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.

Through a glass, darkly

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The Hall of Dreams.

Weird dreams last night. Lots of rain; a bicycle with a dynamo light I couldn’t get working; a close encounter with a mystery motorist who nearly clipped me as I wrestled with the unresponsive light; long drives with people I knew through vaguely familiar landscapes and towns; a small, dilapidated guest house that likewise had the feel of someplace I’d lived before; a couple of friendly dogs I didn’t recognize; and a visit to and some conversation with a genial old man living in a single cluttered room.

What finally blew me out of bed at 5:19 a.m. — and I mean had me out of the rack and onto my feet in some fight-or-flight reaction — was the sound of a woman either laughing or crying.

Herself watching a cute-animal video on the iPad? The garlicky pasta sauce I made for dinner? La Llorona?

Wasn’t Herself. She was in the kitchen making coffee and entertaining Miss Mia Sopaipilla. And she had disturbing dreams too, about her late mom and an old friend who passed not long after Herself the Elder. So it could’ve been the pasta sauce, I suppose.

La Llorona? A strong maybe. This is the Southwest, after all, though my crowd, the Ó Grádaighs of County Clare, is more closely associated with the banshee, an Irish herald of death.

So it may be relevant that yesterday I spoke with one old bro’ about friends and relatives gone west, and with another about the Doors, who took their name from Aldous Huxley’s book describing his experiences with mescaline, “The Doors of Perception,” its title likewise lifted from a William Blake metaphor in his book, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.”

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern.

Now, I have had my own experiences with mescaline and other psychedelics, starting in “high” school and continuing off and on into the Eighties. And they certainly took the Windex to my perceptual doors, if only for a little while.

But these days I see “through a glass, darkly,” as did Paul in 1 Corinthians 13, adding, “now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

Or, as newspaper lingo once had it: “More TK” (more to come).

Y’think? Naw. Maybe? I dunno.

Until further enlightenment arrives, I’m betting on either garlicky pasta sauce or acid flashback, though the latter doesn’t explain why Herself had weird dreams too. An acid head she was not.

The good news? We have leftovers. So, “more TK.”

Turn the page

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Drawing a blank instead of drawing a bead.

I’ve been finding it hard to write lately.

It’s not the infamous “writer’s block.” The problem is that the only thing I want to write about is all the you-know-what coming from you-know-where.

And isn’t there enough of that sort of thing available pretty much everywhere? Every day? Every second?

I find myself belatedly having some sympathy for the mouth-breathers who squealed like maladjusted brakes whenever my columns would veer off the course laid out in the race bible and careen into the real world. Which, if we’re being brutally honest here, was pretty much all the time.

“Stick to cycling!” they’d wail.

“Everything is political!” I’d bark.

Now I’m just a blogger and don’t have to meet a regular deadline or wrestle with nervous editors, penny-pinching publishers, and illiterate critics.

Too harsh? Hey, I read the letters.

“Go back to waxing your chain, Spanky,” I’d grumble. “Leave writing to the pros.”

These days I write for free, because I like it. Anyone who doesn’t like it is likewise free, to fuck off.

Still, I’m not entirely sociopathic. I have you hardcores, my small, deeply disturbed audience, to consider. And I don’t want every single brain-dump here to be of the rancid, greasy, orange variety. There are only so many different ways to say ‘BOHICA!'”

Thing is, to write about anything else feels vaguely criminal. Borderline treasonous. Anyone with a voice, however small, should be sounding off like they have a pair.

What’s a poor mad dog to do?

Well, you may imagine my delight when I stumbled across another scribbler in similar straits. Chuck Wendig is a published author — like, of actual books, an’ shit — and he has a new one due out April 29, “The Staircase in the Woods.”

I first noticed him when The New York Times included “Staircase” in a roundup of 24 new works of fiction to read. Then his name came up again over at Daring Fireball, the free-ranging blog by John Gruber, who promoted this “crackerjack essay” Wendig had written while trying to write about other stuff and promote the new book and basically just live his fucking life.

It’s titled “What It Feels Like, Right Now.” Here’s a sample:

Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.

Top-shelf stuff here, folks. Rage and comedy, despair and hope, the whole ball of wax. Writing as an escape and an act of resistance. Inspirational.

In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately ordered up his new book from my favorite local bookstore, Page 1 Books.

Shit, I’d have given him the $32.29 just for the essay.

Up the (pedal) revolution

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
Going up. …

Some days, the smashing of the State will just have to wait.

… very, very slowly.

Yesterday was one of them.

The high temp was 83°, which can be something of a shock to the system in April. But we’ve eased into it, starting with 50-something on Monday and jumping up 10 degrees each day.

Shoot, I’ve managed nearly 100 miles so far this week and it ain’t over yet.

Oh, yeah: And in case you think I’ve gone soft on fascism, I’ll have you know that I struck a blow for The People on yesterday’s ride. The gate to La Cueva Picnic Site was closed and locked, but I snuck around it and rode to the top anyway.

¡Venceremos! ¡Sí, sue puede!

Keep your Guard up

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 26 Comments
I don’t think this one’s gonna make it.

So, the New Mexico National Guard will be deploying to … The Duck! City?

Good training in case they have to go up against the Houthis anytime soon, I suppose.

But at first glance this “emergency response” to crime hereabouts seems to have a lot of wobble to it.

According to the Albuquerque Journal, the planned deployment follows “a March 31 request from APD Chief Harold Medina for the military to fulfill ‘non-law enforcement duties’ such as providing security at crime-scene perimeters and transporting prisoners, among others.”

But Medina says this thing “has been in the works for months after the NMNG offered help.”

APD is to monitor the “pilot project” with an eye toward measuring its success, says the chief. But the executive order from Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham “left the timeline for the NMNG’s presence open-ended.”

The 60-some-odd Guardspersons are to provide security at the courthouse, airport and other facilities, and medical support for the unhoused along East Central. Medina said this “would free up 20 to 30 officers for law enforcement and crime-fighting.” I’m not sure Skippy the Dipshit and his DOGEbags would call this efficient, but hey, what do I know? Onliest thing I run is this keyboard here.

Oddly, in making their case for bringing the Guard to town, Medina and Duck! City Mayor Tim Keller cited quarter-year stats indicating “large decreases in crime, compared with 2024.”

The mayor explained thusly: “What we want to do is double down on what’s working … and what’s working is technology and civilians … freeing up officers to fight crime and keep those statistics going in this powerfully good direction.”

P.S., he added: The city isn’t picking up the tab.

Neither Medina nor Keller offered any idea of how long the Guardspersons would be needed. Medina hopes to have a bunch of new cops on board — about 150 of them — before the bugler sounds “Retreat.”

The GOP said what the GOP usually says, which explains why it has as much influence on state politics as some poor sod living in a Glad bag at Wyoming and Central.

Likewise, the ACLU views with its usual alarm. Daniel Williams, policy advocate at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, said in a press release that the assistance was “a show of force, not a show of solutions.”

“History has shown that military collaboration with local law enforcement often leads to increased civil rights violations, racial profiling, and criminalization of vulnerable populations, particularly those experiencing homelessness and poverty,” he said.

The troops are to be unarmed and clad not in uniforms but rather in polo shirts (we can only hope that pants will be included). I do get that breezy feeling from the rear that our pants are being pulled down here, but you know what they say about paranoia.