Ciudad Juárez

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.

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.

Ciudad Juárez: Difference between revisions

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 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.