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.
The weather was supposed to be taking a turn for the worse after a short stretch of sunny skies, and so I had planned to go for a short trail run this first day of February.
Instead, the sun leapt out from behind the clouds, the temp shot upward into the mid-50’s, and I called an audible: “Ride today, run tomorrow.”
I’ve had the old Steelman Eurocross out twice this week, and it was leaning against the Subaru just waiting to have another go, so I grabbed it and did a quick 90 minutes on the foothills trails, which have finally firmed up a bit since last week’s rain and snow.
It was just the ticket, especially since I was feeling unkindly toward running after reading about the Outside Hyperactive Currency Furnace’s latest scheme — to transform the ridiculously simple act of putting one foot in front of another into a mighty revenue stream through the miracle of MarketSpeak®.
Running is one of the most basic acts imaginable, and humans have been doing it since we first came down from the trees, which is starting to seem like a really bad idea. As soon as we hit the deck we were running toward things we wanted to kill, eat, and/or fuck, and away from things that wanted to do likewise to us.
Like I said, basic.
No longer. According to a press release whose author(s) should have “The Elements of Style” tattooed on their foreheads with a jackhammer, we runners have been blessed with a new “Running Media Platform” intended to meet us on our running journey and elevate, empower, build community, and disrupt through a one-stop shop of iconic brands delivering gender-equitable and inclusive best-in-class, world-class content.
Or something very much like that. I don’t know for sure. I blacked out somewhere in the middle of it and when I came to I was butt-ass nekkid with blue paint on my face and a big knife in one hand, shrieking and dancing around a fire built of old running shoes.
I showed the press release to my buddy Hal Walter, who has been running for something like 45 years, everything from 5Ks to marathons to the World Championship Pack-Burro Race in Fairplay — he guesses maybe some 65,000 miles all told — and he was immediately unimpressed.
The final update from Mad Blog Media circa 2000. | Screen grab from the Wayback Machine.
Ken Layne at Desert Oracle Radio throws a bonus bone to his Patreon supporters now and then, and the latest was a podcast about his early adventures in bloggery, with one of his old running mates, Matt Welch of Reason magazine and the podcast We the Fifth.
Back in the Day™, when Layne and Welch were building their online presences, they were basically trying to find a new way to do The Work, have fun, and still get paid. They may still be looking. The experience “left both of us semi-internet famous and broke,” quipped Welch.
Me, I was just looking for a publisher-free zone where I could have the occasional public argument with the Voices in my head without frightening anyone’s advertisers.
“That? Oh, that’s just him being him. No, we’ve looked into it, and the Constitution and the ACLU both say he can do that. It’s kind of like the smellies at the off-ramps waving their cardboard signs, except he spells all the words right and he’s not asking for money.”
I’ve lost track of the precise timeline, but the Wayback Machine shows examples of prehistoric TrogloDogS(h)ites dating back to 1998, when I was but a baby blogger cooing and gurgling at the world via satellite Internet from our hillside hideaway in Crusty County.
But there were even earlier versions, long gone off the back and into the broom wagon. I know this because their URLs are in the copyright notices I attached to everything I wrote for the paying customers back then. The hosting outfits were small-timers in central Colorado, most of them no longer with us, and not even the Wayback Machine can find their bones.
I first mentioned a Mad Dog Media website in a 1997 column:
My very own Mad Dog Media Web site lets me slip the leash of conventional publishing and run at large, watering all and sundry with no regard whatsoever for the dictates of good taste or profit margin. Stuff that no one in his or her right mind would publish finds a home here.
—Patrick O’Grady, “Mad Dog Unleashed,” Bicycle Retailer and Industry News
In addition to wanting my own pot to piss in, there was an issue with boredom. The hours can pass very slowly indeed when you’re perched on a rocky hillside 10 miles from a town with no stop lights, more cows than people, and more churches than bars. I was traveling less than I had been when Herself and I did our first tour of Bibleburg in the early Nineties. Back then I’d dash off to Boulder to help VeloNews and Inside Triathlon with production, or venture further afield to cover races, trade shows, whatever. And the races were a lot closer when we lived on the Front Strange. Moving to Crusty County added about 150 miles to every round trip, so I made fewer of them.
Finally, the Crusty County cycling community was basically me, myself, and I. The Voices needed more of an audience than that.
So, yeah: Blogging. My toolkit included (in addition to the attitude and analog-publication experience): PageSpinner, Netscape Navigator, Photoshop, and Fetch; a series of analog and early digital cameras from Pentax, Canon, Sony and Epson; and Macs of various shapes and sizes, among them one of the ill-considered MacClones, a Power Computing PowerBase 200 that I described as “possessed by devils,” because it was.
I taught myself some extremely basic HTML and bounced the blog around those bush-league ISPs before killing off that model in February 2000 (bloggery from the remainder of that year and all of 2001 has gone walkabout); sampled just about every free prefab blogging package available; even tried a self-hosted WordPress build for a while. Then you lot decided you wanted to be able to comment on posts, and on comments, and on comments about the comments, and the simplest way to get all that was to hand the whole shebang over to WordPress.com.
So here we are.
It’s been a fair amount of labor just to run my mouth to no particular purpose for 26 years. But unlike a lot of other refugees from straight journalism, I never thought about trying to make it pay, not really. That would’ve added a whole new degree of difficulty: charging a membership fee; selling advertising; signing up with (and giving a cut to) Patreon, Medium, or Substack; doing some tip-jar beggary like Charles Pelkey and I did for Live Update Guy; and relentlessly self-promoting on social media (“Hey, lookit me, lookit me, LOOKIT ME!!!”).
Anyway, I was already earning something resembling a living by acting the fool for VeloNews, BRAIN, Adventure Cyclist, and anyone else who could stand the gaff and write a check that wouldn’t bounce. And some days that could really feel like work. I felt that if I started to charge admission to the blog, it would turn into a job, and I already knew how that sort of thing ended. Badly.
I may not get paid for this, but I derive other benefits from the work. It keeps me engaged with the world, however distasteful that may be at times. Some people like it, and even say so, in public. And it keeps the rust off this old pen that some folks think is mightier than the sword, possibly because they’ve never fallen afoul of an angry dude with a sword.
At times blogging feels like a training ride on the bike, taking photos that never make it out of the iPhone, or thumb-fingering my way around some John Prine tune on the guitar. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, or anywhere else? Practice, practice, practice.
I’ve been practicing bloggery for a quarter-century now. Who knows? One of these years I might just get it right.
The Wolf Moon, peeking through the clouds over the Sandias.
I was a little late to moonrise last night, but managed to catch a glimpse of the Wolf Moon despite the heavy cloud cover.
The Duck! City has been gray and damp the past few days, with 0.13 inch of precip’ in the past 48 hours. On Wednesday I just beat a short downpour home as I wrapped up a run, and yesterday I caught a little sleet in the chops while cycling through the foothills.
Climbing into the Elena Gallegos Open Space I saw a couple of Albuquerque Police Department vehicles in the parking lot. The officers waved at me, and I waved back. If they thought I must have been drunk to be cycling in January — rain jacket, tuque, tights, winter shoes — they didn’t oblige me to perform the Stupid Human Tricks or empty the wallet I wasn’t carrying. (I had a $20 in the Ziploc bag that keeps my phone dry, but shh, that’s top secret.)
Mayor Tim Keller addresses the crowd at Sunday’s ward meeting.
It’s been a few days since we hosted the Donk ward meeting and El Rancho Pendejo remains in a state of disarray.
We had to shift the furniture around to accommodate the throng and speakers, and the plan was to put everything back in its proper place on Monday. Until Herself had to go in to the old job site to piss out a number of fires, that is. Ordinarily Monday is a work-from-home day with a little leeway built into the schedule.
So here it is Wednesday, and if I were the sort of geezer who wanders around the house at night, leaving his eyeglasses back on the nightstand while hunting the source of some strange noise and/or peeing on the floor instead of in the toilet, I’d be doctoring a number of lacerations, contusions, and abrasions from stumbling into this and that instead of entertaining you lot over the second cup of joe.
Meanwhile, I see our national house remains out of order as well. We are shocked — shocked! — to learn anew that barring some random act of god or man we’re looking at a Joe-NotJoe contest come the fall. This, after a thundering herd of 410,000 Republicans in two states has expressed its preference. That’s about 151,000 people less than live in The Duck! City, according to the latest U.S. Census estimate, from 2022.
Well, cultists gotta cult, y’know?
Nobody else in the cult was actually running against The Leader. They were pitching themselves as The New and Improved Him. And doing a piss-poor job of it too. It was like watching a bunch of home-schooled thumb-suckers auditioning to play the Joker with Joaquin Phoenix standing right there, smirking. “Aren’t they just darling?”
One by one they bend the knee, kiss the ring, and wander off to seek some other role better suited to their talents, or lack thereof. All the world’s a stage, y’know.
Image lifted from the City of Albuquerque website.
O, Lord, it must be fun around the ol’ cop shop these days.
Take two steps forward toward getting out from under a Justice Department consent decree, take one back over some nonspecific fishiness involving DUIs, at least one local attorney, and an FBI investigation.
Online reports are light on details — more than 150 pending DUI cases dismissed, a number of Albuquerque Police Department officers placed on paid leave or reassigned, a lawyer’s office raided, etc. — and long on speculation. The Albuquerque Journal‘s print edition is a tad more specific, but it seems nobody feels very chatty in the early days of whatever this turns out to be.
APD spokesman Gilbert Gallegos told the Journal that APD had been working with the FBI “for the past several months on an investigation involving members of the department” and that “several” officers have been placed on paid administrative leave while the inquiry continues.
Of the 152 pending DWI cases dismissed, 136, or nearly 90%, were filed by three Albuquerque police officers, according to court records. One officer was responsible for 67 of the cases; another had 41; and the third was listed as the arresting officer on 28.
The Albuquerque Journal
Attorney Kari Morrissey, who has one client whose case was dismissed, told City Desk ABQ, “I will say that as a lawyer who has been practicing criminal defense in Albuquerque for almost 25 years, I am not surprised as to these developments.”
John D’Amato, an attorney with the Albuquerque Police Officers’ Association, told City Desk ABQ he was aware of a pending criminal investigation, adding: “No comment is the word of the day. It’s developing and the facts are unclear.”
One thing is clear. We have statues of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman here in The Duck! City. But not of Frank Serpico. Or Saul Goodman, now that I think of it. That dude couldn’t even get an Emmy.
Mad Blog Media 
