Month: December 2020

Climb every mountain

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments
The southern end of the Candelaria Bench Trail.

My work, such as it is, is done for the year.

Actually, I’ve already shipped the first cartoon of the New Year to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. That hole in the back of the book won’t fill itself, after all. Especially since all the hate mail goes up front.

I should’ve celebrated with a bike ride, but I didn’t feel like pulling on all that winter kit, like some elderly knight gearing up for a quest. So instead I went for a short march through the foothills, figuring I’d finish breaking in the low-rise Merrell hikers I’ve mostly been using for street wear.

Looking west along Comanche.

El Rancho Pendejo sits at the bottom of a cul-de-sac and endures considerable shade on its eastern and southern sides, especially when the sun is low in the sky, so I always think it’s going to be colder outside than it really is. And our little weather station said 32 degrees with a brisk wind out of the north.

But once I got out in it I enjoyed myself immensely, in large part because it’s harder for the shit-flinging monkeys of the media to draw a bead on a moving target.

The lightweight boots felt great on the trail, so I scampered up a couple short climbs just for giggles. While I was up there I took a nice long sight along Comanche at all the country I haven’t been able to visit this year.

Hey, at least I was outside. Forty-five minutes, an hour, hour and a half … they’re not much, these little expeditions of mine, but they’re a whole lot better than nothing at all. A small thing, but oh, how very, very necessary.

And now that the vaccines are rolling out, maybe it won’t be long before the people who’ve been locked down for real, for months, in nursing homes, group residences, and assisted-living facilities, will be able to get a breath of fresh air. Even if they have to take it through a mask, in a wheelchair, on a sidewalk.

R.I.P., John le Carré (and George Smiley)

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Two of the many John Le Carré books I’ve read over the years.

We keep losing George Smileys while the Karlas of the world dig in like ticks.

John le Carré, a.k.a. David Cornwell, wrote a couple dozen books before he finally set down his pen forever, and I read most of them. I especially loved the Smiley stories; in another life his rumpled little man with an eye for detail, plodding doggedly along in the shadows, could’ve been a newspaper copy editor, so no doubt I felt some kinship there.

And le Carré was none too keen on Adolf Twitler, who reminded him of the other fella, the original fascist gangster. Probably compromised by the Russians, too, he thought.

Speaking with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” back in 2018 he said he thought it possible that Il Douche “was taken into what I call a honey trap — that he had ladies found for him, and he misbehaved in Russia.” But the real trap, he thought, may have been laid by the orange nitwit himself.

“I think the kompromat, if it’s taken place, has taken place very largely through Trump’s own endeavors to raise money in all sorts of dark places,” le Carré said. “And together, all those efforts amount to a self-compromising activity, which the Russians have embraced. I think they have him by the short hairs.”

Le Carré raised his money the old-fashioned way, by working for it. His final book, “Agent Running in the Field,” was published in October 2019, when he was 88.