A tip of the Mad Dog fedora to Marc Maron, who reminded me of this quote.
On pestilential debates
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.
Nuts?
And in a sealed plastic bag, from the grocery.
What we have here is a metaphor for the last presidential election, right down to the health-care plan.
“I can’t say it’s cult activity,” the sheriff told reporters. “It is something that we have never in my career run across in this part of the country. It is borderline some type of activity. … We know there’s a lot of rumors out there but at this time there’s no danger to the public.”
Uh huh. Just a couple good ol’ boys who took teabagging to a whole new level.
The Four Horses’ Asses of the Apocalypse
A neighbor rang our doorbell a few minutes ago to advise us that the Cowboys for Trump were parading down Comanche, practically dancing in our laps.
Naturally, I grabbed the iPhone, hopped on a bike, and rolled out to collect a few memories.
I’m told that there were four riders on horseback leading the thing. I suppose the irony eludes them, as do many other things.
Including that they inspired my neighbor to drop everything and go vote — for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Pup fiction
Anxiety dreams last night: I was walking the earth, like Caine in “Kung Fu,” hoofing it from place to place, meeting people, and getting in adventures.
And everywhere I went nobody was wearing a mask.
I was outraged, weaving through the shambling hordes of brain-dead booger-bags as though they were zombie cowboys bent on nativist misbehavior, until I realized that I was likewise unmasked, with my ugly mug hanging out in the wind.
No doubt any competent brain mechanic could make sense of this. I’m guessing it means that deep down I think we’re all in the shit together. Just another kernel panic in MeatWorld™.
Probably didn’t help that I saw a bunch of maskless wanderers on my bike ride yesterday. Or that the guv’nah gave New Mexicans another dressing-down for spreading El Buggo® like honey on a sopaipilla. We are not yet in the actual shit, she sez to us she sez, but we are certainly circling the bowl.
I’m doing my part, boss. Staying home except for grocery shopping and exercise. Washing my paws. And wearing my mask.
Whenever I’m awake, that is. Who doesn’t dream about not wearing a mask?
Two weeks
Hard to believe, innit? Wasn’t it just the other day that we were all sitting in front of our TVs as the election returns began unfolding like the wings of a giant vampire bat, or maybe Rodan the Flying Monster, and we began discussing our options for the next four years?
“Ireland?”
“No, too damp. I’d start drinking again for sure.”
“Canada?”
“Too nice. We wouldn’t fit in. I wouldn’t, anyway.”
“Argentina?”
“Hey, if we wanted to while away the hours around a bunch of old Nazis we could just move back to Bibleburg.”
Now, suddenly, here we are, two weeks away from our last chance to chase Adolf Twitler and his Brown Noses out of the White House before they finish gutting the place like crackheads stripping a squat for its copper wire.
I was running a couple errands yesterday and took another glance at our neighborhood polling place as I passed. The line was even longer than on Saturday, this time stretching all the way around two sides of the strip mall and out of my sight as I barreled down Montgomery in the usual thundering herd of honking land yachts.
I chose to interpret this as a good sign. No, not the land yachts. The line. Angry people ring other people up, write letters to the editor, and vote.
I choose to hope — yes, there’s that word again — that this time the right people are angry for the right reasons.
Yeah, yeah, I know. “Hope in one hand, shit in the other, see which one fills up faster.”
Still, what the hell else can you do? Unless you like living in a Tom Waits song. …
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