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.
If there are any Okies in the Tour of California peloton, the Dust Bowl days must be looking pretty damn’ fine to them after three days of soaking rain.
Astana and OUCH might want to think about swapping sponsors, seeing as it’s the boys in blue and yellow who are spending all the time on the deck and in need of medical attention.
Lance Armstrong, uncharacteristically, has sampled the California asphalt a couple of times now — once after T-boning his own photographer’s motorcycle — and today race leader Levi Leipheimer had a brain fart and found himself tumbling along the tarmac after a touch of wheels with Big Tex.
Meanwhile, the VeloNews.com mob is frantically cranking out the online love, slapping up live updates, race reports, photo galleries, video and the occasional pointless comment from Your Humble Narrator, so you should probably be over there instead of here. I don’t make a dime on this thing.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. I can give you both. Here’s a shot of the basement a week after a sewer crew fountained Herself’s crapper, ruining carpet, vinyl flooring, drywall and my sunny disposition. The outfit hired to handle the cleanup and restoration is on the job, and God willing (and the toilet don’t rise) we should have a functional garden-level basement once again sometime by, oh, I dunno, the 2010 Tour de France. Maybe.
This is a small house, just 1,300 square feet, and it gets a lot smaller when you don’t have full use of that basement, which housed Herself’s office, bathroom and walk-in closet, the washer-dryer combo’ and the cats’ litter box. We’re both working upstairs now — Herself on a Dell Latitude at the kitchen table, and me on a MacBook in the living room, because the dehumidifiers kept tripping breakers and crashing my office. We’re doing a load of laundry for the first time in a week. And we’re down to one toilet, which makes mornings interesting:
“I need to take a shower!”
“Well, I need to take a shit!”
And so on.
We kept the cats upstairs while things dried out downstairs, which was an exercise in sleep deprivation. After a couple too many early risings I took to waking up Turk’ and Mia whenever I caught them napping during the day, purely out of vengeance. “Big Man don’t sleep, don’t nobody sleep!” I’d growl. Everyone got cranky, even Herself, who is ordinarily the acme of sunniness. Finally we settled on locking the cats up in my office at night. What the hell, I thought, if I can’t use it as an office, it might as well serve as a feline penitentiary.
Throw in a couple extra shifts at VeloNews.com during the Amgen Tour of California, a wine rack full of bottles and a closet full of firearms and you have a recipe for headlines. Happily, so far we’ve avoided the mainstream media. But the wind is howling like a banshee now and my skull is throbbing like a Harley Fat Boy, so all bets are off.
You’ll never catch me riding from Davis to Santa Rosa when it’s pissing down rain. Maybe in a car, if someone in Santa Rosa is buying at a brewpub, but not on a bicycle.
My boys Merrill and Chris got together to chase the AToC around for a few stages this year, but I’ll bet Merrill wishes he’d stayed in New York, where the rain from on high is warmer, mostly generated by supervisors at The New York Times, and doesn’t continue for hours at a stretch.
It was one of those stages you’d like to watch from a lead car, listening to race radio, taking notes and tossing ledes around in your head while you wait to see if the lone breakaway actually makes it all the way to the line. But there are moments on the sideline, too, watching the poor soggy sonofabitch churn past in a spray and counting the seconds until the chase arrives.
Meanwhile, there are some very nervous dope fiends in Sacramento today, wondering how the hell they can quietly and quickly dispose of a one-off, $10,000 time trial bike belonging to a certain Texan without going to the stripey hole for felony theft. That wasn’t some college kid’s single-speed you lifted there, meth-for-brains.
If this year’s Amgen Tour of California is half as lively as the pre-race press conference, it should be big fun indeed. Lance Armstrong and Sunday Times reporter Paul Kimmage hissed at each other like a couple of tomcats, and Juliet Macur of The New York Times got in a few swipes her own bad self, chiding Armstrong for making snarky comments about her reporting after refusing to take her phone calls seeking comment.
Meanwhile, Floyd Landis has already crashed, but is said to be ready to race after a few beers and a couple shots of Black Jack. He will be supported by a water tender from the San Diego fire department.
Tales from the Shitworks, Part II: We’re on our third vinyl-floor-removal dude. He took a shot at the title with what looked like a spade, then gave up and left to fetch what he called “a ripper stripper,” some class of power chisel that scared the piss out of the cats but did the job on the laundry-room floor.
Now we have to get the futon out of there somehow so the crew can take up the rest of the carpet. I never liked the giant sonofabitch anyway, and I like it less now that I have to find a way of getting it up our narrow stairwell and out the back door. It was assembled downstairs when we bought it, and thus disassembly is indicated. With an ax.
Late update: The Intertubes are all atwitter with word that Lance Armstrong will not be attending Don Catlin’s Anti-Doping Science Institute. Frankly, I don’t know what all the fuss is about. I understand Lance has a note from his mom.
