one day I was floating: a short story to share

Hi all (those that may be reading).

It has been a minute. More than a minute. It has been a while. I do not keep up with the blog like I should, but it is not for lack of writing. I have been busy lately—really busy. This past year I built a house with Rachel and we got married on our property and we got a dog named Goose and I finished up and have (almost) sold my first novel. In the meantime, I have also started working on a book of short stories. Now, like all my projects, it has taken on a life of its own. One book of short stories has since become two: two different projects, but each a collection of my thoughts and ideas, which some days, I feel I am finally beginning to channel and understand. The first is called Future Stories of the Past and I would struggle to try and characterize it any way other than it is a general collection of stories of eco-speculation (eco sci fi, cli fi, whatever genre you think applies). The other is called Parábolas and it is a collection of near-future eco-sci fi stories but written as old school Spanish parables.

Both of them have been very fun to work on and are, admittedly, very me. And both have come along very fast. I have almost 12 stories written between the two of them and I as I try to submit some of them for publication, I thought that perhaps it is time I share some of them with others.

So, I am including below one of the stories I have worked on recently from Future Stories of the Past. “Story” is perhaps not the right word for it. But then, I don’t really know what the right word is. Anyway, here it is, I hope you all enjoy:

one day I was floating

It’s funny. You’d never expect it. Just normal one moment and then all of a sudden, you’re floating away. At least, that’s how it was with me. My feet on the ground and then, all of a sudden, they’re touching nothing at all, only air and air and air. No one ever told me how much air there was here on earth. We must have done a lot of bad things to have been able to hurt the air as much as we have, because no one ever tells you quite how much there is. But when you float away, like I did, like I am still doing, you really get a sense of it all. All the air, that is. It’s something I never quite appreciated until I was almost to the edge of the exosphere, which is the final layer of earth’s atmosphere before you reach space, which I can say from experience is less of a distinct boundary than you might think. Everything exists in probabilities and so, there is always the chance that the thing you left is still holding you or that the thing you’re moving towards hasn’t quite begun yet. I don’t know any other way to explain it other than the earth’s atmosphere is just a cloud of potential, like an electron or a wave function or the chances of rain. And that, of course, means two things: 1) that some part of the air and its possibility exists everywhere and 2) that even where it is at one moment abundant, the next it might just cease to be at all. I was thinking about all these things as I floated away. Thinking about how all of earth is just a probability, how all of everything is just a probability. And that probability is only an estimation of the scale of our own ignorance and if we knew enough--knew everything perfectly well--then we might not need probability at all. At least, that would be true only in a world that was deterministic. But here I was, just floating away: away from earth, away from everything. What could explain that? Nothing determinedly. It was random, and I can say from experience that random things do just happen sometimes. You might push back and say ‘no, I don’t believe this is random’ and I would say ‘how else can you explain it?’ and you would say ‘perhaps something was pulling you, like gravity’ and I would say ‘I know you were going to say this, because this is what I thought at first too,” and then I would say, ‘it’s not like the moon is pulling me or the sun or any other planet’ and you would say ‘how do you know?’ and I would say, ‘only that it feels that way.’ I don’t want you to misunderstand. I too, at first, misunderstood. But the moon wasn’t pulling me. Not the sun either. Everything just kept on its own orbit, changed only the slightest bit, if not at all by my presence as I just floated by. It’s true they never tell you how much air there is on earth, but it's also true they never tell you, or never know how to tell you, how much bigger the vacuum of space is. I can say from experience that it is much, much bigger than all that air, of which there still is a lot on earth, but not that far out. Not far out at all actually. Actually, it’s just a thin, thin layer. Actually, it's almost nothing at all. But still that’s a lot when you’re standing on the ground, looking up, seeing the heavens smile down. But not when you’re actually up there in the heavens, which, they never tell you, are actually mostly entirely empty. I am beginning to think more about the air situation after realizing that I wasn’t sure how, in all my floating, I was even still alive. All the thoughts of vacuums and space and how there is nothing makes me realize that it has seemed like forever since I took my last breath. It is strange how I don’t feel the struggle inside my chest that I am used to feeling when I hold my breath. I don’t really feel any struggle at all, really. This is interesting, I tell myself, because I have felt this struggle my whole life. The struggle to breathe, even when air is everywhere. But I don’t feel it now, I just feel kind of fine and easy. I feel separate from those things that once ate at me. And all that happened was that one moment, I just started floating. Movement, in any direction, is sometimes what you need. That’s what my grandfather used to say. 'You gotta keep moving,' he would say, 'when you stop moving, you die.' He tried his best, and I loved him dearly, but of course, that is only true for so long. I don’t know if I ever will die or stop moving, not with all this floating and all. But then, the inevitable question cannot cease but to arrive: what is it I am moving towards? I do not know. I don’t think I can know. But I sense that I am gaining, at least, a deeper understanding of myself in the process, which, they never tell you, also comes with a certain amount of alienation from the world. I know it’s not a popular theory because we like happy endings, we like things wrapped in a bow, things you can sell. We like things that are purposeful and hopeful and connected, even when they seem everything but. I am afraid that it's a bit more complicated than that. Yes, everything is connected in some inexplicable, ineffable way, but everything is also mostly empty space. A lot of reality is what we bring to it. And if it's only you, only you and you’re just floating away, like I am now, then what if you’ve got nothing to bring? I am not perfect. But I am floating and so far, things seem to be alright. Floating is not so bad, not for a while anyway. It’s something that I can say from experience, at least from my experience, the experience of floating. Still, just because reality is more complicated, doesn’t mean it's less beautiful. Far from it. In fact, I think it's more. More beautiful. More open. More free. Random, of course, and sometimes that is a curse, but sometimes random is good and novel or at least a bit little funny. I can take that deal. (What else is there to take?) For me, for someone who woke up one morning and just found themselves floating, there was no consultation in the matter. Things just happen. That’s how the universe is, remember? There are no right answers, that is something they don’t tell you, there is nothing for sure. But I think it is hard to come to any different sort of conclusion once you’ve gotten so far out, so far away from earth and seen it all there like a tiny blueberry in the middle of the absolute nothingness of space. It took me a while to arrive at this understanding, but I have been floating now for so long, that everything seems like an old notion and so many thoughts have run together that it's crazy that there is anything at all I haven’t thought before or at least entertained. When I am not thinking, when I am just floating, sometimes things come to mind that I am not expecting, like the things on earth that I will miss. Trees. I think I will miss trees most of all. And warm, sunny days. The rain could also be beautiful and the snow and even hard times, which made one work, but also appreciate small, simple things. I think I will miss all of that too. But this, this floating life that I have found myself living, it is its own kind of wilderness and even though sometimes I remember what that other life was like--that one on earth forever ago before all the floating--when I remember that and get all tingly, I need to remind myself that there are good things, great truths, even in the vastness of outer space, things that might make me feel the same kind of calm and ease as a crackling fire on a cold day. But if they are there, I have not found them yet though I am still looking. For now, I am just floating. Floating and I’m not sure I will ever be coming home.

Finishing my novel, The Maw, again again

It’s funny, if you would have asked me 10 years ago if I would ever write a book, I would have said “yes” and then immediately been terrified at the daunting nature of such a monumental task. For a while now, I have had this feeling like I had books in me (i.e. conversations that I have been having in my own head for decades and felt the need to put to words). But feeling it and doing it are different things. To actually start writing a book, to put pen to paper (finger to keyboard) and actually do the damn thing was still a huge obstacle.

But here I am, 33 (my Jesus year), with a dissertation (which is a kind of book, albeit, one that mercifully, no one will read) and now finished with my (second) novel again again. What? Let’s take one step back.

Writing a book is a weird process. This may be true for everyone else, or no one else, but this is true to me. My first foray into actually seeing if I could write something on the order of tens of thousands of words was, objectively, my PhD dissertation. It was, obviously, not written for narrative flare (though I like to think I try to write my academic work with care and an eye to aesthetics, when possible), but it was proof of concept for actually having the capacity and attention span to pound out a whole heap of words that made any sort of sense.

While working on my dissertation, I also felt the need to start working on a novel that I had been bouncing around in my head. It is, and will always be, the first official “book” that I wrote. And sweet baby jesus, let me tell you, it was rough.

I had this crazy huge idea: that the biosphere was connected by fungal mycelia, creating a planetary interweb that a private company had learned to hack and program and control. Fucking sick, right? But the problem for me was that the story kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Things didn’t resolve. Whole scenes, whole chapters became unnecessary. Not to mention, none of it was chronological. I added a rebel group and a secret underground city and cybernetic wolves and pretty soon the 150,000 word novel became just the first in what, I was convinced, had to be a two novel series.

For a reader (which often happened to be Rachel, to her everlasting credit) it must have been a wild ride. For the writer, it was so much fun. It was a fantastic exercise in my creative capacity, in my ability to solve narrative problems, and in developing a voice in my prose. Still, not all books are meant for the world to see and this book, my first, The Codex Amanita, will never see the light of day.

After that, I decided to start a different kind of project. One that was smaller and more self-contained. So my first idea for The Maw came about. It would be a simple story: only a few characters, one main literary conceit (i.e. what if ________ happened?), and one timeline. The premise was this: what if one day, a normal suburban family woke up to find their neighborhood had been replaced overnight by a massive, forested wilderness? For me, the interesting elements would be the family dynamics that would arise as well as the lack of practical skills they would have to survive.

And so, about three years ago, I started writing The Maw.

It took me about a year to write the first draft. Weighing in at around 60,000 words, I finished it during the summer of my last year in graduate school. Rachel has a picture of me the day I finished it for the first time. I look exhausted. For me, when I finish a draft of something that big, I never want to see it again. In that moment, the relief of having it off of my shoulders and out of my brain was better than almost any other feeling. But the thought of having to dive right back in made me shudder.

But over time, as I sat with it and let it bug me, I slowly realized “god fucking dammit, I am not done with this thing after all, am I?”

So after my first draft of The Maw, I eventually decided to go in for round two, which I was convinced, would be the final round. I ended up adding something like 30,000 words on the second go round (bringing it up to over 90,000 words total) and it took me another 8 months to do. That’s alright, I thought, it’s done now anyway. I started to reach out to agents to see if I could actually sell the thing, but didn’t have any luck. I kept trying and kept thinking and and kept getting rejected (which is never fun, but oh well, that is the world, isn’t it?) and eventually I realized, yet again, that either I was not done with the book or it was not done with me. Either way, I had work to do.

Here’s the thing: this book was supposed to be simple. It was supposed to be a story about other people in a crazy context. Sci Fi. Dystopic future shit. Not about me, not about all of these weird pieces of myself. But somewhere into the first draft I started to realized that each character was a different facet of myself. Werid. Almost like I wasn’t writing the book and instead, the book was writing out the parts of who I am in an insane situation and playing them out to see which parts survive and which ones do not. (Its fucking crazy inside my brain sometimes). Because of this, at some point, I inevitably had this interesting thought: well, if this book is about me, and if my grandfather and his influence was so profound in my life, how come he is nowhere to be seen?

It bugged me. I wasn’t sure. I didn’t want this book to be about my family, or about my Cuban heritage, or about any of those complicated elements of personal identity. It was supposed to be a simple book, remember, a few characters, a single conceit, blah blah blah. But no matter how I tried to spin it, I couldn’t get past the thought.

Then there was this other thing to consider: despite my name, which is about as Hispanic as it gets, I nevertheless look and sound and read like a white guy. And I am. My heritage is mixed, on one side I am the product of an immigrant family, my grandmother from Austria and my grandfather from Cuba. On the other side, I am the product of a farming family from rural Wisconsin. I am incredibly proud of all of these things. But because of my uniquely close relationship with my grandfather, I am especially proud of my Cuban heritage, which I have spent much of my life exploring and nurturing. I spent the past decade plus living and traveling in Latin America, re-connecting with my family in Cuba, learning Spanish and how to cook my favorite Hispanic dishes from when I was young. It is a huge part of who I am personally, regardless of what it means to society and the weird ways (especially nowadays) that it vetts people for their identity like checking boxes.

My whole life, I have always felt complicated in the ways in which I claim a right to my Cuban identity. After all, I only read Latino on paper of if someone says my name out loud. How then, does this part of myself fit into my life?

It is a difficult question, and one that I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life thinking about. But in working on The Maw, I realized that this was the part of the story that was missing, because this was the part of myself that was missing. Once I realized this, I changed the main character’s name on the first page, which was both incredibly white sounding and also the first words of the story the are read. I changed it from Mike Tanner to Miguel del Campo, and re-read the first page. The entire feel of the story changed immediately. It sounded more like I had always imagined it.

I started developing this angle, adding my grandfather into the story almost exactly as I remembered him (some of the details of him in the book are embellished, but his character is very true to his affect). The whole book suddenly felt like it began to click into place. The motivations and perspectives of the main characters made sense in a way they did not before. The mystical realistic element of the book was drawn out and in a way to counterbalance the more sci fi elements, and the result was something I couldn’t have predicted, but which felt as true and authentic to me as anything else I had ever written.

Last week, I finished writing The Maw again again. I am very proud of how it came out and I would love to publish it and see it in the world. But if nothing else, writing it has helped lead me to a better understanding of the world and of myself. If that is not the point of writing, I do not know what is.

My advice to anyone out there thinking about writing a novel is this: do it. Don’t even think about it. Make space in your life, even if only a hour here or there, or twenty minutes. Start small. Let the story reveal itself. Writers are more like archaeologists than anything else. The story already exists. Your job is just to peel back the layers, bit by bit, until we see enough pieces of the whole to understand how this all fits together. And most of all, have fun. Because the world is a chaotic fucked up nightmarish hellscape. But if you take some time to think about and write about beautiful shit, or at least write about the fucked up shit beautifully, things can feel a little less bad.

hasta la victoria, siempre.

-mario

On the death metal/ecology beat once again

For those that have read my work over the past few years, you may know that one of my favorite subjects outside of my academic research is death metal. Not only am I a huge fan of heavy music in general (I won’t delve into this—just know, that my passion for br00tal tunes runs deep), but I also really enjoy thinking, analyzing and writing about it. I am especially interested in the space where death metal (and black metal and various other metal sub-genres), as a form or artistic expression, intersects with issues of environmentalism, activism and ecology.

To date, this has added up to a few articles on the topic. The first two entitled Anthems for the Anthropocene and Mapping the End of the World were published in Guernica magazine. The latest, entitled Can death metal help save the Amazon? has just been published by the UK-based magazine Ecohustler. For those that are unfamiliar, I would highly recommend you check out Ecohustler—they cover all sorts of topics on culture, technology and the environment.

I am really excited about this latest piece, as it represents the long-overdue culmination of some work I was able to do alongside the French death metal band Gojira (one of my favorites) and their recent efforts to support indigenous tribes in the Amazon.

A screenshot of my interview with Joe Duplantier, lead singer and guitarist for Gojira, for my latest article with Ecohustler. By far one of the coolest interviews I have done and one of the best conversations I’ve had so far on the death metal/ecology beat.

For those that are interested, the article uses the black earth soils of the Amazon (called terras pretas in Portuguese) as an ecological metaphor to understand the unlikely collaboration between indigenous environmental activists and one of the world’s biggest and heaviest death metal outfits. Not only am I really proud of the writing and the concepts drawn together in this piece, but I am incredibly passionate about every facet of this topic—the music, the indigenous activism and the ecology and natural history of the Amazon.

This space that I find myself—on the death metal/ecology beat, as I call it—is a truly unique and fascinating niche to have stumbled into as a writer. Still, there are a number of reasons why working in this space is a challenge. The first is that it has proven quite difficult to find outlets willing to run with such stories—after all, death metal (and other various metal sub-genres) are rather specific and inaccessible genres to begin with. People that love this music really love it, but most people really don’t (their loss, as far as I am concerned). In addition, the intersection with ecology and environmentalism is also not very clear and in fact, sometimes even appears as the opposite (think: hippies). So while these things make it a hard sell for outlets and publishers, this is also why it the death metal/ecology beat is such a fascinating space to work in.

Lastly, the other major challenge in doing this work is that of compensation. Even if I am fortunate enough to find outlets willing to run with these articles, most of these outlets either do not compensate writers or do so very minimally. The result is the same for me as for many other freelance writers—lots of work, energy and labor, but little to show for it financially.

In the future, I would love to expand my work in this space, but that would require a bit more consistency with the gigs and at least a little bit of getting paid. This is not meant to sound greedy and I hope it doesn’t, because lord knows I will keep doing this work regardless of whether or not it every makes me money. But to make this a more regular part of my work, I need to be able to justify the many, many hours of writing, interviewing and research that goes into each one. Until then, it will have to remain one of my side hustles, albeit one of my favorites.

New article with Orion Magazine

Two blog updates in one week. I must be turning into quite the social media mogul over here. But alas, it is only because I totally forgot that today an article I have been working on for a while was finally published with Orion Magazine. My co-author for this pieces was Margarita Fernandez, a long-time friend, mentor and collaborator on all things Cuba and agroecology. Margarita is the director of the Caribbean Agroecology Institute at the University of Vermont. She is also an incredibly talented researcher, scholar and advocate.

The article, titled This Cuban Town Has A Sustainability Lesson to Share takes a dive into some research I recently completed for my dissertation looking at a small, rural town in central Cuba, called La Picadora. Since the sugarcane industry left the region almost twenty years ago, La Picadora has undergone a radical shift from large-scale, industrial agricultural production to small-scale, diversified farms implementing agroecology. This shift has entailed vast social, economic and ecological changes which my research aimed to document and explain.

I’ll have more to say about this research in future blog posts, especially after I publish the academic article version of it in a journal (hopefully soon!). But for those that want to take a gander at this more accessible, and interactive version, the link is included below:

https://orionmagazine.org/article/cuba-la-picadora-agroecology-sustainability/

Belated updates on house construction

My commitment to posting blog updates more regularly was short lived. But I guess I should have expected as much considering the fact that we are (still) in the process of building an entire house.

When Rachel and I moved to the property at the end of March, we were expecting a few quick months of roughing it (i.e. no running water, no bathroom, no shower) before being in the lovely new home that we willed into existence. In retrospect, we were a bit naïve, or at least, we put too much stock in idealized timelines.

Here we are, 6 months later and about two weeks away from our wedding (which is taking place here on the property in NH), and we are still in the thick of it. We are so close—one service wire, a septic inspection, and a well pump away—but we certainly did not expect to be this close to the wedding and still working on the house.

Still, we are closing in on the end now and after several feverish months of really hard, really constant physical labor, I finally feel as if I have a few moments to step back, reflect and begin to process the fact that we really have built the house that we began imagining some two years ago. That is no small thing.

I have learned a lot in this process. There are of course, the technical things I have learned, like how to run electric and install a chimney and hang drywall and lay tile. But there are also the things that I have learned about myself.

The first is something that I have known for awhile, but this process has helped to solidify: I was made to work. And I am good at it. I may not be excel at many things, but I can swing hammers and move stone and toil with the best of them. Still, the ability to do this kind of hard labor is not as valued in other arenas of my life. After all, in my day job as a researcher, my work is more about thought and communication. It is still labor, don’t get me wrong, and it is exhausting at times, but in a completely different way. To me, both physical and intellectual labor have a creative component, and that is the part I relish in each, but they scratch different itches. Both can be a slog at times—real Type 2 kind of fun—but I am good at slogging, whether through my body or my mind. It is something I am still quite proud of in myself. I need both kinds of labor in my life to balance each other out and to keep me content and engaged.

The second thing that I have learned about myself through this process I am less proud of. It is the fact that sometimes I get so focused on the task at hand that literally everything else goes out the window. If it is a short-term project, this can actually be a good thing. But if it is a long-term project, like months and months of building a house, then I have a tendency to bear down until the thing is finally dragged across the finish line. In the meantime, everything else—including my ability to rest, to take time to enjoy life, to manage my mental and physical health—all of it gets shirked. It is not a great combo of things and tends to lead me to the point of burnout, which I have been staving off for what seems like a few months now. I need to get better at giving myself space and time and being more personally gracious. Cause life is nothing but an endless series of projects—some big, some small. There will be plenty of rest to be had when I am dead, but before that, it doesn’t hurt to build in some time off. A little bit of r-and-r never hurt.

The last big thing I have learned through this process is that, while I don’t know how to do a lot of things, I am still very open to being taught. This is not a skill that was super aware of before. I mean, it doesn’t even seem like a skill, really. But I realize now how valuable it has been for me over the years. There is humility that comes with admitting you don’t know how to do something. And even more in asking someone for help. Not everyone is great at that—in fact, some people are really bad at it. But this is something that my father really helped to instill in me as a kid. I am happy to say, it seems to have stuck. I think when you try to tackle something big, like building a house for the first time, it is impossible to not be overwhelmed by the number of things you don’t know. To overcome this, both Rachel and I have had to constantly seek advice, guidance and help from so many of our friends and family. And being open to being taught new things by people that know better is a skill that has helped us out immensely. Mistakes will still be made even with the best guidance, but you stand a better chance of doing a better job the first time if you allow yourself to learn from those that have done these things before.

Overall, though, if there is a single lesson that I will take out of this experience it is this: IT IS NOT ADVISABLE TO BUILD A HOUSE AND GET MARRIED IN THE SAME YEAR/AT THE SAME TIME. Give yourself a little wiggle room—like a year or two—just in case. Luckily, I will never have to do either ever again.

Below is a short gallery of some of the finishing details around the house that I am most proud of. The first is the bathtub with some beautiful tile work that we did (the tiles look like the surface of Jupiter) and cedar wood towel hangers for accent. The second is the wood stove that we installed, complete with red granite slabs and grey granite tiles for a fire back which we cut and mortared ourselves. The third is the same gray granite tiling as a backsplash for the stove, which I cannot wait to cook on. And the last is our open kitchen layout with oak cabinets and butcher block counter tops.