all Me Smiley.
My given name is Ismael, but I don’t go by Ismael. I go by Smiley.
Like many Hispanic first names, Ismael has two pronunciations: [ees-my-el] in Spanish and [is-mee-el or is-may-el] in English. Okay that’s three, but don’t bother with the math or the phonetics because I already told you, nobody calls me that. The only two people that ever called me Ismael are the two people who made me and named me Ismael, but those people are dead now, which should serve as a warning to you. I’m not saying that I had anything to do with their untimely deaths; I’m simply stating that persons who have called me Ismael in the past are now six feet under. RIP, ya’ll! Just a fact.
Another fact is this: any person who thinks that Smiley is simply short for Ismael is not only simple and short on brains, but whatever limited matter they do possess upstairs is more fecal than grey, meaning they got shit-for-brains to boot. Granted, my superior nickname is derived from an inferior forename it was designed to replace, but Smiley is most certainly not the shortened version of Ismael. To begin with, they are both equal in length—six letters each (just like stupid and shut up)—and to end with, well, that’s where the parity ends, and where my story begins …
Actually, this isn’t my story at all. This is somebody else’s story, or more precisely, it’s somebody’s collection of stories; which isn’t really a story per se when you think of it in terms of one wholly cohesive narrative. True, each individual story contains its own plot structure—complete with a beginning, a middle, and an end—but these tales are not connected to an overall story line like in a novel. That’s the beauty of an anthology blog (anblogogy?): each literary work can stand on its own, and because the pieces are usually arranged in no particular order, reading them out of sequence does not disrupt some grand scheme of storytelling.
That makes this blog perfect for readers with short attention spans who like to skip around at their heart’s content; or for people who like to enjoy a quick read on the toilet during a lengthy bowel movement. It’s also ideal for airline passengers who are in need of some light reading material. However, I wouldn’t recommend combining any of those three scenarios in any simultaneous fashion because skipping around like a lunatic for no apparent reason with an electronic device in your hand and your pants around your ankles during a commercial flight can get you punched right in the kisser. Take it from me, I know from experience. I decked a passenger so hard once I almost broke my ankle. Did I say “ankle?” I meant “knuckle.” Sorry, that’s my verbal paraphasia acting up. It’s an annoying condition I picked up from my mother’s side, specifically from an alcoholic uncle named Lucho, and specifically from the time when he dropped me on my infantile head from five feet in the air after he drunkenly tried to hoist me onto his flaky shoulders. I say “flaky” not because his shoulders were unreliable at catching toddlers (which they were) but because they were always buried under a blanket of dandruff. I remember Tío Lucho used to stumble into our house looking as if someone had taken a cheese grater to both sides of his scalp. I also recall that like me, he too would often struggle with his own issues of semantic confusion, uttering such classic verbal blunders as “The sky is as clear as a bird!” and “I got drunk as a box!” Though I think his head trauma was more attributable to the effects of alcohol abuse, along with the natural consequences of being born a dipshit.
I have to pause here for a moment to address an issue that just cropped up on my screen. After typing that last sentence on my laptop, the term “son of a bitch” was underlined by the officious little prick living inside my computer. I placed the cursor over the highlighted notation and the following message appeared: Sexist expression. Avoid using this phrase. Term is considered by many to be offensive. Can you believe the vagina on this machine? I’m sure it expects me to comply by altering my choice of words to son of a gun or son of a biscuit, but that’s not going to happen. Image the great F. Scott Fitzgerald sitting at his desk finishing The Great Gatsby with a censor standing over his shoulder and suggesting that he replace the legendary phrase “That poor son of a bitch” with “That poor son of a biscuit-eatin’ flapper” (or whatever euphemism was considered more acceptable during in The Roaring Twenties).
I’m not a violent person, but I think that I would blast any such bowdlerizer in the crotch at close range with a rapid-fire T-shirt cannon. So listen here, before you start breathing down my neck about improprieties, and before I retaliate against your genitalia with an all-cotton round of double-XL-caliber slugs, let me give you ample warning: this blog uses foul language, toilet humor, inappropriate sex matter, drug abuse content, violent imagery, and offensive stereotypes as part of its desperate attempt to entertain the misguided covey that have accidentally navigated to its pages. If you are easily butt-hurt by dirty and sophomoric humor, then I’m afraid you’ve wandered into the wrong movie theater my biscuit-eatin’ flapper, because this movie’s rated R.
Now back to the topic at hand… but first, a clarification: the correlation to F. Scott Fitzgerald was not meant to draw a literary comparison between this writing and The Great Gatsby. One is a literary classic from the Jazz Age and the other is a literary classic from the Digital Age. Two completely different Ages. Also, Fitzgerald was a master of the written word, whereas I am just wordy, with a limited vocabulary and a limited comprehension of sentence structure, composition, punctuation, and general levels of detail. But at least I know enough not to start a sentence with the word “but,” and I’m a good speller (for that I do welcome the officious little prick), and I don’t convey my losing battle against ADHD by jumping around from subject to subject with total disregard for the importance of linear flow. Believe you me, reader, I despise that as much as the next reader.
Now, where was I? Ah yes, Smiley … that the shit of my nickname does not stink should never come into question; moreover, it should never be answered (since it goes without saying) whether I am worthy of such a supreme alias, especially when you consider that I also fail to produce an odor when I defecate. Okay, so I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect. Truth be told, I don’t even defecate. What I do do (doo-doo with no odor, of course) is occasionally slip into brief episodes of temporary delusion and hyperbolic fantasy. That’s not to say that I’m an unreliable narrator, not like your unreliable author. I mean, come on, Chencho Jecka? This guy is obviously using a nom de plume to conceal his true identity, so he can’t even be relied upon to come clean with his own name. However, that’s not my business. My business is narration, and I’m here to tell you that I am about to start reading you a blog of essays, poems, plays, and short works by a Chicano named Chencho Jecka. Some of it is worth reading, most of it isn’t, but you can be sure of one thing: all of this happened … mas o menos.