“Boy, this must be a really secure location. It doesn’t look like there’s been a janitorial crew in here since … well, since forever. Smells worse than Pence’s butt-breath in here.”
Inside the White House, the mood was bristling with tension. Hundreds of protesters were gathering outside the gates, shouting curses at President Trump and in some cases throwing bricks and bottles. Nervous for his safety, Secret Service agents abruptly rushed the president to the underground bunker used in the past during terrorist attacks.
After his evening in the bunker, Mr. Trump emerged on Saturday morning to boast that he never felt unsafe and vow to sic “vicious dogs” and “ominous weapons” on intruders.
Because of course he did. Right after he changed his underwear.
“I’ll need $6.5 mil’ for improvements to your feeble industrial park. I trust that won’t be a problem?”
The bad thing about being a former copy-desk guy is the questions you don’t get to ask assistant city editors and reporters.
Here are a couple of examples:
Raytheon shuts its operation near the Sandia National Labs-Kirtland AFB complex in Albuquerque, where it employs 200 people as an arm of Raytheon Missile Systems, based in Tucson. In the service of consolidation their work is going elsewhere, along with the paychecks for same, and Raytheon has returned $850,000 in state economic-development funding, the company announces.
Meanwhile, Amazon proclaims that it is building a “fulfillment center” on the west side. In a press release, Bernalillo County says it will kick in $6.5 million for “a regional public infrastructure improvement project” to encourage “future development” in the Upper Petroglyphs Industrial Park.
Bad news, good news, yeah? The basic ingredients for any publication. Add some filler to hold it all together — cute kitten videos, celebrity breakups, the latest dispatches from the phone of Adolf Twitler — and you’re good to go. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Well, maybe. Me, I’d kind of like to know, without having to Google it, what sort of work the Raytheon people did (it involved microwave and laser weaponry, apparently); what the average salary was; how they feel about the loss of their jobs; and what their next steps might be.
I’d also be interested in learning how many people the Amazon warehouse will employ, what they will do, and what they will earn; what the county can expect to get for its $6.5 million investment; and whether someone has calculated that Albuquerque’s economic future involves herding boxes, not making zap guns.
I’m guessing that some of the newly idled Raytheon employees will not be a good fit for an Amazon fulfillment center. Unless Darth Bezos is planning a little Death Star project on the side.
The other night we revisited one of the great plague movies, Terry Gilliam’s “12 Monkeys.” A line delivered by Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) has long been a favorite observation around El Rancho Pendejo:
“There’s no right, there’s no wrong, there’s only popular opinion.”
How do I feel about something? What’s in it for me? If enough people think the way I do, it must be Truth, yeah?
“Disney’s closed, Universal’s closed, everything’s closed. So where did everybody come? On the first warm day with 50 percent opening, everybody came to the beach,” Volusia County Sheriff Mike Chitwood told CBS Miami.
It practically goes without saying that Il Douche spent the weekend tweeting like a fat orange budgie on Adderall and urging Americans to go to church while he air-mailed divots to Jesus from one of his own golf courses. Dude brings a whole new meaning to the term “a bad lie.”
What does surprise me is that no matter who is “in charge,” or whether the enemy du jour is a Saudi with a box cutter, a highly communicable disease, or some other threat most Americans have never seen, some of us continue volunteering for and serving in the armed forces, or signing up for less celebrated duty at emergency rooms, cop shops, nursing homes, fire departments, pharmacies, sewage treatment plants, grocery stores, appliance-repair shops, hardware stores, restaurants, and delivery services.
I’m guessing that a lot of these folks would rather the customers hadn’t spent the Memorial Day weekend playing Beach Booger Bingo with a few thousand of their closest friends.
But hey, what do I know? There’s no right, there’s no wrong. …
The Bug® has put AAA’s Memorial Day travel forecast up on blocks.
It’s the first time in two decades that AAA hasn’t had a stab at guessing how many Americans might be traveling over the holiday weekend, according to PR manager Jim Stratton.
No worries, Jimbo. I haven’t been big on holiday travel since, well, forever.
If Tony Stark had been a cat, Iron Man might look something like this.
When I was still a newspaperman it was possible (and pleasurable) for a single fella to piss off for points unknown while the breeders were juggling work, school, and the juvenile justice system.
My shift was generally something like 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., with oddball days off like Tuesday and Wednesday, and I got spoiled by not having to deal with crowds whenever I wasn’t on the clock and wished to make a nuisance of myself without billing someone for it.
After mutating into a cycling scribe I often frequented Durango on Memorial Day weekend, getting my ass handed to me en route to Silverton, in the crit at Fort Lewis College, or on whichever stretch of hilly, rocky dirt Ed Zink was using for a mountain-bike course that year.
But holy hell, a long haul to an ass-whuppin’ loses its appeal faster than a kissing booth at the state fair in a plague year. So I decided that if I ever craved a beating I could sass the wife, save myself all that driving time and gas money.
We’ve had the ingredients for this bench lying around the rancheroo for the better part of quite some time.
This time around, as it happens, it is a plague year. So we kicked off the long weekend with a short road ride and some light landscaping.
Parts of the back yard were looking like that part of your neck you always miss with the razor because at age 66 you’ve taken to shaving in the dark to avoid panic attacks, myocardial infarctions, and suicidal impulses, and the whole concept of shaving at all has become meaningless since nobody gives a shit about that part of your neck because mostly they are not looking at it or any other part of you, unless they think you may have wandered away from a nursing home or insane asylum and are wondering whether there might be a cash reward for your return, dead or alive.
But I digress.
So we pulled weeds and dug up junk elms, laid down weed block and river rock, and bagged up unsightly piles of this, that, and the other. There will be more of this sort of thing as the holiday weekend progresses. Or so I am told, anyway.
If Herself posts any FaceButt pix of a new “flower bed” that’s 6 by 6 by 3, you’ll know I’ve given up shaving and yard work for good.
This teensy little sumbitch got me back on four wheels after a few hours plugged into a wall socket (the four-wheeler, not me).
Almost forgot: Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster is back on the road after a few hours hooked to the Schumacher SC1301 Fully Automatic Battery Charger.
So, yay, etc.
I must’ve triggered one of the 2,485,397 interior convenience lights somehow. When you only fire up the four-wheeler every couple of weeks this can pose a problem re: infernal combustion and the application thereof.
Happily, the SC1301 was on sale at O’Reilly, so with all the moneys I saved I added some jumper cables to the order.
Even so, I think I may start using bicycles and the Vespa for errands more often, because (a) I really don’t enjoy driving in Albuquerque all that much, and (2) I rarely venture far from home in this, the Year of the Plague. So why not make my outings more funner?
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