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.
“Holy Moses. … this may be the worst staff infection I’ve ever seen.”
Shit is getting Biblical here in the Land of Enchantment, a division of Netflix, Inc.
We have the fires and floods in and around Ruidoso, another blaze in El Malpais National Monument, and a dust storm up by Algodones that caused a 17-vehicle pileup, closed Interstate 25 in both directions, and sent 18 people to the hospital — plus two more to the calaboose after they acted the fool in the presence of law enforcement.
Quite a kickoff to the summer solstice. I don’t think we have to worry about the Rio Grande turning to blood, though. That’s what Central Avenue is for.
Well, hell, here we go — we’ve had a few warm-up fires this season, but looks like the main event just kicked off at Ruidoso, where everyone has been advised to git while the gitting is good.
“We were getting ready to sit down to a meal and the alert came on: Evacuate now, don’t take anything or plan to pack anything, just evacuate,” Mary Lou Minic told KOB-TV. “And within three to five minutes, we were in the car, leaving.”
“Jungle?” you say. “Looks more like desert to me.”
Indeed it does, especially when you gain some perspective by leaving the mean streets behind and hoofing it a mile or so southeast and about 500 ankle-twisting feet up into the Sandia foothills, just below the Candelaria Bench Loop.
But it’s a jungle, too, down there. And for a cyclist, well … let’s just say we’re not the apex predators.
I was reminded of this on Friday when I got the word that one of my riding buddies had been hit by a car at Alameda and 4th.
He and another riding bud were eastbound on Alameda, preparing to turn left onto 4th. Alas, auto traffic being what it is down there, RB No. 2 made it to the left-turn lane without incident while No. 1 got boxed out. So No. 1 hung a right, planning to make a quick U-turn and head north on 4th.
But there was this car, and the laws of physics were applied, and our riding buddy got carted off to the hospital with what I’m guessing was a pretty significant elbow injury (a couple breaks and a dislocation, according to RB No. 2).
It’s particularly disheartening because he was riding so well and with such enthusiasm last Wednesday. And then this happens.
Still: It could’ve been a lot worse. A lot worse. I ride Alameda west from Guadalupe Trail now and then, to get to the bosque, and I always feel like a rabbit on a rifle range.
Let’s all us cottontails be extra careful out there as we’re hopping down the bunny trail. They’re always locked and loaded on the firing line.
When the temps hit triple digits — 101°, another record — the first thing I think about preparing for dinner is a piping-hot pot of soup. A fragrant chicken soup with chickpeas and vegetables from Melissa Clark, to be specific.
OK, between you and me, I was thinking more along the lines of a jambalaya, or maybe some slow-cooker chipotle-honey chicken tacos.
But when I made the mistake of consulting Herself about the week’s menu, she ordered up salmon with potatoes and asparagus, and the aforementioned soup.
Well, whaddaya gonna do?
We get two dinners out of a pound and a half of salmon, a half-dozen taters, and 12 ounces of asparagus.
And that burly soup serves six to eight, which means we’ll probably be eating it through the weekend. Especially since I made a fresh loaf of whole-wheat bread to keep it company.
Maybe next week I’ll pitch a gazpacho at her. Yeah, that’d be cool. …
“Dude. It’s actually raining,” I told my man Hal Walter yesterday via Messages. “If it continues at this torrid pace we could have an ounce of water on the property in two, three days.”
Elena Gallegos, pre-deluge.
Ho ho, etc. That was at 2:19 p.m. Over the next four hours we got nearly an inch of rain with a side of hail that shotgunned more than a few leaves off the backyard maple.
We were under a flash-flood warning and our cul-de-sac looked like a pond tipped on one side, draining into the arroyo behind the house, one of many that funnel water from the foothills to the Rio.
We were happy to get the rain, seeing as we have a couple stupid-hot days coming up later in the week. The neighbor girls were dancing barefoot beneath umbrellas in the runoff.
And I was delighted to have logged a little trail time in and around Elena Gallegos Open Space before the mierda hit the abanico. Those trails hold up pretty well, but 0.86 inch of rain in a few hours is a big ask. We got just 0.27 inch in March, 0.33 inch in April, 0.06 inch in May, and none at all in June. Until yesterday.
In its absence it’s easy to forget the sheer power of running water. A few people got a harsh reminder yesterday; at least three were swept away in the arroyo system, and only two made it out alive.
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