Month: May 2024

Thumbing it in soft

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
Top left, homepage, NYT.

Above you’ll see the latest example of what The New York Times finds consequential this morning.

At upper right on the homepage was more Pulitzer bait: “Should you delay your morning caffeine? Some influencers say that doing so can offer benefits. We looked at the evidence.”

Well. Shit. I thought we had a couple-three wars, the trial of a former president, and some vigorous debate over whether Supreme Court justices are answerable to anyone who isn’t a yacht bro going on. But I remain slightly muddled by the Snotlocker Surprise and may have missed a memo.

This other bullshit — what the hell, let’s add “Hundreds of readers told us their favorite soundtracks. Which came out on top?” — is strictly from the Whisky Dick Department; soft and useless.

It’s bad enough that editors are assigning this shit and parking it up top on the homepage and app. If people are actually burning 17 minutes of their day reading it we’re in more trouble than I thought. Especially if they haven’t caffeinated yet.

Back to you, Charlamagne.

O, booger

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Hm. Time for resupply. Either that or I start using the guest towels instead of Kleenex.

I may be running out of Kleenex and boogers more or less simultaneously, which I call either a miracle of planning or the usual dumb luck.

Something grabbed me by the snout a week ago Monday. I was thinking the allergies had seemed a tad fierce lately, but then Herself seemed to come down with an actual cold, so, uh, no. Not allergies. Or maybe not just allergies.

She took two Bug tests, both negative, and since we had similar symptoms I didn’t bother testing myself.

As Herself is a spry young thing she had a couple rough days, then pretty much bounced right back and soldiered on. But then she’s the type of person who would take a childhood diagnosis of asthma and allergies and be all like, “Hm, probably should stay on top of that so it doesn’t turn into a lifetime of skull-fucking sinus infections.”

Another type of person, by which I mean me, might decide to enhance these pre-existing conditions with a marinade of swimming-pool chlorine, nicotine, marijuana, hashish, cocaine, and popskull in various flavors because why the hell not? What could go wrong?

What goes wrong, in my experience, is that every so often you find yourself feeling slightly unwell, with something oozing out of your beak that looks like a microwave pizza that some cube farmer nuked on Friday, promptly forgot about, and rediscovered on Tuesday after a long, hot Memorial Day weekend.

Back in the Day® the medicos would hit you with some interesting speedy drugs and a Z-Pak, the pharmaceutical equivalent of chucking a grenade into a spider hole. Nowadays the thinking is that this only gives rise to antibiotic-resistant infections like Matt Gaetz.

Today the standard practice is to bill you for the visit and send you home empty-handed, save for some sound medical advice. “Get that shit out of here. Jesus. Makes the snack-room microwave look like a surgical theater.”

So I saved myself the trip. Lots of rest, hot fluids, vitamin C, and a really hot pot of posole. Ride it out, same way you do a White House full of eejits and maniacs. I’ve done it before, I can do it again.

Peace, pop

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments
Your Humble Narrator and the old man circa 1954 in Harundale, Md.

When Col. Harold Joseph O’Grady drove his only son downtown to register with the Selective Service System back in 1972 he may have been thinking, “This kid will last about as as long in Vietnam as an ice-cream cone.”

The old man brought some experience to bear, having done his bit in (and above) the jungle during World War II with the New Guinea-based 65th Squadron, 433rd Troop Carrier Group, Fifth Air Force.

Thirty years later, those halcyon days spent rocking a biscuit bomber out of New Guinea must have looked like R&R in Sydney compared to sharing quarters with a smart-ass peace creep/wanna-be hippie who favored Abbie and Jerry over Tricky Dick and Spiro; a hairy asthmatic nuisance who couldn’t mow the grass without wheezing but smoked acres of it without complaint and then ate everything in the house.

Well, now he was 18 and that’s Reveille you hear, son! Just ’cause you had the good fortune to be born into a career Air Force officer’s family doesn’t mean you get to skip your turn in the barrel. Especially with your GPA. Sign here, dismiss, and await your letter from the president.

Thus I duly registered with Selective Service as required; continued my cursory antiwar theatrics at college; and voted for a WWII B-24 pilot in November’s presidential contest.

Then, in December, the last induction call was issued, and the authority to induct expired in July 1973. They may have had my number, but they couldn’t put me in that barrel anymore, and I certainly wasn’t going to get in there by myself. I knew what the knothole was for.

What I don’t know, a half-century down my own long and winding road, is whether my opposition to the Vietnam war was a principled stand or a simple exercise of privilege. Peace for everyone, or just for me?

O, to be a sprat again, with no question weightier than what’s this interesting sticky bit up my nose? My only connection to that plump munchkin above is an unstable and unreliable continuity of memory; I had sinus problems then and I have them now.

When I finally graduated from college at age 23 — about the same age as my old man when he was matriculating at the Pacific Theater — my parents presented me with a used Japanese pickup. That’s was mom’s doing. I never saw the old man driving a Japanese anything. He wanted to buy me an Edsel.

Today, my hiking boots, running shoes, and more than a few of my shirts were made in Vietnam.

There’s a lesson here somewhere, and you’d think I’d have puzzled it out by now. I’ve never been smart, but I’ve often been lucky.