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.
Somebody — multiple somebodies, actually — has intercoursed the penguin in dramatic fashion as regards the Albuquerque Rapid Transit (ART) project, which already had all the positive press of a buddy flick called “Hey, Look At My Dick!”, starring Louis C.K. and Harvey Weinstein, directed by Roman Polanski from a script by Woody Allen.
Seriously, how do you fuck up a nine-mile bus line? And the nine miles of retail that goes with it? That takes real talent. I expect these people to go far, and probably soon, too, before the angry mobs kick down their doors.
• Late update: And meanwhile, as expected here at the Duke City Chuckle Hut, the ACLU comes after Albuquerque for its thickheaded, ham-handed anti-panhandling ordinance. Defending this attempt to keep Those People away from the tony real estate is another budget item we could have done without.
Well, kinda, sorta. Still, it was enough for the National Weather Service to declare an end — or at least an intermission — to the fifth longest dry streak since 1891.
“All in all, it’s nothing to write home about,” said NWS meteorologist Randall Hergert.
Oh, I dunno. Maybe a quick email:
Dear Mom,
Not on fire. Yet. Please send fire-retardant jammies for my birthday.
Love,
Patrick
Elsewhere, I see Steve Bannon is at loose ends. Never fear, he’ll land on his feet. Just as soon as he pulls them out of his mouth.
And the Republicans aren’t waiting around to get tossed out like Sloppy Steve. They’re running — not for re-election, but for the exits. Even Obama’s bestie Darrell Issa has seen the light, the way a roach does right before it scuttles under the stove.
Meanwhile, what the fuck is it with The New York Times and its pix of elevator doors closing on fascists? Cut that shit out. Seriously. You can bring the concept back when it’s lids closing on coffins.
Blogging is a sort of ballet, a piece of performance art originally done largely by amateurs.
But what if you don’t feel like keeping yourself on your toes?
Happily for me, I have you to keep me hopping. But my man Hal Walter has a smaller, less boisterous audience over at Hardscrabble Times, and he’s been wondering whether the game is worth the candle.
We have similar professional backgrounds, Hal and I. And we both dove headlong into the so-called “gig economy” long before it was cool and as a consequence have wives who outearn us six ways from Sunday.
But we find ourselves in wildly different situations at the moment.
Hal rattles around the rarified boondocks of Crusty County, Colo., whilst I reside in the tony suburbs of the Duke City. Hal keeps burros; I keep cats and what Herself claims is a dog. Hal mostly runs, and occasionally rides; I do it the other way around.
And Hal has an autistic son, while I do not.
That may be the kicker right there. A kid “on the spectrum” can be a real time-suck, and something of an unexpected and ongoing expense, and so Hal naturally feels compelled to devote the bulk of his attention to (a) his son, and (2) feeding the beast that dollars up fastest on the hoof.
This would not be his blog, in case you were wondering.
I hate to see it lying fallow, and say so now and again. But Hal replies that feeding the beast and shoveling up the mess afterward turns his brain to mush and leaves him with little left to say for free at Hardscrabble Times.
Where little is said, there are few to listen, and if the house is full of empty seats when the lights come up, well, shit, why bother to put on your red shoes and dance the blues?
So here’s my question: What brings you to a blog like mine or Hal’s? How many of these shops do you visit while making your daily rounds and what do they have on tap? Is it all about the words or do some folks do compelling photos, audio and video as well?
And if you like something you see on this blog or any other, do you comment, and then spread the word elsewhere?
My Bicycle Retailer and Industry News column may be a thing of the past, but I still have deadlines, and Lord, how them sumbitches can fill a feller’s dance card.
I’ve been burning daylight over the Giant ToughRoad SLR 1, exchanging emails with former VeloNews comrade Andrew Juskaitis, now senior global product marketing manager for the Big G, and after an extended stretch of demonstrating my profound ignorance I decided yesterday that it was time to ride one of my own damn’ bikes for a change.
It had to be steel, of course, with drop bars, rim brakes, and tires with inner tubes. And with the weekend promising congestion on the trails I thought it might be nice to get a quick off-road ride while the gettin’ was good.
When is a rock not a rock? When it’s a Buddha.
So the Voodoo Nakisi and I set off for the usual casual loops around the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
Well, almost the usual.
Our local trail network is well marked with signs for people who like to follow maps (Trail 365, 305, etc.) and for those who don’t (Trail Closed for Rehabilitation). But there’s the occasional unmarked stretch that makes you go “Hmmmm.. …”
On a whim, I followed a couple of those yesterday, just to see where they went, and one of them meandered upward until it became frankly unrideable (by me, anyway). So I got off and wandered around for a bit, assuming I was more or less up against the wilderness boundary, taking snaps with the iPhone and just enjoying being away from the office.
I looked down at the Duke City, and snap, and then looked up at the ridgeline, and … holy shit! Check out that rock formation. It looks like a Buddha sitting zazen with his back to all of this.
Well, it does to anyone with an overactive imagination, anyway. It seemed too heavy a stone to carry around in my head, though, so I bowed to it, left it where it was, and got back about the business of avoiding business.
• Editor’s note: Further bows to “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones: A Collection of Zen and Pre-Zen Writings,” compiled by Paul Reps and Nyogen Senzaki.
