ode to an unforgettable neighborhood personality , and an essay on coping with robotic public vending

Dear Oaxaqueñan Tamale Man, with your speaker larger than your steaming tin pot of your wife's proud tamales, man of the year, Aztec of the new hipster emerald city:

I hate you. I would never buy from you. You're worse than a bum: I can't shut you out. If I went to hell, your tamale recording would play.

But it is you I have chosen to love. Because my heart must laugh, must have love. Your song is as kind as my favorite E.E. poem:
"I have eaten the plums
In the icebox
Which you were probably saving
For breakfast
Forgive me
They were delicious
So sweet and so cold."

I hear your hum. It is brain-paralyzing. Your distribution never ceases to amaze, but your sales must be terrible. You are entirely unoptimized. Your frequency is 2,000x and 200MHz over cap. I have to ask you, to make sure you are human, and to preserve my own humanity:

How meditative is it for you to go on for hours with that speaker? How much joy, curiosity, release and nervous eagerness does a tamale sale give you? Does anyone run out to catch you, a naive immigrant, and shock you? Where do you stop, to say hello? How old are you? Do tamales even matter to you? Or are you perfectly pleased with the echo of your sound through familiar streets, your empire, which you know best, hundreds, hundreds, hundreds of times a day, and well after dusk?

Tamale man, no one can deny it you are a robot-being, but you are our most loyal guardian; if awake, you see every store awning hung, clausurado sticker pasted; bike unchained and flower sprouted. Maybe even people changing behind cracked Victorian second-floor open windows.

If you are as you seem- an existential post-death trance of broken pavement, grime and electronics; striking both curiosity and fear in pedestrians who hear you every night from their beds, and every morning naked in their showers; do those familiar eyes give you life? When people look at you as if they know you better than their own spouses, want to see you, yet also loathe you- how does that make you feel?

Don't you ever wish to one day, you could go home and ask your great aunt to sign a hauntingly beautiful love ballad in a native language ... And the following rainy morning, emerge with your bike, haunting everybody with the new song from your speaker?

Imagine the physical excitement to rotate the same streets as always, your meditative circuit - and let the lovers, the cooks, the children and the mechanics all hear this new piece of your own intimate life, as you forcibly enter theirs? Auntie Marisol, singing with tones of deep, lush real life? Tamale man, vulnerable and human? Tamale man monologue? How many ignore you- and close off their senses - since it is impossible to know you? How loved could you be, if you broadcasted your own self one day?

Ever since the yelling morning man stopped yelling with mad ferocity and became two, the yelling brothers, who together began howling lower, more tired, more forgiving.... It made me imagine the yeller sitting before his meal, capable of human sensitivity. The unthinkable, not long ago.