It’s not just the sky, mind you.
Every Monday, rain or shine, sickness or health, the blue trash and recycling trucks that work our cul-de-sac toot their horns for the two little girls next door, who jump up and down in the driveway, shrieking with delight.
The drivers don’t have to do this. It’s not part of the job description. But they do it anyway.
So in case you’re starting to wonder whether any hope remains … I’d say yeah. It rolls by twice every Monday in a big blue truck.
Auto shops are essential, but bike shops are not?
We beg to differ.
Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham’s order designating some New Mexico businesses as essential and others, eh, not so much, could use a little gentle tweaking. Thanks to Khal S. and the League of American Bicyclists, we can suggest that bike shops be given the all-clear to operate, even if only in some greatly reduced fashion.
Says Ken McLeod, LAB policy director:
“The League of American Bicyclists has received several requests for advocacy support to make sure that bicycle repair shops are designated as essential businesses in New Mexico and other states. … The League of American Bicyclists believes that bicycle repair employees are within the essential workforce described by federal guidance released by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. That guidance says that the essential workforce includes ‘Employees who repair and maintain vehicles … that encompass movement of cargo and passengers.’ We think that the correct interpretation is that bicycle repair employees fall within that description. Clarifying that by explicitly including bicycle repair shops as essential businesses would be helpful so that they can continue serving the needs of people who depend upon bicycles for transportation or find bicycles preferable as a low-cost transportation option in this time of crisis.”
LAB has created a campaign page for people to direct messages to the governor on this issue. Ken, Khal and I urge you to circulate the link as you see fit.
Beyond hoarding beans, buttwipe and bullets, people don’t seem to be taking The Bug seriously in these parts.
Or they didn’t on Sunday, anyway.
When Herself and I bicycled over to the Dark Tower to deliver some vino to Herself the Elder, we passed three trailhead parking lots that were jam-packed and overflowing onto neighboring streets.
Call me crazy, but this seemed like antisocial distancing to me, on a par with slow dancing in a burning building, the New Mexican equivalent of sunburned bro-brahs wearing bikini babes like earbuds during spring break in Florida.
Maybe the authorities were watching, too. Maybe our crowds were not out of the ordinary.
Because come Monday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham went on TV to lay down the law. Or the advisory, anyway.
The nut graf? Keep your distance, preferably behind closed doors.
“There are a lot of people out and about,” she said. “This creates risk. This creates exposure.”
I created a few exposures myself with the old iPhone camera, and here they are, all shot from a proper social distance, if only to avoid an ass-kicking (“Hey, man, whatchoo taking pictures of, huh? You work for my old lady?”).
And when I got back to El Rancho Pendejo I created another podcast.
Yes, yes, yes — it’s a socially distant, viral episode of Radio Free Dogpatch!
• Technical notes: I recorded this episode with an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB mic straight to the MacBook Pro, using Rogue Amoeba’s nifty little app Piezo. Editing was in GarageBand. The background music is “Buddy,” an iMovie jingle. The other sound effects were liberated from the GarageBand loops library. And those musical references? The musicologists among you will be familiar with “Highway to Hell” (AC/DC); “Stairway to Heaven” (Led Zeppelin); “Happy Trails” (Roy Rogers and Dale Evans); “Get It While You Can” (Janis Joplin); “The Last Waltz” (The Band); and “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” (Johnny Cash). These are not necessarily the folks who wrote the music, but the ones who came to mind as I was writing the podcast.
It’s early days yet, of course, but so far our lives have not been radically altered by the governor’s stay-at-home edict.
Even before The Fourth Horseman rode his sneezy hayburner into town we were mostly homebodies. Herself got up at stupid-thirty four days a week to pull a 10-hour shift at the Death Star, and by the time she came home she was rarely in the mood to go out to do … well, pretty much anything.
So I would cook dinner, we would watch something on TV, and then it was early to bed because see “getting up at stupid-thirty,” etc.
After the guv gave us the word yesterday, I cooked dinner, we watched something on TV, and … well, you get the idea. One of us still gets up at stupid-thirty, too. Guess who.
We maintain our respective hobbies, of course. Herself eBays bits of this and that, for us and for friends. And as you see, I continue to operate my little one-ring nonprofit, the Cirque du Sowhat.
Meanwhile, Miss Mia Sopaipilla remains firmly atop the org chart. Somebody has to be in charge around here, and it’s never gonna be me.
Well, kids, there you have it: Stay the (You Know What) Home.
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