ME: Ok, what’s your wish?

JULIAN: Um, [unintelligible]

ME: What?

JULIAN: [repeats] Ok, it’s your turn next.

ME: Oh, um. I wish… that I had a marshmallow.

JULIAN: Oh cool. I wish I was, uh, bag of marshmallows.

ME: [laughs] You wish you were a bag of marshmallows or you had a bag of marshmallows?

JULIAN: I had…

ME: Oh, okay. I wish I had a fire, then.

JULIAN: Me too!

ME: So I could cook the marshmallows.

JULIAN: Me too!

ME: You have to wish something else.

JULIAN: Um, okay. I just wish marshmallows!

ME: You just wish for marshmallows? I wish all those stars were marshmallows. [laughs]

JULIAN: [laughs] It’s my turn, okay. I wish I was a, I wish my tio (uncle) was a movie star.

ME: [laughs] You wish I was a movie star?

JULIAN: Yeah.

ME: That’s cool. I wish you were a superhero.

JULIAN: Oh that’s cool! My turn.

ME: Yeah. [iPhone screen went black] It’s on don’t worry keep going.

JULIAN: I wish I would fly to the moon so faster than a bird.

ME: You wish you could fly to the moon faster than a bird?

JULIAN: Yeah.

ME: Oh, that’s good. Um, I wish, I wish I could touch the stars and change the colors.

JULIAN: Cool! It’s my turn. I wish, I wish I could play all the hard/card games.

ME: You wish you could play them or bring them.

JULIAN: Play them on your phone.

ME: You want to play all the games on my phone?

JULIAN: Yeah, when I get six.

ME: When you turn six?

JULIAN: Yeah.

ME: How old are you now?

JULIAN: Still five.

ME: You’re still five, but when do you turn six?

JULIAN: …be big.

ME: I know you’ll be big, when? When’s your birthday? Do you know your birthday?

JULIAN: July 28th.

ME: July 28th! That’s only in a couple of weeks.

JULIAN: Mhmm, yeah it’s just a couple of weeks. It’s your turn.

ME: My turn, um. I wish I could swim like a fish.

JULIAN: Cool. I wish, I wish, I wish I would ride on a fish.

ME: A what-fish?

JULIAN: I wish I would ride.

ME: What kind of fish, a ride fish? I don’t know what kind of fish.

JULIAN: Um, it’s an animal that you can pick him and you can ride on him.

ME: You can ride on him.

JULIAN: Yeah.

ME: A riding fish.

JULIAN: Yeah!

ME: [laughs] Okay.

JULIAN: You know what? And a riding fish eats sharks.

ME: The riding fish eats sharks?

JULIAN: Yeah.

ME: Is it like Shamu or is it like a whale? What’s a riding shark?

JULIAN: I think it’s like a whale.

ME: Okay, what color is it?

JULIAN: Big and huge and pink.

ME: Big and huge and pink?!

JULIAN: Yeah, and Nathan you know what?

ME: What?

JULIAN: A ride fish is faster than a whale.

ME: He’s faster or fatter?

JULIAN: Faster.

ME: Oh, that’s cool.

For a few days in November of 2006, we visited Guanajuato. In this video, Rosario reminisces about her first childhood trip to the state’s capital city.

One of our nieces sent Flat Carlita in the mail for a visit. She toured San Diego and Tijuana for a few weeks, meeting friends and family, making memories, and seemed to have a great time.

Tijuana is never quiet. The city’s soundtrack of bustling traffic and barking dogs syncopates with the surrounding beats of banda and hip hop. Bright blue, green and orange homes punctuate a sea of gray cinder block.

But beneath it’s sun-dried skin, boys like Benjamin step into adolescence. Not ready to venture out into the world alone, but old enough to want it. A quiet and restless awakening.

Music: Perfidia (instrumental) by Café Tacuba

It had been more than 10 years since my last letter went unanswered. It was harder to keep in touch after he moved back to Chicago when we were 15 years old. I’m left with a deep sense of loss; I always hoped we’d reunite one day, reminiscing about the good old days and share where our lives had taken us.

The Krause family drove from Chicago to San Diego in the early ’90s. Benson’s father preached at the 7th & Orange Church of Christ in Escondido. One evening, a group from the church came over to my parents’ house. Benson and I sat in my room to avoid the crowd, learning about each others musical tastes. He picked up my keyboard and began teaching me the chords to “One” by U2. I played and he sang. We may have stumbled through it like an awkward first dance, but it changed my relationship with music forever.

One night, we stared at the ceiling in sleeping bags on the livingroom floor of his parents’ house. We threw out ideas for naming our new band. We had the concept down pretty quickly — something that embodied the idea of being out of place, just a step outside the circle. We settled that night on The Third Half.

Benson wrote the music and lyrics, I played along and generally followed his lead. Kenrick Buchanan joined the mix and we recorded some tracks. Soon after we released our first album “Thirsty,” which we sold for $5 at church.

One Sunday morning, his father Jim was preaching. He spoke about being corrupted by the world and used his youngest son Timothy’s innocence as an example. He said Tim was sitting in the pew making gestures with his hands and wound up being fascinated with his middle finger. Jim explained how it meant nothing outside the context of the world’s negative influence. What he did next is something no one in the audience that day will forget. He rested both wrists on the pulpit with two middle fingers extended upward. “Does this offend you?” he asked. I applaud the man’s courage, but needless to say it caused controversy. Not long after, the family returned to Chicago.

A year later, I boarded a plane at age 16 for my first flight alone. I brought the keyboard and an electric guitar that Kenrick had been teaching me to play. Benson and I recorded sessions that become “Water Compan and the Go-Go-Gadget Arms” and “Join the Family.”

The group in California kept practicing, adding Javier Ortiz and my cousin Josh Gibbs. Meanwhile, Benson sent a solo tape called “Wit’s End.” Through the following year, we recorded music and sent it to Benson to add vocals and mixing. He sent us a tape with the album title “Satisfied: The Final Reunion (version one and two).” It had become harder to stay in touch at a distance and somehow we knew the title was appropriate.

Later that year, I made another trip to Chicago for his sister’s wedding, though we hadn’t spoken in months. Seeing him again, it was clear we were growing older and apart. We recorded a couple of tracks but there was no album coming in the mail.

A year or two later, I got news that Benson’s mother Benja was killed in a car accident. The yearly updates that followed included a lot of ups and downs. The last letter I sent included a Delirious? album “Live & In The Can.” I told him I loved him and tried to send a message of hope. I never heard back and feared it ended up in a box, dismissed as an overly spiritual message.

Music was an ever-present part of his life. In the years since we lost touch he continued to make music as as the vocalist for the band Ophur. Their website allowed me to follow him a bit closer, watching live performances and listening to their latest recordings.

The Benson I knew was a passionate friend, a talented musician, and a loving son and brother. He inspired me creatively and played a crucial role in my adolescence. I wouldn’t be the same without his influence and he will always be a part of me.

[ temporary note: I'm going to update this post in the coming week as I reconstruct some details, upload more images, and add audio from the albums ]

It’s impossible to point a camera in any direction in Tijuana and not find something interesting. It’s a cultural war zone, the mezzanine between two worlds. But in the middle of this political purgatory, there are people. And my Saturday routine is about family.

The song used in the video (On Our Own by September Malevolence) is available as a free download on Last.fm.

Living in a small rustic house with three (sometimes five) college guys in Abilene, Texas, I wasn’t sure who was to blame for the cockroaches. Things weren’t exactly kept clean. But one summer, I stayed to work while others left town. The roaches didn’t leave with them.

I happened to run into the landlord and I mentioned the bugs. His response was unexpected. “Yeah, but don’t worry. They’re tree roaches. They just come inside to look for water.” He went on to explain that the typical cockroaches people worry about are a different, smaller kind. They get into your food, but these don’t.

To get rid of them, he suggested a unique attack. Let’s call it the banana borax blitz:

• Step 1: Chop up a banana and leave it outside near where you think they might be coming inside.
• Step 2: After midnight, go outside to check the banana. You should find more cockroaches than you ever wanted to see in one place.
• Step 3: Lightly dust them with borax, or powdered boric acid. You can buy it at most grocery stores.
• Step 4: Panic as they scatter. Beware, these things can and fly when disturbed!

When cockroaches clean themselves, they eat the powder. Death is swift. I actually watched a few slowly crawl away and flip over with a kind of cockroach kabuki gesture.

It turns out boric acid is well documented for killing roaches (although others suggest a more subtle approach). Four of the top 10 results on Google are from .edu’s.

• Cockroach Elimination | University of Kentucky Entomology
• Cockroaches Management Guidelines–UC IPM
• Cockroaches
• Cockroaches and Their Control

Rosario asks her aunt how she eventually married José. “Por accidente! By accident!” Esperanza explains how different times were back then. She was a good girl who held hands but didn’t kiss. One day, she got angry with a neighbor and the two exchanged heated words. Later, Esperanza’s father, a man who rarely spoke to her whatsoever, asked her if what the neighbor told him was true. She reluctantly agreed. What she didn’t know was that the neighbor actually said Esperanza and José were having inappropriate relations. Her father obliged José to marry Esperanza. She liked José but had no interest in marriage at age 16. Her father insisted. The Catholic train couldn’t be stopped and the two were married. It wasn’t until several years later, while talking with her mother, she realized what had happened.

But the story didn’t stop there. She describes José’s drinking, the beatings, the 20 pregnancies, and their first kiss after over 50 years of marriage. After an hour of her stories, all those telenovelas with ridiculous plot turns somehow seemed a little less ridiculous.

Meet Esperanza:

Benjamin is 12 years old and lives with his father and grandmother in Tijuana. His mother died when he was two. He knows her mostly from pictures. His father moved them to California a few years after; Benjamin went to school and learned to speak English. After several hard years working multiple kitchen jobs, they returned to Guadalajara. Some years later, they came back to Tijuana to live on the same street they lived together as a young family almost 10 years earlier. My wife Rosario had told me about her sister and the child she left behind. And I met my new nephew less than a year before becoming his uncle.

“La tiramos afuera, tio?” “Sure,” I say following him outside to play catch at 9 o’clock at night. The brisk air becomes more and more bearable as I warm up, throwing fast and fly balls, sprinting to chase the green grounders that get by. Between breaks for passing cars, Benjamin’s cousin, Roberto (another nephew I neglected to mention who lives in California but had to come back and enroll in school to renew his visa), comes outside to join the game. Benjamin scoops up a broken two by four, hands it to Roberto and takes the mound. I pull a chunk of particleboard out of the neighbor’s construction scrap and place it at home plate. The rules quickly come together, hits and runs measured by speed bumps and telephone poles. In this moment, Tijuana blooms. Streetlights become stadium floodlights and the uneven pavement becomes a world-class ballpark.

The moment never lasts long enough. I didn’t hit the hero’s home run I had hoped for. But it doesn’t matter to them. Who says you need a baseball or a bat to play baseball. They can turn the contents of your pocket into ninja stars. And they have no idea how much they inspire me.