He'd always told his friends that he'd one day love to hire a mariachi band to follow him around and play songs as pertaining to his ever shifting moods. After his pregnant girlfriend left him for the big empty that is to his mind not being with him, he decided that there was no better time to stay true to that threat than the present (which is now the past). He did his research. He had his friends with uncles and fathers and even an aunt or two. The most important thing he learned was not to ask them if they could play Cielito Lindo; of course they could! Some of them could even play Hava Nagila. They were musicians (!); the love of music and the alternating celebrations and sadnesses of life compelled them. He pictured himself strolling down the summer pavement of the street that reminded him most of her, the mariachi band in tow, playing something like: "Ay, mi amor perdido" or something like that. Yeah, he did his research alright. Because was that even a song? Was it in a song? He didn't know and he didn't care. It was less about the sounds than it was about the imagery that was representative of his thoughts and feelings. For example: he'd think about his unborn child and become fraught with the conflicting emotions that that particular dilemma entails (dilemma, perhaps, being the wrong word): the fear, the anxiety and the variegations of shimmering energy and lowering lethargy thereof, the lump-in-the-throat wistfulness that one almost feels ashamed of because then there's the guilt of self-pity, which is then translated to selfishness and now it is all about oneself, is it not? All of this weighed on him at once like he was in the middle of some nightmare intervention in which all of his loved ones encircled him and browbeat him into a fetal position assuming the meekest of submission to the accusations and congratulations and that faint-fucking-praise that may as well have been a singular remonstration with all of that which is the very essence of who he is. He imagined a banda mariachi confundida in his shadow, melting under the smile of the mid-day sun playing songs no one has even heard because it's more of a medley of conflicted thoughts, feelings; nothing concrete; everything abstracted and melded together like some freak-of-nature (loved and respected nonetheless) and on-the-move; bi-polar, even-- was that his problem? Sometimes he felt so angry and resentful AND WHAT WOULD THEY PLAY THEN?