Damn son!

You’ve got your salted cashews, your lightly salted peanuts, your dry roasted peanuts, your crispy pumpkin seeds, your gummy bears, your runts, your mike n ikes, your boston baked beans, your hot mango, your gummy orange peel slices, your pistachio nuts, your mucho fiesta delicious fun bag, your sour balls…

Standing in line at the 7-11 down the road from my house I’m watching the Indian guys talk to the irish truck drivers with the white stock boy helping the Mexican coffee buyer. I’m driving in my car thinking about how some people really complain about this place. How there aren’t any Ethan Allens or paneras or hip coffee shops or cool places for all these kids to go and look cool. But I think that’s bullshit. I attribute that to the hipster ideal that interest is dead and indifference is ironic and nobody knows if knowing anything is worthwhile. I think that cool is being interested in experiencing the local flavor. I think it’s a beautiful mix we have here. An old town from the early nineteen hundreds that basically stopped developing somewhere in the 50’s. All the houses are those nuclear ranches with big locust trees out front and basements with walk in steps and there are still Sinclairs here with the box pumps. People take that for granted. We have a rich mezzo American culture here. Indian (feathers), Mexicans, English, Germans; those predominant cultures prevail here establishing a weird mix of suppressed Mexican and native American pride, that really only comes out in the some 30 or so Mexican restaurants that peddle half real food to half interested white college students. I say give up the game. Give us real Mexican culture. In fact, unleash it all. There’s a growing Indian (dots) population growing here too. The latino culture needs to embrace them; the latino, mezzo American, Mexican American, latin American whatever you want to call it. Everybody needs to get together and stop giving a shit. Have the Day of the Dead festivals in the middle of Center street. Hold Sego up the road at Pioneer Park. Let the Indians have Hopi dances across State Street. Let the Buddhists and the Hindus pray silently and then dance wildly through 900. Germans go ahead and prost all over town. Irish, fife and dance and punch each others teeth out. I want one big stereotype orgy and I want it now. I want to watch as this town explodes with culture and all the bored white college kids pick up a sari or a kilt or a trash bag poncho and stop caring about anything. I want all the hobos who sit on parkway with their sleeping bags and their bottles of liquor and their walking stick to sit back on their heels and smile at everything. I want them invited into homes and I want them to not steal anything and I want them to leave quietly in the morning and to hike up to Heber to tell everybody about it, and I want these valleys to bloom into big garish color displays of celebration and fall. I want a harvest dammit. Break the pavement into slabs. Bust the windows of cars. Kiss in stairwells and set up wires that criss cross town from window to window, sending gifts and baskets and flowers and cheese to friends and people we don’t know. Just do something instead of being bored and not giving a shit anymore. Celebrate, winter isn’t here yet.

Sometimes I wonder whether or not the minorities here pretend to be different ethnicities. If the Indians put on name tags that say "Juan" when their real names are "Chiraq" or "Dixit." I wonder if anyone notices but me. I wonder if it's a way to abandon everything you've been and where you come from. I'm making a name tag right now that says "Jamaal Washington." I'm testing this out.