Category: Bibleburg

Down and all the way out

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
A Farm Service Administration photo of families camped roadside during the Great Depression, taken from the Library of Congress\' American Memory collection.
A Farm Service Administration photo of families camped roadside during the Great Depression, from the Library of Congress' American Memory collection.

Here’s a sad story for you, straight out of “The Grapes of Wrath”: A homeless bricklayer profiled in the Bibleburg Gaslight on Monday was found dead outside his tipi on Thanksgiving morning — four days before the story ran.

Ray Medina, 53, told reporter Carlyn Ray Mitchell that he came to Bibleburg three years ago from Function Junction, hunting construction work at Fort Cartoon. Four months ago he moved to the banks of Fountain Creek, living first in a tent, then in the tipi. He gave the tent to a camp mate once the tipi was finished.

“None of us really want to be here,” Medina told the G. “I’m hoping (construction) will pick back up, hopefully in the spring.”

Added officer Dan McCormack with the Bibleburg Police Department’s Homeless Outreach Team: “He was convinced he was going to get a job and get off the street. Obviously his plans weren’t working out for him.”

Lots of plans are failing to reach fruition these days. Paul Krugman writes that there are six times as many of us looking for work as there are job openings, “and the average duration of unemployment — the time the average job-seeker has spent looking for work — is more than six months, the highest level since the 1930s.”

Here in Bibleburg, the unemployment rate is hovering at 7.5 percent, a slight improvement over the first half of the year attributed not to an improving economic climate, but to discouraged job-seekers dropping out of the labor market because there is no work.

So many tipis; so little hope.

Ho ho ho, Baby Jesus!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
Turkish seeks Jesus in my drawing board's lamp.
Turkish seeks Jesus in my drawing board's lamp.

We haven’t even sat down to Thanksgiving Day dinner and the pulpiteers at Focus on the Fambly are already trotting out their annual Christmas In Peril fantasy. Focus Action spokescreature Carrie Gordon Earll breaks it down for us in Palinesque style (and I’m not talking Michael here):

“The eradication of Christmas is a politically correct idea that we can’t have sacred ideas in our culture.”

Uh huh. Can someone please ask Spock to pop round with his Universal Translator? I assume it handles Cretinese.

The more I see of industrial Christianity, Bibleburg style, the more I like Zen. You never see a mob from the local sangha berating the manager of a Best Buy because he won’t hang banners inscribed with the Four Noble Truths on Shakyamuni’s birthday. George Carlin had this crowd nailed, you should pardon the expression.

Meanwhile, thanks for all the music recommendations. I’d forgotten how much I like some of your suggestions, especially The Band’s “The Last Waltz.” Wouldn’t you know the sumbitch isn’t available on iTunes? Yo, Carrie, forget about that eradication-of-Christmas bullshit — we got a real problem right here.

Altitude sickness

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Well, that’s officially it for summer — I pulled the cover off the pergola and stashed it in the garage. No chance of cranial sunburn on the back deck for now, the skies being gray, the temps in the mid-30s and some nasty-looking weather to the south.

Still, it could be worse. My man Hal up in Crusty County reports thusly: “It’s snowing again. I’m moving to Pewblow.”

He’s kidding, of course. We have both lived in Pewblow, and the best that can be said for the place is that it’s 10 degrees warmer than where Hal is right now, which would be stuck in a steadily swelling snowbank at 8,800 feet just east of Weirdcliffe.

Pewblow makes Bibleburg look like San Francisco on a sunny day. My hometown has its faults — many, many of them — but at least here the cops don’t tase you before they shoot you just to see that look on your face. They just ask if you’ve found Jesus and then blow a great big .40-caliber hole in your heart so they can see if he’s really in there.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to work up the ‘nads to go out for a short bike ride, maybe a little cyclo-cross over in Monument Valley Park. Try that in Pewblo sometime. The cops will see you running with the bike and figure you stole it. Then it’s zap, bang, and hasta la vista muchachos.

• Late update: OK, I did it — sucked it up, pulled on the winter kit and went out for an hour of solo ’cross. Lord, did I suck, particularly on the running bits, which used to be my strength. But about 40 minutes in, it finally started getting good to me, and for a lap or two I felt marginally competent, if awfully slow. And now my back hurts. Mine will not be a pretty old age.

Diary of a mad rumormonger

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments

Another gray day in Bibleburg. Big Bill McBeef popped by to say howdy after his Sunday ride, and he was wearing some old long-sleeved Mad Dog Media kit, at least two iterations off the back, the real warm stuff we got from Aussie about a thousand years ago.

Naturally, being a cyclo-crosser (emeritus), I called him a pussy for wearing long sleeves so early in September. But I was slouched in my office chair with a cup of tea, in front of two large, heat-generating flat-panel monitors, editing copy for VeloNews.com, so there was little doubt as to whose manliness was in question.

We have a moment between revenue-generating chores here, so let’s take stock of what’s going on in the hairy-legged world.

First, Jim Carroll, the punk-rocking poet perhaps best known for his memoir “The Basketball Diaries” and his punk anthem “People Who Died”? He died.

Next, The Washington Post continues to undermine the notion that the media are controlled by a tiny group of media elites. (Thanks and a tip of the Mad Blog tinfoil beanie to Steve Benen at Political Animal.) Honorable mention goes to The Bibleburg Gaslight, which proudly lists the right-wing harpy Michelle Malkin as an advisory member of its editorial board, which is not unlike Sybil adding another demonic contributor to the list of voices in her head.

And finally, my buddy Hal Walter writes about net worth versus self-worth. Take a squint; it’s most definitely worth pondering over a hot toddy as you wonder why you are where you are — and where you left the snow shovel.

Outside ♥ Bibleburg

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Part of the stellar trails network praised by Outside magazine after a summer of torrential rain and minimal maintenance.
Part of the stellar trails network praised by Outside magazine after a summer of torrential rain and minimal maintenance.

The city fathers must be frantically pulling their withered puds over the news that Outside magazine has dubbed Bibleburg No. 1 in its “America’s Best Cities” spooge-fest. I myself prefer Outside‘s hometown of Santa Fe, N.M., but Herself and I can barely afford to visit there, much less own a piece of its preposterously pricey property.

If we’d had any brains (and a bunch of money), Herself and I would have bought a place when we lived there 20 years ago, right about where the Railyard clusterplex is now. Then we could visit all the damn’ time and on the cheap, too. But we had neither brains nor money in abundance, and thus we live here, where a couple can buy a small house without selling Don Rumsfeld to Al-Qaeda.

Bibleburg has much to recommend it, as Outside notes. We’re five minutes by bike from a trail that stretches from Fountain on the south to Palmer Lake on the north, and 10 minutes from the 730-acre Palmer Park, which contains some 25 miles of trails (most of which are in pretty wretched condition from our insanely wet summer). And you can ride from downtown straight into the Rocky Mountains without spending too much time on an actual city street (which is good because they are in a terrible state of repair and packed curb to crumbling curb with insane people driving with neither skill nor mercy).

True, there is no downtown to speak of, barring a two-block strip of grog shops, alehouses and toilets whose last calls often lead to street fights, but at least the parking fees are world-class. And the stranglehold that chain eateries have on the local appetite, thanks to a transient population and abysmally low wages, means that fine dining is mostly a thing that takes place in one’s home, if one knows how to cook.

We did finally land a Whole Foods about 10 years after the rest of the country had grown bored with it, and it’s not uncommon to see some of the more colorful locals skulking about the place like retarded coyotes, filling up on free samples of exotic tidbits they don’t recognize because they are made of actual food.

When you get tired of watching them there are the neo-libertards and Elmer Gantrys for entertainment. The first lot wants government drowned in a bathtub but won’t pay for the tub or the water, while the second wants to stop the rest of us from having as much fun as they do until the hooker rats them out on “Oprah.”

And the newspaper sucks, the local TV news is worse and even our local NPR affiliate could do with a vigorous shaking from time to time.

But y’know? It could be worse.

We could be living in Pueblo.