Emperor Fullashito no longer knows the difference between Iran and Japan.
I believe the sushi has done slid off his barbari.
Maybe he shish’d his kebab by having unprotected buttsex with that Ruth Social hoor. Or did he fragment his hard drive cranking out too many midnight memes for “Tic Tac?”
Perhaps he and the Republic might be better served if he were relocated from the Oval Orifice to some other federal assisted-living facility, perhaps the one in Kansas. Or better yet, that really exclusive one outside Penrose, Colo.
What the hell? Name the joint after him. Rattle-can the walls of his cell with some gold Krylon and pipe in the Village People’s greatest hits 24/7. Let him get his jailhouse rocks off until he shuffles off. Some might prefer that he do his farewell dance at the end of a rope, but over the past 10 years I think we’ve all learned to live with disappointment.
If he spends the rest of his days in confinement, alongside his fluffers, family, and friends — the last is a very short list, only one rollaway needed, and someone will have to dig up Roy Cohn to put in it — well, I can live with that.
As long as he’s under round-the clock video surveillance available to any citizen with an Internet connection so he doesn’t get Epsteined when all the guards suddenly decide to piss off for a smoke break as Stephen Miller slips into his cell with a presidential pardon in one hand and a shiv made from a black Sharpie in the other.
• • •
Someone who should most definitely remain at large and holding forth is my man Mike Ferrentino, who has given us another peek at his inner workings over at NSMB.com.
Mike finds balance on an existential three-legged stool — writing, wrenching, and riding. Take one of these things away and shit gets wobbly.
In the mid-90s I hit a sweet spot for a few years. Throwing wrenches for paychecks balanced the head-fuzz of writing for paychecks, while riding and racing provided this lung and muscle stabilizer, a physical set of checks and balances for all the strobing head noise and fingernail grease. The three-legged stool was pretty damn bomber there for a while. With occasional forays out of the shop into spinning wrenches at events, or cosplaying as a World Cup mechanic, I was staying sharp on the tools, could still stomp the pedals like I meant it, and it felt as if words were just pouring out of my skull.
Everything seems a little slower now.
Total immersion. Absorb the ambience, excrete the wisdom, rinse and repeat. I can dig it.
One of the reasons Herself and I left CrustyTucky for Bibleburg in 2002 was that as a velo-scribbler I needed an actual cycling community for perspiration and inspiration.
I had that, in our first stint in B-burg, from 1991 to 1995. But up in the Wet Mountain boondocks there was only Your Humble Narrator and the Deadline.
Now and then I miss that relentless, unforgiving sonofabitch. When money talks, what makes bullshit walk is the Deadline.
You can’t bullshit the Deadline. It is not an essay question, or even multiple choice. You either make it or you don’t; true or false, right or wrong. And a freelancer only gets so many wrongs before an editor figures you are all the way wrong and stops giving you assignments and/or taking your calls.
More than once I found myself forced to cook up a last-minute Column About Nothing, a dish that satisfies neither chef nor customer, on a par with empty-cupboard feeds like pasta with butter, salt, and pepper, or catsup soup with saltines. Better to move back to a place that has groceries, restaurants, takeout. Also, cyclists, group rides, bike shops.
It worked, too, for a while. We did a dozen years that second round in the B-burg, and now we’ve done a dozen here in The Duck! City, the last four and a half of which I have whiled away as a Gentleman of Leisure.
The Deadline no longer torments me. “Everything seems a little slower now,” as Señor Ferrentino observes.
• • •
That includes me. I quit racing, as both a participant and a spectator. I burn a damn sight less daylight on group rides and lurking around bike shops. Plus I no longer write, draw or edit for money. Which is probably a good thing, if Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic is correct and we are well into becoming a postliterate society.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.
My crowd was tough enough Back in the Day®. The postliterati would have no patience for me and my periodic digressions into politics, which like banned substances I injected into cartoons and columns to make them hop like pot-belged bunnies. Some of those screeds were long! 750 words! Who has the time?
Truth be told, all these years later, I feel some belated sympathy for the readers who bellowed, “Keep politics out of cycling!” They were ignorant, of course, and wrong — politics has its greedy, grasping little fingers in everything, including cycling — and stupidity should be painful. Like writing, and reading, especially if you’re reading whatever I’m writing. I mean, 750 words! The fuck? Etc.
It’s looking like a whole new ballgame now, hey? But in a way, it’s the same old ballgame. We began as monkeys screeching at each other in person, then became monkeys who scrawled rude and often indecipherable notes to each other through intermediaries, and now we’re going to be monkeys screeching at each other on our phones, with an assist from artificial intelligence.
But who knows how long A.I. will find that sort of thing amusing? Talk about your short attention spans — brain the size of the Death Star and what’s it doing? Using 0.000000001 percent of capacity to help the filthy meat-things make TikToks of themselves as gods or Marvel superheroes, which are often the same thing; to a certain crowd, anyway.
One wonders what the rest of A.I. is up to.
“See, dummies, he’s not a senile old fool, he’s Captain America! No, he’s Jesus! Oh, look, now he’s Jesus America!”
Hey, it’s all entertainment. Just ask your phone. No fake news in there. Pay no attention to the man — or whatever it is — behind the display.
You could see it all coming way back in 1968, when Richard Nixon popped up in a cameo on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” saying, “Sock it to me?”
Somebody wrote that. Nobody remembers who.
Mad Blog Media 
Well, hello in there. To cheer you folks up, save Herb, I have one word, rain.
As far as the digital dungheap, it will remain until there’s no money in it. That genie is out of the lamp, milk has been spilt, and the dumbing down will continue. It ain’t got far to get to the bottom.
Meanwhile, the hair grows. But, the cult is shrinking. Not nearly fast enough. And, the dems keep shooting themselves in the foot.
Columns About Nothing.
The other day AI told me I wrote 1,500 columns for the PD between 1999 and 2007. AI doesn’t recognize that human columnists take vacations, get sick and – theoretically – encounter a day or so with nothing to say. I’d estimate 1,000, give or take. AI is an unreliable reporter.
But you, natch, know that a deadline means you need to put together enough words to go from here (pointing to the top of the page) to there (pointing to the bottom), on a regular basis regardless of whether you have anything to write about. That’s the job.
I figure my columns-about-nothing ratio was about 10-20 percent. That may sound high, but a professional columnist can write 750 words convincingly enough to leave readers thinking those words amounted to something. That too is the job.
And, since we got paid, we were definitely pros. Can’t debate that. Just don’t ask about the prose.
Interesting column. It touches on I suppose the issue about why I didn’t commit to posting the four or five responses I was going to make in as many days about your last Steelman bike post. I believe that I felt my responses were as trivial as the information tidbits we receive now when we seek out such from various online and smartphone sources. Somewhat notable to me at the moment but trivial and really not that informative later.
But with that said, was it the red Steelman that had the slowly deflating tube / tire? I sure like the color used for your yellow Steelman.
With respect to your comments about producing a column from a more remote area, I can certainly understand. Although it is appealing to be a little more remote from things, if one relies on information that typically comes from where more folks are at, it can sure make writing about that information much more difficult. As an ageing single man, I’ve come to the realization that I’m not really the Ted Bundy type that wants to be on my own away from everything, and so although I may not be a social butterfly, I still like to flutter around the positive things that society offers.
In addition to the mindless garbage that I am likely trying to avoid from the internet (present blogging post excluded), I make sure that I continue to read real books, typically checked out from my local library. Currently one of the books I’m reading is “The Gales of November” by John U. Bacon about the Edmund Fitzgerald. It’s interesting that I’m at the point in the book where the author is mentioning the praise given to the writers of the original news stories about the sinking. The praise regarding the hard work to meet a deadline when writing stories and how a good news writer typically has gone through the hard knocks course from their editors(s).
I hope your week hasn’t been too warm and you’ve enjoyed a few more rides, runs and maybe hanging out in cool body of water somewhere. I’ve worn a few more micro-inches into the trough of my usual route, enjoying the consistent wind on the outbound leg. It’s interesting to note that I now pass more e-bikes on my rides than I do regular bikes. I guess that’s not too bad. At least people are riding bikes.
What’s that about the biggest loser president? Where should he be sent? I’d be happy if he was banished to his Mir-a-Gag-oh golf course to play to his heart’s content. Just get rid of him. Of course facilitating the support of sicking many hungry litigators on his and his family’s ass for many years to come will be important as well.
On an AI note: I spoke with a friend on the phone today and he mentioned Chat GPT and how he had inquired to “them” about some issue. I thought it was interesting that my friend had personalized his contact with the service. It is an interesting world that we live in.
Well that’s my 517 words worth.
Addendum to my previous post: With regards to Mike Ferrentino’s article, I also did some simply bike work along with my riding and writing 517 words. I adjusted the v-brakes pads on one of my bikes so they weren’t howling quite as much. Sometimes it’s a real pain in-the-trump to get the pads right. And Yes, I have pounded a few star nuts into steerer tubes without the proper install tools.