Rolando y La Recoleta

I'm going home. Well, my second home, anyway. In April of next year, I will be returning to Argentina for the first time in six and a half years.

Last time I was there, the country was weeks from spilling over into one of the worst economic and political crises of it's history. Last time around, my father was also alive.

It will be weird visiting my father's grave site for the very first time since he died this past July. I'm not sure what I'll feel, really. I'm not sure what I feel about Rolando, even now.

My father was without equal. A real character and a true enigma. He was the type of person you'd expect to find in a Charles Dickens novel via a Gabriel Garcia Marquez fairytale. The type of trickster you take gerat delight in hearing about, but great joy in knowing he's not your father, yet for me, he is my father.

After taking in my father's grave, I'll probably make my way to La Recoleta. Whenever I journey back to my ancestral home, Buenos Aires to more specific, I always make a trek to the city of the dead, La Recoleta. One of the most amazing and artistic enclaves of marble mausoleums in the world. In addition to housing beautiful sculptured final resting places, La Recoleta is also home to a large colony of feral cats and several Argentine luminaries, including Broadway's favorite, controversial first lady, Eva Peron.

Traveling back in time to the more tender parts of the heart is never easy. However, I like not easy. I guess that's part of my genetic inheritance - taking the road less safe. This will always be one of my strongest bonds with my Father - our ability to find trouble even in a nursery of newborns. Yet, trouble can be rewarding in the most unexpected ways.

Some pretty pictures of La Recoleta

Deep Inside a Family Haunting

People all over the world have a fascination with hauntings. At one point or another, we've all heard stories of slain soldiers, murdered peddlers and disease stricken children seen walking the hallways of places they once inhabited, or waking up the current homeowners in the middle of the night.

Rarely, however, do we ever get to meet the Poltergeist and their children, nor do we often get the chance to peek inside the emotional damage left behind a senseless murder, turning a simple ghost haunting story into a tale of deep family woe.

Courtesy of This American Life, here is the story of Jason Minter, an associate producer of the HBO hit, The Sopranos, whose quest to come to terms with his mother's murder reminds us all that ghosts don't just haunt homes, they also haunt memories.

(Warning: Story contains graphic details of a murder)
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The Circle of Life

It is with great sadness that I announce the passing of my sister-in-law, Donna Crabtree (age 41), She had been battling juvenile diabetes for many years, and the last 5 years of dialysis were too much for her weakened heart. She will be buried next to her husband, Carl, who was killed 3 years ago by a drunk driver.

Donna is survived by her two children, C.J. (age 20) and Emily (age 13).

We miss you already, Donna.

Life Support

On August 7th, an hour prior to the start of my AfterlifeFM show, my sister-in-law, Donna (age 41), suffered a massive heart attack due in part to complications from juvenile diabetes. She is currently on life support and in a coma. The outlook is not good. She has two children.

Prayers are needed.

Great Deals on Coffins at Costco

The timing is a bit odd for me to have come across this story today. After all, I just had to buy a coffin for my father less than two weeks ago. Maybe that's why I am not put off by this story. In fact, I had to buy more than just a coffin, I had to pay for mortuary services and an entire funeral.

There are no Costco's that I know of in Argentina. Even if there are, they wouldn't be anywhere near where my father lived. Every time I asked my father for an address, it would be a succession of "at the intersection of this street and that street, just up the road from the gas station, turn right and look for a small shack past a column of red berry shrubs."

In the end, the coffin my father received was a plain pine box - humble, simple and totally unpretentious. All qualities my father lacked in life. In a way, I figured I'd make one last attempt to instill in him traits I thought might aid him getting past security at the pearly gates.

To some, selling coffins at Florida's Costco may seem tasteless and even opportunistic, but in a competitive, free market environment, even the Grim Reaper has to take advantage of demographic opportunities. See news article on Costco Coffins.

So, what's my point here? Well, for one, you'd better pick out your own coffin ahead of time, because you never really know what revenge your children will take if they have to buy one for you. And secondly, if you are going to go the cheap route and buy one at Costco, go ahead and kill two birds with one stone (pun intended), and buy yourself a whole palette of discounted Lysol All-purpose cleaner while you're at it. Aisle 12, I believe.

The Last Gasp

In the early morning hours of July 22nd, 2007, a defeated and disease-ravaged man lay dead in his bed. Beside him, his nerve-shattered companion dialed a preset number on the man's cell phone.

My phone rang. It was 12:30 am. I almost didn't hear it. Nick Drake strummed his last stance on my iPod, and my Pit Bull and a German Shepherd were chasing a wild scent left on a butcher shop's brick wall.

My phone rang again. Standing under the shadows of the San Gabriel Mountains and the yellow light of a half moon, I flipped open the cell phone and saw the caller ID, "Papi".

"Oh God, my father's dead."

I was right. He was.

"Papi" was no ordinary liar. He was, without exaggeration, the Mozart of liars. His fictional compositions were orchestral masterpieces of fib. As composer and conductor of his fabricated truths, my father was unrivaled below the equator. Yes, below the equator. My Papi was born, lived and died with all his lies in Argentina. Beautiful Argentina.

Hours before my father died, on July 21, he celebrated his 69th birthday by trying not to die. Papi was always afraid to die on his birthday. His mother, my grandmother, died on her birthday, and he couldn't shake the awful irony that that coincidence somehow represented. So on his birthday, my father held on for as long as he could to make sure the clock hand past the midnight mark. Life, in his opinion, had been sadistically cruel to him, and even though he nevr seemed to win at it's game, he wasn't planning on losing this time. There was no way that the cruel irony of his own mother's death would repeat itself in his life.

I called my father to wish him happy birthday only 6 hours before he died. He sounded awful. More awful than all the other times I called him and he sounded awful. The problem was, you never knew when he was faking his illnesses or not. This time, however, there was no mistaking the sounds of a man running away from the last gasp of life. He sounded so bad that after hanging up the phone, I started making plans to go down to Argentina. It had been six years since I had seen my father last, and though my wife and I had wanted to travel the year before, something always delayed our plans.

Papi adored my children the same way he adored his children. With all his might and always from afar. I think it was easier for him to be an exiled father than a real one. Self-exiled, of course. My father had a hard time living in truth, and he never wanted his children to really see what he himself could not face. That his life was an unfinished romance novel wrapped around a plot line of "would have's, should have's and could have's," and written by an unreliable narrator who was always running to stay one step ahead of his last gasp.

Me, I am in a mixed state of emotions. I'm thousands of miles away, and instead of attending the funeral, I attended to the arrangements and the payment. A few weeks before he passed, Papi made me promise to bury him properly. He didn't want to end up in the community pothole as he called the public cemetery.

Like most deaths, pain is accompanied by laughter and silly memories, but death also reminds us how ephemeral our physical experience really is, and it brings into focus our own use of that time. Death screams, "do all you can to not waste a single second."

For the most part, my father wasted his life and threw away his relationships. Just a few days ago I talked to him about regrets and he was defiant all the way. This time, I didn’t get upset, I just laughed and said, “well, I’m sure you’ll be changing your mind one day soon, just don’t forget to come back and let me know.”

Amazingly, Papi gave me a sign not even 24 hours after his passing. A little miracle of a sign that conceded, “Marcel, maybe you were right, but hey, I’m still here, so I guess somebody is going to give me a second chance.” Maybe one day I will write about this sign, but for right now, I'm happy to keep it to myself.

I've also decided that one day I am going to tell my kids everything about their grandfather. Yes, everything. Hopefully they will understand why, in spite of it all, I loved him strong.

Grieving Mom in "Afterlife" by Donald Antrim

Antrim has turned, in his nonfiction, toward a reckoning with the complicated grief brought on by the loss of a complicated parent. The seven chapters of "The Afterlife" are dominated by his mother, Louanne, who married and separated from Antrim's father twice and died of lung cancer in 2000. Her alcoholism, her smoking, her emotional volatility, her needy, proud, eccentric temperament — these all add up to a legacy that challenges Antrim's impulses toward clarity, irony and reserve.

Read more from The New York Times Book Review

Restore the Republic

I grew up in a libertarian family. I am sure that I was educated in constitutional law long before I knew anything about the birds and the bees. Yes, it's kind of sad to note that while other boys my age were transfixed by naked tribeswomen in National Geographic, I was totally engrossed in the papers of Jefferson and Adams.

An amusing side note to my family's deeply involved political dogma, was that at one point, at least 75% of the members of my family were on a ballot somewhere in the State of Texas. Even I was dragged into the political arena, though a bit begrudgingly.

When I turned 18, my older brother submitted my name as a candidate for Texas Railroad Commissioner. He was too busy running for another High office post. When I informed my brother that I was going to college and had no intention of being Railroad Commissioner, he said, "don't worry, you are going to abolish the position the first week you are in office."

In college, I became more "progressive" or "liberal", and I rebelled against what I perceived as the outdated and old-fashioned theories of the Libertarian Party. When I started doing stand-up comedy, digging into my family's "let's go back to 1776" mentality was a good source of humor for my act. Let's face it, Libertarians are not the coolest cats in the alley.

In 1988, my family, and the whole Libertarian world, was all gaga over a new political hopeful. Ron Paul became the Libertarian Presidential candidate and made quite a showing on election night - better than anything the Libertarians had ever experienced nationally before.

Flash forward 20 years later, and Ron Paul is aiming his sights on the big house once again. Some things have changed, though. This time around, Ron Paul is a Republican Congressman, not a Libertarian dark horse. Like last time, his campaign is still focused on the idea that government power is born from individual rights, not he other way around.

I would like to think the work I do as a medium has a similar message to it. After all, I am of the belief that God comes from individual consciousness, not the other way around.

Would I vote for Ron Paul given that he win his party's primary? I'm not sure. He does possess that one quality we all wish we could possess - selfless integrity. As a person, I trust him more than Hillary or Obama. Stranger than that, I'm beginning to think my crazy family might have been right all those years ago. Sometimes I even wonder how different life would have been as the Texas Railroad Commissioner instead of a guy who talks to the dead. Ah, the wonder of it all.

V is for Vaccine

We didn't vaccinate our daughter Nina, well, not until she was a month past two. In April of this year, I was guilt fed and coerced by her new pediatrician into giving her the Hib vaccine and Prevnar (pneumococcal).

It's not that my wife and I don't want to vaccinate. We just want the freedom to choose how we vaccinate. So now that my son Waylon is here, we are once again pressured (and accosted) to make a determination about how we plan on vaccinating our child.

Trust me, I've done as much research as a lay person can on this subject. I understand both sides to the argument. I acknowledge that some vaccines have greatly reduced if not eliminated certain diseases from childhood experience. However, there is also that mysterious element out there which worries me greatly... some of you know it better as the unknown.

As a medium, I know about the unknown. Almost all scientists would tell me that I was full of shit if I tried to explain to them how it is that I can communicate with the consciousness of the dead. So you see, I have personal experience telling me that, as well-intended as science may be, it isn't always right.

My big concern about vaccinations is that the schedule is too aggressive for a baby's body. More importantly, there has not been a single long-term study done to explain the "explosion of neurologic and immune system disorders in our nation’s children." since the widespread introduction of public immunization. Here is a webpage that explains this concern far better than I ever could.

I truly welcome all opinion, criticism or spiritual support on this.

Joy Ride

I'm back with a head full of mush, madness and little moments of in between. That's what it's like going back home to what was once your home.

I did bring back some sand with me. Take a look.

Yeeeeee Hawwwww, Pard'ner!

Ever been to Texas? It's a small country stuck inside a big state. I'll be there on vacation visiting friends and family, so don't be surprised if you start to miss me some.

Along the way, the Family Cairo Tour 2007 will make variouos stops, including a visit to San Antonio, the city where my journey with Spirit began. From there we're off to the beach town of Port Aransas, a Spring Break haven which in my youth played host to some of my most embarrassing failures as a budding Casanova. As a finale, I delve deep into my college nostalgia with a trip to Austin.

See you in a week and a half, ya'll.  

Not so terrible two's

Sure, life can be tough, but sometimes life will give you a small surprise... like two lollipops, one for each hand. These moments are rare, savor them slowly.

To demonstrate what I am talking about, I present Nina, my newly-turned, two-year old daughter.

Who moved my fridge?

Our kitchen remodel just concluded after a very long three months. I don’t know about where you live, but here in California, good contractors are both hard to find and hard to keep. This very simple fact actually explains why our small kitchen remodel took so long, and why it took an additional six months just to get the project started.

I don’t even want to get into the story of how “José or “No Showsé,” as my wife called him, messed up everything he touched. What I do want to talk about is our unattractive refrigerator.

Being that our outdated refrigerator is already too big for the space we have, it was definitely going to have to move for any work to begin. So, with a very unceremonious road trip to our living area, our “Ugly Betty” took up residence next to our book shelves and dinner table. And there she lay for three long months.

At first, being able to pull a Henry Miller book out from the library with your left hand, and then some sugar-free syrup from the fridge with your right seemed like a luxury the rich could only dream of knowing. Then, however, the true downfall of this unpleasant arrangement became apparent as the fridge began leaking water and my daughter’s Dora the Explorer “chill” chair fell victim to water damage. As you may have guessed, our insurance premium was too high to even consider submitting this claim. Sadder than that, though, was that soon enough, we all got used to walking through the fridge pond to get to the TV remote.

Fast-forward to this past Saturday, and the fridge is now back in its old spot, a cool time capsule, unburied and distorting our very lovely, updated kitchen.

The problem, though, is that we cannot stop walking into the living room to fetch the butter. Seriously, even when I instructed Nina, my 21 month old, to go put the magnet on the fridge, she walked right past the kitchen into the living room.

So why does the refrigerator look out of place now in its right place? I’m sure there are countless university studies on this, but like usual research and footnotes give me headaches, so I’ll just generalize and assume their existence.

This assumed research I never read got me thinking about how readily we all adapt to negative situations, and how quickly we form habits out of them. Personally, I can think back to many failed relationships where I, or my partner, allowed negative behavior to become an expected routine. How did these bad habits affect my beliefs and perceptions of love, trust and faith? Who knows, but I’m sure the damage was done.

So think about it, did you or someone you love move your fridge? If so, here is some helpful advice on how to put it back where it belongs.