Did I leave the gas on? No! No, I'm a fuckin' squirrel!
Is that Rep. Michelle Bachmann, R-Minn.? Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn.? Pat Buchanan? Nope — it’s Blondie the squirrel, enjoying a healthy organic corn chip taken straight from the dainty hand of Herself, who also snapped the pic. “Fucking nuts!” he seems to say. “Fed up with them always. I long for a grapefruit.”
Squirrels are said to live from six to 10 years, so Blondie, like me, must be a geezer. He’s been panhandling the neighborhood since we moved in seven years ago and is absolutely fearless — he’ll stroll right up to you like a Bibleburg wino hunting a handout.
If you’re a Bibleburger into squirrels, organic chips and other such tree-huggery, don’t miss today’s Pikes Peak Earth Day extravaganza at Cornerstone Arts Center. Blondie won’t be there, but you should be.
No, that’s not the stairway to heaven — that’s a shot of the pergola over our back deck, taken from a folding chair while the cats chase bugs around the yard. Alas, those beautiful blue skies are supposed to give way to showers this weekend, a little gift from the gods to the body-armored knuckleheads who live for manhandling their double-boingers across the wet clay trails of Palmer Park, where their tracks will remain for alien archaeologists to ponder some eons hence.
Speaking of dark clouds, some of you may wonder why I haven’t weighed in on the debate over “enhanced interrogation techniques” that has been so much in the news of late. It’s because in a sane society no debate should be required. Torture is wrong, period, end of story. And anyone who says otherwise should be tortured.
And speaking of torture, there is much bicycle racing coming to flyover country here as April segues into May. There’s the 31st edition of La Vuelta de Bisbee, which starts today in the Arizona town of the same name, and the 23rd annual Tour of the Gila, which kicks off April 29 in Silver City, N.M. I covered LVDB once, back in the day, but I’ve never been to the Gila. VeloNews.com’s grand poobah, Steve Frothingham, is headed that way again this year, so look for lots of word count, pix and maybe even some video.
This being Earth Day, I thought I’d ride on some. Poked a sharp stick at a few colleagues confined to their respective cages and rolled away. The legs, as Chris Horner might say, were not good, so I thought I’d take a little light exercise in Palmer Park. So, apparently, did everyone else.
Oddly, it was a pleasant outing, despite the crowds. Without exception, everyone I encountered was just happy to be there — a pair of women cyclists battling a balky derailleur, a lone horseman, various dog-walkers, a couple of strolling teens, a mountain biker taking a wrong line into oncoming traffic (me).
I was on a mountain bike, too, and enjoyed something not unlike zazen on two wheels until the drivetrain started acting up after about 90 minutes. My right-hand Sachs twist-shifter had finally gone to its reward after 15 or so years, so I manhandled it into a cog I could live with and rolled it on home.
After a snack I chucked the bike in the back of the White Tornado (another of the various beaters infesting the DogHaus) and headed for Old Town Bike Shop, where a crowd of mechanics gathered around the ailing two-wheeler like surgeons in an operating theater. As they marveled at the geezer-mobile, discussing repairs, workarounds and replacements, I was reminded of a scene from “The Milagro Beanfield War” by John Nichols:
But finally, at 76, there loomed on Amarante’s horizon a Waterloo. Doc Gómez in the clinic at Doña Luz sent him to a doctor at the Chamisaville Holy Cross Hospital who did a physical, took X-rays, shook his head, and sent the old man to St. Claire’s in the capital where a stomach specialist, after doing a number of tests and barium X-rays and so forth, came to the conclusion that just about everything below Amarante’s neck had to go, and the various family members were notified.
I had been thinking in terms of a similarly radical intervention, perhaps a pair of Shimano bar-cons mated to Paul’s Thumbies, or (gasp) an upgrade to nine-speed. Happily, like Amarante, the old DBR Axis TT has defied the Grim Reaper and rolls on, thanks to a quick and inexpensive Grip Shift transplant. Chapeau to the OTBS folks.
From our When Drowning, Grasp the Anvil Firmly Department comes the news that the Bibleburg Gaslight is taking another stab at offering a free paper with a blend of wire-service news, staff reports and dispatches from “citizen journalists,” which is to say anyone with a PC and a craving to see his or her name in print. Oboy, can’t wait.
Sweetheart, gimme rewrite ... no, on second thought, make that the promotions department!
Astoundingly, this thing, dubbed Ink, will be targeted at a trio of areas I would consider either blue or independent — downtown, the west side and Manitou Springs — where the Gaslight‘s deranged, fire-engine-red, wingnut-libertarian fan base mostly isn’t. We’re all commies and queers and atheists in these parts. Some of us are all three.
The Gaslight‘s previous attempt to masquerade as a zoned collection of “neighborhood papers,” an embarrassing throwaway bumwad called The Slice, died unmourned a couple years ago, if memory serves. It made those god-awful holiday letters you get from acquaintances look like the “Essays of E.B. White.” But it arrived on the doorstep once weekly, packaged in a nifty plastic bag suitable for picking up dog shit, so it wasn’t entirely useless. For those with hamsters or parakeets it was a two-fer.
I suppose I should be gratified that the Gaslight is trying to pay some attention to “downtown” Bibleburg and other pockets of local weirdness. I like to go out for breakfast now and then, and breakfast out means reading the newspaper, but I haven’t seen a copy of the Gaslight in a box downtown for the better part of quite some time. They’ve either cut way back on the press run or abandoned single-copy sales altogether. Either way, I could care less. More trees will grow in the wild wood.
The Colorado Springs Independent seems to be hanging on despite the sagging economy, but two other throwaways with less baggage have fallen upon hard times recently — Newspeak, which has moved online, and Springs Magazine, which has simply gone away. Ink seems destined to follow them down the drain. Remember your Humphrey Bogart, as crusading editor Ed Hutcheson in “Deadline U.S.A.” — “Stupidity isn’t hereditary, you acquire it by yourself.”
Beer-thirty. Well, actually beer-twenty. But who's counting?
Another brutal two-day stint in the editorial barrel is slouching toward its finale, and being as today is 4/20, I cracked a beer at 4:20, just ’cause. Hey, it’s not like a guy needs to be stone-cold sober to commit misdemeanor journalism, ’cause nobody bothers to read or write any more. It’s all thumbs on CrackBerries and up arses.
I took the cats out for an airing when the temps topped the mid-60s and did a spot of editing in the sunshine. Those glossy MacBook screens really pop outdoors, and so do those nasty blisters a peckerwood like me gets after about 15 minutes of solar roasting following a winter of discontent, so ours was a short stint under the Big Yellow Ball, much to the cats’ dismay.
The Turk’ in particular loves the outdoors, and when he’s not busy trying to murder something he rolls ecstatically about on the toasty sidewalk, thunking his noggin against the concrete with every flip. Thock, thock, thock. No wonder his mental processes seem a bit scrambled from time to time.
We’re supposed to be enjoying a stretch of sunshine and 70s here, so I hope to emulate the Turk’ and spend more time rolling about in the sunshine, though I hope to keep my cranium off the concrete. I’m getting to the point where if John Goodman should happen to see me (not likely) he might bellow, “Jeez, look at that fat bastard.” I stretch the design limits of my cycling kit much more and it will go from red and black to pink and gray.
Getting back to journalism: I can’t help but notice that the Pulitzer committee overlooked me again this year. When, oh when, will they announce a Sister Mary Stigmata Memorial Award for Filthy Mouth and Bad Attitude?
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