He's a walkin' contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction.
Author: Patrick O'Grady
After decades with his scabby little nose pressed to various grindstones of journalism, Patrick O'Grady came away with plenty of mental scar tissue, a good deal less hair to cover it, and an undiminished appreciation for three subsets of the craft: drawing cartoons, writing commentary, and composing headlines. All three are short, punchy attention-getters, the literary equivalent of yelling, "Hey, look at me!" before hanging a moon out the school-bus window, and thus own a natural appeal for an overgrown class clown with the attention span of a rat terrier raised on angel dust and bong water. And thanks to the Internet, the best thing to happen to journalism since the invention of movable type, he gets to do all three of them without having to go to work at a newspaper, where management has slowly devolved into a button-down mutant hybrid of the worst aspects of the Spanish Inquisition, the dental bits in "Marathon Man" and the DMV of your choice. He and his wife, the long-suffering Shannon, share an adobe hacienda in The Duck! City with their cat, Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
It was still February yesterday, but I “marched” (har de har har) up from Trail 365 to the foot of the final climb to the Candelaria Bench Trail.
I considered finishing the ascent to the bench, but the wind was coming up, I hadn’t brought any water, and I didn’t feel like finding out what the descent was like these days; it’s been a while since I rock-hopped down the other side to the Hidden Valley Road trailhead.
Going down.
Today I had to get on two wheels, wind be damned. This morning I checked my mileage for this year and holy hell.
No, I won’t tell you the actual numbers. I will say that I had logged twice as many miles by this time last year. I haven’t screwed the pooch this badly since I broke my right ankle in 2020. People on spin bikes are covering more ground than I am.
So far I’ve managed to avoid the ER this year (knock on wood). Little victories, hey? Very little.
Can I call January-February the “off-season?” ’Cause I’m, like, way off.
The final “Dilbert,” in its Sunday-funnies incarnation, anyway.
Wile E. Coyote never saw the edge until he went over it.
Then it was “Ffffeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww … pow!”
Working the ragged edge for fun and profit is a hazardous occupation. Become enraptured by your own artistry and suddenly you notice a certain lack of mission-critical support. That telltale rush of air. From joker to joke in one easy misstep.
Uh oh. …
Until cartoonist Scott Adams took his header I hadn’t read “Dilbert” in years, but I remembered the strip being funny, even though I hadn’t had any real personal contact with office culture since I quit The New Mexican in 1991.
Apparently the strip had become less amusing over the years — to some readers and editors, anyway — and then when Adams shat the bed with a David Duke impersonation over at YouTube, before you could say “Meep meep” it was “Ffffeeeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww … pow!”
I got a little too far out over my skis a time or two, mostly before Twitter mobs became a thing.
The University of Northern Colorado’s Mirror gave me the heave-ho after my cartoons inchwormed up some overly tight arseholes. Years later the weekly Sentinel chain in Denver showed me the door; it was part of the usual layoffs, but I got mine for being a dick. The publisher was a twat. These two things can coexist, even find happiness, but ours wasn’t a match made in heaven.
As a freelancer for VeloNews and Bicycle Retailer and Industry News I annoyed a few readers and advertisers with cartoons and columns, but my crimes were rarely felonies and management almost always had my back.
When I finally left it was under my own steam and nobody changed the locks afterward. There were no mourners, but neither was there a lynch mob. I’ll call that a win.
Dilbert and The Old Guy Who Gets Fat in Winter appeared the same year, in 1989. Thank Cthulhu old Fatso never made it as big (har de har har) as Dilbert did. ’Tis unknown what class of a dick I might have made of meself on the YouTubes.
• Editor’s note: Props to The Firesign Theatre’s Nino the Mind-Boggler for the headline.
Hot water at the touch of a button. Welcome to … the Future!
We bought an electric kettle to save all y’all from our gas cooktop.
You’re welcome.
Now instead of firing up the KitchenAid Death Machine to heat water for the morning pour-over, we punch a button on this OXO Brew and hey presto! Hot water. It’s magic.
Of course, we get our power from a secret plant outside Grants that generates electricity by slow-roasting the homeless. It sells the meat to Mickey D’s. We like to think of it as a win-win.
There’s a whole lot going on in the world lately, and I’ve been doing my best to ignore most of it.
Turn your radio on.
Instead of breaking news, I’ve been breaking wind, metaphorically speaking — which is to say, farting around with Radio Free Dogpatch again.
Hey, what could I tell you? The Voices have been bored, and that’s always bad news.
We’ve been having a meeting of the minds as to exactly why we want to belly-flop back into this sonic kiddie pool, a shallow backwater that drains feebly and sporadically into the Great Audio River.
But apparently we’re at least one mind short.
However, we do not lack for Voices. And they all have their own microphones because somebody around here got a little acquisitive a couple years back. If we don’t pipe them into your heads, they’ll keep hanging around in ours.
All of which means, yes, yes, yes, it’s time for another episode of Radio Free Dogpatch, where the air is never definitively dead, it’s just not at all well.
Our friendly neighborhood water wizard John Fleck got to make a big wake by the boat dock in The New York Times this morning, taking California to task for “trying to protect its outsized water supply at the expense of others in the region. …”
Those others, in case you were wondering, include Your Humble Narrator and his friends and neighbors in New Mexico, Colorado, and Arizona.
John writes:
If we approach the challenge with a sense of fairness and shared sacrifice it will be possible to save the West that we know and love.
From your lips to God’s ears, as my people say. What was the line about learning to share in kindergarten? Maybe California needs some remedial education. That juicy Colorado River pie has become something of a dried-out shit sandwich, and we’re all going to have to take a bite.
Check out the entire essay, and follow John over at his own little adobe hacienda on the banks of the Great Digital River.
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