Rain. Again. And plenty of it, too. All we need is the Nautilus and a giant squid and we’re good to go.
Big Jonny of DrunkCyclist torments me via Twitter, announcing, “Sea World’s got beer, son!” He then follows up with this photo of himself (well, one hand, anyway), the wife and kidlets in sunny San Diego, along with said beer — a pair of Bud Lights.
Now, if I have just wrapped up my first year of law school, and I am spending my vacation driving from Phoenix to San Diego and back with the tots and spouse in order to see a bunch of sushi on the hoof, there had better something more palatable than Bud Light on hand to take the edge off or there will be trouble. Stella Artois. Mirror Pond Pale Ale. Lagunitas IPA. A case of Pacifico and a few shots of Herradura. A jeroboam of Talisker. Maybe some smack, I dunno.
But Bud Light? Puh-leeze. If this is what living in Phoenix and going to law school does to a man, I’ll stay ignorant, right here in waterlogged Bibleburg. Maybe Captain Nemo will take me water skiing.
My IHBC lasted all of 33 minutes, and pursued by thunder I hit the driveway just as the first raindrop hit my upper lip. That’ll teach me to piss away 20 minutes of fleeting sunshine chatting with the neighbors. If I could’ve kept my fat yap shut, my fat ass might be a tad smaller. But noooo.
Anthony Colby and Mara Abbott got a slightly better workout — they won their respective races at the Iron Horse Bicycle Classic this morning. My man Ned Overend could only manage 15th, two and a half minutes back. He must’ve had a mechanical. Or maybe somebody shot him.
My brother Mad Dog Mikey O’Schenk rode in for 67th in the masters 55-64, crossing in 3:52:17. And oh, the shame — his wife, Susan, was 17 seconds faster, finishing 19th in women 45-54. Mike Elmer was the fastest ex-Dog; his 2:49:17 was good enough for 28th among the senior men IV-V 19-34. Tungsten Alcazar was the slowest, crossing in 3:53:28 for 104th in masters 35-44.
April showers bring May flowers. May showers bring puddles.
That was Eddie Izzard talking about landing on the moon only to find it was covered in jam, but he could have been talking about Bibleburg. Except Bibleburg is more squishy than sticky, and if there were any jam lying about, the rain of the past few days would’ve washed it away, so no. Sticky? Not so much. Squishy, that’s the thing. There. Glad we’ve got that sorted out.
This would be fine weather if I were a duck, but since I’m more of a dick it’s not doing much for me. Or for the Turk’, either. I just heard a loud thunk from the living room and went in to see him affixed to the top half of the screen door, forepaws spread wide, like an inmate clutching the cell bars. “Hey, y’dirty screw, call m’lawyer! I’m innocent, I tell ya! Lemme outa here!” If the Turk’ had a spoon and opposable thumbs, he’d be digging a tunnel in a blind corner somewhere.
Speaking of prisons, The New York Times recently paid a call on Cañon City and Florence to sample public opinion about sprinkling Gitmo inmates around the various local graybar hotels. One dingbat who owns a coffee shop fears an influx of Muslims and terrorists that would drive down property values for “good Christian conservatives” like himself. Never mind that property values have already taken quite a beating from the good Christian conservatives running the country and its financial system for the past eight years.
No, by all means let’s reserve our correctional system for fine upstanding American nutbags, like Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, who enjoys three hots and a cot in the federal Supermax at Florence. At least they won’t hate our freedom, despite having none of their own.
I was never any great shakes at the Horse. My best finish was a 12th place in 1991, racing the masters 35 (2:31:33). My nadir was in 1995, the year we hit snow on Molas Pass. I had blown up earlier on Coal Bank, after tweaking a hamstring while working a chase group with Mikey O’Schenk, and was shaking like a dog shitting peach pits on the winding descent into Silverton, having all kinds of no fun at all.
O’Schenk’s wife, Susan, dragged my half-frozen ass into their minivan along with a couple of other blue-lipped Dogsicles. The sound of teeth chattering made the van sound like a Dumpster full of pissed-off timber rattlers. “Worst time I’ve ever had at Iron Horse,” I noted afterward in my race diary. And that was that.
The next year, instead of pinning on a number with the rest of the suckers I worked the race for VeloNews and watched colleagues Tim Johnson and Charles Pelkey freeze their nuts off along with a thousand or so of their closest friends. Some 400 racers were evacuated from the route in ’96, and many of those who made it to Silverton were treated for hypothermia; two were hospitalized.
In ’97, snow, whiteout conditions and 40-mph winds croaked the Horse altogether just as a 13-man break in the elite men’s race hit Purgatory. That year, I didn’t even show up with pad and pen; senior editor John Rezell covered the race for VeloNews.
But O’Schenk soldiers on. He and his wife — who had her own nightmare ride in 2007 after her drivetrain got sideways after an early crash — are registered, as are ex-Dogs Tungsten Alcazar and Mike Elmer. Susan didn’t get a chance to get back on the Horse last year, when the race was canceled due to (wait for it) snow. Here’s hoping she enjoys better luck this time around.
Even the weather should be vastly improved. The forecast is for rain.
It was curtains — for the blinds. For the yos among you, that's some retro Jimmy Cagney gangster lingo, a'ight?
Between the Giro d’Italia, deadlines and various household chores, I haven’t had much time for politics lately. That said, fuck Dick Cheney. This pustular pestilence is less in need of a soapbox than of the contents therein, though I expect it would take more than Ivory or even Lava to wash the bloodstains off his pudgy pinkies. Perhaps we should try napalm or white phosphorous.
But enough about Evil Dick. How’bout that Giro time trial, hah? Didn’t turn the GC all topsy-turvy the way some pundits had predicted, but it sure was fun to watch — until the Universal Sports feed went black in the final 3km of Denis Menchov’s winning ride.
A certain former Tour champ has ceased speaking with the working press, freeing reporters to actually write about the race for a change. And while my homeboy Danny Pate is not exactly a GC threat, it was nice to see Juliet Macur of The New York Timesnote the former U-23 world time-trial champ’s performance in this most recent race against the clock — seems he lost it on a descent and shot straight through a hospitality tent.
“I just rode into there, went around some tables and shot back out,” he said. “I didn’t have any time to grab Champagne.”
Oh, snap. Swing on by when you get back to Bibleburg, homes, we’ll pour you a little sumpin’-sumpin’.
Here in Pate country, meanwhile, we’ve been doing our little part to keep the economy humming along. Herself’s mother is coming to visit for a few days, and we have no spare bedroom, so we had to hunt up a love seat that folds out into a single bed. I proposed that Herself v1.0 camp in the back of the ’83 longbed, which isn’t getting any use right now, but that dog didn’t hunt with v2.0, so we’re out a few C’s that could have been spent on bike parts and beer.
Another substantial chunk of change evaporated when Herself decreed that our bedroom needed curtains after a half-dozen years getting by with some cheapo blinds. And those pricey new curtains do indeed look nifty, but not as nifty as, say, a week at the beach, quaffing colorful beverages with little umbrellas shading their ice cubes.
Then the fire blight is nibbling at the trees again, the decks demanded stain as protection against the elements and our basement remains incomplete after someone screwed the pooch on a key measurement, leaving us with a bathroom door that won’t fit; it only took six weeks to build and ship, but the good news is that its replacement should only take four. Yeah, right.
Whoops, here come the love-seat-delivery dudes. Anyone want to place a bet on whether the sumbitch will fit through the back door?
• Late update: It fit. Barely. Like an H2 on a sidewalk. Sucker sure looked smaller on the showroom floor than it did going down the basement stairs.
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