Sorry, folks, I’ve been MIA from the blog but I got a new novel by Castellanos Moya through interlibrary loan, and I can’t tear myself away.

It never ceases to warp my mind. El Salvador has had one shitty deal after another in what concerns history, economy, politics, and even nature. The country hasn’t caught a break since forever. And yet Salvadorans go and come up with this absolutely sensational quality of writing. While some other folks, who by all measures are more fortunate than Salvadorans, haven’t produced any art worth a crap for 80 years.

Twenty years ago, the way to determine who were the people we really cared about was to ask, “Who would you donate a kidney to?”

These days, there is a much more reliable measure of love. Donating a kidney is nothing compared to this really big sacrifice. Of course, I’m talking about the sacrifice of one’s smartphone. Are there many people you’d hand your phone over to for a week on a moment’s notice? Or for a day?

For me, the sacrifice is not as much about not being able to use the phone (although that stinks, too) as it is about the invasion of my most intimate space.

“Abolish ICE” is a slogan that undoubtedly is being misinterpreted by many Americans as “Let’s have no immigration enforcement whatsoever.” (That’s not what candidates who say “Abolish ICE” actually mean.)

Yes, the slogan is an election-killing dud. And unless voters turn to Ouija boards to find out what anybody “actually means,” they’ll have to base their assumptions on the decades of Democrats being eager to accommodate global capital at the expense of workers and on the frequency with which the slogan “Open borders!” appears at Abolish ICE rallies.

It’s the height of insanity to promote “Abolish ICE” instead of “Abolish college debt burden,” or “Free community college for all,” or any actually meaningful ideas that would attract voters instead of scaring them.