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I moved for them. Busted my ass for them. I fill my life with monetary possessions because I feel worthless. I feel like my kids are living emotion to emotion the way I live paycheck to paycheck. Neither is a way to love or live. So what do we do? What do I do? Do I need to even be here? Should I just leave, end it? Or end myself? Either way no one is happy with me. I'm a fake in my work life and a failure in parenthood and as a partner. The world does not need another life draining it's resources. That's it. That will be one and final contribution to this life, not being in it. The planet will continue to rotate, my kids will finish high school and my wife will find peace and happiness without my negative intersections that continue to grow and grow as I chip away at her. Only one question remains. How?

#bad thoughts #painful #no more please

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Lending your soul

What if when someone dies, they take a piece of your soul with them and that’s what grief really is. It is why you experience physical pain deep in your chest and in your heart. It would make sense since each loss becomes more and more difficult. You begin to develop a growing numbness in your heart where you lock away your soul. After a while when you are nearing the end of your own life’s journey, your heart becomes light as a feather because your soul is not there any longer to weigh you down in the physical plane and lifts you out of this world. As you leave, you in turn continue the circle with those you leave behind by taking a piece of them with you so that you are forever tethered to your ancestors and descendants and can find each other in the the afterlife.

#ancestors #heart #soul #afterlife #grief #death #life

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7-11 Arrives in North Modesto

Breaking news in the snack community!

     A 7-11 is finally opening in the North side of town here in Modesto. Store number 39851. Applications are currently being accepted at the three of the other nearby locations;1305 Herndon Rd in Ceres, 505 Mchenry Ave in Modesto, and 853 E Yosemite Ave in Manteca. As you can tell from the city locations, finding a conveniently located 7-11 can be difficult I have personally been ranting to family members and commuter friends on how I could personally benefit from it. All of those sweet tooth moments can finally be subdued without having to gas up and drive down to a grocery store. 

Being here in the valley I have had the opportunity to experience the solitude of Salida and the quiet community it has to offer. From there I relocated just a few miles inward to Modesto where I have been for the last several years. Growing up in San Jose, 7-11′s where a staple for most of us after before and after school stemming well on into adulthood. Having a 7-11 location popup so close to me firmly plants my roots here in the valley. I miss my hometown mostly for the friends and family I left behind. It may seem petty to most, but I call this instance in the franchise location a personally satisfying victory in my book. I willed something to happen, and poof!

I happened upon this information by being snoopy and a round the clock foodie. The old Hostess location at 2101 Standiford Ave #A on the corner of Prescott Rd has been undergoing its internal and external transformation for a few weeks now. They have done their best to conceal the renovation with blacked out windows and unmarked equipment. The final piece of the puzzle came as I was rubbernecking while waiting at the stoplight on Standiford Ave heading North on Prescott Rd. A slip of a window covering revealed the latest of 7-11′s additions, a hot food sign hanging over what corresponds with the standard positioning of their menu displays above the roller grill.

This was a great move on the company’s part to roll the hot and ready food initiative out around two years ago. Since then they have gone mobile as well with their rewards app that offers deals on snacks and occasionally food and drink combos. 7-11 has been what seems a great franchise opportunity for those who are willing to put in the time and effort. With that I want to wish the new owner all the best of luck and great success on this new venture. You have at least one committed customer already. 

#711slurpee #7-11 #snacktime #nowhiring

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On October 12, 1492, the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus landed on a small island in the Caribbean, which he named San Salvador (in the modern-day Bahamas) and claimed for Spain (the country that had sponsored his voyage). Although Columbus was not actually the first European to reach the Americas, and millions of indigenous people already lived there, he has traditionally been celebrated in the United States as the “discoverer” of the Americas. The first Columbus Day celebration took place in 1792—the 300th anniversary of his arrival. Columbus Day celebrations grew in popularity over the decades that followed, especially in Italian American and other Catholic immigrant communities, where—amid a general climate of anti-Catholic prejudice—Columbus was regarded as a symbol of what it meant to be both Catholic and American. A federal holiday was signed into law by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937.In recent decades, though, activists and scholars have called attention to the darker significance of Columbus Day. Although Columbus remarked in his writings that the natives he encountered were gentle and hospitable, his treatment of them was generally brutal; Columbus’s men pillaged villages to support themselves and enslaved large numbers of indigenous people for labor, sex, and sale in Europe. Bartolomé de Las Casas, a Spanish missionary who arrived in the Americas in 1502 and who later became an outspoken critic of Europeans’ treatment of the native peoples, described Europeans committing murder on a vast scale. Furthermore, the arrival of Columbus in the Americas inaugurated the era of European settlement and economic exploitation of the Americas, in which native peoples were slaughtered, expelled from their territories, and decimated by foreign diseases. Today various cities and organizations around the United States observe Indigenous Peoples’ Day on the second Monday in October as a countercelebration to the federal holiday of Columbus Day. The day was first proposed by activists in 1977, and the first celebration was held in Berkeley, California, in 1992 as a protest against celebrations for the anniversary of Columbus's landing. --www.britannica.com

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Resist

Walking out with fists raised

Our parents in fear

Their children no longer with options

Ideas kept locked away

Rights unclaimed

This will not stand

But we will

Brown, black and unheard

Lift your voices up

Hold yourselves up against the ceiling

Fight through the clouds that stand in your path

There is more beyond

It is what they guard and cherish most

What they cannot take

Our solidarity

Our intent pinned to our hats

Not hidden in litigation

Or misguided by their forefathers so called birth right

Land of the free is one without borders

We will walk if we must

Fight if we must

Our skin was made to take the sun

Yours were meant to hide

Our people will provide what you will not

Xicano, African, Asian or European

We all bleed red

But the Earth bleeds brown

#xicano #mexica #brown and proud #aztlan

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While currently researching Mexico and my ancestry for a sociology class, I came across this essay written by Anthony. I have respected him for his food ventures an culinary prowess but knew nothing of his vested time and love for my heritage. This is worth a read and sheds a humble light on the Mexican people. 

Under The Volcano

Americans love Mexican food. We consume nachos, tacos, burritos, tortas, enchiladas, tamales and anything resembling Mexican in enormous quantities. We love Mexican beverages, happily knocking back huge amounts of tequila, mezcal and Mexican beer every year. We love Mexican people—as we sure employ a lot of them. Despite our ridiculously hypocritical attitudes towards immigration, we demand that Mexicans cook a large percentage of the food we eat, grow the ingredients we need to make that food, clean our houses, mow our lawns, wash our dishes, look after our children. As any chef will tell you, our entire service economy—the restaurant business as we know it—in most American cities, would collapse overnight without Mexican workers. Some, of course, like to claim that Mexicans are “stealing American jobs”. But in two decades as a chef and employer, I never had ONE American kid walk in my door and apply for a dishwashing job, a porter’s position—or even a job as prep cook. Mexicans do much of the work in this country that Americans, provably, simply won’t do. 

We love Mexican drugs. Maybe not you personally, but “we”, as a nation, certainly consume titanic amounts of them—and go to extraordinary lengths and expense to acquire them. We love Mexican music, Mexican beaches, Mexican architecture, interior design, Mexican films.

So, why don’t we love Mexico?

We throw up our hands and shrug at what happens and what is happening just across the border. Maybe we are embarrassed. Mexico, after all, has always been there for us, to service our darkest needs and desires. Whether it’s dress up like fools and get pass-out drunk and sun burned on Spring break in Cancun, throw pesos at strippers in Tijuana, or get toasted on Mexican drugs, we are seldom on our best behavior in Mexico. They have seen many of us at our worst. They know our darkest desires.

In the service of our appetites, we spend billions and billions of dollars each year on Mexican drugs—while at the same time spending billions and billions more trying to prevent those drugs from reaching us. The effect on our society is everywhere to be seen. Whether it’s kids nodding off and overdosing in small town Vermont, gang violence in LA, burned out neighborhoods in Detroit— it’s there to see. What we don’t see, however, haven’t really noticed, and don’t seem to much care about, is the 80,000 dead—mostly innocent victims in Mexico, just in the past few years. 80,000 dead. 80,000 families who’ve been touched directly by the so-called “War On Drugs”.   

Mexico. Our brother from another mother. A country, with whom, like it or not, we are inexorably, deeply involved, in a close but often uncomfortable embrace. Look at it. It’s beautiful. It has some of the most ravishingly beautiful beaches on earth. Mountains, desert, jungle. Beautiful colonial architecture, a tragic, elegant, violent, ludicrous, heroic, lamentable, heartbreaking history. Mexican wine country rivals Tuscany for gorgeousness. Its archeological sites—the remnants of great empires, unrivaled anywhere. And as much as we think we know and love it,  we have barely scratched the surface of what Mexican food really is. It is NOT melted cheese over a tortilla chip. It is not simple, or easy. It is not simply ‘bro food’ halftime. It is in fact, old– older even than the great cuisines of Europe and often deeply complex, refined, subtle, and sophisticated. A true mole sauce, for instance, can take DAYS to make, a balance of freshly (always fresh) ingredients, painstakingly prepared by hand. It could be, should be, one of the most exciting cuisines on the planet. If we paid attention. The old school cooks of Oaxaca make some of the more difficult to make and nuanced sauces in gastronomy. And some of the new generation, many of whom have trained in the kitchens of America and Europe have returned home to take Mexican food to new and thrilling new heights.

It’s a country I feel particularly attached to and grateful for. In nearly 30 years of cooking professionally, just about every time I walked into a new kitchen, it was a Mexican guy who looked after me, had my back, showed me what was what, was there—and on the case—when the cooks more like me, with backgrounds like mine—ran away to go skiing or surfing—or simply “flaked.” I have been fortunate to track where some of those cooks come from, to go back home with them. To small towns populated mostly by women—where in the evening, families gather at the town’s phone kiosk, waiting for calls from their husbands, sons and brothers who have left to work in our kitchens in the cities of the North. I have been fortunate enough to see where that affinity for cooking comes from, to experience moms and grandmothers preparing many delicious things, with pride and real love, passing that food made by hand, passed from their hands to mine. 

In years of making television in Mexico, it’s one of the places we, as a crew, are happiest when the day’s work is over. We’ll gather round a street stall and order soft tacos with fresh, bright, delicious tasting salsas—drink cold Mexican beer, sip smoky mezcals, listen with moist eyes to sentimental songs from street musicians. We will look around and remark, for the hundredth time, what an extraordinary place this is.  

The received wisdom is that Mexico will never change. That is hopelessly corrupt, from top to bottom. That it is useless to resist—to care, to hope for a happier future. But there are heroes out there who refuse to go along. On this episode of PARTS UNKNOWN, we meet a few of them. People who are standing up against overwhelming odds, demanding accountability, demanding change—at great, even horrifying personal cost. This show is for them. 

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A little Halloween accessory.

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A little logo design for the fall. #typography #design #fashion #fall #menswear #dapper

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When you run out if stogies, turn your humidor into a charging station. #edc #note7 #samsung #dapper #cigars #fashion #kobalt #samsunggear

#edc #fashion #samsung #samsunggear #kobalt #note7 #dapper #cigars