By JARID MANOS

And so, after all these years, it’s my last Christmas in Como.

This 100-year-old neighborhood, built as a servant city on the virgin prairie back when wolves still howled along the streetcar route to wealthy, new Arlington Heights, endures. Homeboy Liquors changed its name but is still the same store, people still lie in the gutter every once in a while, and the sign for Edmondson’s Chicken never lights up all the way. There’s a continuity in that.

A month ago, I looked around and thought: “We ain’t hit the apocalypse yet.” And I realized that, in many ways, while I preached health and hope for the future to everyone else, I had been living my life with private unease and uncertainty.

My job, the one I created for myself seven years ago when we founded Great Plains Restoration Council, is all about healing ourselves through healing our Earth, our prairie, and teaching all kinds of kids about it. In a sense, my job is believing in the future, acting now, and helping others do the same.

But doing that involves daily understanding that, if enough good people do nothing, we may not make it because of burgeoning ecological and social collapse, a possibility that is still all too real.

And so for years, I’ve let the horror and sorrow of the world privately inhabit me. In a way, I never let myself out of the war zone. The violence that people do to each other mirrors the violence they do to the Earth. I’m a writer, but maybe I’d begun to think: What good is art if society is going to collapse? As a stone-cold soldier in a world gone mad, always working to open the door into that elusive green and peaceful future, I lost some of my own balance.

I’ve been trying to break out of this cycle and get settled, without feeling like I’m selling out. It’s difficult, with the massive amount of service I need to do. But my son and his mother, who live in Houston, have taught me to love on a level I never knew existed. I’ve decided to renew my commitment to life, to literature — to the future.

My ass’ll probably be a hood rat ’til the day I die, but I’m ’bout to become a first-time homebuyer across town. Brand-new house — I won’t know what to do with myself.

With all the world’s problems, I never paid any attention to my own living conditions before now. Survived on a small salary, lived in, uhhh, spare quarters, knew I still lived like a king compared to folk in Darfur or Baghdad or a thousand other places.

Even though I keep a clean, vegetarian household, my collapsing old house got progressively worse. There were periodic outbreaks of fleas (from all the squirming alley cats outside?), the last time which gave me some weird five-week disease where my muscles felt like they were being torn off my bones. Rats ran across the wires at night. Giant cockroaches dragged their twitching bodies out of the shower drain like that dead woman in The Ring. The place never had heat or A/C. In the summer I shut the hot water completely off, didn’t buy bananas because they liquefied before sundown, left shampoo bottles open so they wouldn’t explode. On frigid winter nights, the ghetto fireplace (stovetop burners) kept things from freezing. And something lives below the bathtub, under the house near the water heater. At first I thought he was a bear, but of course all the bears in North Texas were killed off long ago. He bangs the pipes, coughs, and sneezes. Got big shoulders. I’ve gotten used to his company. Only in the last few weeks has he started snarling, a low, fang-dripping rumble. I’ve finally decided he’s a chupacabra.

I died very early on in life from all the hatred and ugliness, then for a long time burned in a strange netherworld of thug callousness and super-sensitivity. For the last seven years I’ve worked 60- to 80-hour weeks building our ecological health movement to the breakthrough point. Now we’re seeing exhilarating successes on the ground and in our communities, we just got a major grant, and I’ve got a book coming out shortly. The publicity that the New York PR firm is planning is a li’l scary. (After all, my dream job used to be a baggage handler at the airport). These days feel like those first few moments before stepping off a cliff.

It’s a time of transitions. Whether we admit it or not, we all know it’s do-or-die time. We’ve got less than 20 years to turn things around or face worldwide consequences of collapsing water and food supplies, irreparable ecological damage, and all the societal upheaval that comes with those disasters.

As for Como, the chicken that used to tease the chained dog is long gone. I never see the crack lady anymore, with her exotic dress of newspapers and head wrap fashioned from a girdle. The abandoned 1910-era house with its 1970s Christmas lights recently burned down to the prairie dirt it was built on. The dog fighters still dump their dead pit bulls down in Death Gulch by the lake, where ranging sunflowers turn their faces to the sun and where one day water (an ancient underground spring?) cracked through the asphalt, burbling and sparkling. My 2003 string of green Christmas lights still hangs forgotten from the scrawny front-yard mesquite tree. The prairie winds blow warm up from Mexico, for now, rattling my old house by its ears. Chupacabra sneezes and snarls and bangs the pipes. It’s dark and late, this Solstice moment before the returning of the light. Crickets sing outside, until the next arctic front pushes back.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.

By JARID MANOS

Como at Christmas is still a wifebeater kind of place. Meaning the kind of white undershirt tank tops that ’hood dudes wear as regular gear on warm days. Hanes or FTL, worn close-fitting, with loose jeans, and maybe a ballcap, skully, or kangol, and thin silver or gold chain.

I’m used to being a center of the cops’ (unwarranted) attention, but my neighbors across the street override me. I slip in and out mostly unnoticed. One afternoon, in her big white bra and big orange panties, the woman from over there lay flat on her back in the gutter, arms spread wide like she was about to make a concrete angel, legs up on the weedy Westside curb. “I’ma call the po-lice!” she yelled, shaking her head side to side. Her big-n-tall dark-skinned dude, potbelly stretching his wifebeater out, screamed down at her. “Bitch, get in the house right now!” “I’ma call the po-lice!” she screamed. “Get in the house,” he yelled.

He took a tire iron and began bashing in the windows of his Cadillac. First the windshield, then the side windows, then the back. Glass sparkled up like soda in a tv commercial. When she finally got up, he lumbered in ahead of her and slammed the door in her face. She banged. “Let me in!” Pounding. Silence.

She went back and lay down in the gutter and began shaking her head from side to side again, arms out, crying. “I’ma call the po-lice!” One of my block’s stray dogs gingerly walked past her, sniffing, but giving her moving head a wide berth. Somebody called the police. As they came, she got up, and her dude let her in. And wouldn’t let the police in.

Each night in Como more families put up their Christmas lights. Some hang simple “icicle lights,” while others string long lines of pure white lights together into elaborate winter scenes set in snowless Texas front yards of weeds, dirt, and buffalo grass, outlining shapes of animals, Christmas trees, and huddled figures. Still others create a carnival of multi-colored, brightly blinking, head-hurting lights covering their entire house and yard — especially the families recently arrived from Mexico, families who are gradually browning up Como. Brown/black integration is happening in every dirt-poor, still-rough ’hood in the West.

Our long-glowing prairie twilights and icy blue nights at this time of year connect us to drier lands further west. So many stars become visible in the winter-clean air and low humidity that I can see the Seven Sisters, the high-up little cluster that whispers through Plains Indian cosmology. With the winds regularly swinging from north to south, cold to warm, and back, ruled by winds we are, it’s hard not to want to reach for more, but that “more” — at that moment when the twilight seems to penetrate most — seems outside of this life. At times like this, when I was little, I’d get so exhausted that I thought I’d go to sleep and wake up the next day as an old man, my black hair turned white, and with a big, long, coarse white beard.

In a handful of houses, there’s activity all night long, cars coming and going. Cops also come periodically. Their blue-red-white strobe lights flash the block. After a late day at work, I slipped past them onto my dark porch, old insecurities about fitting some police profile still making me want to be inconspicuous. My shadow on the wall stopped me. In the flashing lights it was dancing, shifting side-to-side, rhythm on the old white-painted wooden boards. A sudden gust of wind exhaled through, shaking the few scraggly Texas trees and pushing over the long, winter-dried prairie grass in the vacant lot next door.

The following afternoon, dragging himself up my block, a hunched-over, bearded old man I’ve never seen before came dragging a big hunk of chain-link fence. It sounded like chains being dragged over the pavement, and I absolutely could not take that sound. An ashy old black man from Como, dragging chains. Pushing toward the end of a year and into a baby new one.

I have a scrawny-ass mesquite tree in my front yard. Right now its bare branches are shaking in a strong warm south wind hushing over us from Mexico. I walked to Walgreen’s and bought me a string of green lights for $3.99 and strung its top like a crown. It’s my Como Christmas tree. When the winds blow on a cold or warm prairie winter night, I feel so restless and flushed, I get excited. The green is for Earth, and I know somewhere up over the horizon we will have good, good news.

Jarid Manos is executive director of Great Plains Restoration Council.