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.
By “them” I mean Herself, and by “cake” I mean “half a cinnamon roll,” and why on earth should Herself be eating cake for breakfast?
Because it’s her birthday, that’s why.
There was but a single candle on the “cake,” because record-low snowpack, record-high temperatures, drought continues, red-flag warnings, etc., et al., and so on and so forth. I lit it up and we hopped around the kitchen like crazed bunnies to The Beatles’ “Birthday,” blaring from a JBL Clip 2 fed a YouTube video by my iPhone 13 Mini. Can’t say we Revered Elders are helpless when it comes to managing all these doggone, consarned, newfangled whizbangs, whatchamacallits, and comosellamas, even the ones whose “new” is mostly wore off leaving only the “fangled” bits.
Once breakfast is in the rear view there will be a short trail run followed by some medium-light shopping, a lunch without so much cake in it, and a delicious dinner that may or not conclude with cake, depending upon whether we can get to The Range before they run out and/or close, which happens early in these dire days, when no one can afford gasoline, much less three servings of cake per diem.
You wouldn’t believe the tariff on cake. And you can trust me, because I’m in the media.
Gas prices on March 9 along Tramway Boulevard between Lomas and San Bernardino.
Monday’s chores were medium-heavy and I didn’t get a chance to ride until late afternoon.
It was going to have to be a short one, and I was thinking I should just go for a run instead.
But it was a gorgeous day — 77°! — and the forecast for today was looking a little less favorable. So I kitted up, grabbed the Rivendell Sam Hillborne, and set off for a brief inspection tour of gas prices at four stations along Tramway.
As you know, “the roaring economy is roaring like never before,” and though I’ve seen no signs of this at the grocery or anywhere else, The Pestilence says it is so and thus I must be mistaken. Wouldn’t be the first time.
I rarely drive, gassing up the ol’ rice rocket about once every three months or so. And lately I’ve quit collecting receipts because the pumps’ printers are usually on the fritz and damme if I’m stumbling into the kiosk to stand in line with the proles waiting to pay for their Slim Jims, malt-liquor 40s, and coffin nails, whatever they haven’t already shoplifted.
But I’m pretty sure that the last time I filled up — before we decided to bomb Iran into democracy — the price per gallon for regular was $2.83. And yesterday it was as you see above.
Winning? Your mileage may vary, as the fella says.
This may become a regular feature here at Ye Olde Dogge House. Feel free to chime in with the gas prices in your neck of “the roaring economy.” In the meantime, I have a year’s worth of grocery receipts to examine. I suspect that if there is any roaring to be heard as a consequence, it will be coming from me.
Still, this year’s “spring forward” meant we spent one less hour today stacking sandbags against the tide of bullshit flowing downstream from the Orange House.
So, winning? Maybe. We must take these little victories wherever we find them.
This morning I burned a little of my saved daylight by reading an essay in The New York Times, in which the daughter of two former American revolutionaries found the Oscar-nominated “One Battle After Another” to be “nothing more than entertainment” rather than “a battle cry for a generation.”
Huh. Hollywood veterano Paul Thomas Anderson cranks out a rapid-fire rom-com inspired by a rambling mythical history by Thomas Pynchon, and Hope Reeves — who herself is working on a comic memoir of being raised by retired Weatherpersons James H. Reeves and Susan Hagedorn — finds it regrettably unserious.
Well. Shit. Can’t have that. Can we?
Why not?
• • •
I myself have been regrettably unserious since — well, since forever — and, like the thought of suicide, it has gotten me successfully through many a bad night. And a few fairly grim days, too, whether shortened or lengthened by government fiat.
My upbringing was unremarkably middle-class — Catholic Republican father, Presbyterian Democrat mother — and yet somehow I came to cast myself in the role of atheist radical son.
A diet rich in Warner Brothers cartoons, Marx Brothers movies and Mad magazine will give a kid a taste for anarchy. Who do you root for? Not The Man, that’s for sure. It was one battle after another and Elmer Fudd lost every one of them.
So while I would eventually become interested in Weatherman, and personally sample various flavors of Marxism — Socialist Workers Party, October League, Communist Party (M-L) — these last two, like Weatherman, offspring of the Students for a Democratic Society — my first real political infatuation was with the Yippies.
• • •
Elmer wanted to cut off my lovely hair and send me to Vietnam. I wanted to Bugs Bunny his ass. And so did the Yippies, whose regrettably serious alias was the Youth International Party.
Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were probably the most famous of these Groucho Marxists, whose theater was the street. Levitating the Pentagon. Throwing money at traders at the New York Stock Exchange. Running an actual pig — Pigasus the Immortal — for president.
The Yippies invaded Disneyland, taking over Tom Sawyer’s Island, threw pies, and applied for a permit to blow up the General Motors building. When it was denied, the Yippies shrugged and said it only proved that it was impossible to work within the system to change the system.
Alas, that old system sure proved durable, resisting change from within and without.
Some Yippies became yuppies. Rubin traded his Viet Cong flag shirt for the suit and tie of a businessman. He died in 1994 after being hit by a car while crossing Wilshire Boulevard, in front of his penthouse apartment. He was 56, well past the 30th birthday after which nobody was to be trusted.
Hoffman jumped bail after a dope bust and went underground. He eventually resurfaced, did some light time, and returned to activism.
But it was the Eighties — remember those fabulous Eighties, kids? — and the old act didn’t seem to be going over so well with a new audience. Hoffman died, reportedly by his own hand, in 1989. He was 52.
• • •
By then, mockery had already begun infiltrating (or was being co-opted by) The Establishment. “Saturday Night Live,” which debuted in 1975 with guest host George Carlin, somehow remains relevant in an aw-shucks-just-kiddin’ sort of way. David Letterman, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have had their innings, and Jimmy Kimmel is still in there pitching despite some booing from the luxury box at Fudd Stadium.
But there’s something about old-school, street-level mockery that really gets The Man’s dander up. The reigning Man, Elmer Befuddled, who hires out his shotgunning of critters at home and abroad because bone spurs, watches a shit-ton of TV. And if he sees yuuuuge crowds from coast to coast rocking the next No Kings rallies on March 28, giving him the old Warner Bros.’ sendoff — “Th-th-that’s all, folks!”— he might just do a John Belushi, spin right out of his chair, and hit the deck in a slobbering, shitting sayonara.
It comforts me to think back to one of Gilbert Shelton’s “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” cartoons, in which political candidate Rodney Richpigge commits suicide by proxy, ordering his chauffeur to drive off a bridge because he thinks people are laughing at him (a half pint of amyl nitrite getting an unexpected wash in Fat Freddy’s jeans was the actual giggle-trigger).
Hope, as they say, springs eternal. No matter what time it is.
The lone GS-1 running the National Weather Service must’ve lost her Magic 8-Ball and is reduced to winging it, calling for “a slight chance of snow showers” here before 8 a.m.
As that hour has come and gone, we will not be breaking out the cross-country skis anytime soon.
Still, the weather is finally more or less seasonal for a change, so I can probably leave the lawn mower in the garage for a while, too.
“I think I’ve seen this movie before. …” Photo by Thang Cao on Pexels.com
Good news! Americans weary of watching war in the desert (“Yawn … seen it!”) can change the channel to jungle combat as U.S. troops “advise” their counterparts in Ecuador.
Jaysis fuck, etc. Yanks just can’t stop lashing uncounted tonnage of “dumb dust” up their snouts, so we expand the War on Drugs to include “narco-terrorism” and start shipping Special Forces to Ecuador, which itself does not produce any nose whiskey but serves as a trafficking route.
I suppose it’s only a coincidence that what Ecuador does produce in quantity is — wait for it — oil.
Meanwhile, Sniffles the Clown keeps horning fat rails of Adderall to take his mind off that pepperoni pizza he’s baking on his neck, and that’s OK because he’s the Pestilence an’ shit, so keep it coming, bitches.
“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law. Also, and too, the Green Berets.”
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