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.
“We should get $2 mil’ for this gig. One for the snatch, the other for this cool ransom note.”
I hope none of yis paid this tab.*
March has been heavy on various home “improvement” projects, visitations, landscape maintenance, a decline in the healthful and refreshing outdoor exercise, an abnormally spastic conga line of nightmares in the headlines, and an accelerating oscillation between exasperation and ennui that eventually led me to declare — and mind you, I’m quoting from memory, which is an unreliable source in the best of times, but it seems to me that these were more or less my words — “Fuck this shit.”
When even I find my musings unamusing, concerning perhaps, possibly even actionable, and yet the only place to run is off at the mouth, well … it’s time to batten the gob. Tick a lock. Zip it. Nobody wants to hear that shit, not even me, not even for free. “Tell it to Anne Frank,” as Jim Harrison’s titular character in “Warlock” was said to quip to those who whined about life’s difficulties.
So, yeah. An extended period of the shutting the fuck up seemed prudent. You’re welcome. We now return you to our usually scheduled blog, which is already in progress.
Here’s a pic of a cute lil’ kitty-cat to distract you from the other one.
Call me cynical (“You’re cynical!”), but I don’t think that other cat, the bedraggled, raggedy-ass orange tom that keeps slinking around the joint, yowling, spraying on the national furniture, and clawing the Stars & Stripes curtains into ribbons, is in danger of being put to sleep anytime soon.
Nossiree, he’s got himself a solid majority of black-robed laps in which to curl up while he awaits delivery of The Big Fish, the one that got away on Jan. 6, 2021.
Fuck me running.
Meanwhile, the playacting continues. Government shutdown: Will they or won’t they? Dueling VIP visits to The Border, that deadly, open-air, razor-wired waiting room where all the brown foreigners go to apply for the jobs nobody else wants. The Senate leadership following the House down the rabbit hole to Wonderland. Gaza. Ukraine. “Dynamic pricing” at Wendy’s.
And now, this: Is a president a king?
I thought we settled that question back in 1776. But as I recall, that king required a few years of rather aggressive convincing before he conceded the point.
The early bird can have the damn’ worm. Especially if it’s a brain worm.
Who needs a cranial parasite before coffee? Not me, Skeezix. What I need before coffee is sleep, and plenty of it.
And I really don’t need a brain worm at midnight, which is about when some noise of unknown origin finished the job of dragging me out of a sound sleep the other night.
Herself had just gotten up for a drink of water and tiptoed back to bed. After three decades of holy macaroni I barely notice this nightly ritual. I drift lazily up toward consciousness, wondering idly: Ghost cat? “Play Misty for Me?” Night fart powerful enough to levitate a sheet, blanket, and comforter? And on the other side of the bed, too. …
But it’s always Herself, having a wee or a drink or a wee and a drink. If it were a gust of the southern wind strong enough to unmake the bed I’d be sporting a fresh bruise or two somewhere.
This time, however, just as she settled back into the sack, came the Mystery Noise.
Ordinarily my practice is to ignore all things that go bump in the night, as hauntings, Clint Eastwood movies, and night farts often end badly. There will be some cleanup involved.
Alas, unable to forgo a bit of vengeance for three decades of midnight wees, I rolled over and asked, “You hear that?”
“Yep,” she replied, burrowing deeper into the bedclothes.
Well. Shit. Check and mate. Outsmarted yourself again, ould fella.
So up I got to prowl around the house in my skivvies looking for … well, your guess is as good as mine. Herself has added NextDoor to her list of online pasatiempos and recently showed me a wildlife-cam video of a mountain lion slinking up a nearby driveway with a raccoon in its jaws. For sure we have had bobcats, raccoons, foxes, skunks, hawks, coyotes, and deer in our yard.
But a peek through various windows and sliding glass doors revealed bupkis.
Maybe it was our in-house varmint, Miss Mia Sopaipilla? I checked her bedroom (a half-bath off the kitchen) but saw no evidence of midnight mischief. She was briefly delighted to have company, then outraged that breakfast was not forthcoming.
And I abandoned all hope of zeroing in on the mystery noise because the hills were alive with the sound of Mia.
Back to bed. Sleep, like wisdom, would not come. The imagination, no longer gainfully employed, was working overtime on threat analysis.
Water heater finally gasp its last? No rusty puddles by its door. Roof failure? Didn’t stumble into the package unit or any ductwork while wandering around below. Owl hit the pigeons nesting by the wisteria? No feathers. Bicycle thieves? Jesus, this isn’t some postwar Italian neorealist film — it’s your basic Yankee jump-scare, meat-in-the-seats, spill-your-popcorn slasher flick. Happily, the only Jason in the vicinity lives next door with his lovely wife, two saucy daughters and several bikes of his own.
Sunrise surprise.
Finally I drifted off to a restless sleep … and then, bam, Herself arose again, this time to go to work and get a start on earning the preposterous amount of money required to remedy whatever hideous tragedy had befallen us during the night. Early birds. Worms. It felt as though they were locked in mortal combat between my ears.
I padded into the kitchen to make coffee, briefly contemplated going back to bed instead, and then glanced out the window.
Wow. Now that’s worth getting up for. It’s almost better than coffee.
Oh, yeah. And the noise? Turns out it was the uppermost cardboard box on a tall stack of same toppling onto an exercise ball that then bounded about in Herself’s home-office-slash-eBay warehouse.
Guess I broke out the ladder and clambered onto the roof for no particular purpose. I will never be smart. Or well-rested.
I think we can all agree that some who have held the office do not deserve a Day, unless that day is in court, wherein a judge intones:
“Will the defendant please rise?”
Still, setting dreams aside for the moment, there once was a time when Presidents’ Day was less about presidents, good, bad, or indifferent, or even our first president, than it was about (wait for it …) bicycles.
According to a 2015 story by Yoni Appelbaum in The Atlantic, Americans once honored George Washington on Feb. 22 through feats of cycling.
When the date became a federal holiday in 1885, Appelbaum wrote, the nation “was deep in the grip of the bicycle craze.”
“In Boston, cyclists used the public holiday to hold bicycle races before cheering throngs. Local bike stores opened their doors to entice the race-day crowds, bringing them in off the snowy streets to preview the pleasures of spring. February 22 soon marked the start of the season, the day on which bicycle retailers held open houses to show off their latest models to eager crowds.”
—The Atlantic
As with quality in the nation’s highest office, this glorious state of velo-affairs could not last, of course. As the appeal of the humble two-wheeler began to wane in the early 1900s, the automobile rose up to take its place on the national stage, and the seasonal advertising campaigns shifted gears, from vehicles powered by living people to ones that ran on dead dinosaurs.
This will not stand, y’know? This aggression will not stand, man. So, today, turn a pedal for Liberty! Leave the dino-burner in the driveway! Take your bicycle for a red-white-and-blue spin!
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