When I was a kid, I heard voices and saw visions from The City of Angels.

Movies possessed me and they were legion.

Hooray for Hollywood.

My first drug of choice in The South Bronx of America was Television. I OD.

I survived to tell a story about a wish to live life like a Great American Novel.

I wanted it to read like the sci-fi of A Great Comic Book, one worthy of my childhood Fortress of Solitude, The Public Library. Ms Raeside, a beloved 6^th grade English teacher who introduced me to Greek mythology, advised me to write what I know.

I know the harassment of poor celebrities by the paparazzi as seen on TV.

                                                   Media Dearest by Danny Aponte

I’ll live up to what Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: if people knew how to write about their lives everyone would have a great story. So here I go again on my Royal typewriter.

                                      Chapter One: It was a dark and stormy night.

When I was a four-eyed kid, I enjoyed painting pictures with words much as drawing my own comic books. I learned to focus the eye of the viewer inside me and surprised myself with the mystery of creativity.












































One millennium later, on my way home from the library, I found Kodachrome pictures for a slideshow projector, one found on display at The Smithsonian Museum. They were scattered next to a church built in the 1940s on Prospect Avenue in The South Bronx. To illustrate vision on the future of history, I scanned the items from the 1960s into Win98. I used Adobe to make art out of garbage.

I see art everywhere in a universe that wastes nothing.

I dedicate this artwork to the 3 muses: Ms. Flan, my art teacher at P.S 161, my mysterious mentor, Rosie Lewandoski, who painted machines and microchips that talked to me in her studio until The Wonder Years reactivated, and to Carmen, my mother, a pen and pencil factory worker who drew me my first smile on the third rock from the sun. Their magical art insights made me feel like the Ritchie Rich of the South Bronx.

I Saved Win95 From The Junkyard In 2001 & It Saved Me

 Bear with with me as this blog undergoes reconstruction

Time: two years after 9.11

The workday began in pitch-blackness.

Then the outlines of trees appeared in morning mist.

I worked at rebuilding houses alongside illegal aliens. Unlike me, they had cars, ID and cell phones in The Garden State where invaders from The Angry Red Planet traveled on the airwaves of NBC Radio in the 1930s and caused a panic attack among Americans.

One of them tried to exercise machismo over me. I pointed to the crucifix around his neck. Jesus was never an illegal and he paid his taxes, I said. They left me alone with my Tru-Temper ax and the tree stumps that had to be uprooted from the backyard.

Morning, said Mr. Kennedy, the resident next door. I shook the hand of a man who shook hands with the nation’s first space age president. He has a son who was part of the team on NASA’s Rover Project before he moved on to work for the Chinese.

Eventually, humans might become illegal aliens far, far from a weather-beaten Earth.

Think they’ll find life on Mars, I asked as a strange insect crawled inside an empty coffee cup. Who knows, replied a man who works as a school administrator.  He wanted to know where I was from. Like The Man In Black sang, I’ve been everywhere, man. This journal of my travels is like a star gone nova eons ago.

And so I begin reentry again.

                                      Chapter One: It was a dark and stormy night.

In the zero gravity of cyberspace, creative vision fires up as powerfully as The Red Eye of Jupiter. It fuses scattered memories into a phantom brain and makes true a childhood dream to live life like the sci-fi of a comic book. No more Waiting For Super Man. Today, I taught the future of history.

Sneak Peek At The Making Of The Bronx Identity!

On the first day of school, our teacher gave us homework to make tour books on our hometowns. For the time being, she asked us to introduce ourselves and highlight our tourist attractions. Most of the students were from countries like England and lived in places like Beverly Hills. Everyone applauded after every student’s brief presentation. Everyone’s mouth dropped when they found out I lived in The South Bronx.

The teacher turned pale face and almost fainted. A few minutes later a rich student from Switzerland quietly got up and moved to another seat. I had a marketing problem.

And I was ethnic profiled at NYU.  The kids were mean to me!

“No can’t go out with you,” said a polite Japanese girl, “You poor! You South Bronx!”


Her laughter made my face redder than the rising sun over her country.  I began to dream of a way to draw tourists into town with The Big Idea

I began to spend hours at the computer lab working with exciting programs like Adobe, Lumina and Word. They helped to formulate a strategy. I was going to put citizens from our town like Al Pacino, Colin Powell and now Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor on police line-ups with the headline Take Another Look.

This was the new Public Image of my town: IN YOUR FACE!

And since The Bronx is the only town connected to the mainland, I was going to capture The American Spirit to the tune of The Magnificent Seven at Yankee Stadium to hit the ball into orbit.

Let go, said a voice. Use The Force.

I experienced an academic second wind at the university from a Big Bang of so many ideas, one blaze of glory.   The genius is out of The Bronx School of Science. Then I was held down on the holy grounds of higher education and had my memories wiped by a Neo Nazi.  The plug was pulled out on my brain. 

My 2001: A Cyber Space Odyssey began when Win95 reactivated A.I in the year of XP

  (Read A.I as Amazing Imagination more important than knowledge said Albert Einstein.) I became Casper The Friendly Ghost in the machine of the media matrix. This is Bronx, Baseball and Beyond Tron Legacy! 

                   Seriously, this really happened.                    

 I got to go now. I only get 15 to 45 minutes of computer time at NYPL, that helped make a  wish to live life like A Great American Novel, one like the sci-fi of a Great Comic Book, come true.

“Don’t let them tell you who you are. You tell them who you are,” said Charlie Rose at a commencement speech at a university I never graduated from and yet I did.

Yes, I did.

I graduated with flying colors.