The high point of today’s outing, just below the Sandia Tram.
“And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”—Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, “Beyond Good and Evil”
Screw the abyss, I said, and went for a ride. And what a fine idea it was, too.
It was sunny and warmish out there, away from the Mac, and grew more so. I’m still reviewing the Fuji Touring Disc for Adventure Cyclist, and thus it’s the go-to machine for any bike rides out of El Rancho Pendejo, unless I absolutely, positively must have some dirt time.
I can’t stay gone for long. The Boo has been showing signs of the Dogzheimer’s and frequently forgets the difference between indoors and outdoors, with deleterious consequences for the brick floors and carpets. I kennel him when I leave, but that’s no guarantee that I won’t come home to a mess. And confining him to quarters means he can march around in any messes that he makes. I should get him some little Wellingtons to wear in the slammer.
So, yeah. Short rides, two hours or less. But still, it beats watching everybody in America be revealed as a perv’, fascist, false prophet, lickspittle, tinpot dictator, coward, fool or some combination thereof.
The Mud Stud is not exactly the most enlightened of males. In fact, he’s a pretty dim bulb on most matters.
Some of the lads wandered a bit off topic in the previous post, toward the cascade of revelations about just how many of us appear to be dicks.
The sheer number of recent revelations feels overwhelming, until you consider how long women have been enduring a thumping of one kind or another.
In this country women didn’t get the right to vote until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920 (it was Tennessee, presently home to Herself the Elder and Herself’s younger sister, that tipped the scale).
Inequities remained and continued, of course. Today, women still earn less than men. Forbes says the Fortune 500 has more women CEOs than ever before, but that’s not saying much (32). Women hold just 8 percent of the top corporate spots in the U.S., according to CNBC.
In government, we find all of 21 women in the Senate and 84 in the House.
And of course, if you’re talking about simple condescension, or a good old-fashioned beatdown, men have the edge there too.
Then there’s sexual harassment.
I’m willing to bet that we all know at least one person who’s been the unwilling target of unwanted attention. In my newspaper days I knew two people — one woman, one man — who were stalked by their supervisors. To management’s credit, both perpetrators were disciplined, one by a swift sacking.
These creeps were creating toxic environments for at least two employees and had to go. But newsrooms, like cop shops, are rough-and-rowdy places, with an us-against-them atmosphere, frequent booze-addled socializing outside the workplace, and a lot of raw language. Plenty of torrid romances bloomed — editors with reporters, reporters with photographers, and ad salespersons with their clients.
And of course the publisher was boinking all of us.
So where do we draw the lines between acceptable, frisky, risky and abusive behavior, especially at the workplace? What merits a “Oh, go fuck yourself, Ed, you’re drunk” and what mandates a pink slip?
I look at Al Franken and I see a comedian who made a stupid joke. I look at King Donald the Short-fingered and I see a self-confessed serial abuser. Plenty of built-in bias in that evaluation, to be sure, but there it is.
Am I wrong? If so, what’s right? I’m particularly interested in hearing from the women in the audience on this one, because I’ve never been sexually harassed, on the job or anywhere else.
Unless you count the time the giant African-American crossdresser in the red miniskirt hooted at me as I was cycling through Denver’s Cheesman Park back in the Eighties.
“Oh, honey, let me ride it, let me ride it!” s/he squealed. I don’t think s/he was talking about my bike.
Early in the week the Fuji Touring Disc and I got our kicks on Route 66.
It’s been a productive week around the old rumormongery.
I edited and shipped two short videos for Adventure Cyclist; continued my evaluation of the latest review model, a Fuji Touring Disc; and wrote a column and drew a cartoon for Bicycle Retailer and Industry News.
Cha-ching! Just back that armored car up to the vault, boys, and start shoveling. I’ll be on the patio contemplating my investment portfolio.
Speaking of which, I see our national leadership is dancing merrily with the ones who brung ’em. It can’t be much longer before there’s a new agency working hand in glove with the Eternal Revenue Service, the Department of Spare Change, which sends agents round to root through your pants pockets, sofa cushions and swear jars. Hand over those nickels and dimes, Gramps, you lot would just piss it away on housing, food or medicine.
Don’t worry, soon it will all come trickling back to you. Why, look, what’s that there, on your shoe? Looks like it’s raining on somebody!
The Marin Nicasio is part of the company’s “Beyond Road” line, so naturally I took it beyond roads. I’m funny that way. Maybe not.
Weekend? Holiday? Your words are strange, friend. We have no such things here on Freelancia. What a paradise your world must be. Tell me more.
OK, awright, yeah, so as work goes, riding the old bikey bike hardly qualifies. And glad I was to be doing it, too, after a couple weeks of a dodgy back. But still.
The pic is a screen grab from a bit of video I shot Friday for Adventure Cyclist to accompany my review of the Marin Nicasio. Yesterday I was rolling around and about on a Fuji Touring Disc, which is next in the pipeline.
Fuji has been doing touring bikes for the better part of quite some time (anybody remember the Fuji America from the fabulous Seventies?). The Touring model has been in the line since the Nineties, and for 2018 — like pretty much everything else — it is available with disc brakes.
This one I won’t drag out onto the singletrack. That wouldn’t just be be one step beyond — that would be Madness.
Mad Blog Media 