Sixty-seven miles? Not gonna happen. Sixty-seven kilometers? Nuh uh. Sixty-seven minutes? Maybe, but not on a trainer. That much I know for certain.
It’s not a “Duane’s Depressed” kind of situation. I don’t have a pickup to park, or a shack to walk to. Anyway, I’m waiting on our yard guy to come around and tell me how much money he needs for his next trip to Vegas.
But afterward maybe I’ll take a page from ol’ Duane’s story and go for a 6.7-mile walk. I do have these feet at the ends of my legs, and I don’t have to air ’em up or grease ’em or nothin’.
My Larry McMurtry collection falls far short of his actual output.
Larry McMurtry has loaded up his last rented Lincoln Continental and rolled west, into the sunset.
I didn’t come close to reading his entire output, but I managed more than a few of his novels; it’s a habit I have, working my way steadily through an author’s collected works.
Got started with “The Last Picture Show,” as I recall, after seeing the movie of the same name. Finished with “Duane’s Depressed.”
And is there anyone who didn’t read “Lonesome Dove?” As Skip Hollandsworth writes in his remembrance of McMurtry at Texas Monthly:
McMurtry had spent years railing against writers who produced clichéd novels about the Old West. He swore he would never stoop to writing a western. But he did, and the novel he produced gripped the public’s imagination. “Lonesome Dove” won the Pulitzer Prize and sold nearly 300,000 copies in hardcover and more than a million copies in paperback. It spawned a sequel as well as prequels, and became one of the most popular miniseries of all time, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. To Texans, went one joke, “Lonesome Dove” was the third-most-important book in publishing history, right behind the Bible and the Warren Commission Report.
Like Stephen King, McMurtry was too preposterously prolific for some critics. Also like King, he wasn’t always winning Pulitzers for his work.
But he buckled down and got to ’er anyway. As his writing partner Diana Ossana told Hollandsworth: “Larry is like an old cowboy who has to get up in the morning and do some chores. He has to get up and write.”
Not anymore, he doesn’t. He can pull off the boots, put up his feet, and enjoy a well-deserved rest.
Wednesday’s snow tamped down the pollen for a while, which is a pleasant respite for the snotlocker.
It’s still not warm — 39° at the moment, which would be 10 in the a.m. on a Friday morning — but as we’ve noted before, nobody who lives in the desert should complain when it’s cool and damp. Because it never lasts.
Sleepy Joe held his first presser yesterday, but I had to bail on it after just a few minutes because I kept hearing Dana Carvey’s spot-on impression of him in my head and couldn’t focus on what the real Joe was saying. I know, I know, bad citizen, bad bad citizen!
But from what little I saw, and read afterward, I feel confident when I say that Sleepy José is unlikely to challenge his predecessor’s score on the Loon-O-Meter® anytime soon.
Meanwhile, Herself is slated to get her first jab today. She and a colleague will each get a dose of Moderna, and then if the weather permits they might find some nearby bistro for a socially distant bite of something and perhaps a celebratory shot that doesn’t go in the arm.
And I am scheduled for round two in late April, at the same place that stuck me on Wednesday. Round one left me with an achy arm and a touch of fatigue, though the latter could have been weather- or allergy-induced. As far as I know my DNA remains unchanged, I am not shedding mutant viruses, and I have not croaked. Yet.
It practically goes without saying that on the morning when I was to drive a dozen miles northwest and a thousand feet down to get my first shot of Kindly Old Doc Pfizer’s Sho-nuff Genuine Bug Killer, it would be snowing sideways from the northeast at 40 mph, the power would be yo-yoing, and the cul-de-sac would look like the top of a Marie Callender’s coconut cream pie fresh from the freezer.
The wind, the power outage(s), and the cat clued us in at about 2 a.m. that it would be an interesting morning indeed. Ordinarily we’re talking about a 15-minute drive here, most of it in fifth gear. But traffic lights were out all over the place, with transformers on fire, and I had my doubts about whether we would even be getting out of the garage.
But I noticed that two neighbors had laid down tracks in the pie — pardon, the snow — and when I checked various weather cams around town I was all like, “Say what? Are these shots from yesterday?”
Nope. The fabled Albuquerque Snow Hole was in full effect. And so, by the time we slalomed through the whiteout and one pileup (not us) to the corner of Tramway Boulevard and Tramway Road, it was smooth sailing all the way down to the Presbyterian COVID-19 Vaccination Hub. The wind wasn’t even blowing down there, and we were seriously overdressed.
We were also about 40 minutes early, which turned out to be perfect. Seriously, the whole deal took about 45 minutes, including standing in line, passing through various checkpoints, getting the shot, and spending 15 minutes afterward waiting to see whether I’d turn into The Incredible Hulk or just explode in a manky cloud of pink stink.
Everybody involved was cheerful, helpful, prepared, and efficient. It was the finest example of the American Health Care Machine in operation that I’ve seen since … well, since forever. Frankly, I’ve never seen anything quite like it. Bravo and chapeau to everyone involved, including Herself, who came along to make sure I did not soil myself (I hate needles, unless I’m the one doing the needling).
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