My origin story.
What’s the relevance of David?
You’ll see 😉
Money Flows Like Water, And I Am Never Thirsty
The sun hangs overhead, as bright and blistering as I have always known it to be. My guess is that it’s around 90 degrees. A violent wind threatens to whip my body around, my large fluffy curls sway this way and that. This breeze would be cooling in other circumstances, but a grey haze fills up half the sky, choking the air with humidity.
Still, I do not sweat.
My coolness does not come from my vintage cotton Breton striped J. Crew dress that shows off my lightly goldened knees. It does not come from my beat up black sandals, nor my overfilled Dooney and Burke tote that keeps me grounded in the wild wind. And it certainly does not come from my red Wellbefore K94 style mask.
No, the reason I am able to feel fresh despite it all is because of my greatest accessory– a beautifully arranged iced coffee from the local coffee shop down the street. Perhaps it’s a bit gauche to flaunt my class aspirations so openly, but the fact is, holding a cold object helps one stay cold. Otherwise, there’s no barrier between you and the heat, and just walking to your car becomes a wet odyssey.
But, I am not thinking of any of this. I am not thinking at all. Slightly tired, my mouth an exquisitely stupid hidden “O”, I step inside the nearby Family Dollar, locked on finding what I need.
Even in a place as hot as a Valley, this is not what a March should be. But in 2026, nothing seems to be what it should.
Was it ever that way at all?
Tiqqun’s Young-girl, untouchable in his/her/their perfectly performative consumption, was never meant to be an instruction guide to life, and the idea that this is only option available as the world crumbles apart seems bleak. Indeed, when I was younger, I thought all symbols of wealth and status were pointless and violent, and rejected all pretensions of glamour and conventional beauty. But in the present day, I have to come to understand that the facade of Western civilization is inherently violent. We dance, drink, smoke, and fuck on the foundation of violently extracted bones.
They’re already dead. They’re already there. To not acknowledge them, to let their sacrifices go unappreciated, is the ultimate violence.
I myself was almost born a pile of bones.
And yet I live.
Still, to keep a baby born a month early alive is very expensive, and my world debut cost about thirty thousand dollars in ‘90s money. This is the first debt I ever incurred, and it has been hanging over my head since. It imparted a deep heaviness on my young parents’ psyches – just six months later, my diehard Nuyorican father and Filipino mother made their way to the Rio Grande Valley, enticed by the possibility of a six figure nursing job and fat sign-up bonus.
To the average person in the Valley, that kind of money is crazy. The only way you can get that is if you go into medicine, policing and border patrol, or law and politics: all professions aimed at controlling the populace and maintaining social order. Since it’s deviant for a place in America to be 90% native Mexicans, it’s punished with being the most economically depressed region in Texas.
However, since I was raised to be a good American, an aspiring elite American at that, none of this bothered me growing up. In fact, I hardly noticed it, my immigrant Filipino medical bubble a fuzzy hologram projected above it all. The privilege of being able to visit my family in New York City every year growing up never registered – instead, I felt deprived in not being able to visit Europe or East Asia like my peers.
What a successful American is supposed to do is: when they have extracted all they can from their origin, they are supposed to rise above it. They are supposed to go somewhere with more opportunity, more people, more visibility. An actor goes to LA. A writer goes to NYC.
That’s just sense.
That’s how you become somebody.
I did not do this.
My life as a proper American peaked when I fulfilled my mother’s dream, a prospective full scholarship at the local university. I tried medicine; it wasn’t for me. I parlayed this opportunity into studying art for free, but I still could not square away the true educational demand of university – learning to uphold the daily rituals necessary for living a respectable American life. I simply could not perform these things, and trying to resolve the ideals projected onto me with my reality literally drove me crazy. I slipped out of the hologram I lived in for so long and finally became aware of the world around me.
The Valley is a difficult place to live. It’s obscure and mired in poverty. If it’s in national news, it’s for something bad, the latest example – birthing the two Hispanic ICE agents that executed Alex Pretti.
Even if not for those things – big “if” – it’s still a tropical desert with temperatures in the 80’s and 90’s most of the year. The native plants, 90-something-percent of which have been destroyed over the past three centuries, are prickly for a reason. If they didn’t have thorns and spikes, their hard-earned water would be easily stolen. The average household, the average business is run on a razor’s edge. And if it isn’t, that in itself is suspicious.
I have always felt lack, and continue to feel lack, but I’ve never had to deal with no credit, no family, no nothing.
Wealth is relative.
On a mild spring’s day in 2023, I manage to wake up early and attend my first estate sale on the edge of town, lured by the promise of a bronze statue of Saint Michael. It’s out of budget by a magnitude of several hundreds, and already sold anyway, but the scene is extraordinary. The meticulously decorated mansion is buzzing with all types and ages, from transient opportunists like me to those I would come to learn were regulars. We had all come to pay our perverted respects to some doctor we never knew, hoping his success would bless everybody.
Half-asleep, wandering the mansion feels like a dream. Catholic memorabilia everywhere. Many, many cowboy hats for sale, but no ladies’ clothes. Giant portraits of Marilyn and Audrey. Heady mix of symbols…am I seeing what I think I’m seeing? He-Man and She-Ra DVDs.
I wander into the backyard. The pool is surrounded by crime scene tape. I take a selfie with Michelangelo’s David, my black mask near his white dick. I see a slightly crude commissioned painting of The Virgin of Guadalupe above where the pool chairs are and want to cry.
I could have loved this stranger.
He would have definitely loved me.
If only life itself could flow more freely.
Written March 2026