Category: Bibleburg

From our oft-ignored Good News Department

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

I had just wrapped up a bit of leaf-raking this afternoon and was vigorously applying water to what serves us as a lawn when my friend, neighbor and bicycle adviser John Crandall of Old Town Bike Shop rolled by to exchange pleasantries.

John, as you may recall, was involved in a horrific bike-auto accident a year and some months back, and in his recovery has suffered the trials of Job. He has been carved like a Thanksgiving turkey (and more than once); had parts installed and replaced; taken steps backward as well as forward; and endured physical therapy that would make the Grand Inquisitor say, “Aw, c’mon, guys, ease up.”

And now he’s cycling again, on the road; has been for a couple of weeks. Ten miles is a good day. He’s trying to figure out whether he can still ride a motorcycle, which must be an agonizing decision for a throttle-twister of some four decades’ standing.

But at least John is back on the bike. I should’ve taken a picture. He looked so happy.

The weather is here, wish you were beautiful

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
One shot, three seasons: Summer in the lawn, fall in the trees and winter on Pikes Peak.
One shot, three seasons: Summer in the lawn, fall in the trees and winter on Pikes Peak.

Deadlines suck. Like The Turk, I’ve been indoors more than I care to be lately, in my case generating bicycle comedy for fun and profit (well, for profit, anyway, and only just barely). This is particularly irksome because we’ve been enjoying a stellar fall here in Bibleburg. It’s 76 right now — 76! — at 5:45 p.m. on Oct. 15. Imagine my amazement.

This will change, as it must. Tomorrow and Sunday look pretty damn’ nice, and wouldn’t y’know, I have to clock in for a couple of shifts in the old VeloBarrel. Come Monday, the weather should become a bit more seasonal, as in 50-something with a chance of showers. Ick.

After that, it’s the Colorado lottery, which means exactly what it sounds like — a total meteorological crapshoot, which I must say keeps life interesting, like the wining jug in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row,” a punch blended by understudy barkeep Eddie using any booze left in glasses by the patrons of La Ida. A Palace Flophouse roommate, Jones, first pans, then praises the concoction:

“You take whiskey,” he said hurriedly. “You more or less know what you’ll do. A fightin’ guy fights and a cryin’ guy cries, but this —” he said magnanimously — “why, you don’t know whether it’ll run you up a pine tree or start you swimming to Santa Cruz.”

That’s the sad part. Pine trees we got. But Santa Cruz … not so much.

Real wool socks and virtual ravioli

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments

Thank Buddha for wool socks. The only way to get a gas flame around the DogHaus today is to light one’s own farts.

Happily, it is October, not February — which means it’s about 55 outside and 65 inside as we speak at 10 a.m. Bibleburg time. That ain’t bad, though I confess I miss our old Weirdcliffe wood stove. It, unlike our rooftop solar unit here, worked even on cloudy Sunday mornings like this one.

Meanwhile, Friend of Dogpatch Larry T. sends word of his raviolipalooza. Watch and weep as you nibble your shredded wheat.

Going places

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
The Air Force Academy as seen from the New Santa Fe Trail.
The Air Force Academy as seen from the New Santa Fe Trail.

People often ask me how I can bear to live in a stony-broke garrison town full of Bible-thumpers, Birchers and boneheads, a place that can’t afford to keep its streetlights on unless you care to adopt one, where economic development seems confined to the crucial tattoo, pawnshop and medical-marijuana sectors and nearly half the respondents to a recent survey think we’re headed in the wrong direction (unless you’re ripped to the tits and pawning your deployed sister’s iPod to get some fresh ink).

I ask myself the same question every time I venture out of our little enclave northeast of Colorado College. Here the streets are wide, the trees tall and the neighbors friendly. It feels like the sort of small-town America that probably never existed beyond the confines of a black-and-white TV screen — until you head north, east or south and experience the real Bibleburg in full color, 3-D, with SurroundSound, a collaboration between Steve Spielberg and Terry Gilliam with an assist from Stephen King.

So mostly I don’t do that. Beyond the once-weekly dash north to Whole Paycheck my north-south peregrinations are generally restricted to cycling along the Pikes Peak Greenway/New Santa Fe Regional Trail, which offers a 35-mile auto-free roundtrip if taken south and a 60-mile out-and-back if ridden north. I used a portion of the trail for a time trial to the North Gate of the Air Force Academy on Tuesday and failed to medal even though I was the only contestant.

Greater cosmopolitan Bibleburg as seen from Palmer Park.
Greater cosmopolitan Bibleburg as seen from Palmer Park.

East I head mostly never, having learned in the Seventies that the real Bibleburg stops somewhere around Hancock Avenue, about six blocks from here. But I will venture in that direction as far as Palmer Park, a trail-rich, 730-acre reminder of what that side of town looked like before Bibleburg dropped trou’ for the developers. I spent an hour and a half there yesterday trying to remember how to ride a mountain bike.

This is a survival mechanism learned from Ernest Hemingway, Jim Harrison and other word-slingers who often longed to be somewhere other than where they were. “Do not scorn day trips. You can use them to avoid nervous collapse,” writes Harrison, who should know.

In fact, I feel a day trip coming on as we speak. I just put new tires on the Nobilette and I am so out of here.