Call me cynical (“You’re cynical!”), but I don’t think that other cat, the bedraggled, raggedy-ass orange tom that keeps slinking around the joint, yowling, spraying on the national furniture, and clawing the Stars & Stripes curtains into ribbons, is in danger of being put to sleep anytime soon.
Nossiree, he’s got himself a solid majority of black-robed laps in which to curl up while he awaits delivery of The Big Fish, the one that got away on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fuck me running.
Meanwhile, the playacting continues. Government shutdown: Will they or won’t they? Dueling VIP visits to The Border, that deadly, open-air, razor-wired waiting room where all the brown foreigners go to apply for the jobs nobody else wants. The Senate leadership following the House down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Gaza. Ukraine. “Dynamic pricing” at Wendy’s.
And now, this: Is a president a king?
I thought we settled that question back in 1776. But as I recall, that king required a few years of rather aggressive convincing before he conceded the point.
Mad Blog Media 
Beyond insanity is what. That punk is getting on my nerves. Like Arnold told Colbert the other night, “Todays politicians are party servants not public servants.” And the punk serves only himself.
This hot potato is gonna get passed around and around and around until it lands in his teensy little hands. Then he’s gonna toss it to the White House chef and tell him to turn it into a platter of fries to go with his cheeseburger.
Immunity for TFG in 2021 means immunity for the current guy in 2024.
“I have deployed Seal Ream 6 to Mar-a-Lago while we await the SCOTUS decision. Meanwhile, I’ve ordered the IRS to audit all taxpayers whose name rhymes with rump.”
Happy Leap Day POG and other fine readers ! With respect to resting felines, bizarre art frames hanging around, and the forking preaks at Exxonus-shitonallofus deciding that they want to live in Mar-O-Land with others of implausible deniability regarding what most of the rational scientific world concludes is occurring, I will refrain from stating my opinion about the state of our wandering cruise ship. I believe it’s more important to spend our brain synapses on deciding which bike we shall roll forth out of our stables and which direction we shall proceed. Go forth o-wizened ones and forget for a time that history and calamity repeats itself.
And remember to pet those that keep us sane.
Leaping back atcha, Shawn. That “art frame” is my Golden Toiddy for Excellence in Bad Taste from the Society of People Who Actually Make Their Own Shit (SOPWAMTOS). To its left you’ll see a photo of Your Humble Narrator racing cyclocross while wearing a GT that (who knows?) may have been made by Mark Nobilette when GT still had a Longmont factory. Two shelves down you’ll notice a holiday card from Jacquie Phelan and Charlie Cunningham. Is that enough name-dropping for one comment?
Speaking of relaxing, I got up with a start. Stephen Newhall emailed me today and asked if I would help run a LAB cycling class up here in the City Indifferent. Been a while since I did that. I don’t want to end up like that inexperienced armorer, getting someone killed. Guess I better brush up on my teaching skills. But at least bicycles don’t shoot you.
O, man. That sounds like a job of work. You’re not gonna use Cerrillos for your classroom, are you? The failure/dropout stats would be staggering.
Cerrillos at 2 a.m. on a Friday night/Saturday morning?
Is that sucker (big freaking street) actually 6 lanes? I did a check on giggle maps and it appears that one could land a large aircraft on it in an emergency pinch. Do they have pedestrian tunnels or elevated crossovers on it, or do they just have those very long traffic light controlled intersections? I can imagine crossing that sucker at 2 AM would be like crossing the Mulsanne Straight in early June.
Roads like Cerrillos in Santa Fe — and Tramway, Montgomery, Wyoming, and Louisiana in The Duck! City; Academy and Powers in Bibleburg, and the entirety of Las Vegas and the Greater Phoenix Metropolitan Area — are part of why I no longer enjoy driving. I can’t even imagine having a go at Los Angeles or San Francisco anymore.
For me your list would include the New Jersey Turnpike and the Tri-State Tollway, I-94, in Chicago. Never again!
I’ve only flown through Chicago, or driven past, the last time being 1977, when I skirted both Chicago and Cleveland in a Datsun pickup from Greeley to Winooski and back again.
In the summer of 1972, I was hitching through Missouri and got a lift from a van full of stoners fresh off a Mexico trip. They said I could come along if I drove, because they were somewhat the worse for wear. The cat’s cradle of roads around St. Louis scared the bejaysis out of me (I’d had a driver’s license for maybe three or four months) and when I bailed I was in such a rush to get out of the van that I left half my worldly goods in the sonofabitch and the 20-watt bulb in my head didn’t click on until they were driving away.
Somehow I ended up wandering around downtown at o-dark-thirty, by this auditorium, where I saw a sign: TONIGHT ONLY: THE ROLLING STONES. It was a two-show date at the Kiel Auditorium in support of their “Exile on Main Street” album. “You’ve got to be fucking shitting me,” I grumbled. I’d missed it, but I didn’t have any money, so I’d have missed it even if I knew it was happening and got there in time.
That night I wound up sleeping in a church nursery. I’d awakened the resident sky pilot and said I’d be delighted to kip in a pew if that was cool with him, but he did a young hippie dumbass a solid and let me bag a few Z’s in relative comfort.
That was a long and eventful trip. Another ride, this one bound for Kansas City, got run off Interstate 70 into the grassy median as we pulled around a semi at the same time the semi’s driver decided to pull around the vehicle in front of him. My driver freaked, spun the wheel left, and into the median we went at speed, doing donuts. Happily, the grass was wet, so it wasn’t a rollover. But I was so scared I was laughing.
In Iowa Falls, Iowa, I got fired on the first day of a job detasseling corn for smoking dope on my lunch break. Next I helped clean and move a newspaper’s printing presses so they could install another unit. Painted a house, ineptly and incompletely. Caught a lift back to Colorado and swear to God I took five at the same Longmont gas station that Jack Kerouac did while thumbing it to Denver in “On the Road.” Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
This may have been the same trip when I phoned my old school chum Mombo, who fetched me to his parents’ house in Thornton where his mom cooked us up about a thousand pounds of groceries and insisted we eat all of it (old-school north-Denver Italian-Americans). Could’ve been the same trip when I got stranded on the Valley Highway through Denver, which even then was no place for a pedestrian, and caught a lift from a cop who took me all the way to the county line.
The kindness of strangers, heh?
For reals. Jeez, was I ever a useless little spalpeen.
Ever think of trying your hand at cowboy poetry? Seeing as how you are already the Master of Metaphor, maybe that would be a new outlet for your talents.
Didn’t Baxter Black slap his brand on that critter? I dunno as I care to tangle with the ghost of a former large-animal veterinarian.