Tell me this isn’t gonna get interesting real fast.
Well, he makes us gag, so …
Month: October 2023
Tea time
My morning routine changes with the seasons.
Come autumn, the first part of the day is always the hardest — getting out of bed.
Hey, it’s dark out there, man. What am I, a farmer?
Stagger to the bathroom, dispose of the next item on the agenda, pull on some clothes — the past couple mornings, with temps in the low 40s, this means a T-shirt and lightly trail-shredded Patagucci joggers, not my ancient, decaying Columbia shorts — and shuffle into the kitchen to mumble “Hell’s goin’ on in here?” to Herself and Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who do not object to early rising and consider Your Humble Narrator a hopeless slacker.
Next there must be strong black coffee, and the morning news, which is mostly what you might expect from an afterlife peek at the front page of The Lake of Fire Cauldron-Inferno (“The Hell You Say!”).
A slice apiece of homemade whole-wheat toast with Irish butter and French jam helps soak up the acid (avoid those stomach ulcers, kids!). And then breakfast gets serious.
This time of year it’s likely to be hot oatmeal with a dash of brown sugar, maple syrup, cinnamon, dried fruit and nuts, plus a tall mug of tea. Yogurt, müesli, and smoothies are generally summertime fare, while eggs with taters and chicken sausage have been more of a lunch than a breakfast in recent years.
Just now as I was finishing my tea I heard a thunk! in the living room that couldn’t be attributed to an old house slowly warming as the sun peeks over the Sandias.
It was a dove taking a header into the picture window — they will do that, especially if the neighborhood Cooper’s hawk is clocked in and on the job — but this one apparently augured in without assistance.
Dazed, the bird squatted on the landscaping rocks, blinking like an old computer slowly booting up. Slowly, the frantic breathing became more regular; next, the head swung first this way, then that; and poof! Liftoff, straight up into the backyard maple.
No harm, no foul. Fowl? No, the sun may finally be up, but it’s still too early for cheap jokes.
Sun of a bitch
El Rancho Pendejo in The Duck! City was the perfect spot to catch the 2023 annular solar eclipse.
Herself scored some paper safety goggles and we inspected the celestial event at our leisure, from the back patio.
Things grew dark and chilly, the birds went all radio silence, and the sun looked like a big Power button just waiting for Someone to click it off. Happily, no one did.
And you bet your ass I howled at the sucker like a werewolf. Got to keep the neighbors on their toes.
The light throughout was truly weird, with acid-flashback shadows on the brick pavers and concrete walkway. Put me in mind of Mark Twain’s “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court” it did.
You see, it was the eclipse. It came into my mind in the nick of time, how Columbus, or Cortez, or one of those people, played an eclipse as a saving trump once, on some savages, and I saw my chance. I could play it myself, now, and it wouldn’t be any plagiarism, either, because I should get it in nearly a thousand years ahead of those parties.
But unlike Hank Morgan, I couldn’t derive any profit from the eclipse; our modern lords and ladies mostly keep their heads where the sun don’t ever shine, preferring to work their mischiefs in the dark. So I just enjoyed it.
Friday the 13th
Is today the day we get Gym Jordan (R-Locker Rumba) as Squeaker of the House of Reprehensibles?
That would be bad luck indeed, on a par with naming Koba chairman of the Flying Monkey Caucus.
Of course, one wonders whether this conclave of lesser primates could agree to hand the gavel to anyone, even a troika comprising Taylor Swift, Jesus Christ and Zombie Ronald Reagan.
Still, dumber things have happened, or are being contemplated, and here are a few of them:
• Streets on the moon (The Guardian). Scientists have devised a method to transform that pesky moon dust into solid landing pads and roads. “You might think: ‘Streets on the moon, who needs that?’” said professor Jens Günster of the Federal Institute of Materials Research and Testing in Berlin and co-author of a report on the technique. Right you are, prof. How about repairing a few of the roads we have down here on Terra, where the people are? We can’t even reliably land and maintain a construction crew alongside Interstate 40 west of Albuquerque, much less at Faustini Rim A.
• Throw up, pay up (The Washington Post). Restaurants whose bottomless-mimosa brunches have encouraged bargain boozers to do what drunks do — hurl, blow chunks, call Ralph on the big white phone — are starting to charge for the privilege of engaging in the Technicolor Yawn on their premises. “Welcome to the Vomitorium (a small handling charge will be added to your check).” The Romans got here first, of course, but you know how empires are; always declining, and not just to learn from history, either.
• Go ruck yourself (The New York Times). I’m not quite certain how we transitioned from upchucking to rucking up, but here we are. Wipe your lips, buff the barf off your boots, and shoulder that pack, soldier! It’s great fun! As long as no angry foreigners are shooting at you. If marching around and about with a heavy pack catches on, I wouldn’t expect a spike in enlistments, but we might see a few new magazines in the Inside Outside Sideways Down portfolio, like Rucking, Rucksacker, and Rucksack Retailer and Industry News. Hey, vulture capitalists gotta eat, and not just at bottomless-mimosa brunches, either.
Decline and fall
We’re slowly easing into the fall routine around here.
Arise, make coffee, scan the news, shriek, “Jesus Christ!” and run away. Maybe play with the cat for a while. She doesn’t know what to make of it all either.
“Cold, cruel world, isn’t it?” she murmurs.
“Well, not that cold,” I reply. “The weather widget says 52°, which is not bad for 7:50 a.m. on Oct. 11 in The Duck! City. Still, I take your point.”
We should spend more time talking to the other animals. I’m guessing you could walk into any primate house in the world, and if you understood the language you might hear something like: “You hear what the hairless ones did this time? And yet we’re the ones in the cages. Go figure.”
Mad Blog Media 