“I hate to get hit myself as it digs a hole you don’t quite get out of for a couple of weeks.” — Brown Dog in “The Seven-Ounce Man,” by Jim Harrison
Brown Dog, a.k.a. B.D., didn’t burn a lot of daylight worrying about politics or getting his ass kicked.
He got drawn into both from time to time, as we all do. But they didn’t leave any lasting marks on him. Not for long, anyway.
Preparing to do battle with a couple of bruisers whose women he’d been romancing B.D. mused that “it wasn’t likely to be the end of the world, just a real expensive way to pay for getting laid a few times.”
All the world cares about, his grandfather once told him, is that you get to work on time.
Well. Shit. We got boned and beat up last Tuesday. I still feel as though I’m down in that hole, but I guess it’s time to get back to work.
“Our special correspondent in the day after tomorrow reports,” the journalist was saying. … — H.G. Wells, “The Time Machine.”
We traveled back in time for a while yesterday. Seemed appropriate, given Tuesday’s events.
Instead of tapping, tapping like a stately Raven upon the keyboard after the power went out at 12:53 a.m. Thursday — and stayed out, for nearly 15 hours — it was scribble, scribble, scribble like Mr. Gibbon, recording my little fragments of history with pen and paper.
When your entire life has been light on calamities, save those self-inflicted, it’s illuminating to see just how far up your ass you’ve been storing your head. The things you don’t think about until circumstances insist.
Let’s begin at the beginning.
Campfire coffee, but indoors.
First, when the indoors feels like the outdoors you dress like the homeless, albeit with a dash more style because you and your spouse scored some killer deals while doing time in the outdoor industry. When I hit Keller’s for tortillas as the storm began rolling in on Wednesday the two dudes I saw using Heights Cleaners as a windbreak were not outfitted so handsomely.
Next, an electric gooseneck kettle is great for making coffee when there is electricity. Without juice it’s the battered old blue enamelware pot, gas cooktop, and butane lighter.
Speaking of heat, we have two fireplaces that we haven’t used in 10 years, because fireplaces are basically heat pumps that run backwards and messy to boot. O, for the highly efficient wood-burning Lopi fireplace insert of good ol’ CrustyTucky. But when the power failed there we had to break out the Coleman camp stove to cook because the range-oven combo was electric.
Let there be light.
We have a portable propane heater suitable for emergency indoor use, but like the fireplaces, it’s never been put to the test. I envision the headline: “Carbon monoxide blamed in couple’s death.” The cat ate their lips. Safer to add layers.
Light, too, was an issue at dark-thirty in the icebox. Instead of flipping a switch we were flipping our wigs as we tracked down the battery-powered flashlights, lanterns, and headlamps we haven’t used in the better part of quite some time. Some were charged; others were very dim indeed, like their owners, who had neglected to stock actual candlepower.
Once the issues of coffee, heat retention, and illumination had been resolved, the next hurdle was finding out what the fuck, etc.
We are, as you know, in the information business, Herself and I. She gets paid to find it, but I am no longer a meat hunter. I’ll track the wily news items, but only for sport. Shooting off my mouth for fun instead of profit.
For a change — ¡Que milagro! — both our iPhones were charged. So we quickly learned that about 50,000 of our fellow New Mexicans were shivering in the dark alongside us, and that it would be something like 2 in the morning — on Friday — before we could expect any relief.
As you might expect, I had a few thoughts about this, along with many other things as well. And as a scribbler emeritus and amateur podcaster I like to share my musings with this small, deeply disturbed audience while they’re fresh. But I can’t do them justice on an iPhone, not without a magnifying glass and a lot of bad language. I deal in emotions, not emoji. I demand at least an 11-inch display and a physical QWERTY keyboard.
The 15-inch 2014 MacBook Pro I’m using now was literally a non-starter. Ever since the “Geniuses” at the local Apple Store buggered its display while replacing the battery it needs an external display to function, and the external display requires (wait for it) electricity.
So I booted up my 11-inch 2012 MacBook Air, which — untouched by “Genius” — still gets excellent life from its battery. When it’s charged. Which it was not. Ten percent and dropping faster than the temperature.
That left the 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro. Boom! Fully charged. Using the iPhone as a hotspot I popped up some notes about the power outage and a link to the latest episode of Radio Free Dogpatch. Behold, the mountain labors and brings forth a mouse.
Then we waited.
We took a bit of indoor exercise, Herself doing calisthenics in her office, me riding the Cateye CS-1000 trainer as a warmup for some light weightlifting. There was lunch.
Snowpocalypse. Or not.
As the phones slowly lost juice we went on another scavenger hunt, unearthing a handful of portable power banks and lanterns with charging capability that kept communications alive until the power suddenly returned at 3:12 p.m. yesterday, well ahead of schedule.
We were a little worried about losing it again — the forecast called for 5-12 inches of snow in the foothills — but at a glance I’d say the weatherpeople missed their guess by, oh, let’s see here, about 5-12 inches.
So don’t call FEMA. We don’t need a trailer or anything.
As for the political news — well, our special correspondent in the day after tomorrow has yet to file his report. But his friend had some thoughts.
He I know — for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made — thought but cheerlessly of the advancement of mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla mans (cats?) the National Affairs Desk in our bedroom.
It was not quite 4:30, and I was not quite up.
I was awake, rolled up in the blankets like a strip of bacon in a breakfast burrito. But I was in no rush to get unwrapped, gnawed on, and shat out by Election Day 2024.
My Gonzo pin, a gift from a friend during my own Gonzo period.
Like Mike’s bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises,” it has finally arrived: “Gradually and then suddenly.”
Don’t worry. I haven’t been reading Ernest Hemingway in the run-up to The Big Show. No, I’ve been wallowing in bits of this and that from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.
The Good Doktor wrote madly about The Edge, until he finally stepped over it. Nineteen years later, dead by suicide, cremated, and shot from a cannon by Johnny Depp, he still has more class — albeit in a certain Hell’s Angels style — and gave more service to his country than many a president.
Writing about the Hell’s Angels in his book of the same name, HST described people like the ones Herself recently saw herding flamboyantly Trump-flagged pickups up and down Tramway, horns honking:
“They are out of the ball game and they know it, (so) they spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand … Instead of losing quietly, one by one, they have banded together with a mindless kind of loyalty and moved outside the (establishment) for good or ill. (That) gives them a power and a purpose that nothing else seems to offer.”
He may have been a bit premature with the second volume of his “Gonzo Papers,” titled “Generation of Swine: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80s.” If he had kicked his dope-soaked alter ego Raoul Duke to the curb and survived to see this generation of swine — HST would be 87 today — he might have looked back on the ’80s with a certain fondness, even longing.
Describing the difference between the ’60s and the ’80s, between the Watergate and Iran-Contra scandals, he wrote:
The criminals in Watergate knew they were guilty and so did everybody else; and when the dust cleared the crooked president was gone and so were all the others. They were criminals and they had the same contempt for the whole concept of democracy that these cheap punks have been strutting every day. …”
Don’t you wonder what he’d have had to say about the 45th president — impeached twice, beaten in his bid for re-election, tried to reverse the defeat with violence and chicanery, obviously insane, declining hourly — and still within a whisker of winning a second term, going two for three? I know I do.
HST mentioned that guy only in passing, as far as I can recall. But he took note of Joe Biden’s first major presidential-election meltdown over a plagiarism scandal at law school in the ’60s. The candidate who hopes to succeed Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, had won her first election — as San Francisco district attorney — just three years before HST died in 2005.
So, yeah. HST left the party too early for a change, and more’s the pity. He wasn’t always right, and sometimes wasn’t even readable. But when he was on his game the Good Doktor could walk with the King. Or savage him. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be reading right now as we all tiptoe toward The Edge once again.
Here he is again, quoting John Keats instead of his personal fave, the Book of Revelation:
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“We are all droogs, but somebody has to be in charge. Right? Right?”
Appy polly loggies, droogies, but I could not watch last night’s “debate” between Coach Walz and Clockwork Orange.
I made it past the explanation of the rules and maybe two questions in and then yelped “Out out out out!” like a doggie.
Bedways was rightways as I saw it. We weren’t going to learn anything from this gloopy chepooka that would change our rassoodocks about these two chellovecks.
The Coach seems a proper moodge who plays by the rules while Clockwork Orange is anything but. He’s a smart, mean grahzny bratchny who would steal the coppers off his dead granny’s eyes for his ante into the Big Game, with a few aces up the old sleeve courtesy of his prestoopnik pals.
And you don’t fight him with facts. A cutthroat britva is what a lewdie needs for this lot, O my brothers.
• O my brothers (and sisters): If you’re not conversant with the nadsat dialect Anthony Burgess devised for his characters, you’ll have to hunt down a glossary. Burgess was opposed to such assistance, but one of my copies went against his wishes.
“I wouldn’t be doing any of it if it weren’t for writing,” he said, looking back on his career, in a 2006 interview with the online magazine Country Standard Time.
“I never would have gotten to make records if I didn’t write. I wouldn’t have gotten to tour without it. And I never would’ve been asked to act in a movie if I hadn’t been known as a writer.”
“Writer” was the occupation listed on Mr. Kristofferson’s passport.
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