Category: Assholes

Surprise

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” — Proverbs 16:18

Boy, looks like Yevgeny Prigozhin got way out over his Wagner skis, hey? You need a real big stick to poke the bear, and it seems as though he couldn’t find one when he reached into his fatigues for something to wave at Vladimir Putin. I haven’t seen a bootlegger’s turn that snappy since “The Rockford Files.”

Watching bloodthirsty fascists bumping dickheads over the best way to fuck up someone else’s country is not my idea of light entertainment, especially when I have no idea how much of it is performance art.

Some smart folks say Prigozhin is a dead man walking, a bad dog who snapped at his master and got shipped off to a farm in Belarus where he’ll have the run of the back 40, happily chasing bunny rabbits all day.

Others say Prigozhin caught Pooty-poot with his Stalinist drawers down, the inept Russian army overcommitted and outmaneuvered, and forced him to cut a deal using Belarus boss-fella Aleksandr Lukashenko — who seems to be a bro-brah of both belligerents — as a go-between.

The guys to watch, it seems, are Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Prigozhin would like to have their jobs, their stature — and, not incidentally, their nuts for a necklace.

And since Shoigu and Gerasimov are fucking up in spectacular fashion what was supposed to be a cakewalk in Ukraine, maybe Vlad the Impaler is using Prigozhin as an adjunct to the Kremlin’s HR department.

If one or both of them suddenly decides to retire to spend more time in their dachas with the family, Putin gets another KGB merit badge from the media, and Prigozhin starts to look less like Steve Buscemi and more like Steve McQueen.

Doesn’t mean Putin won’t croak him too, of course. Talk about your toxic work environments.

Cleared to land

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Heading home, to where the coffee is.

The thing I hate most about driving to the airport at dark-thirty, surrounded by one-eyed, high-beam tailgaters, lift-kitters’ lugnuts, and Fruehauf mudflaps, is that I am never the person actually flying anywhere.

Other than to the airport, that is.

I have not flown through the air with the greatest of unease since March 2014, if memory serves. Unless you count my unscheduled short-range trips on the local trails, which cause only physical trauma.

Could I even remember how to navigate the unfriendly skies after nearly a decade on the deck? Unlikely. Also unnecessary. If the trip is under 2,000 miles and involves no bridgeless water crossings I will travel via Air Subaru, where the pilot is unreliable but a close personal friend, we go and stop at my convenience, and all the mechanicals take place at ground level.

But Herself, who is made of sterner stuff, blazes a trail straight through the customer-disservice wilderness without batting an eye.

She did it again this morning, far too early, in order to visit a friend in Minnesota. I was the first stage of her launch vehicle and burned up during re-entry, which necessitated a short nap.

But now Herself is safely in orbit around Minneapolis and I’m back at my desk in Mission Control, where the temps are inching toward triple digits with winds of 25 mph and up.

Say, did someone ship me to Mars while I was napping? Anyone seen Elon lately? You can’t take your eyes off that bozo for a nanosecond. That’s his mission, anyway. I find myself rooting for simultaneous knockouts.

This Bud’s for you

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments
We should be so lucky.

Ho hum. I see some deep-pockets blowhard strolled in and out of court again yesterday, without consequences, as per usual. Not even a mug shot.

Shit, I’ve done more time than this blabbering plastic sack of fast-food farts, a serial liar who cheats at golf and would sell his idiot children to the Saudis, if he could find one dumb and mean enough to buy them for sex toys and/or dog food.

And I didn’t have to lip off to the cops, DAs, or judges to get jugged, either.

No, that would’ve been one of my bros, the dude who told the graying Colfax beat cop with the rookie partner: “You can’t arrest us for walking out of a bar with a beer.”

Ho, ho. Wrong again.

This regrettable incident took place in the Glory Days, when my friends and I were basically ambulatory recruiting posters for the War On Drugs. We’d have let the feds put our faces on a “Know Your Enemy” flyer if they paid us in cocaine and Stoli.

None of us was wealthy. We had no well-connected allies. We had dedicated ourselves to scaling new heights of impairment and then tumbling down the other side into a crusty rental house that used to be part of a Glendale nursery. For plants. Not children.

And thus we learned how to talk to cops. Be polite. Rely upon the short, simple words you can still pronounce without drooling. Don’t let the nice flatfoot see the devils raging behind your blood-red eyeballs.

And never, under any circumstances, tell a cop, “You can’t arrest us for [insert your offense here].”

My friend forgot this cardinal rule — only for a moment — but that’s all it takes. Loose lips sink ships, especially when the crew is hammered. And so we all got a fun ride in the drunk wagon and a night to remember in the Denver calaboose, where we met some fascinating people.

One was a duster (crazed on PCP), and he was quickly awarded the entire drunk tank for his earsplitting arguments with people or Things who were not there. We more numerous but much less scary drunks got packed into two-man cells so we could enjoy the floor show from a safe distance.

Another was a glum-looking permed and pastel-leisure-suited gent who had gotten popped for soliciting a hooker who turned out to be a vice cop. He could see his apartment from our cell, but not his wife inside it. He was not looking forward to seeing her in his new digs.

We got sprung in the morning without charges. Go and sin no more, you silly little shits, they told us. But goddamn it, we did our time.

If only we’d been riot-inciting former presidents of the United States whose Florida resort’s crappers were overflowing with national secrets instead of addled stoners getting sideways with a Colfax cop.

We’d have been back in the Satire Lounge before closing time.

A wee bit of civics

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
The backyard maple is trying to coax a bit of rain from those clouds.

June 1. Good gawd awmighty. Three weeks until the first day of summer.

Where the hell does the time go?

It doesn’t feel very summery, not yet. We’re slathering on the sunscreen when we go out and about, but highs have only reached the mid-70s to mid-80s, which are very much bearable.

Thus, we have no excuses for staying inside to watch Sleepy Joe and Charlie McCarthy make the sausage. We’ll be eating it soon enough.

It all reminds me very little of what we were taught in junior-high civics classes. Or home economics, for that matter.

What it reminds me of is gym class, specifically the shower portion, wherein a jock occasionally would pee surreptitiously on some poor geek’s leg while distracting him with conversation.

The geek was usually so astonished to be having a chat with one of his betters that he didn’t notice the augmented fluids coursing down his calf until the giggling began.

And then he couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

The geek didn’t yet know about the sausage. He still thought it was just something mom put on his plate with the scrambled eggs and toast. He still thought Bob Dylan was just singing a song.