Today we’re celebrating a man who stared down the sun and didn’t blink. A one named Albert Camus. That’s spelled C-A-M-U-S... but if you’re French, you don’t say the “S.” Just kinda let it hang in the air, like cigarette smoke in a Paris café.

Camus was born out there in Algeria; bright sun, blue sea, hard times. His mother cleaned houses. His father died in a war before he could walk. So Albert grew up looking straight at the world, no rose-colored glasses. Said life didn’t make much sense, but you might as well live it anyway.

Now, you might have heard his name in philosophy class, right next to a man named Sartre — Jean-Paul, the man with the round glasses and the smoky cafés. But Camus, he wasn’t sitting in the corner pontificating. He was out in the sun, feeling the heat on his face. That’s the difference. Sartre, he liked to talk about freedom, said you can choose who you are, even if it’s tough. But he also got tangled up in politics, made excuses for dictators because they fit his theory. Camus didn’t play that game. He said if your philosophy justifies killing folks, it’s no good. You can’t talk peace out of one side of your mouth and cheer for revolution out of the other. He called it “living as you preach”, (personally big fan). Walking the line between thought and action. No fancy words, no double talk. During the war, while Sartre was writing in cafés to later walk back home to his fancy apartment in the city of Paris, Camus was printing underground newspapers, fighting the Nazis with ink and paper. He didn’t just write about rebellion, he was one.

He said: “I would rather live my life as if there is meaning, than die for the idea that there isn’t.”

That’s not bad for a kid from the slums of Algiers.

He wrote about plague, murder, and the meaning of life, or maybe the lack of it. He said the world’s absurd, but that don’t mean you got to give up. You just keep pushing that rock up the hill. Some folks called that philosophy, others just called it Friday.

Camus won the Nobel Prize when he was forty-four. Handsome guy, looked more like a movie star than a philosopher. Wore that trench coat like he was born in it. You half expect to see him walking down a foggy street with a cigarette and a secret.

But life, she’s got a mean sense of humor. Camus died in a car crash with a train ticket in his pocket he didn’t use. Kinda poetic, if you’re into that sort of thing. The man who said life had no reason ended up in the backseat of fate.

So that’s Albert Camus, ladies and gentlemen, the philosopher of the absurd. He said the only way to deal with a world without meaning is to give it your own. Maybe he was onto something. Maybe that’s what we’re all doing here, finding our meaning between the grooves of a record, the spaces between the notes.

ink, watercolor on paper

contact ibarraloana@gmail.com

I do not own this image. It is from Patent No. US000256265, available on the United States Patent and Trademark Office website (www.uspto.gov/), where the copyright information states that “most government-produced materials appearing on this website are not subject to copyright restrictions within the United States and are therefore in the public domain.” I am using this image to illustrate an educational article at BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com/).

I do not own this image. It is available for sharing on Wikipedia, and the file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license. I am using it in an article for BellaOnline (todayinhistory.bellaonline.com/).

Kwanon's image for today celebrates National Dollar Day, the day in which Congress established the U.S. monetary system in 1786. Every single dollar he had was torn or wrinkled, so the clever little Camera decided to iron out the wrinkles on the best-looking bill in his possession. He rarely even irons his own shirts, but Kwanon will do practically anything to create the perfect prop for a photo shoot, even if it's 9 o'clock at night! #NationalDollarDay

~Image from a 2016 Photo of the Day series: "A Dawn's Eye View: 366 Days Focusing on my 'Cameras'"

Today we celebrate a writer who wrote like he was whispering to the wind and arguing with the angels. José Saramago.

Saramago was born in Portugal with a slow, patient voice that could cut through a mountain like a river if you let it run long enough. He didn’t write books, he carved little universes out of questions a few were brave enough to ask. What happens if blindness becomes contagious? What if death just decides to take a vacation? What if the world’s been holding its breath so long it forgot how to breathe?

You read him, and the sentences roll on like an old freight train that never stops for fuel, just keeps humming through the night. Some might say, “Hey, why ain’t there more periods in here?” But Saramago, he didn’t believe in fences, he wanted the words to run free, like wild horses on a moonlit plain. And if you stuck with him, if you kept your ear to the track, you’d hear the rhythm, and you’d know he was telling you a story older than any grammar rule.

He wrote for the lonely, the forgotten, the ones who keep asking why the world is the way it is, even when the polite thing might be to just nod and go inside. He wrote like he was taking you by the hand and saying, “C’mon now, let’s take another look. Maybe that shadow ain’t just a shadow. Maybe it’s a door.”

So here’s to José Saramago the quiet rebel, slow storm, lighthouse keeper of all the questions we still don’t know how to answer. If you’re out there, sitting in some kitchen lit by a tired little coffee mug, maybe give one of his books a try. Might open something in you you didn’t know had a hinge.

ink, watercolor on paper

contact ibarraloana@gmail.com

This one's for Amy.

Today we celebrate a man with a bass slung low, a rasp in his voice, and fire on his breath. A mexican cat I got to hear already when mother was carrying me in her belly, his name is Alex Lora.

This is a story about a kid from Puebla, born under the shadow of a pressed uniform and polished boots. His old man was military, the kind of guy who stood so straight he made telephone poles look lazy. My father remembered him so well, they went to the same school, parallel class. Apparently young Alex Lora grew up with the rules barked at him like marching orders. “Stand up straight, keep your shoes shined, don’t make a fuss.” But life has a funny way of trying to tame the wild ones, and the wild ones have an even funnier way of refusing.

His first band was called Three Souls in My Mind. But long before that happened my father and aunt recall all the spontaneous and rebellious acts he suddenly put on in the school yard, which led to trouble.

Three Souls in my Mind was formed back in the late ’60s, when Mexico was spinning fast and nobody seemed to know where the brakes were, they were the house band for a generation that wanted the volume turned up and the rules turned down. They started off singing in English, like everybody else wanted to be part of that big Anglo jukebox in the sky. But somewhere along the road, something snapped. Maybe it was the protests, maybe it was the streets, maybe it was just life getting a little too real. They switched to Spanish, and suddenly the music sounded like it came from the pavement itself. Three Souls in My Mind played for the bikers, the outcasts, the rebels… the folks who had more scars than savings. They brought blues to the barrios, rock to the rooftops, and truth to the troublemakers. And right in the middle of all that feedback and fury was Alex Lora, skinny bass hung low, voice gravelly as a dirt road in August, hair flying like he’d stuck a fork in a wall socket. You can hear Puebla in his voice sometimes. Three Souls in My Mind didn’t just make music. They made noise. Honest noise. Necessary noise. You listen to that track “Abuso de Autoridad” or “La Gitana” and your body will move to each word sang out.

Alex Lora is the kind of musician who doesn’t walk onstage, he storms it, later he became the leader of El Tri, a band that’s been cranking out electric thunder longer than most folks have been keeping receipts. He’s got that tangle of hair that looks like it’s been electrified by the chords he plays, and a voice rough enough to sand down a freight train. A lot of singers sound like they smoke, but Lora? He sounds like he smokes the whole factory.

He’s Mexico’s street-corner philosopher, hollering gospel for the working folks. The kind of guy who can turn a three-chord progression into a revolution, or at least into a pretty good night out. His songs talk about the things you don’t read in tourist brochures, the struggle, the hustle, the jokes that keep people going when everything else is falling apart. And he’s got that attitude, leather-vest confidence, outlaw grin, a little punk, a little blues, a whole lot of heart. If rock ’n’ roll had an embassy in Mexico City, Alex Lora would be the ambassador, the doorman, and the guy who fixes the amp when it starts smoking.

El Tri’s been rolling for decades, longer than a lot of marriages, a lot of governments, and a whole lot of fashion trends. And through all that noise and neon, Lora’s still there, bass in hand, growling into the microphone like a bluesman who took a wrong turn at the Mississippi and ended up in a cantina with a neon Virgen shining over the bar.

“Mexicans are the only ones capable of laughing at their own misfortune”

So here’s to Alex Lora, the electric shaman, the barrio bard, the man who turned rock into a national sport and made every show feel like a block-party turned lightning storm. The kid from Puebla who traded military order for musical disorder, and in the process gave Mexico a soundtrack for its rebellions, its heartbreaks, and every beer-soaked, joy-soaked night in between.

watercolor, ink on paper

contact ibarraloana@gmail.com

Today we celebrate a woman who knew how to turn a sentence into a sleigh ride; smooth, cold, and a little dangerous if you weren’t holding on. I’m talking about Selma Lagerlöf.

Yeah, that Selma the schoolteacher, storyteller, Nobel Prize winner… the whole works. First woman to get the big gold medallion, too. Not that she needed it. Her stories were their own kind of medal.

Lagerlöf came from a place where the air doesn’t whisper it whittles. Shaves the world down to its essentials. Out where the pines stand like old men keeping secrets, and the lakes are so still you’d swear they were listening. Maybe that’s why her books sound the way they do, half fairytale, half warning, half sunrise. Yes I know, that’s three halves sometimes that’s how good writing works.

Selma Lagerlöf wrote about trolls and miracles, about young boys flying across Sweden on the back of a goose, about landscapes that could tell you a thing or two if you sat quietly enough. And she believed in something a lot of people forget: that stories aren’t decorations, they’re maps. Maps to places we knew before we had names for them.

People like to say she blended realism with fantasy, but I think she just saw the world the way it really is; strange, holy, and full of neighbors you haven’t met yet.

You pick up Gösta Berling’s Saga, and you can just about smell the woodsmoke and hear the crunch of snow under a sleigh runner. You read The Wonderful Adventures of Nils, and suddenly you’re looking down on the whole country, seeing farms and forests like notes on a sheet of music.

So here’s to Lagerlöf, a writer who didn’t just wrote stories. She opened doors. And folks’ve been walking through them ever since.

ink, watercolor on paper

contact ibarraloana@gmail.com