It’s gonna be one of those holiday seasons.
The minor plague working its way through El Rancho Pendejo is taking its sweet time about the project. Herself seems past the worst of it — a lingering cough, but otherwise feels fine — while Your Humble Narrator remains in the early stages, making noises like a plumber’s helper working a clogged toilet.
As problems go, this is strictly First World, which ain’t bad for a couple of gabachos who live in the Third. We know people who have real diseases and realer troubles and somehow never go all Gloomy Gus on us.
“Gee whillikers, pal, you say you don’t feel perky enough for a little bikey ridey in the late fall sunshine? Hard knocks for sure. Our puppy just died and the basement’s flooded and the kid just got filmed having gay sex in a congressional hearing room, so we had to quit our jobs, change all our phone numbers, and cancel the Internet. Plus we have Nazis marching around the neighborhood at all hours roaring “Blood and soil!” But I feel ya, bruh. ’Scuse me, back in a jiff, I gotta put out the cat. One of the Nazis set her on fire.”
So, yeah. Instead of being a whiny little gobshite all the time (instead of most of the time) I make my little tee-hees on the Innertubes, drink lots of hot beverages, and take short walks around the foothills trails, all the while hawking and snorting and spitting and in general trying to encourage the boogers to abandon this crumbling temple of the soul and jump on someone else, preferably a cat-torching Nazi.
It even helps, for a little while. Haven’t seen any sniffling Nazis out there yet, but I remain hopeful, if not optimistic.
Speaking of optimistic, the Colorado Supremes whack an underhanded insurrectionist with the fat end of the bat. The real Supremes bat next.
Mad Blog Media 
I wonder. If you look back at yourself 30 to 40 years ago, and think about what you might have thought of yourself now, back then, and the lifestyle that you live and how you live it, do you think you would be happy looking into the future at yourself now? I suspect that with the exception of getting old and the pains that exist thereupon, that you probably would be pretty pleased. Although maybe you’d be disappointed because you weren’t drinking as much or smoking as much – Things back then that might have been important. Certainly I think you’d be happy with who you partnered up with. “Damn was I a genius making that decision!”
Here’s to dwelling on the past and thinking about how great we turned out. Keep getting better sir.
I never really knew where I would end up. Started out as a working class kid of a single mom in Buffalo, NY who barely survived college without flunking out and who had a huge working class chip on my shoulder and a stepdad who I made peace with while in graduate school. Definitely helped my survival options via a good second marriage. First one was a cluster fuck.
So here I am. How the fuck did that happen? I am truly amazed that I am where I am rather than dead, on welfare, or in jail.
As the saying goes “If’n I knew I was gonna live this long Ida taken better care of myself.” Actually if I had known how many times I was going to get hit with/by cars, trucks and other weapons of transportation I would have gotten a better lawyer. Because most of my current difficulties can be laid at the feet of all the times I got hit, except that right hip, I pulled it falling out of a yoga pose trying to take better care of myself because I was getting stiff in the mornings from all the times etc. back in 2011.
Given that 40 years ago, I seemed to be constantly being ripped up into the military, running around with an automatic SLR & having people trying to kill me, I would have laughed my arse off at the thought of hitting this milestone.
And regardless of the arthritis & cancer, I’m very grateful, so many of my friends were denied the privilege.
I have absolutely nothing to complain about. Zip, zero, nada, niente, bupkis.
When I was a sprout I was certain I’d be a wisp of vapor in a nuclear holocaust before I could make it to the legal drinking age. Some years later I figured it was the booze and/or drugs that would get me (or some comorbidity like an auto crash, jealous husband with handgun, or prison shanking).
Next on the hit parade: Angry publishers and editors. O, you may chuckle at the thought of such getting blood on their tailored suits or Patagucci sportswear, but many of them have sordid connections. I suspect there was a time or two when a plump, manicured finger hovered just above the telephone’s keypad for a long moment before slowly withdrawing to explore one neatly trimmed nostril.
“No, I think not. No point in wasting a favor on this guy. Just look at the state of him. Another couple years and he’ll be kipping in a cardboard condo, sipping Sterno through a dirty sock while he copyedits the other stewbums’ ‘DISABULED VET PLEESE HEP’ placards for a cut of their take.”
If you’d told me back in 1983, when I was trading one bush-league newspaper for another 1,500 miles away with nothing on on my side of the scoreboard but a Toyota truck, two dogs, a typewriter and drawing board, one broken ankle, and a whole lot of help from my dwindling platoon of friends, that 40 years later I’d be happily married, sober, debt-free, and drinking a bespoke cup of java while idly noticing that the expression on my 16-year-old cat’s face exactly mirrored the one she wore as an itty-bitty kitty playing in our bathtub back in Bibleburg, well … I’da told you that you were either nuts, on something, or both.
My brother and I actually had a bet, first one to hit 30 had to buy a case of beer for the other one. He proposed it as a joke, being the younger one, so there was no way he could lose. Except he did, car accident at age 23. So on my 30th birthday, I bought a case of Schaefer, poured the whole thing into the Monocacy River.
I was in better shape at 35 than 25, a total wreck at 45, got things moving again at 55. If the sinusoidal rhythm holds true, I better double up on the life insurance for the next 10 years, and then I can exhale for a little bit.
If my sister were a betting woman like our mother, she’d have been surprised to see me still standing all these years later, odds be damned.
“Huh. I didn’t see that in the cards at all. …”
I got to wondering where the Monocacy River is. Turns out there’s a Monocacy River in Maryland, and a few years back I spent a pleasant afternoon in its watershed riding a just repaired motorcycle from Gaithersburg up into Pennsylvania. According to Wikipedia the river is scenic but quite polluted, I guess this means it looks good and smells bad. Could it be your case of Schafer, I used to buy it by the case, quarts often, and can affirm it is a potent pollutant.
I wish you success in breaking your 10 year sinusoidal rhythm, unless you’re looking to continue it.
I suspect that riding bicycles delivered many of us into old age in comparatively good health. “If I have told you this story before don’t stop me, because I want hear it again.”
I also think the walking, at any age, is underrated for physical and mental well being. There is nothing better for the soul and body than a hike with good boots and piece of hickory in hand. A walk to the neighborhood jam session, in sneakers with a guitar case in hand, is also golden.
I tell that to anyone who thinks a daily ride or run is something bordering on the superhuman or miraculous.
“It isn’t. But you don’t have to run a marathon or ride a century right out of the gate. Walk. Take a nice stroll. Then take a longer one. Listen to the birds, look at the clouds, mind the snakes. Also, and too, the dog shit. Keep your eyes and your mind open and put all the electronics on airplane mode.
“If you decide you want to up your game after a while, go for it. But it’s not necessary. We came down out of the trees to take a walk, see what’s what, not to win the Tour de France.”
When the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hopes seem hardly worth having, just mount a bicycle and go for a good spin down the road, without thought of anything but the ride you are taking.
I have myself ridden the bicycle most during my practice as a physician and during my work in letters. In the morning or the afternoon, before or after work, as the mood o’ertakes me, I mount the wheel and am off for a spin of a few miles up or down the road from my country place. I can only speak words of praise for the bicycle, for I believe that its use is commonly beneficial and not at all detrimental to health, except in the matter of beginners who overdo it.
The bicycle craze seems to me to be only in its infancy, for probably in time we shall witness the spectacle of our business men going to their offices mounted on the bicycle, instead of using the tramways. — Dr. A. Conan Doyle
HG Wells: “Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.”