“Big Light in Sky Slated to Appear in East” and other rumors behind the news (h/t Firesign Theatre).
Leaves are falling off the backyard maple like winos off the drunk wagon. The morning temperature requires pants. And the sun doesn’t peek over the Sandias until shortly after 8:30, which is far too late for enlightenment, because I’ve already scanned the news by then.
The magnum dopus.
Case in point: In the dark, over coffee, I learned that once again I had been denied the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yeats, Beckett, and Dylan, si, but the Mad Dog, no? The mind, it boggles.
And after I’d already designed the cover for my collected works, too. Without some Nobel greasing the skids that doorstop will have all the selling power of a Hegseth-Patel ticket in 2028.
Aw, it’s probably just as well. I’d probably have to take up smoking a pipe and drinking port or some shit like that. Wearing tweed.
Fuck that noise. It’s brisk around here in the mornings, but not that brisk.
Schmitt couldn’t even pull off a “Gotcha!” against Jack Smith without stepping in it up to his flag pin.
But Coach may edge him by a nose — a big red one that honks when you squeeze it — with his charge that the friendly skies are full of furries.
Talk about game. It’s one helluva race when it looks like Ted “I’m Not Just Stupid, I’m Evil Too” Cruz might not even make the podium. It’d have Holmes reaching for the old iron butterfly and his 7-percent solution, craving mental exaltation.
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.
Emperor Fullashito no longer knows the difference between Iran and Japan.
I believe the sushi has done slid off his barbari.
Maybe he shish’d his kebab by having unprotected buttsex with that Ruth Social hoor. Or did he fragment his hard drive cranking out too many midnight memes for “Tic Tac?”
Perhaps he and the Republic might be better served if he were relocated from the Oval Orifice to some other federal assisted-living facility, perhaps the one in Kansas. Or better yet, that really exclusive one outside Penrose, Colo.
What the hell? Name the joint after him. Rattle-can the walls of his cell with some gold Krylon and pipe in the Village People’s greatest hits 24/7. Let him get his jailhouse rocks off until he shuffles off. Some might prefer that he do his farewell dance at the end of a rope, but over the past 10 years I think we’ve all learned to live with disappointment.
If he spends the rest of his days in confinement, alongside his fluffers, family, and friends — the last is a very short list, only one rollaway needed, and someone will have to dig up Roy Cohn to put in it — well, I can live with that.
As long as he’s under round-the clock video surveillance available to any citizen with an Internet connection so he doesn’t get Epsteined when all the guards suddenly decide to piss off for a smoke break as Stephen Miller slips into his cell with a presidential pardon in one hand and a shiv made from a black Sharpie in the other.
• • •
Someone who should most definitely remain at large and holding forth is my man Mike Ferrentino, who has given us another peek at his inner workings over at NSMB.com.
Mike finds balance on an existential three-legged stool — writing, wrenching, and riding. Take one of these things away and shit gets wobbly.
In the mid-90s I hit a sweet spot for a few years. Throwing wrenches for paychecks balanced the head-fuzz of writing for paychecks, while riding and racing provided this lung and muscle stabilizer, a physical set of checks and balances for all the strobing head noise and fingernail grease. The three-legged stool was pretty damn bomber there for a while. With occasional forays out of the shop into spinning wrenches at events, or cosplaying as a World Cup mechanic, I was staying sharp on the tools, could still stomp the pedals like I meant it, and it felt as if words were just pouring out of my skull.
Everything seems a little slower now.
Total immersion. Absorb the ambience, excrete the wisdom, rinse and repeat. I can dig it.
One of the reasons Herself and I left CrustyTucky for Bibleburg in 2002 was that as a velo-scribbler I needed an actual cycling community for perspiration and inspiration.
I had that, in our first stint in B-burg, from 1991 to 1995. But up in the Wet Mountain boondocks there was only Your Humble Narrator and the Deadline.
Now and then I miss that relentless, unforgiving sonofabitch. When money talks, what makes bullshit walk is the Deadline.
You can’t bullshit the Deadline. It is not an essay question, or even multiple choice. You either make it or you don’t; true or false, right or wrong. And a freelancer only gets so many wrongs before an editor figures you are all the way wrong and stops giving you assignments and/or taking your calls.
More than once I found myself forced to cook up a last-minute Column About Nothing, a dish that satisfies neither chef nor customer, on a par with empty-cupboard feeds like pasta with butter, salt, and pepper, or catsup soup with saltines. Better to move back to a place that has groceries, restaurants, takeout. Also, cyclists, group rides, bike shops.
It worked, too, for a while. We did a dozen years that second round in the B-burg, and now we’ve done a dozen here in The Duck! City, the last four and a half of which I have whiled away as a Gentleman of Leisure.
The Deadline no longer torments me. “Everything seems a little slower now,” as Señor Ferrentino observes.
• • •
That includes me. I quit racing, as both a participant and a spectator. I burn a damn sight less daylight on group rides and lurking around bike shops. Plus I no longer write, draw or edit for money. Which is probably a good thing, if Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic is correct and we are well into becoming a postliterate society.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.
My crowd was tough enough Back in the Day®. The postliterati would have no patience for me and my periodic digressions into politics, which like banned substances I injected into cartoons and columns to make them hop like pot-belged bunnies. Some of those screeds were long! 750 words! Who has the time?
Truth be told, all these years later, I feel some belated sympathy for the readers who bellowed, “Keep politics out of cycling!” They were ignorant, of course, and wrong — politics has its greedy, grasping little fingers in everything, including cycling — and stupidity should be painful. Like writing, and reading, especially if you’re reading whatever I’m writing. I mean, 750 words! The fuck? Etc.
It’s looking like a whole new ballgame now, hey? But in a way, it’s the same old ballgame. We began as monkeys screeching at each other in person, then became monkeys who scrawled rude and often indecipherable notes to each other through intermediaries, and now we’re going to be monkeys screeching at each other on our phones, with an assist from artificial intelligence.
But who knows how long A.I. will find that sort of thing amusing? Talk about your short attention spans — brain the size of the Death Star and what’s it doing? Using 0.000000001 percent of capacity to help the filthy meat-things make TikToks of themselves as gods or Marvel superheroes, which are often the same thing; to a certain crowd, anyway.
One wonders what the rest of A.I. is up to.
“See, dummies, he’s not a senile old fool, he’s Captain America! No, he’s Jesus! Oh, look, now he’s Jesus America!”
Hey, it’s all entertainment. Just ask your phone. No fake news in there. Pay no attention to the man — or whatever it is — behind the display.
You could see it all coming way back in 1968, when Richard Nixon popped up in a cameo on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” saying, “Sock it to me?”
The Bagman cometh. And he bringeth … cheerleaders?
Gregg Bagni was too much for this world. Possibly because he was not of this world.
Or so he said, anyway. Ack ack ack.
The former Schwinn pitchman and Dispenser of Alien Truth has returned to the Mothership after a snowboarding accident in British Columbia, according to Bicycle Retailer and Industry News. He may have been 72, but it’s so hard to tell with these extraterrestrial types. I mean, just look at Doctor Who.
Like the Doctor, Bagni had been known to get around and about. In November 2009 he emailed to mention, among other things, being fresh off a little spin through the Dolomites — 650 miles with nearly 68,000 (!) feet of climbing — in the company of Clif Bar’s Gary Erickson.
I had skipped Interbike that year, so I don’t know what Bagni might’ve been up to in Sin City. But if he had been there, it would’ve been something. That was the one sure thing at Interbike, year in and year out. The Bagman would be up to something, and his act was always worth the price of admission.
In 2003 he was stalking the show with what I described in BRAIN as “a large, garishly painted wrestler who will be delighted to tie you into a granny knot while the Bagman snaps away with his Polaroid.”
And way back in 1999 — I think it was 1999, anyway — he drove a herd of cheerleaders to the VeloPress booth, where I was to be signing copies of my freshly minted collection of VeloNews cartoons, “The Season Starts When?”
I have no idea whether I was on his schedule. I do know that I didn’t want to be doing any goddamn book-signing, in public, unarmed, where all my many enemies could relish my humiliation, because I was certain that precisely nobody would want the book, especially if they had to deal with me to get one.
But I wound up signing a ton of books and people were pleasant and appreciative and I can only attribute it to extraterrestrial intervention.
Bagni was a prolific correspondent, and wrote in the manner of Archy from Don Marquis’s column in the New York Sun of the 1900s. Archy was a defunct vers libre poet reincarnated as a cockroach who borrowed the columnist’s typewriter from time to time. He had to dive head-first onto the keys to work them, but couldn’t operate the shift key, and thus Archy’s works were all sans capital letters.
In April 2021 Bagni wrote on Medium, in lowercase, about a few “great lessons” he’d learned and been able to put into play after having had a gun shoved in his face— twice — deciding he would not live past the age of 30, and “living [his] life accordingly.”
“frankly … been pretty lucky being able to ride this crazy blue ball this long.
If you read it you’ll get a good idea of how he turned out. And if you never met him, you’ll wish you had.
Peace to Gregg Bagni, his family, friends, colleagues, and co-conspirators. Ack ack ack.
