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.
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.
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.
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.
His Most Puissant Imperial Majesty, Emperor Turkish the Large, Protector of the Giant White Cats, Lord of the Holy Food Grail, Befouler of Litter Boxes, Biter of Hands, Drinker from Sinks.
Maybe what we need is a king. The American Experiment seems to have given us a clot of unfunny Louis C.K.s bent on showing us their freckled dicks.
Meanwhile, Charlie Pierce is working on the weekend … and so, apparently, is Stormy “Making America Horny Again” Daniels.
Mister Boo still looks pretty chipper for an auld fella, unlike the other one cluttering up the joint.
When a dog yelps at 1 a.m. in the Sandia foothills it can mean someone is climbing in a window with a $2 pistol and a $200-a-day habit, or the deer are in the backyard, eating the trees.
Or, if the pooch is of a certain age, it can be the canine equivalent of the old LifeCall bit (“I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”).
Mister Boo is of a certain age, and when he began yelping at 1 a.m. Thursday I was pretty sure it was neither dope fiends nor deer. He wouldn’t be able to ID either one of those, since he’s blind in one eye and can’t see out of the other.
And if it were a dope fiend, and the dope fiend brought treats, well, The Boo would have a new bestie and the rest of us would soon be chatting with the insurance company, or St. Peter.
You may recall that Herself has an actual job of work, while I do not, so as our furry air-raid siren wailed I stumbled over to the other end of the house to gauge the extent of the damage.
The Boo had peed all over his kennel’s absorbent pads, which was fine, and then toppled over into the pee, which was not.
I carried him outdoors, went back inside, replaced the soiled pads with fresh ones, filled a basin with warm soapy water, and set about freshening up our soggy doggy.
The Boo didn’t like this one little bit, being wet and cold and outdoors, and I didn’t like it either, being shirtless and shoeless, and did I mention it was cold out there?
Afterward he had the shakes and required a cuddle to warm up. I tucked him back into bed as a drowsy Herself wandered in, wondering if it was dope fiends or deer this time. Then we tucked ourselves back into bed and one of us drifted off to sleep.
Come morning I was foggy and irritable for some reason and it was a good thing I didn’t have any paying work on the docket. The Boo, of course, was just dandy. He enjoyed a delicious breakfast — ground beef, minced pasta and green beans in a sauce of apple cider and low-sodium chicken broth — and managed to pee and poop outdoors before joining the cats in morning zazen. Their posture is all wrong and their eyes are closed, but they seem to derive great benefit from these sessions nonetheless.
My mind was not at rest and it was a good thing that my friend Hal messaged me about his latest project. He has a nighttime noisemaker of his own and thought it would be a pleasant diversion to read one of his essays from “Endurance” into some device and pop it up on the Innertubes. So he had some questions about audio recording and distribution.
I am hardly an expert, but the distraction was welcome, so off we went, diving down the rabbit holes of iPads and MacBooks, microphones and headphones, QuickTime and GarageBand, Audacity and Sound Studio, Libsyn and SoundCloud.
The detour proved so absorbing that I drifted off into a side project, reviving my old Radio Free Dogpatch podcast. Well, “reviving” may be a little grandiloquent — as I said, I’m no expert, and audio is more complicated and time-consuming than writing, or even video — but I did rework a 2017 Bicycle Retailer column about The Boo into a sonic short.
