Chino

The Los Angeles area in California continues to hit record high temperatures, such as 48.9 degrees Celsius in the city of Chino.

There was a time when American teenagers thought nothing was cooler than wearing the Gap’s chino pants and branded sweatshirts.

My neighbour Bratislav, of Croatian descent, on Lulu Island, with the two dogs Rafa and Chino, believes that people now live in an age of ignorance. He believes that about 98% of humanity lingers on without questioning the afterlife, questioning what is beyond Earth, etc. Bratislav and I are two of the remaining 2% of humanity with more curiosity. Bratislav believes that outer space may be already inhabited by other sentient beings.

Bratislav, the Croatian-descent dog owner of Rafa and Chino, does believe in souls and spirits, in some ways. On the 20th of October of 2012, with two leashes in hand, Bratislav the vampiric baron phantom struts approaching along the Halloween-like sidewalk, and then we have a conversation near the dilapidated purple-leaved tree in the neighbour Bruce's yard, here on Lulu Island. Yes, he says, he believes in souls and spirits and each kind is in a human body. I tell him that in some religions, people believe in multiple souls and spirits inside a body and to complicate matters, they may be "fluid" in nature. Bratislav thinks that I am like a Hispanic, but I imbue in him the notion of at least some Eastern influence inside of me. I take a pseudo-scientific turn and tell him that the "soul-spirit structure" may be really complicated and may have many components like a chandelier does with different gems and crystals.

It is the 4th of December of 2012. Today, Bratislav uses a long wooden stick to prod his dogs Chino and Rafa. He says that it is too cold to use the water spray bottle. He talks about the emerging Plasma Universe Paradigm. He says that space is not empty. I tell him what I read in Astronomy magazine about Jupiter-sized worlds, twice as many as stars, lonely worlds wandering unanchored to a sun, or primary star. Recently, I have been fantasizing of an elegant teahouse in orbit around such a giant world surrounded by sunless darkness. I call this quiet, eerie fantasy "La Teejo" in Esperanto, or undecidedly "la .tcat. .barj." in Lojban. Some men prefer a Bath and Sauna Dream.