The Shadow knows

April 30, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

Uh, whatever it is, I’ve got it penciled in … or not.

Whenever Herself zips off someplace for an extended stretch I suffer from delusions of creativity.

The idea is that somehow a window will open onto a shining world full of possibilities — blogging, podcasting, cartooning, etc.

Ho, ho. Miss Mia Sopaipilla gets more accomplished in one trip to the litter box than I do all day.

Here’s that annoying poet again, poking his big beezer through my window:

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”

In Herself’s absence Mia and I both find our daily routines disrupted, but Mia bounces back faster. Initially, upon discovering that her support staff has been halved, there is a related increase in vocalization, perimeter inspection, game-playing, and other attention-seeking practices related to separation anxiety.

But then she rockets right through all five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — and simply takes more and longer naps in various sunny spots, reasoning that time passes more quickly that way, and soon she’ll awaken to Herself offering a soupçon of half-and-half while preparing her breakfast coffee instead of that old baldheaded sonofabitch grumbling over a mug of tarry black heart-starter.

Me, I get to pick up a few more shifts in the barrel.

Herself gets up at 4 a.m. most days, so when she is not around to arise and deal with Mia, well, this means that I get up at 4 a.m. most days. This cuts deeply into my beauty sleep, which anyone who has seen me in the flesh knows I need desperately, the way Stephen Miller needs a walk-in freezer full of dead teenage runaways. (“Time for a cold one. …”).

Then there’s the cooking for one. Takes as much time as cooking for two, but now I have to handle the post-dinner cleanup.

Laundry. Won’t do itself. I’ve done the research. Same goes for taking out the trash and recycling, and loading/emptying the dishwasher.

And don’t get me started on the whole “making money” thing. Lucky for me it rolls in like the tide. I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.

Birds gotta be fed. We were out of seed, so it was off to our seed dealer, who is a talker. Hummers are back, so their feeders had to get filled and distributed around the yard, which was in need of mowing.

Somehow mowing is one of my regular chores. I’ve argued that it should fall to Herself, since it’s basically vacuuming outdoors, sort of like the parkour of hoovering. But she just chuckles and reminds me who makes all the fucking money around here.

Then my old VeloNews comrade Casey Gibson happened to be rolling through town to spectate at the Tour of the Gila, so it goes without saying that we had to get together for a couple of meals and complain about all the money we weren’t making.

And of course bicycles must be ridden and runs ran. Run? I’ll get back to you on that.

Thus a whole lot of my daylight (and best-laid plans) went up in smoke. And all I’ve got to show for it is clean laundry, washed dishes, a trimmed lawn, a couple extended chats over restaurant meals, empty trash bins, full birds, and a happy cat.

Because Herself just came home. Half and half is back on the menu. And I’m sleeping in tomorrow.

The cruellest month

April 19, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments

“And now, here’s T.S. Eliot with the weather!”

I’m gonna go out on a snowy limb here and say it was probably a good idea that the Soma Pescadero and I had our maiden voyage yesterday rather than today.

Yesterday it was knickers and arm warmers; today it’s green tea and bloggery.

Cruel it isn’t, though. Not at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, where we haven’t seen any sort of precip’ in the better part of quite some time.

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain

Whew! That Eliot feller would’ve made one helluva blogger, amirite? “The poet’s mind,” he once said, “is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

He also wrote: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

F’sure, bruh. Same thing m’self.

Free delivery

November 18, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

Monday is trash day here in the cul-de-sac.

Stalking around El Rancho Pendejo, muttering to myself as I ticked off the morning chores one by one, I got to thinking how nice it would be if somebody came around regularly to haul off all the garbage stinking up my skull.

Wouldn’t that be convenient? Just flip my lid, yank out the sack full of bad news, worse ideas, outdated references, and pointless distractions, heave it into a black plastic cart, and roll it down the driveway where someone else has to deal with it.

Hm. Wait a sec. We’ve already got something like that. They call it “blogging.”

Lift with your legs

October 14, 2024October 14, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

I got to throw a rare double bird during a ride this past weekend.

Rounding a corner I saw a yard sign for TFG to my left … and then another across the street to my right.

“O! The Joy!” William Clark must have felt like this when he thought he’d finally seen the Pacific “ocian.” In honor of the Corps of Discovery I gave the placards the salute they deserved.

It’s little things like this that keep me on a slow simmer instead of a rolling boil.

As a longtime observer and occasional chronicler of our national political bed-wetting, I have felt compelled for some years now to watch and describe what appears — to me, anyway — to be a brain-damaged orangutan dry-humping the Statue of Liberty.

But damme if the lifting doesn’t get heavier every day. And I’m an old man, with a bad back.

So I lift with my legs. Which is to say that when I feel some crucial part of me starting to give way, I go for a ride, letting my legs lift my flagging spirit.

A bicycle can bear a lot of weight. You can trust me on this: I was a great fat bastard when I returned to cycling after a long absence, and that first two-wheeler had to carry a lot of baggage.

So have its descendants. But the tonnage these days is less Marlboro breath and whiskey sweat, more inchoate rage and existential dread.

That’s hard weight to shed, and not even the bicycle can get it all off you. But it definitely helps, especially if you try not to put the pounds right back on as soon as you get home.

• Pro tip: Try wearing a heart-rate monitor when you scan the news. When you find yourself surfing a hate-wave through Zone 5, remember that there is no Zone 6. Not in this lifetime, anyway. Grab a bike and get the hell out of the house.

Taking a pull

September 10, 2024September 10, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

“Stick to cycling!” the critics would howl whenever one of my columns or cartoons drifted off the back of racing or retailing and into the gutter of politics.

But cycling and politics are inextricably linked. With the right people at the helm, if you’re lucky, maybe you get peace and prosperity plus bike paths, open space and crosswalk push-buttons that you can reach from the saddle (and that actually work).

Ever negotiated with The Authorities while promoting a bike race? That’s politics. Sought cyclist-friendly safety improvements at a dangerous intersection? That’s politics too. Ditto dealing over e-bike access to — and speed limits on — bike paths, where most of the motors run on carbohydrates and water.

Thus my retort was inevitably something like: “You don’t like my work? Don’t watch. Plenty of other stuff to read around here. Now stand back and let The Big Dog bark.”

Well. That was then, and this is now.

I still feel as though I should be writing more about politics. But damme if it isn’t a long pull into a stiff wind.

No matter what else is on my mind, it’s always there in the background, ticking away. Could be an old analog clock; could be a time bomb. Only way to find out is to have a little look-see.

Last night it was a three-hour (!) YouTube stream of a school-board policy-committee meeting. Tonight it’s the steel-cage death match between Komrade Kamala and Felonious Punk.

As debates go tonight’s action seems likely to be less lofty than in the word’s modern definition (a regulated discussion of a proposition) and more like its two-fisted past (the Anglo-French debatre, from de- + batre, to beat, from the Latin battuere).

Jaysis wept, etc. Who wouldn’t rather write about cycling, given the choice? In another corner of this little shop of horrors I’m 300 words and counting into a post about Herself’s 2006 Soma Double Cross.

But Charlie Pierce had to go and pull my chain. Actually, he was pulling A.O. Furburger’s chain for not letting The New York Times call a fascist a fascist.

Wrote Chazbo:

He is a mentally unraveling out-and-out fascist and he is within a whisker of the White House again. He is a mortal threat to everything that is vital to the survival of this republic as we know it. To write about him as such, and to write about him as such every damn day from now until the first Tuesday of November is the proper, truthful, and, yes, the objective thing to do.

Talk about a long pull into a stiff wind. ’Tis a flick of the elbow Charlie is giving us so. I don’t propose to make every post about politics, but I feel as though it’s only proper to lay off the wheelsucking and stick my snout in the breeze now and then.