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.

12 Days of ’Toonsmas

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Cash-ing in: Emerald Expositions shot our show in Reno,
just to watch it die.

Most of yis probably don’t see Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, the magazine I’ve freelanced words and cartoons to since 1992.

Bicycle Retailer, better known as BRAIN, is a trade mag, not made available to the general public. And so unless you’ve been caught short while visiting your local shop to pick up some Kool-Stop pads for your Dia-Compe 986es and stumbled into the “reading room” to offload some oatmeal, why, you’ve been missing all the fun.

For years I wrote a column for the mag, “Mad Dog Unleashed,” which was ostensibly about cycling and its supporting industry, but often wandered far afield, like a shop rat at Interbike in search of free beer. It would have been fun to call it “Collect Telegram from a Mad Dog,” but Hunter S. Thompson would have hunted me down and Maced me for that.

The column eventually went away, as they will, but the cartoon remains. “Shop Talk” is likewise in theory about the bike and the biz, but in practice it often has something to say other than “Disc brakes are superior to rim brakes,” “You must have a full-suspension mountain bike to ride the local trails,” and “E-bikes are the Future of the Industry.”

Uh huh. La Velo Nostra has had a lot of futures, which makes me think it should consider hiring quantum mechanics instead of the usual sort.

But we are dealing with the past at the present. And thus I reprint the “Shop Talk” strip from the January 2019 issue of BRAIN. It’s Day One of the 12 Days of ’Toonsmas, and my little gift to you.

Showing the colors

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
A blast from the past, repurposed for 2019.

Well, the package is under the Christmas tree, but it’s not exactly what we hoped for, is it?

It’s a lot smaller than we thought, for starters. Missing a few pieces, seems like.

And we won’t get much time to play with it. A bunch of smirking old men wearing American-flag lapel pins are gonna take it away from us, just because they can. Doesn’t matter that we paid for it. Or that we’ll keep paying for it, for years.

When Vito Corpulento rose to power I thought that maybe, just maybe, the GOP would eventually wipe the blood off its flabby mitts, look around at the wreckage of the Republic, and say, “Whew. Well, we got almost everything we needed from the loony bastard. He’s not even a made guy. Let’s kick him to the curb.”

Wrong. The GOP is a gang, like the Gambino family, the Klan, or the Hells Angels. And gangs under attack tend to overlook any niggling internal disagreements.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the Angels as a tuneup for writing about Nixon, and tell me if this quote from a Frisco Angel doesn’t sound like your modern Republican Party:

“Our motto, man, is ‘All on One and One on All.’ You mess with an Angel and you’ve got twenty-five of them on your neck. I mean, they’ll break you but good, baby.”

They couldn’t do shit in the House except make a lot of bad noise, like a poorly tuned Harley. That’s the junior chapter over there, a bunch of prospects on mopeds, hoping to wear the colors some day. Good luck with that. The Senate wouldn’t let a bag of farts like Louie Gohmert in the back door to swab out the toilets after Taco Tuesday if he promised to use his tongue.

No, the Senate is strictly for the heavy hitters. It’s where business gets done. And by “done,” I mean done.

“Package? What package?” smirks The Turtle. “We never got no package from those guys. What could I tell you? But hey, it’s the holidays. There’s a lot going on. It’ll turn up, someday, maybe.

“Now get the fuck out of here. We’re doing business. Family business. And you don’t look like family to me.”

Book ’im, Dan-o

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
You have the right to remain noisy as a busted chainsaw.

Well, the cop has written the tickets. But this bozo knows the judge, so. …

Nevertheless, well done to all those who did the right thing despite the Flying Monkey Caucus jinking around the room, screeching like turpentined banshees and shitting all over the Constitution.

A special shout-out to Rep. Deb Haaland (D-NM), whom I have been annoying on this subject for the better part of quite some time.

R.I.P., Larry Heinemann

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment
My old paperback copy of “Close Quarters” has taken a beating from reading and re-reading.

Goddamn, this is turning out to be an ugly day.

Larry Heinemann, who was the surprise winner of the National Book Award for fiction in 1987, died Dec. 11 in Texas. He was 75.

Heinemann won the award for “Paco’s Story,” but I read his 1977 novel “Close Quarters” first, and it is one of the best Vietnam War stories out there. Not a pretty story, but it was not a pretty war. None of them is. It was one of the books that made me glad I missed the party.

He did his year in an infantry battalion, then came home, went to school, and started writing.

“I was not one of those guys who got home and went to their room and shut up,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1988. “I know guys who the war’s been eating up for 20 years. Anybody who asked me about it, I told them. I shot my mouth off about everything — the whorehouses, the endless hatred, the ugliness, the real work of the war. It took two to three years of talking to get the story out.”

Heinemann got more of the story out later, in a memoir, “Black Virgin Mountain: A Return to Vietnam.” His hometown paper wrote about it, and him, even including an excerpt.

Upon his return from Vietnam, he wrote:

I felt joyless and old, physically and spiritually exhausted, mean and grateful and uncommonly sad; relieved as if a stone had been lifted from my heart and radicalized beyond my own severely thinned patience: pissed off and ground down by a bottomless grief that I could not right then begin to express.

So, still sore and raw from the war I began writing.