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.
I’m not quite sure why. Perhaps to avoid the full moon/total lunar eclipse on Election Day? Cthulhu only knows who — or what — might turn up at the polling place come Tuesday.
“He sure does, Gustav old scout, and let’s hope he stays there.”
Of course, we could’ve just skipped voting entirely. Plenty of people do.
Others pick losers and then claim the game is rigged, try to tip over the table, send the cards and chips flying.
You pays your money and you takes your choice.
Clearly these knuckleheads have never been to Las Vegas. There are always losers. If there were not, the Paiutes would still hold the mortgage on the place.
And has anyone else noticed that when these gardeners spreading their fertilizer around the Tree of Liberty actually win, they’re totally cool with it?
“Huh? ‘Stop the steal?’ How’d you like to stop some lead, fella? Looks like Hillary forgot to hit ‘save’ after she had the Illuminati reprogram the Dominion machines for the Chicoms, huh? (singing) Gonna hang George Soros from a sour apple tree. …”
And the game continues.
There are times when it feels that it’s not the arm you’re working on that cherry-popping bandit in Uncle Sam’s Casino. But it’s the only game in town.
And what the hell? If you don’t play, you can’t win.
All Hallows’ Eve at El Rancho Pendejo was a total blowout, but not the kind one hopes for.
Some aspect of PNM’s power project in the ’hood unplugged half the cul-de-sac, including our place.
Around midmorning I saw a few trucks pull in and park, disgorging their hard-hatted contents into a neighbor’s yard. And so when a couple minutes later The Compound went dark I trotted out into my yard and spied them beavering away at some task beyond the wall.
“Hey, guys, the power’s out here,” I sez to ’em I sez.
“Oopsie,” they sez to me they sez, or something very much not like that.
Over we go.
Long story short, an autopsy found a transformer had been terminated with extreme prejudice and would not arise in three days or even three years. It would have to be replaced.
In case you were wondering, this is a tad more complicated than swapping in a new fuse after you try to run the box fan and hair dryer simultaneously in the ol’ singlewide.
The defunct transformer was in some impossible cranny in the yard, because of course it was, and the hard hats couldn’t just sherpa a new one in there. Superman was taking a meeting with James Gunn and Peter Safran at Warner Bros-DC, and the Hulk said he wouldn’t work on Halloween.
“This is gonna take some doing,” grumbled one hard hat, giving me the side-eye. Hey, boss, I didn’t hammer a stake topped with a Hillary 2024 placard through your transformer’s heart. I was camped in my office, pounding out the fake news, and free of charge, too.
Or I was until the power went out, anyway.
But I keed, I keed.
What happened next was nothing short of amazing.
We — or at least I — have grown accustomed to the “sucks to be you” school of customer service. “We can pencil you in for between midnight and 4 a.m. on Feb. 31st, if that works for you, or even if it doesn’t.” That sort of thing.
But these dudes got right after it. They disappeared for a while, and I was anticipating a long wait for them to return, perhaps bearing electricity, or more likely, excuses.
Nope. In fairly short order the cul-de-sac was clogged with pickups and flatbeds and a big-ass crane, and before you could say “Thomas Edison” the crane was hoisting a new transformer over the neighbor’s roof and into the yard.
Jack-o-taillights.
As dark fell the hard hats were eating pizza from boxes on the hoods of the trucks, and we were eating jambalaya from bowls, and everyone was watching the crane operator perform his magic.
“That’s something you don’t see every day, hey?” said a hard hat.
For real.
We lit our plastic pumpkin with battery-powered Cygolite tail lights, brightened the front walk with their companion headlights, and used a couple rechargeable lanterns indoors (Biolite and Nite Ize).
But with all the goings-on in the cul-de-sac most of the neighborhood trick-or-treaters decided to give us a pass. Herself handed out some treats to the hard hats, but we have plenty left over. It was easily our worst turnout since the height of the Plague Years.
But the power’s back on, and the hard hats popped round this morning to double-check their work. Well done indeed.
Nothing says Halloween like a plug-in plastic punkin.
I used to love Halloween. It was my favorite holiday by far. Who doesn’t want to be someone or something else for at least one day per annum?
Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird … it’s a plane … no, it’s The Kid with the Giant Head!
Mom made more than a few costumes for me: Superman, Mike “Sea Hunt” Nelson, even one of my own cartoon characters, Loadedman.
I can’t remember how the hell I talked her into that one. Surely I never let her read any of the comics. They did not promise a future of fame and fortune for Your Humble Narrator.
Eventually I started cobbling together my own getups, but found my options limited by my everyday appearance, which was long on hair. The pirate thing is easy, but gets boring after a few voyages.
So I stretched myself a bit. I was Chihuahua Guevara one year, and Jesus another. The Che getup was easy — basically pirate, but with assault rifle and beret instead of cutlass and bandana — but the Prince of Peace required a little more skull sweat.
Chihuahua Guevara, Fido Castro, take your pick.
It was a combo act. A newpaper colleague and I planned to crash a divinity-school party as the Deities from New Jersey, with accents to match.
Robes and halos were a snap, and I used green trash-bag ties to fashion a crown of thorns, but we couldn’t talk anyone into joining us as the Holy Ghost. Something about “blasphemy.”
Yeah, right. Like we weren’t already going to Hell for running an afternoon newspaper.
One aspect short of a Trinity, we were forced to improvise and adapt. In short, to evolve. We bought a white helium-filled balloon and slapped a happy-face sticker on it. Hallelujah. The Lord helps those who help themselves.
At another newspaper I managed to catch the publisher napping one All Hallows’ Eve. I throttled back my prodigious beard, then braided my hair and stuffed it down the collar of a very pro dress shirt. Took out the earring, added tie, slacks, and footwear, and went to work.
Well sir, I don’t mind telling you the publisher was impressed. Shook my hand and congratulated me on finally joining the human race.
Later I left for lunch and returned clad in motorcycle-outlaw finery — all hair and earring and black boots and denim, including a vest with homemade “Hell’s Editors” colors on the back and a “No Morals” button on the front.
The publisher subsequently went dotty. I like to think I contributed in my own small way.
These days I mostly play it straight. We hang around the house and wait for all the little goblins to pop round, screeching for sugar.
If anybody asks what I’m doing for Halloween I tell them I’m going as an old white guy. I can’t imagine anything scarier.
Ah, sure, an’ in what class of a donnybrook would ye be without us so?
The scholar and scribe Thomas Cahill has gone west. He was 82.
Cahill is perhaps best known for his book, “How the Irish Saved Civilization: The Untold Story of Ireland’s Heroic Role from the Fall of Rome to the Rise of Medieval Europe.” (You’re welcome, by the way.)
It was to be the kickoff to a seven-part series about critical moments in Western European civilization, according to The New York Times; he wrote six before his death Oct. 18 in Manhattan.
In his introduction, Cahill argues:
“And yet … Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance or Enlightenment — in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture — had one moment of unblemished glory. For, as the Roman Empire fell, as all through Europe matted, unwashed barbarians descended on the Roman cities, looting artifacts and burning books, the Irish, who were just learning to read and write, took up the great labor of copying all of western literature — everything they could lay their hands on. These scribes then served as conduits through which the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian cultures were transmitted to the tribes of Europe, newly settled amid the rubble and ruined vineyards of the civilization they had overwhelmed.”
Without “the Mission of the Irish Monks,” he continues, “the world that came after them would have been an entirely different one — a world without books. And our own world would never have come to be.”
By the end of “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” Cahill seems to wonder whether the worlds of then and now are really all that different.
He writes:
“As we, the people of the First World, the Romans of the twentieth century, look out across our Earth, we see some signs for hope, many more for despair. …
“Perhaps history is always divided into Romans and Catholics — or better, catholics. The Romans are the rich and powerful who run things their way and must always accrue more because they instinctively believe that there will never be enough to go around; the catholics, as their name implies, are universalists who instinctively believe that all humanity makes one family, that every human is an equal child of God, and that God will provide.
“The twenty-first century, prophesized (André-Georges) Malraux, will be spiritual or it will not be. If our civilization is to be saved — forget about our civilization, which, as (St.) Patrick would say, may pass “in a moment like a cloud or smoke that is scattered by the wind” — if we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla couldn’t care less that some elongated muskrat has made off with Twatter, or Twitcher, or whatever that other thing she couldn’t care less about is called.
Miss Mia is an intelligent Animal, a Higher Order (h/t James McBride, “Mr. P & the Wind”). She don’t need no phone, tablet, or laptop to get your attention. If she wants it she will throw a meow your way or do something cute like frolic in a crinkly pile of wrapping paper, or turn your crumpled comforter into a cat cave.
And it goes without saying that she would never ever come over to your house uninvited and hammer a loved one into the hospital.
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