Open thread! Feel free to discuss anything other than the angry boar oinking madly from the No-Ballsroom at the Orange House.
Go hog wild
Month: December 2025
R.I.P., Joe Ely
Joe Ely has driven off from Taos, headed west, because of course he was. He was 78.
Pneumonia, Lewy body dementia, and Parkinson’s did for him, according to The New York Times. It took all three to finally drag the old troubadour off the road.
He was always going places: riding a motorcycle through the halls of his high school; hitching and riding the rails around Texas and the Southwest; covering the earth like a spilt can of Sherwin-Williams. In the photo on his website he’s behind the wheel of a convertible. In London, he joined a touring Shakespearean troupe.
As Mother Times noted:
He might open for Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden one night, and then take the stage in a tiny music hall in the Jersey suburbs the next. He loved it all, especially the hours spent driving from gig to gig on the open road, and above all the vast empty stretches of highway out West. “There’s something about that vast emptiness that makes your imagination come alive,” Mr. Ely told The Los Angeles Times in 1992.
Now and again Ely would hook up with two of his old high-school pals from Lubbock, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Butch Hancock, performing as The Flatlanders. That on-and-off gig lasted from 1972 until the mid-2000s. He opened for the Clash, becoming friends with Joe Strummer, and wrangled llamas for the Ringling Bros. circus.
Jaysis H., what a life. Other people got famous. Joe Ely lived. Somebody give this boy a ride to heaven.
‘Genocide’
Man, did I ever have to take the scenic route to this post.
This morning as I scanned the news, I noticed a headline at The New Mexican‘s website:
“Delays, bankruptcy let nursing-home chain avoid paying settlements for injuries, deaths.”
This sort of revelation is always of interest to me, as I am of a certain age, Herself’s patience is not without limits, and I have seen my mother, her mother, and an old friend renting rooms in such places.
But I don’t subscribe to The New Mex, and didn’t bother trying to hurdle their paywall.
And then, in a sidebar beneath the main story, I saw the name of the nursing-home chain: Genesis.
Aha! As it happens we know someone who had a family member installed in one of their Duck! City facilities. This person failed to thrive, and the tales told did not recommend the joint as a comfy bench upon which to await the Greydog to the Hereafter, though it seemed a stint there might have made good training for a triathlon featuring Cormac McCarthy’s Road and Dante’s Sea of Excrement.
Our source called the outfit “Genocide.”
So I launched a quick search and hey presto: Turns out the piece by Jordan Rau was not by a New Mex scribe. It came from KFF Health News, the news arm of KFF, an endowed national nonprofit that calls itself “the leading health policy organization in the U.S.” (You may remember it as the Kaiser Family Foundation.) They have a very liberal reprint policy, but I’m just gonna give you the links and a free taste:
Once the nation’s largest nursing home chain, Genesis says it was spending $8 million a month defending and settling lawsuits over resident injuries and deaths in recent years. But the company is now poised to wipe the liability slate clean by seeking refuge in the most protective corner of the legal system for the nursing home industry: bankruptcy court. The Genesis case, one of 11 large senior care bankruptcies this year, illustrates how health care companies can dodge public and financial accountability for alleged negligence through delays, confidentiality clauses, and bankruptcy maneuvers, a KFF Health News investigation found.
It seems a bankruptcy judge has declined to sign off on one typical evasive maneuver (the sale of its nursing-home business, reportedly to an insider). Everything I was able to find on that was paywalled.
In other news, though the story mentioned three incidents in Duck!Burg facilities (Genesis has 10 of them here), and despite the ease of reprinting or citing KFF’s heavy lifting in this matter, I’ve seen nothing about this in the Albuquerque Journal, which has been otherwise occupied trying to make its grotesque website easier to look at and navigate.
A “Local” drop-down under “News” would be a plus. Recaps of gruesome murders in California and Australia I can get elsewhere.
And if I were a working editor instead of just another doddering old ink-stained wretch in queue for the Soylent Green treatment I might bookmark KFF Health News, too. The Genesis locations I visited today had full parking lots. Surely the visitors can’t all be personal-injury attorneys. Some might be subscribers visiting loved ones.
O, my heavens!
I overslept this morning and was rewarded for it.
Shambling drowsily through my morning chores, which include unburdening Miss Mia Sopaipilla’s litter box and removing the contents to the trash bin outside, I glanced up at the banana moon — and saw a shooting star.
Wow! Bonus! A Geminid meteor putting on a show just for me. I tipped Herself to it, she brought Miss Mia outside, and we saw a couple more before the gradually swelling morning light overwhelmed the zippy little fireballs.
The light show peaks tonight around 8 p.m. Dog Standard Time, according to EarthSky.
Could this be an omen? Is the Lizard Portal finally closing? Maybe. I haven’t seen a day coyote lately. Like my fellow Burqueño Marc Maron I’ll go mystical if I’m terrified.
Garbage miles
The ever-readable Mike Ferrentino has a meditation on “garbage miles” in his “Beggars Would Ride” column over at NSMB.com.
No spoilers. Pop over and have a squint. I will say only that his thoughts on the topic have evolved over the decades, because he is mos def one of the higher primates.
Photo by Larry Beckner | The New Mexican
I first encountered the concept of garbage miles back in the Eighties, while racing bikes out of Fanta Se. Logging a ton of miles I was, and getting ruthlessly flogged on race day by people doing half my weekly average, or less.
“The fuck?” I inquired.
“Too many junk miles,” they replied.
Junk miles, garbage miles, all samey same. Unfocused and thus unworthy. Or so they said, the rotten, podium-hogging sonsabitches.
But not me. Because whenever I was in the saddle spinning I was not parked at the The New Mexican‘s copy desk, where I had to log many junk miles indeed to underwrite my cycling habit. Many, many of them.
At least the bike miles, like crucifixion, got me out in the open air.
Once we moved to Bibleburg in fall 1991 I kept it up. The Sept. 15 entry in my training journal after a 157.5-mile week was: “A few respectable miles. Nice to not work — nothing like a job for fucking up your training.”
“Training,” he calls it. This is the hee, and also the haw. Oh, I was riding on road and off, first with Rainbow Racing, then later with the Mad Dogs. And I was running regularly, even doing a little inline skating and snowshoeing because I was freelancing pieces to a sports-and-fitness outfit in Boulder between my chores for VeloNews (see, I was actually trying to work and earn, kinda, sorta).
But at my first few Colorado cyclocrosses I was either OTB or DFL, eventually settling into a fairly reliable fourth-place kind of fella, out of the money yet very much in the way. Seventh of 11 finishers at the state championships at Chatfield State Park that year, after which I called it a season.
Too many junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.
Oh, I got better. Or maybe they got worse, as one of the fast guys mused in my presence after I finally managed to finish a race in front of him. In any case, by the mid-Nineties I could podium at a ’cross every now and then, even win, rarely, if the weather got truly evil and the fast guys stayed home.
This could’ve been because I actually trained for cyclocross, which by this time was the only cycling discipline I really cared about.
I worked on technique, ran a ton to counter my lack of snap in the saddle, and even built my own course at altitude (at the base of our 43-acre plot at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe in CrustyTucky).
During the seven years we lived there I rode a ’cross bike just about everywhere, because pavement was miles away and when I finally got to it I didn’t want to be herding the old mountain bike with its 26-inch knobbies and boingy fork. Though I missed its 24-tooth granny ring while cursing my way up the long dirt mile back to the house, 430 feet up from the washboarded county road.
Not a lot of junk miles in CrustyTucky.
In those years I logged my junk miles behind the wheel of a Toyota pickup, with my bikes in the bed. Our Mad Dog cyclocrosses were in B-burg, a 150-mile round trip from home base. The bulk of the state race series meant an even longer slog up the Front Strange, to Littleton, Denver, Franktown, Boulder, Mead, and Fort Collins. The weather was frequently wintry, masters were always first to race, and more than once to make the start I had to hit town the day before, overnighting in some low-rent motel.
Talk about your junk miles.
After a few years of that my training logs crumbled into random entries followed by none at all. It was starting to feel a whole lot like work — which was also suffering in part because the cycling community in CrustyTucky consisted of me, myself and I. It felt like being sentenced to Stationary Trainer Without Parole. I was taking all the pulls and yet going nowhere. In terms of fiscal and mental health it seemed prudent to seek out a few voices that weren’t coming from inside my head.
In those first years back in Bibleburg I had a good crew. Quite a few of the Mad Dogs owned the clocks we punched and could rearrange at least one business day a week to log junk miles and devise solutions to the various crises facing the world (you’re welcome). Big Bill “Shut Up and Ride” McBeef and his bro Other Bill. Usuk and The Geek. Dr. Schenkstein and Dennis the Menace. The Old Town Bike Shop crew. And the rest of you lot; you know who you are. So in 2002 we went back there.
Took me right back to my riding roots it did. I no longer felt as though everything was uphill and into the wind in all directions. A couple years later I quit racing because I didn’t need it anymore. I had my junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.
Some dogs just gotta tip over that trash can.
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