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.
Nope, no balloons or cylindrical objects up there. Not even a “feets ball.”
A quick peek outside this morning found no mystery objects floating over the Sandias, but I understand that some sort of “sporting event” lurks just over the western horizon.
Something involving the “feets ball,” a televised gladiatorial spectacle designed to indulge the American appetite for mayhem, shopping, and bad noise.
We do not follow the “feets ball” here at El Rancho Pendejo. It reminds us of the Marvel nonsense, in which people are paid handsomely to put on uniforms and helmets and then butt heads like randy goats. Herself calls it “punch porn.”
Marvel’s costumed employees generally enjoy longer careers than the “feets ball” gang, because they are only pretending to stomp each other into a thin paste. The NFL’s grunts ain’t playin’, though they call their line of work a “game.”
In that “game,” the average career is just 3.3 years, thanks to injuries, retirement, or getting cut by one’s team. Robert Downey Jr. lasted 11 years as Iron Man. And the only brain damage he has was self-inflicted, before he signed on with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Though I’ll bet his head hurts when he thinks about trying to count all the money he made playing Marvel’s souped-up Tin Man with attitude.
Anyway, instead of watching the “feets ball” or “Ant-Man and The Who: Quadrophenia” we will be checking out Marc Maron’s new HBO special, “From Bleak to Dark.”
Maron riffed on Iron Man and the MCU during his last standup special, “End Times Fun,” available on Netflix. Like Downey Jr. (and Your Humble Narrator), Maron chose the scenic route to brain damage over getting spiked nose first into the Astroturf like a lawn dart, six inches shy of the goal line.
Maron’s not for everyone. But then neither is the “feets ball.”
This dude did not get shot down by the Pentagon, though his flight path took him dangerously close to the super-secret Mad Dog Media Institute for Gratuitous Bloggery.
• Saturday update: Jeebus. Now the Blue Zoomies have shot down another floater, this time over Canada. This is a slightly more expensive version of the old flaming bag of dogshit on the stoop. Whoever wants one is getting an up-close-and-personal look at a U.S. fighter aircraft that entered service about the same time as my Subaru.
This is what a juniper dusted with snow looks like at 5:14 in the ayem.
I meant to post this pic the other day and completely spaced it whilst mumbling on and on about podcasting and whatnot.
We woke on Wednesday to a measurable amount of precip’, not enough to resolve the megadrought, but just enough to keep me off a bicycle. Instead I went for a short run once the temps rose a bit.
I have no idea what made these tracks in the backyard. Fox? Coyote? La Llorona of Hobbiton?
Ten years ago I would come to The Duck! City from Bibleburg in February to get away from winter.
I’d check into the Hampton at Carlisle and I-40 and ride the bike all the doo-dah day, and in shorts and short sleeves, too.
Hit the Mexican restaurants, or fetch a sack of tasty treats from the Wholeazon Amafoods across the interstate from the motel. Binge-watch HBO in the room come evening.
I had no idea that in a year we’d be living down here. Zee-ro. If you’da told me I’da laughed in your face.
“Herself is going to get a job at Sandia National Labs that pays more money in one year than I’ve made in my entire life? We’re moving to Albuquerque? Ho, ho. Pull the other leg so I’ll be even when I go out to run in the snow. Albuquerque. Hee, and also haw.”
Well, she did, and we did, and here I am, running in February on the New Mexican snow.
Nobody — well, almost nobody — is launching a new podcast these days.
Back in 2020, more than a million new podcasts were trying to grab the world by its ears, according to the search engine Listen Notes, via Joshua Benton at NiemanLab.
But in 2021, that number dropped to 729,000. And in 2022, it fairly plummeted to 219,000.
Oof. As Benton adds:
Roughly everyone launched a podcast in the COVID-19 pandemic’s nadir, and a big part of the decline is an aftereffect of that fact. All that time stuck in your house had to be put to use somehow, after all. The 2020-21 spike in cognitive surplus was always destined to recede.
Truer words, etc. Even more so for those of us running a cognitive deficit. I launched Radio Free Dogpatch on Nov. 13, 2013, and churned out 46 episodes on a highly irregular schedule before calling it quits on March 1, 2021, when I finally lost the thread for good.*
I didn’t formally stop production; I just never started another episode. And apparently I had plenty of company. Again, from Benton:
There are 369,545 podcasts whose last episode was released between 2010 and 2019 — a full decade. But there are 1,318,646 whose last episode came out in either 2020 or 2021. Those two pandemic years featured a huge number of new podcasts launched, yes — but it also witnessed the death of an unprecedented number of shows.
To put it another way: Of all the podcasts that have stopped publishing since 2010, 78% of them stopped in either 2020 or 2021. The huge spike in creation coincided with a huge spike in destruction.
I managed only five episodes in 2021 before pulling the plug. But I had been wildly inconsistent since the get-go, never sticking to my goal of one per week for more than a few months and taking entire years off.
You can browse the entire Radio Free Dogpatch archive by clicking the image.
Radio Free Dogpatch was like a rocket that failed to achieve orbit. Three episodes in 2013, three more in 2016, nine in 2018, 10 in 2019. … Hang on, boys, we’re riding the lightning!
Or … not. RFD gained a little more altitude — I managed 16 episodes in 2020 — but that only meant it had further to fall once it flamed out.
If a podcast falls in the media wilderness and nobody’s listening, does it make a sound?
Not in this instance. Producing RFD involved a lot of hardware, software, and uninformed tinkering; writing and rewriting scripts, recording and editing audio, finding and adding effects and music. But it never attracted the volume of comments that attend a simple prose post with photo.
The podcast seemed to have all the traction of a 23mm slick in deep sand. When it finally augured in there wasn’t an audible thump.
I haven’t given it much thought over the past two years. But since reading Benton’s piece in late January I’ve been idly conducting a mental autopsy on RFD, and I think I’ve nailed down the cause(s) of death.
First, my best year, 2020, ran only from January through April. Finally, I was consistent, but only for four months. Why?
Well, in March 2020 we went on lockdown. So Herself had to start working from home, which drastically altered the sonic environment in the old home studio. Suddenly there was more than one of us hollering into a microphone, and only one of us was making any money doing it.
At one point I found myself reduced to jabbering into a portable recorder in our walk-in closet in hopes of getting some clean audio. I briefly felt some sympathy for Paul McCartney, who must have felt likewise bollixed when John Lennon abruptly became available only as a package deal, bundled with Yoko Ono.
Except I wasn’t Paul, or John, or George, or Ringo. Shit, I wasn’t even Yoko. They were all pros. I was just another amateur overequipped with technology he didn’t fully comprehend, all the chops of a Beatles wannabe singing into a hairbrush in front of the bathroom mirror, and not enough space — or drive, frankly — to get any better.
We’re living in what may be the most democratic age of communications the world has ever known. Publishing, broadcasting, exhibiting — if the spirit moves, you can create something and run it up the digital flagpole, see if anyone salutes (preferably with all five fingers).
But occasionally your baby gets that single-digit critique, or worse, a yawn, a blank stare. Not all babies are beautiful.
A laptop won’t make you a writer. A camera won’t make you a photographer. And a microphone won’t make you Ira Glass. It’s not a magic wand, though in the right hands it can be spellbinding.
I just wasn’t that good. But I had fun finding that out.
• • •
* That bit up top about how “I finally lost the thread for good?” While I was banging out this blog post I kept thinking about how I could turn it into a podcast. Jesus H., etc. Some people are slow learners.
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