a mexican laugh in my neighborhood on easter

Music: Mamiffer: Mare Decendrii (2011)

Above the roar of air conditioning warts lining the alley just outside my patio gate, a high-pitched but masculine voice pierces through the humid air. It repeats, like a machine. The voice begins with a many-seconded scream, and ends in that recognizable "ja-ja-ja-ja" that cues the familiar recognition of "the Mexican laugh," today as much of a generic cry in Texas as it is an expression of joy. Hearing it as I sit at the back of my home smoking a pipe, the cry makes me laugh. (A lone dog also barks in the distance.) But the Mexican laugh didn't stop; it kept repeating, almost as if someone was practicing. Although I live in Texas---and in a Hispanic neighborhood, too---such a sustained, celebratory jubilance at 9:00 p.m. on an Easter Sunday seems unusual. Why is this person laughing/crying in this culturally specific manner over and over?

One can't know. But the shear force of its incessant repetition soon dispelled the sense of mirth; going on and on as it does, it's strange, the familiar cadence of the "ja-ja-ja" becoming, of course, uncanny.

This listening experience is not altogether surprising; the dreamlike quality of what (I presume) is waking life tonight mirrors my memories of dreaming this weekend. The last two nights have been fitful and plagued with strange dreams. I have tended to think of my dreams as affect in search of meaning (as Freud tells us to), and frequently what I feel in waking life is homologous to what I feel in a dream (only moreso). There has been a mismatch, as of late, and that's what I don't quite get, like this man laughing over and over and over in a patterned mirth without end.

Early Saturday morning I dreamed I was uncontrollably stabbing my foot with two and three-inch shards of broken glass. Papa Freud would be proud, as the dream featured my mother, who had to witness the ped-mutilation in the dream. In time, I'm sure I will retroactively affix the proper meaning to this odd dreaming, but I am at a loss for understanding whatever affect it is that this dream-image is giving expression to. I suspect Freud might say that the dream gives expressions to the aggression I might have for mum: I have a bunion that will need to be removed, and that has been giving me some pain for many months. Bunions "run" in my mother's family; I remember last Christmas I was complaining of mine to my parents, whereupon my mother removed her shoe and shoed---showed---me her horribly deformed feet and explained my genetic plight. But such sourcing is all too easy.

I remember reading in Schopenhauer's work---I don't remember where---that humans are singular in their expressed reservations and disappointment over having parents at all. We would will our autonomy as if gods, born without parents, or something like this. Only-children are perhaps plagued with such silly sentiments the most---but only in dreams. In waking life, we only-children pretty much report everything to our parents . . . it yields a sense of continuity, and loving.

I talked with my mom this afternoon, as I have done for almost every Sunday since I left home in 1992. It's weird to think I would harbor aggression toward her, as the dream seems to indicate. But Melanie Klein has taught me otherwise, that even an adult ego is powerless to quell the acting-out of the inner-toddler in dreams.

Hmm. The challenge of any toddler is walking by him- or herself. I think of Lacan's discussion of the automaton and tuche in Aristotle's ruminations on "chance." Perhaps therewith is the answer to bleeding feet? Perhaps this is the disturbing spot in the repeating Mexican laugh, the place or hole through which I am made to realize there is an emptiness, a little unscripted place experienced as pain or atonal music?

Easter. When they rolled away the stone the tomb was empty. That doesn't necessarily mean he walked out. It may mean he simply wasn't there.