Month: February 2022

The endorphin hit parade

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
The winter, it lingers.

Six degrees at 6 a.m. Is it an omen, d’ye think?

Probably not. Just the pre-caffeination brain spinning its wheels like a 1996 F-150 with a bed full of firewood, half in the ditch on a snowy Colorado afternoon.

And yeah, I’ve been there.

Today’s high may be that in name only, so I’m thinking ixnay on the ike-bay. A short run seems sensible, if you will concede that running — with empty hands, anyway — can ever be sensible.

I don’t mind it, as long as I’m not breaking ankles. But running will never be my first choice if the temperature is 40° or better and there isn’t snow on the deck.

The Mitchell High School swim team in 1970, the year we went 11-0.

Last on my endorphin hit parade is swimming. I spent 10 years on swim teams, ages 8 to 18, and swam laps off and on afterward in Tucson, Pueblo, Denver, and Bibleburg, because I was a member of some gym that had a 25-meter pool and why not?

But I got tired of smelling like chemicals and wearing green eyebrows and feeling my hair freeze between the gym and the car every February. The hair freezing is no longer an issue, but the rest of it still applies. A friend of a similar vintage quips, “We all end up in the pool,” but I notice he ain’t there yet.

Plus there’s a weird sonic vibe in the pool area, like you’re stroking through a Louisiana Best Buy with a leaky roof during a hurricane. And you have to see other old dudes bareass in the shower, which should be part of any “Scared Straight” programs the schools are running these days.

“This is what prison looks like, kids.”

“Jesus Christ! I’ve shoplifted my last pack of smokes, honest!”

That right there is a kid who’ll take up running with empty hands. Unless he steals a bike first.

The Cailleach has a long arm

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Finally, a wee dusting of actual snow.

It was right about the time I started prepping the green chile stew that the Cailleach dropped her knitting atop Hag’s Head in County Clare and muttered, “Right, time that Ó Grádaigh gobshite in Albuquerque got the back of me hand so.”

Just a love tap, mind you. We are cousins, after all. I make it about four inches atop the wall. Still, it will require me to drag this old bag of bone splinters and bad ideas back and forth across the driveway for a spell, muttering about Gaelic deities and the length of their hairy auld arms.

It’s a refreshing 8° at the moment, a lovely temperature for a bit of upper-body work. I’ll happily take it over the -8° my man Hal is enjoying up to Weirdcliffe, where his Innertubes have quit but the woodstove remains on the job.

I remember those Crusty County temperatures, and not fondly, either. Tunnel out from under the covers at stupid-thirty, squeal like a little bitch, dash downstairs to the woodstove and feed it a few chunks, leap outside for more wood (and more squealing), then sprint back inside to melt the ice in the terlet with a good auld Guinness-and-Jameson’s wee.

It was all downhill after that, and I do mean downhill. We lived on a rocky outcropping 10 miles from town, one mile and 430 vertical feet from the county road, and once you got down to the bottom you mostly wanted to go right back up again, to where the whiskey and Guinness and woodstove were.

If I burrowed deeply enough into the covers the Cailleach couldn’t find me. That was the idea, anyway. I have lots of ideas.

Not so bad

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
I practically had the Elena Gallegos Open Space to myself.

“February is an awful fucking month just about everywhere.” — Kevin Barry, “Extremadura (Until Night Falls)”

Truer words, etc. I have spent many awful fucking Februaries in many awful fucking places, among them my own head.

But Feb. 1 in The Duck! City was not too fucking awful.

I logged 90 minutes of trail time on the Voodoo Nakisi; didn’t fall over or nothin’. Bought some groceries, baked a loaf of bread, picked up a paperback copy of “Station Eleven.” Anybody watched the HBO miniseries?  I’m looking forward to seeing whether Emily St. John Mandel’s vision suffered in translation from print to video. She told The New York Times that the show “deepened the story in a lot of really interesting ways.”

But then she’s Canadian, and you know how nice they are.

Meanwhile, the next few days of February here may meet Kevin Barry’s standard, which is frightening, because he haunts the west of Ireland, where they know from awful fucking Februaries. Herself, who has visited County Sligo, where Barry hangs his hat, recalls many a fine soft day so.

Maybe it’ll make a novelist of me. Nah. Canada didn’t get it done, and Albuquerque’s coming off the bench awfully fucking late in the game.