Thor is taking a few tentative swings with Mjölnir this morning.
The arm and knee warmers have begun tagging along on my morning rides.
I don’t always wear ’em, but it’s nice to know I have ’em. Just in case.
If I were riding today I’d pack a rain jacket, because the NWS boyos are calling for thunderbummers. And snow? Really? In the higher elevations, to be sure, but still, damn. You’d think it was almost October or sumpin’.
Speaking of a chill in high places, I see the usual rampant dipshittery has hit a frosty new low in DeeCee. Fuck me running, but it has become wearisome to watch our national “leadership” rolling around in that big ol’ barrel of titties and telling the rest of us to go suck on our thumbs.
Can we get a conservatorship established to oversee this mess? Maybe Britney Spears could recommend someone. Then again, maybe not.
Personally, I’d like to see more than a few of these Gilded Age fuck-bubbles loaded aboard the next Jeff Bozos dick-missile to the stars, with nothing to eat but each other, but only if we’re talking a one-way ticket.
I suppose we’d wind up replacing them with more of the same. But maybe the new crowd might think about dinner and a movie, and maybe kissing us, before sticking it in.
George Frayne IV, better known as Commander Cody (he of The Lost Planet Airmen), has driven his hot-rod Lincoln into the sunset. He was 77.
“Hot Rod Lincoln” cracked the top 10 of the Billboard Top 100 in 1972. But my personal fave from the Commander and his Airmen was “Seeds and Stems (Again),” for some reason. Also, “Lost in the Ozone.”
George got the band’s name from an old Republic Pictures serial, but never thought he’d wind up becoming the Commander.
“I was watching the ‘Lost Planet Airmen’ movie and I saw the Commander Cody character and I thought it would be a great name for a band,” he said. “I had no idea anyone was going to have to be Commander Cody. I mean, there’s no Lynyrd Skynyrd. There’s no Steely Dan. There’s no Marshall Tucker. Why did there have to be a Commander Cody?”
But there did, and there was, and now he is no more. Smoke ’em if you got ’em. But not while you’re driving your hot-rod Lincoln, please.
Blue skies have returned, but it’s still autumnal out there.
If any of yis should find the “deep thought” dispensed here as shallow as a hoofprint on concrete and infrequent as a desert blizzard, well, take heart, Grasshopper. There are alternatives.
And James Fallows, who has been hard to find lately at The Atlantic, is posting regularly to “Breaking the News” over at Substack.
Fallows is the main reason I subscribed to The Atlantic, a decision I am now reconsidering, since he seems to have been downsized from staffer to contributing writer. But I might keep the sub’, since science writer Katherine J. Wu is doing good work there, too.
The other fella you may recall from his 16-year run as host of “The Daily Show.” I’ve missed both Stewart and Stephen Colbert’s previous incarnation at “The Colbert Report.”
Speaking of TV, here’s another recommendation: “Reservation Dogs,” on FX/Hulu. Shot in the Muscogee Nation and run entirely by people of Indigenous descent, it’s a real gem; sweet without getting sappy, sad without descending into cliché, and funny without telegraphing every comic punch.
I think Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis) may be my favorite character, but Dallas Goldtooth crushes it as a bumbling spirit (William Knife-Man) who occasionally visits Bear (D’Pharaoh Woon-a-tai) to provide some rambling, less-than-useful advice.
The autumnal equinox seemed an auspicious occasion for the flushing out of headgear.
I hadn’t left the confines of Bernalillo County since October 2019, and the walls of El Rancho Pendejo had passed the time by slowly creeping inward. Most people wouldn’t notice. But I am a Professional Journalist and know a hoodoo when I see one (our mantra is hoodoo, what, when, where, and why).
So I got out of Dodge. Threw too much camping gear into Sue Baroo the Fearsome Furster, left the MacBook Pro where it sat, and sputtered off to see if all my long-neglected outdoorsy stuff still worked. Just in case something didn’t, I planned to be gone for not too long, to nowhere too remote, and not too far away. I favor multiple redundancy systems, but still, just because you’re paranoid, etc., et al., and so on and so forth.
Hoodat?
The great thing about car camping is you can overpack without flattening your tires, feet, and/or spinal column. So I took two sleeping pads (Therm-a-Rest BaseCamp and ProLite Plus), and I layered them sumbitches between me, the tent floor, and the ground, just because I could.
You wouldn’t want to backpack that BaseCamp, which goes about 3.6 elbees in the large model, but it is the shit for car camping.
I didn’t double up on tents, going with one Big Agnes Fly Creek UL2. Big Agnes says you can fit two people in there, but not if one of them is me. The voices in my head take up a lot of square footage when they come out at night. But what a great one-person tent. Sets up fast, comes down even faster. Just the thing for that third season, which is my favorite.
The bag was a Marmot Elite 30, which is plenty toasty for a hot sleeper like Your Humble Narrator, but a tad on the snug side. It’s kind of like wearing a puffy coat with a hood, but in a duster length.
For a backpack, I chose the Gregory Stout 45. If I need to carry any more gear than fits in a Stout 45, I ain’t going. I may be a jackass, but I ain’t no burro. This is one comfortable pack for traveling fast and light (or for fetching your gear from the car to the campsite to minimize the back-and-forth).
However, since I was car camping, not backpacking, I brought along two items that didn’t fit in the Gregory: a camp chair from L.L. Bean and my elderly Coleman two-burner propane stove.
Now, I have had more than a few camp stoves over the years, from an MSR RapidFire isobutane burner that for years was my main road-trip rest-area stove, to itty-bitty bikepacking boogers like the Soto Micro Regulator, which fits with its canister in a Snow Peak Trek 700 titanium pot. But man, that old Coleman does the business. It was our backup cooker for when the utilities went south up Weirdcliffe way.
Like everything and everyone else, the Coleman two-burner has been through some changes over the years — my old model has a piezo igniter — but it’s still getting rave reviews, and it’s still as cheap as the dirt you’ll sleep on.
And the Subie? Glad you asked. Seventeen years old and she’s still kickin’. If I don’t drive like the Road Warrior, she won’t set me afoot in the desert. That’s the deal we struck, and so far so good. But sometimes I take a bicycle along just in case (see paranoid, above).
An ominous rattle developed on the return trip, but it turned out to be coming from the plastic garage-door opener clipped to the driver’s side visor.
They say you can’t go home again, but it opened the door for me just like always, so in I went.
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