April’s knocking on the door with a jumbo box of Kleenex in one hand.
“Don’t say I never gave you anything. Gesundheit.”
Swear to Dog, everything’s springing to desperate life at once. Lawn, maple, lilacs, wisteria, ornamental plum, Chinese pistache, a few of the bulbs we assumed the landscapers had done for last summer. Not even a layer of gravel over weed fabric can keep those hardy little bastards buried.
With a red-flag warning posted I thought it prudent to give everything a good soaking yesterday. It was like handing Hunter S. Thompson an entire sheet of blotter acid and a quart of Wild Turkey to wash it down, then watching him fire up the Great Red Shark with the notion of driving the pace car at the fabulous Mint 400. Stand back!, etc.
Should I have been surprised to wake up honking my horn? No. Happily, Herself recently made a Kleenex run so I probably won’t have to resort to sleeves or dish towels for a day or two.
“You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”
—Taisen Deshimaru
When I awakened on the morning of my 70th birthday, March 27, 2024, my heart was still beating. Tick, tock; tick, tock. Fifty-two beats per minute, just like clockwork.
I was pretty sure I wasn’t in Hell. I don’t know if we take heartbeats with us to Hell, but if we do, I expect they’re slightly more elevated, what with the pitchforks and roasting and screaming and all.
Also, it was almost six o’clock, and it seemed I had been allowed to sleep in. I’m almost certain that’s not part of the drill in Hell. If there’s any extra sack time in Hell it’s probably spent in an actual sack, being dipped like a teabag into a giant iron mug of boiling shit that you have to drink instead of coffee in the mornings that look just like midnight, only more so, while a grinning D.I. who looks like a cross between R. Lee Ermey and Hellboy screams at you: “You gotta be shittin’ me, Joker! You think you’re Mickey Spillane? You think you’re some kind of a fuckin’ writer? Now get on your face and give me infinity!”
When I finally crawled out of the sack I was 99 percent convinced I was not in Hell.
For one thing, instead of Gunnery Sergeant Beelzebub demanding an eternity of pushups I found a sweet little kitty-cat purring happy birthday to me. Like Herself, who had slipped silently off to work, Miss Mia Sopaipilla had granted me a little extra catnap instead of yowling me up at stupid-thirty to fill her bowl and/or empty her litter box.
And for another, it was 29° outside, with a dusting of snow on the green grass.
Huh. Not Hell. Albuquerque. Some people think it’s Hell, but everyplace is Hell to someone. Especially in March.
So I enjoyed two cups of coffee instead of a bottomless mug of Lipton Shitfire Hellbroth, attended to Miss Mia, and got back to the bloggery. Tempus fugit. Tick, tock; tick, tock.
Thanks to one and all for the birthday wishes. And apologies to anyone who had 69 in the office pool. I had 30; imagine my surprise.
A much younger Dog with his dogs, Sandy (top) and Clancy (bottom), rockin’ around the clock in those Fabulous Fifties. No date or location on the image, but it has to be 1956 or thereabouts and probably Falls Church, Va.
I’m not even pretending to understand how my mind works (or doesn’t) anymore.
What sane person wakes after a restless sleep with the songs “Paint It Black” and “Wand’rin’ Star” conflated into a mental Spotify loop? Something like:
Do I know where Hell is? Hell is in “hello” I have to turn my head Until my darkness goes
—”Paint Your Wagon Black,” Jagger, Richards, Lerner, Lowe & O’Grady
Just picture, if you dare, Mick Jagger and Lee Marvin croaking along in duet before your first cup of coffee, after a long Night of the Worm Moon. As earworms go this will not crack anyone’s Top 40. Not even in Hell.
Barking my shins on ancient pop-culture references as I stumble drowsily through my hoarder’s skull with the Voices cackling at my missteps — A 1966 Rolling Stones hit? A 1969 musical-comedy miss? And what’s all this about worms? — is hardly a recipe for refreshment.
Whose fingerprints are all over this sonic crime scene, anyway? Well, Clint Eastwood, whose various shoot-’em-ups I have seen far too many times and may have triggered (har har har) my Magnum fetish, is said to have called “Paint Your Wagon” “Cat Ballou II.” You may recall that the Jane Fonda flick “Cat Ballou” — which, like “Paint Your Wagon,” co-starred Lee Marvin — was filmed in part in the Wet Mountain Valley, near the old home place I call Weirdcliffe.
Then we have the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band cameo in “Paint Your Wagon.” Years before Herself and I set up shop outside Weirdcliffe I got to hang around backstage at a whole passel of NGDB shows throughout Colorado, thanks to some San Luis Valley bros with connection to the Nitty Grittys’ road manager.
Worms, you inquire? Night before last, I was revisiting the Don Marquis collection “The Lives and Times of Archy & Mehitabel,” in which Archy threatens to organize a revolutionary society of insects — The Worms Turnverein — to avenge themselves upon their human oppressors. The works of Marquis, along with Frank Herbert’s sandwormy “Dune,” and “The Short-Timers,” the book by Gustav Hasford that was the basis for “Full Metal Jacket” — whose closing credits roll to “Paint It Black” (also, note the Lee Marvin reference at the Hasford link) — are among the books I’ve read many more times than once.
Michael Herr, who worked with Hasford and director Stanley Kubrick on the “FMJ” screenplay, wrote another of my favorite books, “Dispatches,” which with “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Erich Maria Remarque may be tied for the best book about war ever written. From the vantage point of someone who’s never been there and done that, anyway.
I know, I know. This is an awful lot of fuel for a mighty small fire. Happily, Herr, Hasford and Herbert never sat in with the Dirt Band, and Kubrick and Marquis never made a musical (“Paint Your Ornithopter?” “Cat & Roach Ballou?”) so let’s count our blessings. We already have more than enough to keep us awake at night, and most of it is nonfiction.
The turnaround point, just south of Interstate 40 along the Paseo del Bosque trail.
It was a bit premature, but I rode my age yesterday and then some.
The final tally was 44.6 miles, or 71.8 kilometers; I only needed 43.5 miles to make 70km, but I figure the additional mile and change constituted a punishment tax for being a wuss and riding my age in kilometers instead of miles.
My 70th birthday isn’t until Wednesday, but the forecast was not promising and yesterday’s weather looked (and was) superb, so I took a cue from Janis Joplin and got it while I could.
I’ve been in something of a rut lately, literally as well as figuratively. The drill has been to break out a cyclocross bike and ride a mix of roads and trails, the latter slashed into tire-grabbing ribbons by fatheads who shred (or stir) the gnar-gnar after a wet spell. The ruts they leave behind don’t pose a problem for anyone piloting a double-squishy with plenty of travel and 3-inch tires, but can be a tad jarring on a rigid drop-bar bike with 33mm rubber.
Still, it beats working, especially if I pick a day and hour when the usual suspects are likely to be hoeing a row in the cube farm. I managed 24 miles of that sort of thing on Thursday. But doubling up on that, on a Friday, sounded like a punishment tour, not a birthday celebration. Also, too much of the same-ol’, same-ol’.
What to do; what to do. …
Temps looked to be headed for the 60s, with wind from the west. Coasting down to the bosque would force me to commit to some proper distance while giving me plenty of options in case advancing age or some other wrinkled catastrophe reared its ill-considered comb-over in midride. Off I went.
It’s mostly off-street bike path (Arroyo del Oso) and downhill from the intersection of Tramway and Manitoba to the bike-ped bridge over I-25, barring a short, unpleasant stretch of Osuna between the western end of the Arroyo del Oso golf course and Brentwood.
But once I’m on the bridge it’s all bike path, all the time, depending upon how I choose to head home.
I’m prone to overdo and bad at math, so after following the North Diversion Channel Trail and the Paseo del Norte Trail to the Paseo del Bosque, I refused to be lulled into complacency by the early greenery, stifled various miles-enhancing impulses — Hang a right at I-40 and climb to 98th? Hang a left at Mountain and cruise past Old Town back to the NDCT? Continue south to Rio Bravo? — and pulled a U at Mountain, heading back to the NDCT the way I’d come.
I thought I’d get more vertical than this, but that bosque trail is flatter than a Republican’s head.
The wind was mostly with me, so it felt like the right call, not least because it was all uphill back to El Rancho Pendejo. The question was: Which way back?
Arroyo del Oso is kind of a slog if ridden up from NDCT, with lots of stop and go plus a couple-three evil multiple-lane, median-divided, high-speed baby-highway crossings to negotiate with pale, failing, nearly-70-year-old legs. And my limited math skills seemed to indicate the mileage — kilometerage? — wouldn’t make the nut.
So I hung a left where the Paseo trail met the NDCT and headed northeast through Balloon Fiesta Park, where a few didoes through an underused office/light industrial ghetto connect to the Pan American Freeway, which in turn leads to the climb up Tramway — if you don’t mind riding a short stretch of shoulder alongside Pan American against high-speed, one-way traffic, which I kind of do. There’s been talk for years about extending the NDCT north to Roy, which would spare cyclists this game of chicken, but no action as of yet.
A quick digression: As I was rolling through the balloon park en route to doing battle with Pan American I saw a dude on what looked to be a gravel bike who’d left the official trail to drop down into La Cueva channel, a drainage like NDCT only without a bike path along the edge.
It made me wonder if, rather than risking the short against-traffic dash to Tramway from Balloon Fiesta Parkway, a savvy cyclist might be able to ride La Cueva channel underneath Pan American and I-25 all the way to Louisiana, then climb out somehow and head north to Elena, a less harrowing alternative to the 50-mph traffic of Tramway. Never saw the other dude again, so, maybe? To be continued. …
I took my chances on the Pan American shoulder, cautiously skirting two parked vehicles that may have had some unfortunate interaction — one car, one 18-wheeler — and started the half-hour ascent of Tramway to The County Line Bar-B-Q.
This is where the age thing manifested itself. A couple skinny young pups on them plastic-fantastic whirligigs with the disco brakes and what have you passed me so fast I had to stop to check my pulse, see if I still had one.
Nevertheless, I persisted, and upon hitting the stop sign at the barbecue joint it was clear that if I headed straight home I was going to wind up a couple klicks short of the full megillah. Thus I had to add a couple curlicues, flourishes, and do-si-dos to my little dance party before I could leave the floor and collapse into a medium-heavy lunch.
The official high was 69°, four degrees above normal. If that’s my birthday present, I’ll take it.
• Postscript: Lest anyone consider this even marginally impressive, my man the M-Dogg out in California reports having covered 9,000 feet of vertical and 166 miles in four days, none of which was his birthday.
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