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.

Dognition

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Laying down some hot tracks in the cerebral cortex. Or not.

No Bike Day at the Capitol for Your Humble Narrator. Instead, it’ll be Bike Day in Duke City.

Herself is slowly getting past that cold, though she still has a cough.  She’s made it to work the past couple of days, but is skipping her usual Saturday workout class, the way I’m skipping that trip to Fanta Se.

Goddamnit, he’s set up another checkpoint in the hallway.

Hoping to dodge contagion I’ve been kipping on the far side of our sprawling compound, which annoys Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment), who is deeply suspicious of any departure from standard security protocols.

My practice has likewise been upended, and I’ve felt slightly off all week, even more so than usual. Not sick, but not biking, not blogging. Creatively constipated. Irritable. There’s sand in my oyster, but no pearl.

I’ve been trying to get some ignition in my cognition by fiddling with GarageBand, but can’t get any kind of rhythm going (rimshot).

OK, so that wasn’t bad. The oyster bit was OK, too. Maybe I’m on the road to recovery. If not, at least I can get out on the road. …

Going to pot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
Irish penicillin. You knew the Irish were one of the Lost Tribes of Israel, right? True fact. The Tribe of Danny Boy.

Yes, that is a pot of chicken soup in its larval stage.

Herself has crashed and burned on the living-room couch to the stylin’ sounds of KUVO-FM (“Community, Culture, Music”). The Boo is sacked out in his kennel after a long night of behavior I’d rather not revisit while preparing food. And Turkish and Mia are dozing in their respective sunny spots in the master bedroom.

Only I remain awake to tell the tale. And I’d be on the nod too, but someone has to cook and clean and keep the cats out of the damn’ soup.

Of plagues and houses

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell addresses the Imperial Senate.

Herself is not manning (womanning?) her post at the Death Star today.

It’s not the Feddle Gummint Shutdown. As I understand it, the outfit has enough cash in the till to stay open for a couple weeks, if the Imperial Senate can keep it up that long for purposes of jerking off.

Nah, she just has that bug that’s been making the rounds. Seems everybody has had some class of the creeping crud lately, and I’m really hoping to avoid my annual dunking in the booger pool. Old dogs need their sleep, and staying up all night coughing is not conducive to the bagging of the Z’s.

Thus there is much drinking of the hot tea, and consumption of fruit, and if the temps crack the freezing point I may go out and pound ground for an hour, try to put The Fear into those cooties. It beats watching The Turtle rub one out.

Mayor Chris meets The Outspoken Cyclist

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ Leave a comment
Hizzoner having a spot of fun between mayoral chores.

Diane Jenks recently spoke with my old college roomie Chris Coursey for “The Outspoken Cyclist,” her radio show-slash-podcast.

They discussed cycling, journalism and Santa Rosa, Calif., which continues to feel the aftereffects of last fall’s horrific fires in Napa and Sonoma counties.

Don’t let the cycling kit fool you — you’ll recall from earlier posts that Chris is the mayor of Santa Rosa, and I expect he’s logging most of his miles in that capacity these days.

“We are still very much in the middle of this disaster, and hopefully on the road to recovery,” says Hizzoner.

You can give the interview a listen here:

T H E   O U T S P O K E N   C Y C L I S T:

How dry it am

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
The Bloo Voodoo Wazoo on Friday, before Old Man Winter laid his icy breath on the ’hood.
Break out the sled, hon’, the dog’s rarin’ to go.

One minute you’re tooling around in the Duke City dust, peeling off layers under sunny skies, and the next it’s 10-percenting all over the lawn.

Snowpocalypse it isn’t, but we’ll take every milliliter of moisture we can get.

In a few days we’ll be back at the New Normal — 50s and sunny — and the chains will return to singing “How Dry I Am.”

I may go for a run in this winter wonderland, and then again I may not. I feel like Herself is trying to share her cold with me, the trails may be treacherous, and you know how it is with the elderly, pneumonia and broken hips.