Cooties, boogity boogity boogity.
Weird dreams last night. More like this morning, actually. Four straight days of red and green chile will do that to you.
Herself got up at 3:30 for some reason. I made the usual profane inquiries without achieving enlightenment and soon drifted back into a troubled sleep.
I found myself in our old place in Bibleburg and there were bugs crawling everywhere. Great big gnarly muthas that went sploosh if you stomped ’em. Real sandal-soakers.
Don’t suppose we need to engage a brain mechanic to explain that one.
Tags: The Bug
Mad Blog Media 
November 29, 2020 at 12:41 pm |
Just enjoyed a homemade leftover smoked chicken (from Thanksgiving … no turkey … too big for two)/refritos frijoles/red and green salsa burrito for lunch. The red was Pedro’s out of Duke City and the green was King’s Chef Diner from Bibleburg.
Will report back on tonight’s dreams as appropriate. May have a hard time going to bed though based on PO’G’s nocturnal shenanigans!! 🙂
November 29, 2020 at 1:05 pm |
Be careful if you head off to the outhouse in your dreams. If you let your testicles hang to close to the edge of the toilet seat the black widows might get you.
The Milagro Beanfield War. A great flick with great music.
November 29, 2020 at 1:11 pm |
This was the actual music with the squeeze box and may be more apropos to waddling off to the outhouse in the middle of the night.
November 29, 2020 at 2:44 pm |
You must be reading my mail. I was thinking about “The Milagro Beanfield War” — the book, not the movie — just yesterday.
I went out around 2:30 p.m. for a short ’cross-bike ride, which was a bad idea, because everybody else had the same thought. “Hm, looks pretty warm now, I should get out there.” There was not a square meter of trail left unoccupied, I shit thee not.
So I’m yielding trail, and yielding trail, and yielding trail some more, and then taking detours, side trails, goat paths, and snake tracks, and finally I gave up and wrapped up the ride on the road, when a scene from the book popped into my mind.
It was the bit after the burglars stripped Nick Rael’s store of guns and ammo, and Sheriff Bernabé Montoya was doing what he called “investigating” the crime, which meant traipsing through the store, touching this and that, helping deliverymen carry goods inside, and just generally making the place look as though “somebody ran twenty head of buffalo through … just to destroy the evidence.”
When the state chotas ran the prints they pulled, only one set was legible: Bernabé Montoya’s.
“And they literally coated every surface,” Bill Koontz said with relish, “the way flies coat hot horseshit.”
That’s how many people were on the trails yesterday.
November 29, 2020 at 2:52 pm |
That’s a book that I haven’t read yet, and the books are always better.
Bummer about all the flies out on the trails like horsesheet.
I’m going to wander out myself in a little while for a roll. But I’ll be rolling along very careful like, enjoying the views on a few of the backroads around here.
November 29, 2020 at 2:57 pm |
Aw, I had nobody to blame but myself. I knew it was gonna be like that. I was just hoping I was wrong.
November 29, 2020 at 1:55 pm |
Maybe you were in the White House.
November 29, 2020 at 8:04 pm |
Trails up here were almost deserted. I guess the Fanta Se people cannot cope with the cold.
November 30, 2020 at 11:59 am |
Got out friday for the first run/walk after the summer of hospitals and IV antibiotics. Felt good except 3 miles two days in a row left the calf muscles in a tortured state Stretching to walk to anywhere. Balance is improving Will pull out the LeMond buenos aires and see if I can still work the clips soon. I love the Nichols books they take me back to walsenburg and taos before the effing celebrities got there. I knew all the characters in the books because they were friends and neighbors. I see the movie and get so fucking homesick I want to drink all the cerveza and tequila in the pacific nortwest. Scenery and color bring me back to youth,. Going south when the Trump pandemic breaks and scout out my retirement place
November 30, 2020 at 2:29 pm |
Good on ye, mate. Enforced inactivity is the worstest. I’ve had a few bouts of that over the years and it makes me even more unpleasant to be around, if you can imagine such a thing.
When I bought my first copy of “Milagro” in the Alamosa bookstore the cashier said, “You know, this is really about us.” A lot of people in a lot of places took ownership of those characters. And there was a backlash, too; the book was not universally beloved in New Mexico.
For me “Milagro” is a keeper, though I thought it was overlong. A ruthless editor could’ve tightened that sucker up a bit. “The Magic Journey” was good, too, but a little ponderous. It could’ve done with some of the leavening silliness that takes the edge off “Milagro.”
“Nirvana Blues,” the third in his New Mexico trilogy, has a couple moments, but they’re few and far between. The last is also the least.
Meanwhile, the Pacific Northwest is no place for an old desert rat. My stint there taught me that much. I’ve been back to cover bike races and visit relatives, but not to live. I have a dark turn of mind that requires a minimum of 300 days of sunshine per annum.
November 30, 2020 at 3:13 pm |
Desert rats belong in the desert. The longer I stay, 41 years so far, the more I am convinced I should have been born here. We could use a little more rain though. Just a normal year, 14 inches or so, would be nice.
November 30, 2020 at 4:16 pm |
For reals. I’ve turned into a total wuss about cold weather. If it’s under 40 degrees I have a really hard time getting excited about an hour on the ol’ bikey bike.
It was low 40s today and I got out for a short one on the Voodoo Nakisi, goofing on the trails around the Elena Gallegos area. But shoot, I was wearing two long-sleeved jerseys, tights, a watch cap, long-fingered gloves, wool socks, a Buff neck gaiter-slash-mask, the works. And me an old cyclocrosser, too. Sigh.
But the sun was out. And so was I.
November 30, 2020 at 4:28 pm |
I grew up in the sun. But living well north of the Great White North will force you to realize that we can endure. But when I last lived in Reno, I recall days that I’d be out and about, up on a mountain, up on a hillside, enjoying the sun, the weather, the vistas, and wondering why the hell I’d want to move someplace else. Well that didn’t work out. Since most of the good sunny places are full to the brim with other fine folks, and since I like those places enough not to impose upon those fine folks (Last Resort – The Eagles), I’ll eventually find someplace that becomes my place, and who knows, perhaps it will be where I’m at.
I rolled out for a few miles yesterday and got the cobwebs out of the bib shorts. No black widows that I encountered. It was a nice scenic, easy and safe ride. A little climbing here, a little climbing there and some more climbing over there. The cool weather frosted my hands on the long sweeping descent and I had to spend 10 minutes enduring the reheat pain when I got back to the house. But it’s a good pain. A pain that will be over in a few minutes. But it sure hurts in a painful way.
November 30, 2020 at 5:27 pm |
Lived in Reno for two and a half years in early 1980’s. Loved the place but alas it too has urban crapped itself. Loved Jack’s valley but it is gone also. So Raton, Las Vegas, maybe even Mora , NM look like they might have survived the midwest and west coast onslaught. Next spring will tell. Going to look for a place that has real sunshine and a paucity of Scandinavians and/or Germanic peoples. Need the southern european and hispanic cultures I grew up with,
November 30, 2020 at 6:44 pm |
The Greater Raton-Trinidad Metropolitan Clusterplex keeps threatening to shit the bed by becoming “the next [insert your idyllic recreational getaway ruined by tourism here].” Fishers Peak State Park is supposed to become a very big deal indeed. But at least you can smoke dope there.
Las Vegas is undergoing something of a renaissance, but there’s been some interesting crime news out of there lately too.
Mora? Y’know, I don’t think I’ve ever been there.
Las Cruces has some good mountain biking, but ICE probably stops you for a vigorous frisking every 10km or so.
Silver City? Big bikey town, at least when the Tour of the Gila is kickin’. Michael Creed used to have a place there, IIRC.
My man Hal has a thing for Magdalena, probably because Stephen Bodio, a writer he admires, lives there.
As a New Mexican, I’ve lived in La Puebla (Española), Santa Fe, and Albuquerque. If Santa Fe wised up and banned cars, I’d think about moving back there. Or maybe Bisbee, Arizona. I got friends in low places in that neck of the woods.
November 30, 2020 at 7:32 pm |
You move to Bisbee, and I will buy a new bike, or keep my old one. We could sit around the Bisbee Bicycle Brothel and listen to Ken spin yarn after yarn.
December 1, 2020 at 2:16 am |
I need to confirm John’s comment about Reno changing significantly. It was a nice small city when I moved there in 2001 with all the amenities of communities of that time. But it definitely has grown since that time. It’s nice for a visit but I’m not sure I’d want to be there now.
As for the gray overcast marine air surfing over colder air inversion, yep, it sucks. I’ll be seeing that weather soon where I’m at and it will last through February.
Speaking of cold weather riding, have of you guys had the opportunity to ride at colder than -25F or so? You know, when your nose hairs start freezing and you discover why it was necessary to re-lube your hub body with Marvel Mystery Oil or similar less viscous lubrication oil, and you discover not to take your bike inside until you are done riding for the day riding. Otherwise you will be done riding for the day. But riding at -40F and below is real work. All the clothing fabric becomes stiffer and the tires don’t flex a whole lot. Riding 10 to 15 miles is a good workout and you really start thinking in survival mode. “Man, will the world ever warm back up?”
Regarding NM, my Dad was a NM native. He was born up northeast of Cimarron. It’s been about 25 years since I last went through that area.
December 1, 2020 at 7:24 am |
Reno was Interbike’s final resting place. I remember doing some rooting around from a distance (I was not invited to attend the funeral) and found that The Biggest Little City in the World had a crushing homelessness problem.
It’s gotten big with the bike biz since, as a warehousing/shipping hub. Some friends of mine, Bruce and Jodie Ruana, got there early with their family handlebar-tape operation, Off the Front. Some of you may remember their tape — great stuff. Durable, washable, more lives than a cat. Decades later I still have some of it on a bike.
They set up shop in the Gardnerville-Minden area and I popped out for a visit to write them up for that Boulder-based journal of competitive cycling whose name eludes me. Bruce liked the backcountry skiing around there and the low-traffic roads for cycling; the place kind of reminded me of the Greater Weirdcliffe-Silver Cliff Metropolitan Area, where I would set up my own little shop some years down the road.
Bruce and Jodie finally got run out of the biz by overseas competition (surprise surprise) and they got straight jobs in (wait for it) Reno. So it goes.
Meanwhile, -25° cycling? No thank you, please. I walked to classes at Adams State College in temps like that (the beard freezes the instant you step outside). And I have taken to the cross-country skis and snowshoes below zero. But I think my record low for cycling was in the low teens, at cyclocross nationals in Golden, Colorado, in 1992. Jaysis, that was bitter.
Up to Weirdcliffe we routinely got to -10° and occasionally even colder, but on days like that I fed the wood stove and rode the Cateye listening to the Allman Brothers.
December 1, 2020 at 11:04 am |
Only 28F here, but with a “brisk” northerly wind. High Wednesday should be 18F in the Bibleburg area.
I got outside this AM on my MTB and decided after 30 minutes that I’d worn out my welcome. Probably bang out an inside CycelOps on my 20 year old Lemond steel Buenos Aires later today.
But all this talk of cold reminded me of a Jack London masterpiece “To Build a Fire”. I recalled “spittle crackles in the air at minus 75F” (or something close to that). Truly great nature (both Mother Nature and human nature) writing.
Brrrrrr! 🙂
December 1, 2020 at 4:28 pm
Hal was just riffing on that Jack London tale, JD. It’s snowing and stupid cold up Weirdcliffe way. One of the penalties of life at 8,800 feet in December.
From “The Unabridged Jack London,” which I just happen to have at hand:
November 30, 2020 at 5:27 pm |
Well cold is one thing but lack of sun is a whole nudder ting as they say here in the Mitten State. Countless days of gray overcast skies can turn the most obnoxious optimist into a surly old bastard. But ya know what? When you get to my age you can rent sunshine by being a snowbird. And summer in the North is as sweet as the kisses of Esmerelda. So,far, no hurricanes, forest fires or earthquakes but we do have mosquitoes. As for cycling under 40:degrees it’s too much bother kitting up and regulating temps. Best to take a few months off and follow the Absence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder school of thought and keep ones appreciation of biking at full tilt. Aw hell, I’d kill for a sunny 40 degree day come February who am I kidding?
November 30, 2020 at 7:45 pm |
The desert beckons but you resist the siren’s song.
December 1, 2020 at 4:53 pm |
Me resist? Not once Covid 19 is in the rear view mirror. You’ll be buying me stouts Pat whilst strumming a few tunes for me on your guitar. I’ll fan myself with the palm fronds. Would have been down your way last March if the plague hadn’t burst onto the scene.