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.
While all y’all were hunting old welder’s masks, ski goggles and colanders with which to view the eclipse, I was sitting in room 127 at the Bernalillo County Courthouse, waiting to see if my wisdom would be required on a jury.
There was a sizable crowd of us, and three trials, the Duke City being something of a Russian novel, crime-and-punishment-wise. The first call missed me, as did the second, but the third hit the bullseye, and off I went with the rest of the remainders to the courtroom of the Honorable Beatrice J. Brickhouse.
We got the “All rise” and a cheery greeting from Her Honor … and that was pretty much it. The parties had agreed to settle mere moments earlier, and thus 12 angry persons would not be helping resolve their disagreement, whatever that might have been. Maybe it was about who got custody of the eclipse sunglasses.
It would be easy to get pissed over a morning down the judicial rathole, but everybody was just so darn nice I thought I had been magically transported back to Canada.
Plus I got paid $7.50 an hour for working on a Bicycle Retailer column and texting various cronies. Beauty, eh? Take off, you hosers. Go watch an eclipse or something.
Back in 1978, as a young reporter at what then was called the Gazette Telegraph in Bibleburg, I spoke with two people who could not have been more different — David Duke and Dick Gregory.
Duke was all PR and puffery, arguing that integration wasn’t “bringing peace and harmony to America, it’s accomplishing the complete opposite.” He described his button-down version of the Ku Klux Klan as “a white counterpart of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People,” and crowed about “a surge of interest and membership in the organization.”
Gregory, as you might expect, approached civil rights from an entirely different angle, knowing a line of horseshit when he smelled it. It was a product he did not carry and would not distribute.
“As long as we have racism and sexism, we are a nation divided,” he said during a speech at the Fort Carson Field House, where he received a standing ovation before heading downtown for another talk at The Colorado College.
“If I walk about for a week with a pile of horse manure in my pocket, ready to throw on you, then whose pocket stinks for a week?” he asked. “And if I walk around with hate in my brain, what is that going to do with my brain?”
Pockets full of horseshit and brains full of hate. Nearly four decades down the road we’re still covering the same old ground. Sisyphus is all like, “Damn, y’all really like rolling that rock, huh?”
• Update:Rolling Stone‘s obit is a good bit more, uh, colorful, than the one in The New York Times.
• Update the Second: Holy shit, now Jerry Lewis has left the building.
It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood, a beautiful day for a neighbor. Would you be mine? Could you be mine?
Thanks to everyone for chiming in with their thoughts about El Bloggeroo, as we say down here south of the border.
I particularly liked Herb’s notion of going 30 days without a post mentioning … well, you know. That guy.
So, let’s! Starting today. For the next 30 days, anyone craves the latest news, analysis and commentary on that particular topic will have to look elsewhere while we air out the joint. Smells like bronzer and Coca-Cola in here.
It’s all downhill from here. That itty bitty green stripe in the distance is the bosque.
More distraction: Sick of being a spectator at our latest national disaster, I hightailed it to the hills yesterday.
It was a short ride, just 25 miles, but a hilly one, meandering up and down the foothills streets before tackling the star of the show, the short, steep climb to La Cueva picnic grounds.
There’s bears in them thar hills.
The road surface is what we like to call “heavy,” which is to say the chip-seal is mostly thick tar and old boulders. But the views are pretty damn’ fine and well worth the effort to get there.
School having started, there was mostly no one at La Cueva but me. One young gent, who was backpacking his kid up and down the trails, said he was maintaining a wildlife camera up there. He’s getting plenty of bear pix, but no cougars. Might check the bars down by the university, I thought.
The lack of cougars aside, it was nice to take a break from that ruptured sewer line disguised as the news that leads to my MacBook, and thence to the overworked leach field in my head.
And speaking of news, let’s: I can write all day long about the walking, talking Superfund site farting Mickey D’s into the ordinarily rarified atmosphere of the Oval Office like some malignant tuba, but you folks can get better, smarter stuff elsewhere, and plenty of it, too. I’m starting to feel as though we already enjoy an overabundance of words on this topic and rather than picking the scab over and over again we might be better served by taking action to resolve the problem.
So what do you come here for? Politics? Bike stuff? General yuks? Filthy language? Pet pix? Let me know your preferences in comments. But do keep in mind that it’s my shop, and I’m likely to stock many of my favorite products no matter what the customers crave.
