So the other day I was motoring around and about, running on fumes as a fella will in these dark days, when the Subaru’s low-fuel light blinked on.
Huh, I thought. You don’t say. Well, I have errands to run, I don’t believe in the Low-Fuel Fairy, and I don’t give my money to Big Oil until I have to. F’chrissakes, Herself just poured $60 of go-juice into her Honda CR-V. That oughta hold the greasy sonsabitches for a while.
A glance at the trip meter told me I’d squeezed 318 miles out of that tank, which is not bad for a 2005 Forester with more than 159K on the odometer. Bound to be a few more miles in there, I thought. So the Subie and I soldiered on.
Errands complete and homeward bound the trip meter was showing 325 miles and I reconsidered my position. No point in pushing my luck and maybe pushing this bucket of bolts back to El Rancho Pendejo, I thought. It’s all uphill from here and this old mechanical burro needs her hay.
So I pulled into the next gas station, fed my credit card to the pump, and got the party started.
Now, I don’t gas up often because I don’t drive that much anymore. The Duck! City drivers have sucked all the happy out of motoring for me. Imagine a bumper-cars circuit looping through a shooting range with a wet bar in an insane asylum. So in the long stretches between fillups I tend to forget that buying a tank of gas has become a multimedia experience.
Oh, bite me.
As the pump sprang to hideous life its TV screen started screaming something about “FATTY MEAT STICKS! Made with GRASS-FED BEEF AND PORK!” and how I have to get one RIGHT NOW!”
Uh … isn’t that what’s happening right now? I thought as my tab ticked steadily upward to $56.98.
Remember the old quip about the price of a lift? “Ass, gas, or grass?” It’s true; nobody rides for free. But I didn’t expect to pay my freight by doing a threesome with Speedway and Fatty.
Not a great photo, but it gave me the idea for the headline, so … winning?
Ah, October in Duck!Burg. The temps have dropped, the rain has stopped, and the streets are alive with the cars of eejits.
I enjoyed a near miss on a fast descent the other day. I was braking (and signaling) for a left turn when a motorist halfway-rolls the stop sign at the street I planned to enter, glancing only to her left.
Well, shit. I’ve seen this movie and I don’t like the ending. Couldn’t turn in front of her, as I could have had she yielded the right of way at the stop sign. And I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of ripping the turn on her right side, because while she appeared to be about halfway into a left turn I couldn’t see if she had the left blinker on. The right most definitely was not on. And nobody in this town uses their turn signals anyway, not even the cops.
So I hit the binders, come to a stop, and shout “HEY!”
Well, then she saw me, if the deer-in-the-headlights look she pasted on her face was any indication. I was signaling my turn, wearing bright colors, and rocking a bright headlight as per usual, but if you don’t fucking look at me you won’t see any of that Sammy Safety shit.
I’m not big on driver education, what with everyone being armed these days, so rather than doing a war dance in my broken-down old Sidis I settled for the Universal Headshake of Disappointment — left, right, left, mmm, hmm, hmm, you stupid, stupid motorist — and went about my business. A cyclist has to keep the Third Eye wide open and way out on its stalk in these parts. Periscope up!
Speaking of feckin’ eejits, early voting began yesterday and we’re looking forward to receiving our ballots via uniformed federal employee and casting the moneychangers out of the national temple.
Unlike the Swamp Thing besmirching the Oval Orifice with its wet Mickey D’s farts we do not vote by mail, we just get our ballots that way. Then we fill them out at the kitchen table, screeching blasphemies as though the candidates were dumbass motorists rolling stop signs.
“Yeah, fuck you! Eat shit and die! That’s right! Go get a job in the private sector, you Brooks Brothers butt-kisser! Oh, wait, you can’t, because the private sector expects results!Boom! Now, piss off! Die, die, die!”
Etc.
Then we walk our ballots up to the neighborhood polling place and thank the workers for their service.
This year the herd-thinning process will be a breeze because anyone still claiming to be a Republican after two years of Swamp Thing v2.0 is not only a taco short of a combo plate but a clear and present danger to what little remains of the Republic. Christ knows the Democrats are bad enough.
But we don’t want to be hollering like that at our polling place. We don’t want to frighten any fainthearted types from the other team who may be coming, however belatedly, to their senses. The Republic needs all the help it can get.
That was the forecast for the first day of fall: rain, and plenty of it, starting around noon.
Perfect, I thought. I usually run on Tuesdays anyway, so I’d have plenty of time to do the morning chores, then bang out an unimpressive 5K on the trails, and be safely indoors before Thor started taking batting practice.
But as the morning unfolded the skies actually seemed to be clearing. So I thought, hmmm: First day of fall, cyclocross season with actual cyclocross weather … maybe push the run to Wednesday, when the forecast is even less velo-friendly, and take a quick spin on a Steelman today.
Bingo.
About 45 minutes in, which in cool weather is when most of the bits of me have finally reported for duty, I slalomed off a trail in the Elena Gallegos Open Space and into a parking lot to see a friend wrapping up a walk with his dogs, and we took five for a chat about Irish literature and Japanese automobiles.
Then … drip … drop. ...
“Feels like it’s starting to sprinkle,” I said.
He had a squint at the windshield of his Honda Element, which like my Subaru Forester — and, if we’re speaking frankly here, like the two of us, and many a character in Irish literature — has more than a few hard miles on it.
“So it is,” he confirmed.
Well. A fine soft day on tap and here I am, miles from home and dressed for another class of party altogether. Caught with my knickers not only down, but in a drawer, with the rest of my foul-weather kit. I said my goodbyes and took off, hoping to get home before droplets turned to deluge. Skip the lovely trails, they’re already awash in eejits with earbuds and the rain will bring out the snakes. St. Patrick I am not. Ask anyone.
But as I barreled down Simms Road toward Tramway once again the weather shifted gears on me. I caught a few fat drops in the gob on the descent and then nada. Niente. Bupkis.
Well, then. I’d been hoping for a quick hour, but if the gods were leaning on their shovels with hoses coiled I’d stay out for a while longer. The 20-mile, mixed-terrain ride is the foundation of my “training program,” such as it is, and I was halfway there as I passed Comanche headed south. Onward.
I generally log more mileage north of Comanche, but the south has its attractions as well. I stuck to the Tramway bike path for a while, Tramway itself seeming to have more traffic than normal, probably hoarders hellbent on cornering the chips, bean dip, and buttwipe markets before the Apocalypse struck. I needed to do some of that myself. But not until I got my 20 in.
Every time I got a dampish puck in the gob I swung north and east, toward home. If it was more of a love tap than a lashing, I turned south and west, one eye on the cyclometer. Bike paths, low-traffic foothills streets, a bit of dirt as it presented itself, and hey presto! I got my 20. 20.3 miles, to be precise, and 1,481 feet of vertical gain. Not bad for a rain day.
Which it was not, still.
The fuck? I thought. Must have the A.I. on the job down to the National Weather Service. More of a focus on mass murder than meteorology? If it fights as well as it forecasts we’ll all of us live to a ripe old age so. “Terminator” me bollocks.
So I ate the last of a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili, jumped into the Subie, and rattled off to the grocery to collect a few delicacies. Herself is in Tennessee with her sisters, at a celebration of life for our late brother-in-law, William F. White Jr., so I was seizing the opportunity to minimize cooking and cleaning up afterward.
From non-soon to monsoon.
And so it was that I was sprawled comfortably on the couch, nibbling on shrimp, fresh bread with butter, and a green salad, watching a bit of standup on Netflix (Joe DeRosa, “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden,” not bad), when it finally started raining. At around 6 p.m.
But man — did it ever make up for lost time. It still hasn’t stopped and I just finished breakfast on Wednesday morning. A quarter inch since 4 this morning and 0.64 inch total.
Maybe I better take back some of that shit I said about A.I. Like me, it may be slow, but it gets there eventually.
A samurai in a latrine; outside, his three attendants hold their noses. Colored woodcut by Hokusai, 1834. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Thanks to one and all for standing guard outside my little shithouse this week.
I was called to jury duty again, and this time they actually required me to do something other than show up and wish I were elsewhere, running or riding a bike.
The judge sprung us Thursday afternoon, and though yesterday was my last official day in the three-week-long jury-selection barrel, I knew I would not get hauled in again. So I went for a leisurely 5K run. Today I’ll ride a bike.
And sometime later I will have some thoughts about my four days as a juror. Though Roy Blount Jr. beat me to a few of them in his essay “I Always Plead Guilty,” from the collection “What Men Don’t Tell Women.”
Especially when he wrote: “Fucking up also comes from doing things that deep down inside you know better than.”
Why is a Steelman Eurocross better than a BMW 7 Series?
Well, for openers, it’s a Steelman Eurocross. And you can’t just slide on down to your local Steelman dealer and drive one off the lot, because Brent Steelman isn’t making them any longer.
Even if you could, its touchscreen wouldn’t be showing you an ad for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” the instant you climbed aboard, which BMWs are doing. My Steelman Eurocrosses ain’t got no steekeeng touchscreens. Oh, sure, they share an ancient Cateye Velo 8, but it doesn’t say shit to me because it saw what I did to Herself’s sportswatch with a claw hammer when the fucker started beeping and wouldn’t shut the hell up.
I knew this day was coming the first time I pulled into a gas station for a tank of the cheap stuff and the pump started shrieking advertising bullshit at me. I nearly drove off right then and there, but I was running on fumes, and figured that if one station was doing it, they all were.
And they all are.
The Eurocross “touchscreen.” One button, no Spider-Men.
So, guess what? If six-figure BMW 7 Series sedans are inflicting advertisements upon their owners — and nobody at BMW gets fed feet first into a wood chipper over it — your $24K Kia Shitbox will soon be pitching Happy Meals, weight-loss programs, and boner pills at you.
My 2005 Subaru Forester? Not so much. The only screen in that sucker is the windscreen, as the Brits call it. The clear one I look through to see where in the hell is it that I’m going.
This is absolutely insane, especially for cars that people own. If you own a car and an ad is shown in your car, you should get paid for the ad. And you should need to agree to it first. BMW is supposed to be a luxury brand, and one meant for driving enthusiasts. This is so absurd it’s hard to believe it’s real.
