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.
“That’s a half-666,” I thought drowsily, trying to recall the details of a dream I’d been having. Something about needing to be somewhere, late as usual, and rooting through a duffel full of colorful short-sleeve shirts and shorts because of course I was butt-ass nekkid.
Then it came to me. Spring. First day of. I awarded myself a soupçon of spring break and dozed until 5.
When I dragged ass out of the sack to pull on some duds I was not looking for a flowered Paddygucci shirt and shorts, because spring in New Mexico debuted at 22°, which called for pants, long-sleeve shirt, and a light fleece vest.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla had already greeted the vernal equinox by blowing a hairball and carpet-bombing the litter box. Herself was clocked in at work, hoping to cash a few more checks before the X-Man decides Sandia National Labs doesn’t need any librarians to tell his DOGEbags where they might find the owner’s manuals for the Death Ray.
Just wing it, fellas. Hit that big red button on the grip and see what comes out the other end. Probably shouldn’t look down the barrel while you’re doing it. Move fast, break things, etc. Whoops, there goes Paris. Serves ’em right for wanting their statue back.
The ghost bike installed by the Duke City Wheelmen in remembrance of Scott Dwight Habermehl.
“Just bump him, bruh.”
Sounds better than “Gonna hit him hella fast,” doesn’t it?
But the difference was no difference at all to cyclist Scott Dwight Habermehl, who last May was sent flying over the passenger side of a vehicle with three giggling kids in it — ages 15, 13, and 11 — and left fatally injured on the side of the road.
He was 63. Father of two. A Sandia National Labs engineer who was just cycling to work, as he had done for years.
Two of the three kids said to have been in the vehicle that hit him have been arrested, charged with an open count of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, leaving the scene of an accident involving great bodily harm or death, and unlawful possession of a handgun, according to the Albuquerque Journal. The eldest remains at large.
We’ve all been in this neighborhood. I’ve been right-hooked into a parked car; tumbled over the hood of an SUV whose driver passed me only to start executing a leisurely U-turn; narrowly escaped a homicidal trucker on a wide highway shoulder; had a full bottle of beer thrown at me from a speeding vehicle; been threatened with a gun.
The joke among longtime cyclists with a dark streak of humor is that if you want to murder someone without suffering any consequences, wait until your target gets on a bicycle and then hit him with your car.
But it doesn’t seem all that funny when you consider that two of these three suspects were charged — within days of the crash that killed Habermehl — in connection with what the Journal called “a weekslong crime spree that included a smash-and-grab burglary, shootings and auto theft.”
And yet nothing came of it.
The case against the 13-year-old was dismissed in August 2024 “when prosecutors failed to meet court requirements,” the Journal added. It’s not clear what happened to the charges against the 11-year-old.
Maybe prosecutors will “meet court requirements” in this instance, since (a) Albuquerque Mayor Tim Keller and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham have weighed in, and (2) we’re not talking about property crime now — this time, a man was sentenced to death by three children for the crime of riding his bicycle to work.
• Video:The Albuquerque Police Department provided this clip from a video said to have been uploaded to the Internets by those involved. APD says this triggered an anonymous tip, a homicide investigation, and what we can only hope will be justice for Scott Dwight Habermehl. Thank Dog for the stupidity of many of our 21st-century criminals. Back in the Day® we knew better than to rat ourselves out.
Soma Fabrications (a.k.a. the Merry Sales Co.) is at it again.
I meant to add this over the weekend but got distracted by feline maintenance, grocery shopping, cooking, bicycle riding, and what appears to be a remake of “Lawrence of Arabia” taking place on the property.
Still, better late than never, as the fella says. You can save big on Soma and New Albion frames and forks, but you gotta move fast — the sale ends today.
It being St. Me Day, and with a nod to The New York Timesfor its story on how the DOGEbags have been taking a shillelagh to the National Nuclear Security Administration — which is said to have lost “a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation” — we present The Bothy Band performing, “Old Hag You Have Killed Me.”
Big Bill McBeef, shredding the gnar. | Photo by Lolly AdventureGirl (lifted from FaceButt)
Our last track is a skull. — “Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry,” by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison
The letter was returned, marked “Deceased.”
This is how my friend Michael Schenk stumbled across Bill Baughman’s final footprint in our lives, when one of his annual Schenk-family newsletters, sent via snail mail, bounced back from Bill’s last known address in Bibleburg.
Michael emailed me on Wednesday: “Bill Baughman passed away! Have you heard about this?”
No, I had not. And I immediately set out to learn the details.
Which … were not forthcoming.
No obituary in the Gazette. No other trail that I could backtrack via Google, DuckDuckGo, or Bing. Michael’s call to Bill’s former employer yielded only a vague reference to “health problems.”
Well, yeah. Sorta goes without saying, eh?
Bill was not always easy to catch, especially on the bicycle. But if true, this would be a breakaway unprecedented. We had always been able to find him again, somewhere. A bagel shop. A Mexican restaurant. At home, gaming, in his air-conditioned computer closet.
Old Dogs at the O’Neill farewell: Foreground, Joan Stang; background, Bill Baughman, Your Humble Narrator, Herself, and Karl Stang.
Herself and I last caught up with Bill in 2022, in Manitou Springs, during a celebration of life for another old velo-bro, John O’Neill. John, Bill, and his longtime friend Bill Simmons were among the O.D.s (Original Dogs) who joined me when I left Rainbow Racing to form Team Mad Dog Media-Dogs at Large Velo.
In those early days we trained a ton, barking Liggettisms at each other — suitcases of courage were opened, pedals danced upon or turned in anger, elastic snapped — on the Highway 115 rollers to Penrose and back; up Highway 24 through Manitou to Woodland Park and beyond; down to the racetrack south of Fountain, occasionally adding the dreaded Hanover Loop; or around the 1986 world-championships course at the Air Force Academy.
On race weekends we’d bunk three and four to a room in skeevy motels at Pagosa Springs, Durango, Crested Butte, and elsewhere. I was a popular roomie because I always packed my Krups espresso machine on road trips. The Bills proved extra popular with me after I broke a collarbone at Rage in the Sage; Simmons abandoned his own race to take charge of my bike, and Baughman drove me, my bike, and my truck back to B-burg.
Some three decades later, during our conversation at O’Neill’s sendoff, Bill seemed subdued, maybe even a wee bit sad, not at all his usual rollicking self.
His mother, ex-wife, and a son had all passed. He and Simmons had been out of touch. And he had been been hit by a car while riding his road bike, which snatched a knot in his fearlessness; he was avoiding both road and trail, and when he cycled at all he stuck to a few local bike paths. He drank only at home.
It seemed a stunning retreat by a renowned battler who, sweating tequila from a margarita marathon as the peloton thundered along, would turn a baleful eye on anyone who groused about the pace and growl, “Shut up and ride.”
Still, Bill looked good, as though he’d put on a few pounds. He’d always been thin as a frame pump. Holding his wheel during a group ride as he executed his famous “Marksheffel Plan” — an attack near the bottom of the long climb up the east-side road of that name — was like trying to draft a shark’s fin.
We talked about getting together again, the way people do when they reconnect, however briefly, to send some other old friend west. And after Herself and I got back to ’Burque I emailed him. He never replied.
How can someone just drop off the face of the earth with only the U.S. Postal Service taking the slightest bit of notice? I mean, sure, “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” But you’d think Google might have the jump on them these days, especially since Jan. 20.
Facebook, the Pony Express of the AARP, was basically useless. The number I had for Bill Simmons was no longer in service. Cindy O’Neill, John’s widow, hadn’t heard the news until Herself passed it along.
And then I remembered: Amber Shaffer, who catered O’Neill’s farewell gathering, was not just a part of his Colorado Running Club crew — she was once a neighbor of Bill’s on the east side of B-burg, not far from the ancestral home of the O’Gradys on South Loring Circle. Ours really is a small world at times.
Late Friday afternoon I called Amber at Roman Villa Pizza; she said that yes, she had learned via text of Bill’s passing late last year, and … and that was all she knew. Fridays are busy in the restaurant racket, so I thanked her, promised to drop in for a meal next trip through town, and said goodbye.
Looks like Bill has dropped us all again, dancing on the pedals, the elastic snapped for good. I hope there was a frosty pitcher of margaritas waiting for him at the finish.
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