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.

Up on the roof

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
On the roof, the only place I know,
where you just have to wish to make it so.

Every day you are above the sod is a good one.

I was a little further above the sod than is my custom this morning, filling up four 39-gallon Hefty bags with the pine needles carpeting the northernmost corner of our roof.

Ordinarily this would give me some worthy topic for complaint (“Flat roofs are stupid,” and so on). But we don’t live in Turkey, or Syria, so we still have our stupid flat roof intact above our heads instead of in pieces smack dab on top of them.

Plus, we had a roofer take a look-see up there the other day, and he said he thought we didn’t need a completely new roof, just a few precautionary touchups here and there. And maybe someone should rake up that shaggy carpet of pine needles on the north side, he mused.

This roofer worked for the company that installed our roof back in 2007, and shortly thereafter launched his own operation with a lot of the same people from the previous outfit, which is no longer with us (due to personal matters rather than personnel matters).

So we’re inclined toward optimism, which regular visitors know is not Your Humble Narrator’s natural state of being.

Below the roof, down there where the sod lies, a landscaper whose work we have admired has had a walkaround — like the roofer, The Big Boss Man of his outfit — and one of his people just popped by to take some measurements. So we’re expecting a design proposal and cost estimate directly.

Maybe, just maybe, since it seems we might not have to put a new bonnet on El Rancho Pendejo, we can afford to have its grass skirt hemmed. Use a little less of our imaginary Colorado River water. Encourage the lawn-gobbling deer to browse elsewhere, which would endear us to our gardening neighbors.

Flat roofs are stupid, though. Just sayin’.

I’m tired

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
“Vhy don’t you admit it? He’s too much of a man for you. I know! You’re going to need an army to beat him! You’re finished. Fertig! Verfallen! Verlumpt! Verblunget! Verkackt!”

“Joe’s not quick on the draw!
“Won’t lay down the law!”
The GOP croons

But as the Chinese keep spyin’
Joe sends jets a-flyin’
And busts their balloon.

-pop-

Jonesin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Mr. Jones and me tell each other fairytales.

Now and then I think it’s time to thin the velo-herd, so I start taking neglected bikes out for re-evaluation.

“Why are you still on a hook here after all these years?”

“Uh … because you’re a bike hoarder?”

“Oh, yeah, right. Carry on. Next!”

Now, anybody who talks to his bicycles when he’s not arguing with the voices in his head probably should not be evaluating anything without the guidance of trained mental-health professionals in a residential setting.

Yet, here we are, with all these voices and bicycles and daylight to burn. Someone has to take hold. Herself is slightly preoccupied, having the full-time job, plus the eBay side hustle and her volunteer work for the local Donk collective on behalf of The People, whoever they might happen to be.

And anyway, she only has two bikes and one voice, the one she uses to rebuke me for scattering bikes and bits all over the house.

But I digress. As usual.

The Co-Motion Divide Rohloff was getting a lot of love in January. There is no good reason on God’s green earth that I should (a) own this bike, and (2) like it. But I do, with its stout German gizmo hub and shifter mounted near the stem, the Gates carbon belt drive, and even the disc brakes.

And every time I think I should send it away, I treat it to some trail-and-tarmac combo platter by way of a fare-thee-well and come away cooing, “Nope, naw, nuh-uh, not gonna get rid of you. Not this time.”

Mr. Jones and me, stumbling through the barrio.

Yesterday it was the Jones and I who were getting reacquainted in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Both tires were flat when I pulled the Jones off its hook — no surprise, since I hadn’t ridden it in nearly nine months, and I only run 15 psi front and 20 rear. I pumped ’em up, they held air, and off we went.

Now, in my garage, the Jones is something of a weirdo, with its 170mm triple crank, wildly upright position, and swept-back H-bar atop a fork that looks like the uprights at State Farm Stadium. At a prom it would be the oddball in the oversized thrift-store duds slouching in a corner, looks like he cuts his own hair with a Buck knife and no mirror.

But it’s XT all around, with a 19.3-inch low end, and those plump 29×2.4-inch Maxxis Ardent tires soak up an awful lot of rough stuff that a 33mm cyclocross tire just ricochets off of like a stray round from the passenger window of a Civic street racer blowing the red at Central and Pennsylvania.

So, anyway, what was envisioned as a casual one-hour afternoon outing turned into 90 minutes of trails with the sun dropping faster than the New Year’s ball in Times Square.

And once again I came away cooing, “Nope, naw, nuh-uh, not gonna get rid of you. Not this time.”

“Next!”

Antisocial media

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments
Just another fart in a skillet.

Brooding is one of those many useful parts of life that you cannot admit to anymore. People will jump all over you, try to get you committed, drop you off at a yoga retreat. — Ken Layne, “Encounters with Coyote-Man,” on Desert Oracle Radio

I wasn’t brooding, exactly. But I had seen something like the 89,261,254th story on how E. Lawn Mulch has beshat Twatter. Or maybe it was the 63,294,204th “hot take” on how Orange Hitler skirted Buttface’s Maginot line.

Whatever the cause, the effect was my consultation via Apple Messages with colleagues Steve Frothingham and Hal Walter about undertaking a little urban renewal on the virtual town square.

Start sinking today!

“How about ‘TarPit™?'” I pitched to Steve. “‘Stumble into TarPit™ and start sinking today!'”

Instead of a page, users would get a Morass. Instead of tweets or posts, Bubbles:

“Dumbo’s going down for the third time!”

“Hey, I gotta reBubble that … whoops, too late, he’s a goner.”

“I think you are on to something,” replied Steve, who has a magazine and a website to put out and probably included that “to” out of professional courtesy.

As Steve seemed busy for some reason, I took the proposal to Hal, fronting him a couple of Bubbles I thought might be representative of the TarPit™ community.

“Help, help, I’m sinking!”

“Good! ’Bout time, you libtard cuck! Die! Die! Die!”

Hal found the concept interesting but, as is his practice, gave it a redneck spin.

“I’ma launch one called ‘Skillet,’ he announced. “Posts will be referred to as ‘Farts,’ as in, ‘I just Farted about ——.’ And they will be Farts in a Skillet.”

Well sir, I don’t mind telling you we got right on down to some cowboy cooking.

“Instead of ‘Friending,’ people will ‘Sniff’ each other,” Hal declared. “As in, ‘She sent me a Sniff request so I Sniffed her.'”

“ReFarting will be called ‘Lighting,” I added. “‘Hey, I just Lit your Fart!'”

Some unresolved discussion followed about whether direct messages (DMs) should be rebranded “Silent But Deadly” (SBDs) or “Pull My Finger” (PMFs).

As regards a logo, I was thinking — since we’re talking social media here and probably poaching more than a few red hats from Twatter — that we needed something monstrously racist, like a cartoon of a grinning pinto bean sporting a garish sombrero, a huge mustache, and a prominent gold tooth. Good draw for the NextDoor-OffMyLawn shutins, too.

Nope, said Hal. “The logo is just a frying pan: ‘SKILLET.'”

“That would be simpler,” I agreed. “Avoid the DOJ. Also, the Brown Berets.”

“Fucking A,” said Hal. “They don’t play.”

In the end nothing came of all this spitballing, which is probably just as well. It starts with a noble quest — help people heap abuse upon each other without getting punched (and while making bank for yourself) — and next thing you know you’re going off-piste into virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and space travel to places that make Ash Fork, Arizona, look like Maui.

Pretty soon you’re wearing a goggled helmet for real because you can’t breathe what Nuevo Arizona (the planet formerly known as Mars) has for an atmosphere. Orange Hitler’s Meata avatar runs your HOA. And E. Lawn Mulch is doing donuts outside your pod in his AWD Testo with an AI Sex-O-Bot 9000™  working his lap like a Sherwin-Williams paint shaker.

“There goes the neighborhood,” you grumble on NextPod-OffMySand. And then Mark Schmuckerberg Farts at you, and Jeff Bozos Lights it, and your pod explodes before you can create a GoFundMe to underwrite your return trip to Earth.