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.
“One of these nine lives it’s gonna be me putting you in a plastic satchel and taking you to the vet.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla is resting comfortably in her custom BedCave® after having a cyst removed from just above her right eye.
One day the thing was just sort of … there, like bad news from DeeCee. So I took her to the vet to get it checked out. Vet drains it and says: “Full disclosure: These things can come back, sometimes almost immediately, and occasionally even bigger.”
The only real fix is to take it off, she added.
Well, it did come back, almost immediately. And it looked bigger, but pretty much everything does when it’s front and (off) center on your furry friend’s face.
Thus, we scheduled the surgery, which took place yesterday. And now we can’t call her “Knothead” anymore.
Man, they really do it in the road at their West Gomorrah location. Let’s just look at the extras on this fabulous car! Wire-wheel spoke fenders, two-way sneeze-through wind vent, star-studded mudguards, sponge-coated edible steering column, chrome fender dents, and factory air-conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped air-conditioned factory. It’s a beautiful car, friend, with doors to match! Birch’s Blacklist says this automobile was stolen, but for you, friends, the complete price, only two-ninety-five hundred dollars, in easy monthly payments of twenty-five dollars a week, twice a week, and never on Sundays. …
Maybe it’s just that NOAA has been swept away by a tsunami of unitary-executive idiocy, but the weather reports around here lately are bordering on the comical.
Sure, that photo up top looks plenty ominous, but lots of stuff does first thing in the morning, especially since Jan. 20. By 10:30 the temps were in the mid-40s, and after checking the forecast I decided to drop my plans to go for a run and instead took my old road-racing bike out for what I said would be “a short ride.”
In terms of First World Problems this was an iffy proposition. Last time out on this rig I flatted the rear tire just a mile or so from El Rancho Pendejo, and trying to lever the sonofabitch loose of its rim to swap tubes was like trying to pry a Texas Republican’s lips from Beelzebozo’s diapered ass.
I did not want to be doing this in wind and rain. Or snow. But tomorrow’s weather looked worse, so off I went.
And whaddaya know? It was glorious. Bit of a wind, but going out and up it was mostly behind me. And when I turned around to head home I was able to duck in and out of various suburban neighborhoods and mostly keep it out of my face. Stayed out for 90 minutes of hills and even felt a bit overdressed.
Also, I didn’t flat. So, bonus.
When I got home, my iPhone told me it was raining. Huh. News to me. And fake news at that.
Herself, coming back from a run, said her iPhone was telling her the same thing.
I made us some lunch, then she hit the gym, and I rolled out to the bakery and the grocery. Still not raining.
By 4 p.m., it was still sunny enough for a haircut, so Herself broke out the clippers and had at me. Near the end of that process, which is like shaving a particularly lumpy and unlovely blue-eyed coconut, we thought we heard some raindrops on the skylight.
Rain me bollocks.
Nope.
And now my iPhone promises it will be raining in 26 minutes.
Understatement of the year. But it’s only March 5.
Congress is like a drunk dad watching as his sugar-crazed rug monkey tips over a display of Easter treats at an understaffed Walmart, wondering whether he should deal harshly with the little shit, blame it on the ex, or just hit the door running.
And no, we did not watch last night’s episode of “The Worst Wing.” I use the word “episode” in its medical sense, “an occurrence of a usually recurrent pathological abnormal condition.”
No, instead we watched the new Robert De Niro vehicle, “Zero Day,” in which the smart Black lady is president. (In this instance, Art does not imitate Life.)
But at least I didn’t already know what was going to happen in “Zero Day.”
You didn’t have to be Nostradamus to call the play on Zero’s Day in DeeCee.
Zero was going to rave like a poorly raised toddler. The Repugs were going to find it all oh-so-cute. And the Donks were going to be as bold, decisive and effective as a Walmart shopper, watching the kid step out of his overflowing diaper in the produce section as dad idly thumbs his phone, and thinking, “Somebody really should do something.”
Yes, somebody should. We’re still waiting.
Guess what. Didn’t stop. And this was in 1954.
I’m not picking on Rep. Melanie Stansbury here. I’ve met her. I like her. But god damn, etc.
You don’t derail the Dingaling Bros-Barnum & Beelzebozo Circus train by standing on the tracks holding a tiny sign, like Wile E. Coyote. What you get there is run the fuck over. Take it from a guy who knows what it feels like to get hit by a locomotive.