; and his head was resting comfortably on basically plain old pillows, the sort of thing you rest your head on, when you can barely lift your head. He was back once again in the land of the free, in trademark-registered name-brand-equity Patent-Pending America, no doubt barely viable, and with his X-marks-the-spot X on his chest, probably unaware of some possible copyright infringements, but glad to be resting in a comfortable bed, just happy to be alive and in possession of his selfhood.

	As Gene had reached the corner of El Paso Street and Paisano, and been forced to make a choice, under the adversarial circumstances, between a left toward Providence Memorial, on the campus of the University of Texas El Paso, entailing a likely stay for overnight observation, and a right toward the slightly less orthodox, though certainly still educational, approach, which didn’t entail much of anything, and was a bit off the beaten path for weapons-grade observers, he’d taken the obvious right, and arrived at the Abrigado Animal Clinic. After overcoming a certain amount of species incredulity, and patching Ray up with animal products, the Clinic had detected an impedance mismatch, between Raymond’s homo sapience and the minimal capacitance of the overnight pet care cages, and rather than attempting a complex conjugate, they’d released him to walk rather meekly away, while resisting the urge to loan Gene a leash, and offer Raymond a doggie biscuit.		As Gene had reached the corner of El Paso Street and Paisano, and been forced to make a choice, under the adversarial circumstances, between a left toward Providence Memorial, on the campus of the University of Texas El Paso, entailing a likely stay for overnight observation, and a right toward the slightly less orthodox, though certainly still educational, approach, which didn’t entail much of anything, and was a bit off the beaten path for weapons-grade observers, he’d taken the obvious right, and arrived at the Abrigado Animal Clinic. After overcoming a certain amount of species incredulity, and patching Ray up with animal products, the Clinic had detected an impedance mismatch, between Raymond’s homo sapience and the minimal capacitance of the overnight pet care cages, and rather than attempting a complex conjugate, they’d released him to walk rather meekly away, while resisting the urge to loan Gene a leash, and offer Raymond a doggie biscuit.

Dank at 22:15, 18 January 2025

2025-01-18T22:15:17Z

Show changes

Dank at 22:08, 18 January 2025

2025-01-18T22:08:24Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:08, 18 January 2025
Line 3:		Line 3:
	As Gene had reached the corner of El Paso Street and Paisano, and been forced to make a choice, under the adversarial circumstances, between a left toward Providence Memorial, on the campus of the University of Texas El Paso, entailing a likely stay for overnight observation, and a right toward the slightly less orthodox, though certainly still educational, approach, which didn’t entail much of anything, and was a bit off the beaten path for weapons-grade observers, he’d taken the obvious right, and arrived at the Abrigado Animal Clinic. After overcoming a certain amount of species incredulity, and patching Ray up with animal products, the Clinic had detected an impedance mismatch, between Raymond’s homo sapience and the minimal capacitance of the overnight pet care cages, and rather than attempting a complex conjugate, they’d released him to walk rather meekly away, while resisting the urge to loan Gene a leash, and offer Raymond a doggie biscuit.		As Gene had reached the corner of El Paso Street and Paisano, and been forced to make a choice, under the adversarial circumstances, between a left toward Providence Memorial, on the campus of the University of Texas El Paso, entailing a likely stay for overnight observation, and a right toward the slightly less orthodox, though certainly still educational, approach, which didn’t entail much of anything, and was a bit off the beaten path for weapons-grade observers, he’d taken the obvious right, and arrived at the Abrigado Animal Clinic. After overcoming a certain amount of species incredulity, and patching Ray up with animal products, the Clinic had detected an impedance mismatch, between Raymond’s homo sapience and the minimal capacitance of the overnight pet care cages, and rather than attempting a complex conjugate, they’d released him to walk rather meekly away, while resisting the urge to loan Gene a leash, and offer Raymond a doggie biscuit.

	Ray and Gene had a rented house, a mustard-yellow double-decker wreck of a place, a safe house if you will, in that Gomez didn’t know of its Magoffinesque existence, and that’s just where they went to get away from it all, stashing the truck in the garage at the back, hauling Ray off to an upstairs bedroom, and loading him up on goldfish antibiotics. Unaware that the Ethicon sutures in his chest were possibly better suited to a schnauzer’s bladder, but cognizant of the fact that even the slightest movement caused far more trouble than it was currently worth, Ray wasn’t moving around all that much, and had time on his hands to think things over. His first thought, sleep, was apparently not an option: it felt like whoever’d lashed his chest-parts back together must have installed some sort of motion detector, and wired it to a stretch of electrified fencing that was torque-wrenched tight using bolts through his rib cage, and whatever was in these canine pain pills was no match at all for his razor-toothed chest-wound, and taking deep breaths was not real bright, with a roll of concertina wire coiled around his torso, so this seemed like a good time to maybe just sit tight, try to shed a little light on some points of confusion, sort of sort out one or two of his immediate problems, and who knows, why not, just go ahead and solve them. It was, admittedly, pitch-black in the room, with maybe a little moonlight leaking in around the shades, and he didn’t have a clue what the hell the time was, somewhere in that dead-of-night gap before morning, and this whole think-things-over approach to solving problems wasn’t really part of Ray’s normal routine, but here, in a nutshell, was Ray’s current thinking: there was a massive fucking drug war going on in Juárez, and he, meaning Raymond, was now caught in the crossfire, and it was high time that someone, meaning Raymond once again, got the whole damn thing straightened out in his head. If you can picture Ray standing at his own mental whiteboard, drawing up org charts, and color-coded merger histories, and dotted-line arrows from cartel to cartel showing the current state of play among the constantly shifting business alliances, and plaza-sharing deals that would need to be restructured, and reseller channel-conflicts yet to be resolved, with a little stick-figure portrayal of Raymond himself, showing dotted-line arrows going straight through his head, you’ve got a pretty good picture of the problems Ray’s facing, but no sense at all of Raymond Edmunds; Raymond’s a gunman, not a McKinsey consultant, and it is, after all, pitch-black in the room, and even the McKinsey guy hasn’t quite got the picture; not only is his drawing several weeks out of date, but with Gomez and Ray no longer speaking, and the Thetas carving cryptonyms deep into his rib cage, we might be better off, org-chart-wise, portraying Dr. Edmunds as a seated-type duck, about to get dry-erased from the whiteboard itself, leaving a ghostly-looking shade of a sort of Moonlight Yellow feather-pile that might once have been a duck on the porcelain-steel surface. Raymond kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, with his boots off and his feet up and his chest full of violet-dyed Monocryl sutures, with a half-lit moon still rising in the east and two hours from its zenith in the black El Paso sky, which would make the time, am-wise, around 3:45, on April the 16th, meaning a few days past Easter, and a little late now to be filing his taxes, just staring into the dark there, thinking things over, and growing more and more confused about the war in Juárez. Since the best they could do at the pet care clinic was 100 mg Tramadol tablets, Ray was perhaps a little fuzzy from the pain, and eating domestic-animal opiates by the half-dozen handfuls, although even in a state of McKinsey-like lucidity, the drug war battle lines could still be disorienting, and with Ray basing his dosage levels on toy Yorkshire Terrier multiples, and chasing the pills down with the occasional pull from a liter-style bottle of Old Grand-Dad Bonded, he'll soon be having trouble making sense of his own wall treatments. Raymond, in short, has certain practical difficulties, and one or two rudimentary epistemological problems that will need to be addressed before he moves on: if he’s hoping to make sense of the war in Juárez, Ray’s own thoughts will be no help at all; and even if he’s only searching for some inside information, the last place ~~hell~~ find it is inside his own head.		Ray and Gene had a rented house, a mustard-yellow double-decker wreck of a place, a safe house if you will, in that Gomez didn’t know of its Magoffinesque existence, and that’s just where they went to get away from it all, stashing the truck in the garage at the back, hauling Ray off to an upstairs bedroom, and loading him up on goldfish antibiotics. Unaware that the Ethicon sutures in his chest were possibly better suited to a schnauzer’s bladder, but cognizant of the fact that even the slightest movement caused far more trouble than it was currently worth, Ray wasn’t moving around all that much, and had time on his hands to think things over. His first thought, sleep, was apparently not an option: it felt like whoever’d lashed his chest-parts back together must have installed some sort of motion detector, and wired it to a stretch of electrified fencing that was torque-wrenched tight using bolts through his rib cage, and whatever was in these canine pain pills was no match at all for his razor-toothed chest-wound, and taking deep breaths was not real bright, with a roll of concertina wire coiled around his torso, so this seemed like a good time to maybe just sit tight, try to shed a little light on some points of confusion, sort of sort out one or two of his immediate problems, and who knows, why not, just go ahead and solve them. It was, admittedly, pitch-black in the room, with maybe a little moonlight leaking in around the shades, and he didn’t have a clue what the hell the time was, somewhere in that dead-of-night gap before morning, and this whole think-things-over approach to solving problems wasn’t really part of Ray’s normal routine, but here, in a nutshell, was Ray’s current thinking: there was a massive fucking drug war going on in Juárez, and he, meaning Raymond, was now caught in the crossfire, and it was high time that someone, meaning Raymond once again, got the whole damn thing straightened out in his head. If you can picture Ray standing at his own mental whiteboard, drawing up org charts, and color-coded merger histories, and dotted-line arrows from cartel to cartel showing the current state of play among the constantly shifting business alliances, and plaza-sharing deals that would need to be restructured, and reseller channel-conflicts yet to be resolved, with a little stick-figure portrayal of Raymond himself, showing dotted-line arrows going straight through his head, you’ve got a pretty good picture of the problems Ray’s facing, but no sense at all of Raymond Edmunds; Raymond’s a gunman, not a McKinsey consultant, and it is, after all, pitch-black in the room, and even the McKinsey guy hasn’t quite got the picture; not only is his drawing several weeks out of date, but with Gomez and Ray no longer speaking, and the Thetas carving cryptonyms deep into his rib cage, we might be better off, org-chart-wise, portraying Dr. Edmunds as a seated-type duck, about to get dry-erased from the whiteboard itself, leaving a ghostly-looking shade of a sort of Moonlight Yellow feather-pile that might once have been a duck on the porcelain-steel surface. Raymond kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, with his boots off and his feet up and his chest full of violet-dyed Monocryl sutures, with a half-lit moon still rising in the east and two hours from its zenith in the black El Paso sky, which would make the time, am-wise, around 3:45, on April the 16th, meaning a few days past Easter, and a little late now to be filing his taxes, just staring into the dark there, thinking things over, and growing more and more confused about the war in Juárez. Since the best they could do at the pet care clinic was 100 mg Tramadol tablets, Ray was perhaps a little fuzzy from the pain, and eating domestic-animal opiates by the half-dozen handfuls, although even in a state of McKinsey-like lucidity, the drug war battle lines could still be disorienting, and with Ray basing his dosage levels on toy Yorkshire Terrier multiples, and chasing the pills down with the occasional pull from a liter-style bottle of Old Grand-Dad Bonded, he'll soon be having trouble making sense of his own wall treatments. Raymond, in short, has certain practical difficulties, and one or two rudimentary epistemological problems that will need to be addressed before he moves on: if he’s hoping to make sense of the war in Juárez, Ray’s own thoughts will be no help at all; and even if he’s only searching for some inside information, the last place he'll find it is inside his own head.

	First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.		First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.

Dank at 22:08, 18 January 2025

2025-01-18T22:08:08Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 22:08, 18 January 2025
Line 3:		Line 3:
	As Gene had reached the corner of El Paso Street and Paisano, and been forced to make a choice, under the adversarial circumstances, between a left toward Providence Memorial, on the campus of the University of Texas El Paso, entailing a likely stay for overnight observation, and a right toward the slightly less orthodox, though certainly still educational, approach, which didn’t entail much of anything, and was a bit off the beaten path for weapons-grade observers, he’d taken the obvious right, and arrived at the Abrigado Animal Clinic. After overcoming a certain amount of species incredulity, and patching Ray up with animal products, the Clinic had detected an impedance mismatch, between Raymond’s homo sapience and the minimal capacitance of the overnight pet care cages, and rather than attempting a complex conjugate, they’d released him to walk rather meekly away, while resisting the urge to loan Gene a leash, and offer Raymond a doggie biscuit.		As Gene had reached the corner of El Paso Street and Paisano, and been forced to make a choice, under the adversarial circumstances, between a left toward Providence Memorial, on the campus of the University of Texas El Paso, entailing a likely stay for overnight observation, and a right toward the slightly less orthodox, though certainly still educational, approach, which didn’t entail much of anything, and was a bit off the beaten path for weapons-grade observers, he’d taken the obvious right, and arrived at the Abrigado Animal Clinic. After overcoming a certain amount of species incredulity, and patching Ray up with animal products, the Clinic had detected an impedance mismatch, between Raymond’s homo sapience and the minimal capacitance of the overnight pet care cages, and rather than attempting a complex conjugate, they’d released him to walk rather meekly away, while resisting the urge to loan Gene a leash, and offer Raymond a doggie biscuit.

	Ray and Gene had a rented house, a mustard-yellow double-decker wreck of a place, a safe house if you will, in that Gomez didn’t know of its Magoffinesque existence, and that’s just where they went to get away from it all, stashing the truck in the garage at the back, hauling Ray off to an upstairs bedroom, and loading him up on goldfish antibiotics. Unaware that the Ethicon sutures in his chest were possibly better suited to a schnauzer’s bladder, but cognizant of the fact that even the slightest movement caused far more trouble than it was currently worth, Ray wasn’t moving around all that much, and had time on his hands to think things over. His first thought, sleep, was apparently not an option: it felt like whoever’d lashed his chest-parts back together must have installed some sort of motion detector, and wired it to a stretch of electrified fencing that was torque-wrenched tight using bolts through his rib cage, and whatever was in these canine pain pills was no match at all for his razor-toothed chest-wound, and taking deep breaths was not real bright, with a roll of concertina wire coiled around his torso, so this seemed like a good time to maybe just sit tight, try to shed a little light on some points of confusion, sort of sort out one or two of his immediate problems, and who knows, why not, just go ahead and solve them. It was, admittedly, pitch-black in the room, with maybe a little moonlight leaking in around the shades, and he didn’t have a clue what the hell the time was, somewhere in that dead-of-night gap before morning, and this whole think-things-over approach to solving problems wasn’t really part of Ray’s normal routine, but here, in a nutshell, was Ray’s current thinking: there was a massive fucking drug war going on in Juárez, and he, meaning Raymond, was now caught in the crossfire, and it was high time that someone, meaning Raymond once again, got the whole damn thing straightened out in his head. If you can picture Ray standing at his own mental whiteboard, drawing up org charts, and color-coded merger histories, and dotted-line arrows from cartel to cartel showing the current state of play among the constantly shifting business alliances, and plaza-sharing deals that would need to be restructured, and reseller channel-conflicts yet to be resolved, with a little stick-figure portrayal of Raymond himself, showing dotted-line arrows going straight through his head, you’ve got a pretty good picture of the problems Ray’s facing, but no sense at all of Raymond Edmunds; Raymond’s a gunman, not a McKinsey consultant, and it is, after all, pitch-black in the room, and even the McKinsey guy hasn’t quite got the picture; not only is his drawing several weeks out of date, but with Gomez and Ray no longer speaking, and the Thetas carving cryptonyms deep into his rib cage, we might be better off, org-chart-wise, portraying Dr. Edmunds as a seated-type duck, about to get dry-erased from the whiteboard itself, leaving a ghostly-looking shade of a sort of Moonlight Yellow feather-pile that might once have been a duck on the porcelain-steel surface. Raymond kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, with his boots off and his feet up and his chest full of violet-dyed Monocryl sutures, with a half-lit moon still rising in the east and two hours from its zenith in the black El Paso sky, which would make the time, am-wise, around 3:45, on April the 16th, meaning a few days past Easter, and a little late now to be filing his taxes, just staring into the dark there, thinking things over, and growing more and more confused about the war in Juárez. Since the best they could do at the pet care clinic was 100 mg Tramadol tablets, Ray was perhaps a little fuzzy from the pain, and eating domestic-animal opiates by the half-dozen handfuls, although even in a state of McKinsey-like lucidity, the drug war battle lines could still be disorienting, and with Ray basing his dosage levels on toy Yorkshire Terrier multiples, and chasing the pills down with the occasional pull from a liter-style bottle of Old Grand-Dad Bonded, ~~hell~~ soon be having trouble making sense of his own wall treatments. Raymond, in short, has certain practical difficulties, and one or two rudimentary epistemological problems that will need to be addressed before he moves on: if he’s hoping to make sense of the war in Juárez, Ray’s own thoughts will be no help at all; and even if he’s only searching for some inside information, the last place hell find it is inside his own head.		Ray and Gene had a rented house, a mustard-yellow double-decker wreck of a place, a safe house if you will, in that Gomez didn’t know of its Magoffinesque existence, and that’s just where they went to get away from it all, stashing the truck in the garage at the back, hauling Ray off to an upstairs bedroom, and loading him up on goldfish antibiotics. Unaware that the Ethicon sutures in his chest were possibly better suited to a schnauzer’s bladder, but cognizant of the fact that even the slightest movement caused far more trouble than it was currently worth, Ray wasn’t moving around all that much, and had time on his hands to think things over. His first thought, sleep, was apparently not an option: it felt like whoever’d lashed his chest-parts back together must have installed some sort of motion detector, and wired it to a stretch of electrified fencing that was torque-wrenched tight using bolts through his rib cage, and whatever was in these canine pain pills was no match at all for his razor-toothed chest-wound, and taking deep breaths was not real bright, with a roll of concertina wire coiled around his torso, so this seemed like a good time to maybe just sit tight, try to shed a little light on some points of confusion, sort of sort out one or two of his immediate problems, and who knows, why not, just go ahead and solve them. It was, admittedly, pitch-black in the room, with maybe a little moonlight leaking in around the shades, and he didn’t have a clue what the hell the time was, somewhere in that dead-of-night gap before morning, and this whole think-things-over approach to solving problems wasn’t really part of Ray’s normal routine, but here, in a nutshell, was Ray’s current thinking: there was a massive fucking drug war going on in Juárez, and he, meaning Raymond, was now caught in the crossfire, and it was high time that someone, meaning Raymond once again, got the whole damn thing straightened out in his head. If you can picture Ray standing at his own mental whiteboard, drawing up org charts, and color-coded merger histories, and dotted-line arrows from cartel to cartel showing the current state of play among the constantly shifting business alliances, and plaza-sharing deals that would need to be restructured, and reseller channel-conflicts yet to be resolved, with a little stick-figure portrayal of Raymond himself, showing dotted-line arrows going straight through his head, you’ve got a pretty good picture of the problems Ray’s facing, but no sense at all of Raymond Edmunds; Raymond’s a gunman, not a McKinsey consultant, and it is, after all, pitch-black in the room, and even the McKinsey guy hasn’t quite got the picture; not only is his drawing several weeks out of date, but with Gomez and Ray no longer speaking, and the Thetas carving cryptonyms deep into his rib cage, we might be better off, org-chart-wise, portraying Dr. Edmunds as a seated-type duck, about to get dry-erased from the whiteboard itself, leaving a ghostly-looking shade of a sort of Moonlight Yellow feather-pile that might once have been a duck on the porcelain-steel surface. Raymond kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, with his boots off and his feet up and his chest full of violet-dyed Monocryl sutures, with a half-lit moon still rising in the east and two hours from its zenith in the black El Paso sky, which would make the time, am-wise, around 3:45, on April the 16th, meaning a few days past Easter, and a little late now to be filing his taxes, just staring into the dark there, thinking things over, and growing more and more confused about the war in Juárez. Since the best they could do at the pet care clinic was 100 mg Tramadol tablets, Ray was perhaps a little fuzzy from the pain, and eating domestic-animal opiates by the half-dozen handfuls, although even in a state of McKinsey-like lucidity, the drug war battle lines could still be disorienting, and with Ray basing his dosage levels on toy Yorkshire Terrier multiples, and chasing the pills down with the occasional pull from a liter-style bottle of Old Grand-Dad Bonded, he'll soon be having trouble making sense of his own wall treatments. Raymond, in short, has certain practical difficulties, and one or two rudimentary epistemological problems that will need to be addressed before he moves on: if he’s hoping to make sense of the war in Juárez, Ray’s own thoughts will be no help at all; and even if he’s only searching for some inside information, the last place hell find it is inside his own head.

	First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.		First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.

Dank at 21:21, 18 January 2025

2025-01-18T21:21:03Z

Show changes

Dank at 21:07, 18 January 2025

2025-01-18T21:07:39Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 21:07, 18 January 2025
Line 17:		Line 17:
	And thus it was that Phase III began, on December 11, 2006, with 7,000 troops preparing to march on Michoacan, and 40,000 waiting for their birth-death certificates, and everything taking a turn for the terminally weird, with everyone involved, including the Government, not only fighting on any and all sides of the battle, but simultaneously at peace and at war with themselves, which didn’t make much sense, particularly to Raymond, which in turn led to another of those Raymond-type shrugs, and yet another assumption of the “wait and see” attitude, like wait at elevation on a hilltop in El Paso, and see if all of Mexico got wiped off the map.		And thus it was that Phase III began, on December 11, 2006, with 7,000 troops preparing to march on Michoacan, and 40,000 waiting for their birth-death certificates, and everything taking a turn for the terminally weird, with everyone involved, including the Government, not only fighting on any and all sides of the battle, but simultaneously at peace and at war with themselves, which didn’t make much sense, particularly to Raymond, which in turn led to another of those Raymond-type shrugs, and yet another assumption of the “wait and see” attitude, like wait at elevation on a hilltop in El Paso, and see if all of Mexico got wiped off the map.

	On the glass-half-full side, when the Mexican Army had invaded their land, Zambada Garcia had called for a truce among Cartels, and brokered a simple peace pact between the warring factions, which resulted in a coalition called La Federacion, not to be confused with La Federacion, also known as La Alianza de Sangre, much less La Nueva Federacion, which in turn should not in any way be confused with itself, since La Familia Michoacana both did and did not want anything to do with it; this might be a good time to stop thinking trench warfare, with nice clean battle lines, and barren-stretch No-Man’s-Land warnings to civilians, and start thinking back to the Peloponnesian War, and battle lines drawn in the shifting currents of the Aegean, while trying to keep in mind that what Thucydides meant by stasis was a steady-state condition of constant civil war, a condition maintained, fortunately for historians, through the ceaseless suppression of any sort of impulse toward decency and moderation and a sense of shared humanity, which even on paper sounds hopelessly bland, in favor of unleashing the far more interesting forces of greed, fanaticism, and human depravity, without which human history would be a far different story; imagine a world without greed and depravity, and the next thing you know, you’ve never heard of Thucydides, you’ve just reduced one of the world’s great historians to the status, let’s face it, of a complete nonentity, just another nameless Greek, really no one in particular, kicking back on his sunlit porch sipping a kylix of Chian wine, staring off at the blue Aegean and the vast Alimos sky, caught up, just for a moment, in one of those out-of-the-blue moments where everything that is is just as it should be, and even his own rather ordinary gardens, full of lavender shades of agnos blossoms and crimson anemone and pure white asphodelos, are in harmony with themselves, and momentarily timeless, and then unleashing a sudden impulse to take his kids for a swim. Fortunately for Thucydides, as far as the drug wars are concerned, he won’t have to worry about taking the kids for a swim, because greed and depravity are basically immortal, and any sudden outbreak of a sense of shared humanity won’t last long unless it’s heavily armed. Zambada Garcia’s anti-Army Federation was a kind of Lions Club for Drug Lords, purblind knights in the crusade for utter darkness, or a let-the-free-market-function Chamber of Commerce, with yet another long list of inscrutable nicknames. In harmony at last, in a steady-state of stasis, the drug lords were now working together, to fight off the poorly paid and under-equipped Army, and when that didn’t work, they recruited their workers, using banners that criss-crossed the Sinaloa and Sonora and Chihuahua state highways, advertising better wages and working conditions: GOOD PAY, FOOD, AND HELP FOR YOUR FAMILIES. It probably goes without saying, just for the record, that senior Mexican Government officials have a whole different deal, based on a formula that goes back to antiquity, and with an entirely different approach to cost-of-living adjustments: Dónde están mis dólares putas? which translates loosely to Where’s my fucking money? and amounts to a, give or take, lifetime contract. On the glass-blown-to-shit side, peace is for lightweights, there’s not much point in amassing ungodly firepower and armaments exotica and overwhelming quantities of weaponry paraphernalia, unless it’s put to use for the betterment of man, through establishment of more open and democratic societies, and markets free to function without excessive intervention, bringing freedom and prosperity to our brothers in the fight, and raining a fucking shitstorm on the rest of you pussies: Los Zetas found themselves like a landlocked country, a drug cartel without its own plaza, and having also discovered that they were deeply tired of swatting at ~~mosquito’s~~ in coastal Matamoras, they decided to tackle both problems at once, first filling in the swamps with the cranial debris of Gulf Cartel trade reps in Neuvo Laredo, and then seizing the shipping lanes into Laredo itself, which hadn’t looked like much when viewed from the air, but has like 9,000 trucks, and 40% of Mexico’s exports, passing through it daily, jampacked with drugs; La Familia Michoacana, an evangelical religious group, whose spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, had long been heeding the call to the cloth and divine retribution and eternal salvation, through the beheading of nonbelievers in his family-values cause, became deeply disturbed by Federal Government depravity, having caught them in the act of committing the mortal sin of competing with La Familia in the methamphetamine business, and sent word of their disillusionment back to Mexico City, via twelve Federal agents who were so wracked with guilt that their mutilated bodies had to be shoveled-up and dime-bagged from the dust around a Michoacan roadside shrine, where they had come to do penance and atone for their sins, before traveling home with pieces of La Familia’s tortuous message; the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel grew wary of supporting a tyrant named Shorty, perhaps as a result of El Chapo himself dropping a so-called dime on his partner, Alfredo Beltran, leading to a most unfortunate encounter between Edgar Guzman, El Chapo’s son, and 15 or 20 of the omnipresent Zetas, apparently still For Hire for special occasions, and by the time the Zetas had lightened their load of AK-47 8M3 hollow-points, and dropped off their smoking RPG-7s, now rendered grenadeless, in a Guzman-family shopping cart, it turned out that Edgar, El Chapo’s heir apparent, was about half the size of his own “Shorty” father; and to add insult and injury to grievous bodily harm, Los Negros abandoned their principles altogether, becoming the drug-war equivalent of Blackwater/Xe, killing Sinaloans, Zetas, Matamorans, Beltran-Leyvians, hanging severed human heads from the bridges of Cuernavaca, providing risk management consulting to every war zone in Mexico, and had to be replaced by the Thetas Ray’d encountered, in an excess of X’s and lager-bottle fragments and the plaguing of philosophers with arithmetical esoterics, having something to do with the subtraction of human limbs.		On the glass-half-full side, when the Mexican Army had invaded their land, Zambada Garcia had called for a truce among Cartels, and brokered a simple peace pact between the warring factions, which resulted in a coalition called La Federacion, not to be confused with La Federacion, also known as La Alianza de Sangre, much less La Nueva Federacion, which in turn should not in any way be confused with itself, since La Familia Michoacana both did and did not want anything to do with it; this might be a good time to stop thinking trench warfare, with nice clean battle lines, and barren-stretch No-Man’s-Land warnings to civilians, and start thinking back to the Peloponnesian War, and battle lines drawn in the shifting currents of the Aegean, while trying to keep in mind that what Thucydides meant by stasis was a steady-state condition of constant civil war, a condition maintained, fortunately for historians, through the ceaseless suppression of any sort of impulse toward decency and moderation and a sense of shared humanity, which even on paper sounds hopelessly bland, in favor of unleashing the far more interesting forces of greed, fanaticism, and human depravity, without which human history would be a far different story; imagine a world without greed and depravity, and the next thing you know, you’ve never heard of Thucydides, you’ve just reduced one of the world’s great historians to the status, let’s face it, of a complete nonentity, just another nameless Greek, really no one in particular, kicking back on his sunlit porch sipping a kylix of Chian wine, staring off at the blue Aegean and the vast Alimos sky, caught up, just for a moment, in one of those out-of-the-blue moments where everything that is is just as it should be, and even his own rather ordinary gardens, full of lavender shades of agnos blossoms and crimson anemone and pure white asphodelos, are in harmony with themselves, and momentarily timeless, and then unleashing a sudden impulse to take his kids for a swim. Fortunately for Thucydides, as far as the drug wars are concerned, he won’t have to worry about taking the kids for a swim, because greed and depravity are basically immortal, and any sudden outbreak of a sense of shared humanity won’t last long unless it’s heavily armed. Zambada Garcia’s anti-Army Federation was a kind of Lions Club for Drug Lords, purblind knights in the crusade for utter darkness, or a let-the-free-market-function Chamber of Commerce, with yet another long list of inscrutable nicknames. In harmony at last, in a steady-state of stasis, the drug lords were now working together, to fight off the poorly paid and under-equipped Army, and when that didn’t work, they recruited their workers, using banners that criss-crossed the Sinaloa and Sonora and Chihuahua state highways, advertising better wages and working conditions: GOOD PAY, FOOD, AND HELP FOR YOUR FAMILIES. It probably goes without saying, just for the record, that senior Mexican Government officials have a whole different deal, based on a formula that goes back to antiquity, and with an entirely different approach to cost-of-living adjustments: Dónde están mis dólares putas? which translates loosely to Where’s my fucking money? and amounts to a, give or take, lifetime contract. On the glass-blown-to-shit side, peace is for lightweights, there’s not much point in amassing ungodly firepower and armaments exotica and overwhelming quantities of weaponry paraphernalia, unless it’s put to use for the betterment of man, through establishment of more open and democratic societies, and markets free to function without excessive intervention, bringing freedom and prosperity to our brothers in the fight, and raining a fucking shitstorm on the rest of you pussies: Los Zetas found themselves like a landlocked country, a drug cartel without its own plaza, and having also discovered that they were deeply tired of swatting at mosquitos in coastal Matamoras, they decided to tackle both problems at once, first filling in the swamps with the cranial debris of Gulf Cartel trade reps in Neuvo Laredo, and then seizing the shipping lanes into Laredo itself, which hadn’t looked like much when viewed from the air, but has like 9,000 trucks, and 40% of Mexico’s exports, passing through it daily, jampacked with drugs; La Familia Michoacana, an evangelical religious group, whose spiritual leader, Nazario Moreno Gonzalez, had long been heeding the call to the cloth and divine retribution and eternal salvation, through the beheading of nonbelievers in his family-values cause, became deeply disturbed by Federal Government depravity, having caught them in the act of committing the mortal sin of competing with La Familia in the methamphetamine business, and sent word of their disillusionment back to Mexico City, via twelve Federal agents who were so wracked with guilt that their mutilated bodies had to be shoveled-up and dime-bagged from the dust around a Michoacan roadside shrine, where they had come to do penance and atone for their sins, before traveling home with pieces of La Familia’s tortuous message; the Beltran-Leyva Sonora Cartel grew wary of supporting a tyrant named Shorty, perhaps as a result of El Chapo himself dropping a so-called dime on his partner, Alfredo Beltran, leading to a most unfortunate encounter between Edgar Guzman, El Chapo’s son, and 15 or 20 of the omnipresent Zetas, apparently still For Hire for special occasions, and by the time the Zetas had lightened their load of AK-47 8M3 hollow-points, and dropped off their smoking RPG-7s, now rendered grenadeless, in a Guzman-family shopping cart, it turned out that Edgar, El Chapo’s heir apparent, was about half the size of his own “Shorty” father; and to add insult and injury to grievous bodily harm, Los Negros abandoned their principles altogether, becoming the drug-war equivalent of Blackwater/Xe, killing Sinaloans, Zetas, Matamorans, Beltran-Leyvians, hanging severed human heads from the bridges of Cuernavaca, providing risk management consulting to every war zone in Mexico, and had to be replaced by the Thetas Ray’d encountered, in an excess of X’s and lager-bottle fragments and the plaguing of philosophers with arithmetical esoterics, having something to do with the subtraction of human limbs.

	While their aims and ideals were no doubt pure, and both the Drug Lords and Government slept with the clear conscience of all perfectly ordinary socio-psychopaths, from serial murderers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the inevitable result of this Reap the Whirlwind Doctrine was a certain amount of confusion among veteran vexillologists and students of emblemology and normative blazonry prescriptive grammarians: the corpse-size Hefty Bag became the state tree of Tamaulipas, planted by the hundreds along the road to Reynosa, while the new state insect, the greenbottle blowfly, waited in San Fernando for the corpses to decompose; per fess azure and sable, three human heads caboshed, displayed senestré of the sun in splendor, became the mutilated blazonry of the Sinaloa Coat of Arms; the Mexican National Flag tore itself in half, right through the middle of the Eagle gripping the Serpent, and the two halves of the flag began feeding on each other, which didn’t leave much for the vexillologists to ponder; and a new aerial pennant was designed for the Airborne, trucking the body-parts to their homes in the empty Chihuahuan desert, a nasty piece of work, with the Agnus Dei lamb, no doubt slaughtered for Easter, lying beside a crozier flying a banner made of paper, the pink-and-black cross of a Juárez lamp post. If you’re hoping to understand the dynamics of the drug wars, or thinking about becoming a Juárez vexillologist, you might want to consider spending 8 or 10 years trading counterfeit currency for mortars in Mogadishu, while leafing through Wittgenstein on the mythos of volition. If you’re thinking that maybe the current alignment will hold, with Juárez, Zeta, Beltran-Leyva, and Tijuana Cartels on one side of the produce aisle, and Sinaloa, Gulf, La Familia Michoacana, and the Theta philosophers over there on the other, remember how well the Athenian Empire held together, and then loan us a dime, and we’ll blow the whole supermarket. If you believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that a Government cannot endure, at war with itself, welcome to Mexico, and God Bless America, who the hell said anything about needing a fucking Government. If you’re deeply troubled by the rate of civilian death, and the destruction of human life in acts of random violence, and the loss of the innocent and wide-eyed and wondrous to democidal maniacs too hideous to fathom, a bunch of beady-eyed weapons-crazed indiscriminate killers, you should download some photos of how we firebombed Japan. If none of this stuff makes any sense at all, and you’re not feeling all that, what’s the word, lucid, we could try doing a rewrite, or changing your meds, but as far as making sense of the war in Juárez, or even beginning to comprehend why it is that human leaders, members of a purportedly sapient species, tend to act, with some frequency, like messianic robots, our attitude is: frankly, why bother?		While their aims and ideals were no doubt pure, and both the Drug Lords and Government slept with the clear conscience of all perfectly ordinary socio-psychopaths, from serial murderers to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the inevitable result of this Reap the Whirlwind Doctrine was a certain amount of confusion among veteran vexillologists and students of emblemology and normative blazonry prescriptive grammarians: the corpse-size Hefty Bag became the state tree of Tamaulipas, planted by the hundreds along the road to Reynosa, while the new state insect, the greenbottle blowfly, waited in San Fernando for the corpses to decompose; per fess azure and sable, three human heads caboshed, displayed senestré of the sun in splendor, became the mutilated blazonry of the Sinaloa Coat of Arms; the Mexican National Flag tore itself in half, right through the middle of the Eagle gripping the Serpent, and the two halves of the flag began feeding on each other, which didn’t leave much for the vexillologists to ponder; and a new aerial pennant was designed for the Airborne, trucking the body-parts to their homes in the empty Chihuahuan desert, a nasty piece of work, with the Agnus Dei lamb, no doubt slaughtered for Easter, lying beside a crozier flying a banner made of paper, the pink-and-black cross of a Juárez lamp post. If you’re hoping to understand the dynamics of the drug wars, or thinking about becoming a Juárez vexillologist, you might want to consider spending 8 or 10 years trading counterfeit currency for mortars in Mogadishu, while leafing through Wittgenstein on the mythos of volition. If you’re thinking that maybe the current alignment will hold, with Juárez, Zeta, Beltran-Leyva, and Tijuana Cartels on one side of the produce aisle, and Sinaloa, Gulf, La Familia Michoacana, and the Theta philosophers over there on the other, remember how well the Athenian Empire held together, and then loan us a dime, and we’ll blow the whole supermarket. If you believe that a house divided against itself cannot stand, and that a Government cannot endure, at war with itself, welcome to Mexico, and God Bless America, who the hell said anything about needing a fucking Government. If you’re deeply troubled by the rate of civilian death, and the destruction of human life in acts of random violence, and the loss of the innocent and wide-eyed and wondrous to democidal maniacs too hideous to fathom, a bunch of beady-eyed weapons-crazed indiscriminate killers, you should download some photos of how we firebombed Japan. If none of this stuff makes any sense at all, and you’re not feeling all that, what’s the word, lucid, we could try doing a rewrite, or changing your meds, but as far as making sense of the war in Juárez, or even beginning to comprehend why it is that human leaders, members of a purportedly sapient species, tend to act, with some frequency, like messianic robots, our attitude is: frankly, why bother?

Dank at 20:53, 18 January 2025

2025-01-18T20:53:28Z

← Older revision		Revision as of 20:53, 18 January 2025
Line 7:		Line 7:
	First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.		First of all, the man that he works for, Gomez of El Paso, a man of Shakespearean-wit-brevity and marquetry-chronometer-collection fame, was more of a kind of concept to Ray than anything resembling an actual human, and other than posing a threat to his corporeal existence, Ray had no real idea what the man did for a living. To Ray’s way of thinking, Gomez laundered money, while running Ray ragged, and frequently down, to supplement his apparently limitless ego, though he is in fact the Treasurer and CFO for the massive-cash balance sheet of the Juárez Cartel, under Vicente Carrillo Fuentes, or maybe it was Ricardo Garcia Urquiza, or Vicente Carrillo Leyva, or José Luis Fratello, a man who in fact runs the Cartel’s sicarios, a word that goes back to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the slitting of Roman throats using sicae, meaning daggers, though the Cartel’s assassins are known as La Linea, a word that goes back to the “firing line” for cannons, or perhaps it was Rafael Munoz Talavera, who unbeknownst to Raymond has been dead for ten years, found time-travelling backwards through the streets of Juárez in the left rear seat of an armored Jeep Cherokee, with his mind fixed firmly on the rearview mirror, and his bullet-riddled head double-doggie-bagged in plastic, or then again it might as well be Juan José Esparragoza Moreno, known by his nickname, “El Azul,” a word that goes back, via Arabic and Persian, to all the Throne-of-God sky-shades of lapis lazuli, from powder blue to azure to a deep midnight indigo, though calling a born killer such a celestial shade of something would seem to defy all predicate logic, and most conventional color theories with regard to human flesh tones; the truth is, even if we skipped the etymonics, Raymond wouldn’t even know the rudimentary basics here, like who the hell was running his own brigade, or who reported to who with all these psycho Cartel warlords, and as to where the battle lines were drawn, or whose side was whose in War Zone Juárez, he had no better idea than did the DEA or ICE, and they didn’t have enough between the two of them to constitute so much as a whisper of a clue. Ray thought this over, searching for clues, among the baffling contradictions he’d read in the papers, and sort of threw up his hands, metaphorically speaking, since strictly speaking, he could barely fucking move: if he wanted to get out of this jam he was in, he was going to have to give this a whole lot more thought. While it might be educational to listen in on Raymond’s thoughts, regarding the drug war battle lines in Ciudad Juárez, as a massive dose of a tramadol-hydrochloride opioid analgesic slowly eases its way through the blood-brain barrier, and makes itself at home, metaeuphorically speaking, among the opiate receptors of Ray’s human head, we need to keep in mind that Raymond himself barely knows the names of the people in question; just because a man is really and truly high doesn’t mean he’s some sort of paronomasial claircognizant. We’d probably be better off, once the Tramadol takes hold, having a little chat with some of those plump pink cherubs that are about to show up on Raymond’s powder-blue walls.

	So how do we make sense of this war in Juárez? Do we need another consult with our claircognizant angelologist, one of those storefront exonymic Gypsy-type Romanis who reads greased palms, and does Tarot-divination using bank-strapped currency, and makes crystal-clear forecasts out of ~~8-balls~~ of meth? To be perfectly honest, we could probably go straight to the Théophanie Angel Himself, with trumpets blaring away up on top of Mount Sinai, and lightning-filled columns of noumenal phenomena, and the whole flaming mountain about to go up in a pyrolytic feeding-frenzy carbonized rush, and we’d likely get one of those why is there evil shrugs, like Ciudad Juárez isn’t exactly His department. So how do we make sense of this war in Juárez? The same way we’d deal with a Juárez intersection: look both ways and then hazard a guess.		So how do we make sense of this war in Juárez? Do we need another consult with our claircognizant angelologist, one of those storefront exonymic Gypsy-type Romanis who reads greased palms, and does Tarot-divination using bank-strapped currency, and makes crystal-clear forecasts out of eightballs of meth? To be perfectly honest, we could probably go straight to the Théophanie Angel Himself, with trumpets blaring away up on top of Mount Sinai, and lightning-filled columns of noumenal phenomena, and the whole flaming mountain about to go up in a pyrolytic feeding-frenzy carbonized rush, and we’d likely get one of those why is there evil shrugs, like Ciudad Juárez isn’t exactly His department. So how do we make sense of this war in Juárez? The same way we’d deal with a Juárez intersection: look both ways and then hazard a guess.

	Hazard it this way. It had probably started out simply enough, with the Juárez Cartel attempting to defend its own home turf and eponymous plaza, the shipping lanes north via the Port of El Paso into the mood-enhanced States of Operation Dime Bag, against an all-out assault from the Gulf Cartel, of Matamoras, Mexico, in the northeastern corner of the state of Tamaulipas, with its mosquito-infested coastal swamps, and its out-of-the-way plaza, via Highway 2, into Brownsville, Laredo, and McAllen, Texas, and its death-squad army of merciless mercenaries that didn’t much care for the rules of polite society, much less hanging around in a dump like Matamoros, waiting for some sort of calligraphic-invite to the drug-plaza party along the whole U.S. border. If we want to get a handle on this war in Juárez, we’re going to have to come to grips with these merciless mercenaries, as their anti-anodyne methods became the standard of care for every last patient ever touched by the drug war. Los Zetas, as they were known, after the police-band code name of their original founder, were NATO-armed-and-disciplined paramilitary types, with particular expertise in communications and savagery, that the Gulf had recruited, using U.S. currency, out of the Mexican Army, specifically the elite Airborne Special Forces, following training at Fort Bragg and the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia; with their terrorize-the-enemy approach to the human body, and their counter-insurgency training in high-tech munitions, and their unfathomable nicknames, like “El Winnie the Pooh,’’ the Zetas were a little different, that’s all there was to it; the Zetas were innovators, true battlespace visionaries, and the cartels of the ’90s were still fighting the last war. If you pictured a man dressed in dead-of-night black, wearing jungle-warfare facepaint, and spit-shined jump boots, making a minor adjustment to the heterodyning generator on a Stinger Surface-to-Air Missile’s focal plane array, while testing the utility of a hickory-handled framing hammer for removing the genitalia from some grave disappointment, you’d have a pretty good picture of the paradigmatic Zeta, and all the more reason to stop fighting the last war. Ray’s whole approach to dealing with the Zetas was based on a strategy of situational avoidance, like if a situation arose where the Zetas were present, Ray double-checked to make sure that he was absent. This particular methodology, with its redundancy algorithm, doesn’t, admittedly, sound altogether rational: why would a man have to check twice to make a clear determination as to his presence or absence? A man’s either there, facing a situation, or he’s somewhere else, and a quick visual check of his immediate surroundings should more than suffice to resolve any questions. It’s not like a man can be two places at once; we’re talking about a human being here, not some sort of introspective quantum automata; the cartels of the ’90s were a little low-tech, but the Zetas were still years from having quantum computers, using Schrodinger superposition in qubit arrays, where a bit may be set at either zero or one, or both zero and one simultaneously; a man, needless to say, is either present or absent, and he can’t be both at the exact same instant; this sort of living-dead moment may be fine for Schrodinger’s cat, but its no way to deal with an ordinary human. Since Raymond himself was more or less rational, and this part of the war was supposed to be simple, something’s gone wrong here; we must not quite be getting the full picture. Ray had his truck, an aging and rust-eaten K-series long-box, parked on a little knoll, above a streambed ravine, out in the scrub-brush of the empty Chihuahuan desert; three guys in black pulled a fourth from behind the wheel of a green and white taxi that could maybe use a paint job, removed his straw hat, his wallet, and watch, and gave Ray a brief but impressive demonstration of the Zetas’ unique approach to the presence-absence paradox, and it had nothing at all to do with quantum automata. By the time his GMC had driven itself home, quite possibly over the bottom of the bone-dry Rio, Ray found himself doing a quick double-check, feeling around for his face-bones, and searching for his watch-face, not altogether sure, right at the moment, that his head, hands, and watch were even in the same time zone. By now, of course, this where-am-I demonstration is a common occurrence in every war zone in Mexico, but it’s based on a trademarked Zeta innovation: the severed, but still living, missing human head. For all you know, for a few moments at least, you could be staring straight up at the blue Chihuahua sky, just kicking back, sort of watching the crows fly, at a 40-foot remove from the rest of your body. It’s not like Ray started wandering around Juárez, double-checking his math on Schrodinger’s equation; when it came to the Zetas, however, you were far better off being slightly redundant than finding yourself staring straight up at the sky, not so much, at this point, double-checking your watch-face, as doing a slow fade on some serious second-guessing. So when word filtered down that peace was at hand, and that the Gulf, Zetas, and Juárez Cartel were now on the same side, joining forces in the battle against the Sinaloa Cartel, supposedly headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Ray basically shrugged, and took a “wait and see” attitude toward his immediate situation, like wait in El Paso, at pre-checked coordinates, and see if the Zetas started crossing the border.		Hazard it this way. It had probably started out simply enough, with the Juárez Cartel attempting to defend its own home turf and eponymous plaza, the shipping lanes north via the Port of El Paso into the mood-enhanced States of Operation Dime Bag, against an all-out assault from the Gulf Cartel, of Matamoras, Mexico, in the northeastern corner of the state of Tamaulipas, with its mosquito-infested coastal swamps, and its out-of-the-way plaza, via Highway 2, into Brownsville, Laredo, and McAllen, Texas, and its death-squad army of merciless mercenaries that didn’t much care for the rules of polite society, much less hanging around in a dump like Matamoros, waiting for some sort of calligraphic-invite to the drug-plaza party along the whole U.S. border. If we want to get a handle on this war in Juárez, we’re going to have to come to grips with these merciless mercenaries, as their anti-anodyne methods became the standard of care for every last patient ever touched by the drug war. Los Zetas, as they were known, after the police-band code name of their original founder, were NATO-armed-and-disciplined paramilitary types, with particular expertise in communications and savagery, that the Gulf had recruited, using U.S. currency, out of the Mexican Army, specifically the elite Airborne Special Forces, following training at Fort Bragg and the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia; with their terrorize-the-enemy approach to the human body, and their counter-insurgency training in high-tech munitions, and their unfathomable nicknames, like “El Winnie the Pooh,’’ the Zetas were a little different, that’s all there was to it; the Zetas were innovators, true battlespace visionaries, and the cartels of the ’90s were still fighting the last war. If you pictured a man dressed in dead-of-night black, wearing jungle-warfare facepaint, and spit-shined jump boots, making a minor adjustment to the heterodyning generator on a Stinger Surface-to-Air Missile’s focal plane array, while testing the utility of a hickory-handled framing hammer for removing the genitalia from some grave disappointment, you’d have a pretty good picture of the paradigmatic Zeta, and all the more reason to stop fighting the last war. Ray’s whole approach to dealing with the Zetas was based on a strategy of situational avoidance, like if a situation arose where the Zetas were present, Ray double-checked to make sure that he was absent. This particular methodology, with its redundancy algorithm, doesn’t, admittedly, sound altogether rational: why would a man have to check twice to make a clear determination as to his presence or absence? A man’s either there, facing a situation, or he’s somewhere else, and a quick visual check of his immediate surroundings should more than suffice to resolve any questions. It’s not like a man can be two places at once; we’re talking about a human being here, not some sort of introspective quantum automata; the cartels of the ’90s were a little low-tech, but the Zetas were still years from having quantum computers, using Schrodinger superposition in qubit arrays, where a bit may be set at either zero or one, or both zero and one simultaneously; a man, needless to say, is either present or absent, and he can’t be both at the exact same instant; this sort of living-dead moment may be fine for Schrodinger’s cat, but its no way to deal with an ordinary human. Since Raymond himself was more or less rational, and this part of the war was supposed to be simple, something’s gone wrong here; we must not quite be getting the full picture. Ray had his truck, an aging and rust-eaten K-series long-box, parked on a little knoll, above a streambed ravine, out in the scrub-brush of the empty Chihuahuan desert; three guys in black pulled a fourth from behind the wheel of a green and white taxi that could maybe use a paint job, removed his straw hat, his wallet, and watch, and gave Ray a brief but impressive demonstration of the Zetas’ unique approach to the presence-absence paradox, and it had nothing at all to do with quantum automata. By the time his GMC had driven itself home, quite possibly over the bottom of the bone-dry Rio, Ray found himself doing a quick double-check, feeling around for his face-bones, and searching for his watch-face, not altogether sure, right at the moment, that his head, hands, and watch were even in the same time zone. By now, of course, this where-am-I demonstration is a common occurrence in every war zone in Mexico, but it’s based on a trademarked Zeta innovation: the severed, but still living, missing human head. For all you know, for a few moments at least, you could be staring straight up at the blue Chihuahua sky, just kicking back, sort of watching the crows fly, at a 40-foot remove from the rest of your body. It’s not like Ray started wandering around Juárez, double-checking his math on Schrodinger’s equation; when it came to the Zetas, however, you were far better off being slightly redundant than finding yourself staring straight up at the sky, not so much, at this point, double-checking your watch-face, as doing a slow fade on some serious second-guessing. So when word filtered down that peace was at hand, and that the Gulf, Zetas, and Juárez Cartel were now on the same side, joining forces in the battle against the Sinaloa Cartel, supposedly headed by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Ray basically shrugged, and took a “wait and see” attitude toward his immediate situation, like wait in El Paso, at pre-checked coordinates, and see if the Zetas started crossing the border.

Dank: Created page with "Ray kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, his chest patched up with surgical tape, 3M Steri-Strip antimicrobial skin closures, with pressure-sensitive adhesive containing an iodopher germicide, diatomic iodine complexed with an ordinary amphiphilic surfactant, and a nonwoven backing, reinforced with filaments of polyethylene terephthalate, for tensile strength and energy absorption, and finer wound-edge approximation; the deep wounds over his heart and lungs had been n..."

2025-01-18T20:53:02Z

Created page with "Ray kicked back in his waiting-to-heal bed, his chest patched up with surgical tape, 3M Steri-Strip antimicrobial skin closures, with pressure-sensitive adhesive containing an iodopher germicide, diatomic iodine complexed with an ordinary amphiphilic surfactant, and a nonwoven backing, reinforced with filaments of polyethylene terephthalate, for tensile strength and energy absorption, and finer wound-edge approximation; the deep wounds over his heart and lungs had been n..."

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