Burning daylight

Today started and ended well, lightly toasted slices of metaphorical bread comprising an actual shit sandwich.

On arising I recalled that we had a huge slab of meaty Ranch Foods Direct bacon in the fridge, so breakfast included coffee, eggs over easy, American fried potatoes, buttery English muffins and great thick rashers of pigmeat. Your basic heart-attack special, but I like it.

My plans for the workday hinged on breaking a piece of new technology to harness, but despite a hearty breakfast I couldn’t even get my rope on it, much less my brand.

Being something of a persistent cuss — you may call it “obsessive-compulsive,” I call it “persistent” — I kept working at it, trying first this and then that and finally the other, all the while taking copious notes on each fresh dysfunction with an eye toward eventually tattooing same on someone using an icepick and ball-peen hammer, with a sack of wormy dogshit for ink.

Thus the hours passed and the daylight faded, and the technology breezily countered my every move. By late afternoon, which saw the mailperson deliver an overdue check for services rendered that was redeemable for slightly less than half the expected quantity of Dead President Trading Cards, I was at a rolling boil, hissing like a teakettle full of vipers, blistering steam boiling out of both ears.

Herself and I had earlier scheduled a joint birthday dinner with friends, so I stuck my head in the freezer, counted to a thousand in Irish, and off we went to The Blue Star, where the four of us ate all manner of good things while discussing music, metaphysics and literature. Also, we solved every last one of the world’s problems save mine (you’re welcome).

Now I’m hardly pissed off at all. But tomorrow is another day.

Further on down the road

Was it really 10 years ago today that I wrote this?

It shouldn’t be any surprise that on the evening Junior decided to launch his war — a war that is not, repeat not, for oil — the local ABC affiliate’s “news” half-hour featured ads, in rapid succession, for various Chevys and Fords, the Hummer H2, Jeep, Hyundai, Subaru, Pontiac and Honda. Semper finance, with easy monthly payments.

How time flies, etc. Those “easy monthly payments” sure have turned out to be a bitch, though, eh? Especially in this economy. Maybe it’s time to trade the old heap in on a new model.

You can’t spell ‘news’ without ‘ew’

Mister Boo post-cleansing.
Mister Boo post-cleansing.

Trying to keep abreast of the news lately is like following the Budweiser Clydesdales around with a demitasse spoon and a lace napkin. Some days there’s just too much shit for one guy to shovel.

For example, this is not the first time I’m glad I don’t live in Boston.

Also, Los Angeles.

Some buttmunch (or more likely, buttmunches) stole a quarter-million euros worth of bikes and gear from a Garmin-Sharp truck parked outside the team’s hotel, putting them out of the Tour Méditerranéen.

Say it ain’t so, Cipo’.

Is that a drone in your pocket, or are you just unhappy to see me?

And so on, and so forth, etc.

Meanwhile, I have a bum knee that apparently requires physical therapy — always good news for a fella who makes his marginal living in the bike biz — and Mister Boo had to endure a bath, a nail-clipping and the expression of his anal glands this morning. So we’re all a little irritable around the DogHaus today.

How’s tricks with you? Speak up in comments.

Missed him by that much

God is trying to get Paddy McQuaid, sending a flood to bugger up cyclo-cross worlds in Kaintucky, but the fat bastard keeps bobbing and weaving, ducking the punch.

Word is that Sunday’s races have been shoehorned into Saturday’s schedule, so come the Lord’s day we’re unlikely to enjoy the sight of Fat Paddy sailing down the Ohio River on a raft composed entirely of his own bullshit, more’s the pity.

Just one more reason I’m an atheist with a Zen streak.

• Late update: My fellow Bibleburger Casey B. Gibson is shooting worlds for the VeloNews mob. Here’s his latest gallery. The sandbags are going down and the water is coming up. Good times.

Hope and (spare) change

Mister Boo
Mister Boo feels the torpor of the unemployed.

As the coronation of King Socialist Muslim I proceeds in DeeCee, word on the streets in Bibleburg is that job growth locally is confined to pitching greaseballs at motorists through drive-up windows, answering phone calls from pissed-off Comcast customers and blowing shit up, in part because the locals are too fucking stupid to sell legal weed.

The good news is, gas is cheap for anyone who wants to leave town in search of greener pastures.

The local unemployment rate has been at or above 8.9 percent for three and a half years, and would be more like 12 percent had not some 4,000 Bibleburgers given up looking for work altogether, according to the Gazette.

Interestingly, local number-cruncher Tom Binnings of Summit Economics LLC estimates that 24 percent of Bibleburgers are self-employed, “making money where they can and finding a way to survive, but not much more.”

That number seemed steep at first, until I started thinking about most of the local folks I know. A couple are educators, one has a gummint job, and a few are private-sector employees, but a substantial percentage of the others is self-employed: artist, screen printer, construction contractor, bike-shop owner.

We’re not all struggling to survive, but I’m certain we’d all like to be doing better. Thing is, how do we get there? Ranching the view doesn’t put beans in your burrito, blowing shit up seems likely to go out of fashion if DeeCee ever gets serious about reining in spending, and cheap gas isn’t much of a solace if you have nowhere to go.