Say, is that a commie under the bed? Nope, just Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
OK, lemme see if I have this straight. …
A fascist “leadership” that has installed felons, eejits, bullies, tools, and fools in positions of authority, unleashed a small army of masked, murderous thugs on the population, opened and filled gulags, started a needless, ill-considered, economy-strangling war it can’t seem to conclude, raised the cost of everything save labor while hoovering up gazillions for itself, its enablers, underwriters, and collaborators, insulted and/or shaken down nearly every international partner it has, revived dormant diseases, and constructed a convoluted, comical, rub-and-tug cult of personality, is suddenly clutching its stolen pearls and squealing about the perils of … communism?
Gloriosky, tovarisch! The capitalists have reached the bottom of their red-white-and-blue bag of tricks!*
You never saw Karl Marx tweeting shit like, “From each according to his ability, to … me.” But then this is the same crowd that was screeching about “tyranny” because a half-Black centrist was in the White House, mostly not fucking it up.
As we know, FreeDumb® is the most expensive kind.
Fido Castro, Chairman Bao Wao Wao, Che Chihuahua … a red-arsed mutt by any other name, and so on.
We’ve never come within a gnat’s whisker of communism, not even when the Party was in its heyday. Neither has anyone else. That derned ol’ State just keeps refusing to wither away.
But we’ve gotten a pretty good look at actual tyranny. So, excuse the hell out of me for proclaiming myself a proud Groucho Marxist.
Well, sir, I guess I showed that Tim Cook feller where the bear shit in the buckwheat.
After Apple decided to jack up its prices, instead of buying a new MacBook Air suitable for walkabouts (if only around the house), I finally got around to bumping up the storage in my 2014 MacBook Pro.
This is the 13-inch model, and I was pinching pennies when I bought it Back in the Day®, going for the base configuration: 2.6 GHz Intel Core i5 processor; 8 GB SDRAM (which could be doubled at purchase but not afterward); and just 128 GB of flash storage.
What the hell, I thought. I’ll be using it during road trips. How much storage does a dog at large need?
More, as it turns out. That bargain-basement SSD got stuffed like a holiday turkey in fairly short order, throwing a significant hitch into the old MBP’s gitalong. After road trips became a less-frequent thing it wound up parked in my “studio” as a dedicated podcasting/video Mac, with a 24-inch LG display, Bluetooth keyboard/mouse, mic, headphones, audio recorder, and a couple of external drives to handle the internal overflow.
Not exactly a mobile unit. More like up on blocks.
But then so was its big brother, a 15-inch MBP, also from 2014. Once my Main Mac, it has 16 GB of SDRAM, a 500 GB SSD, and a dead display thanks to a local Apple “Genius” who FUBARed it a couple years back while replacing a dying battery.
“Due to the complex nature of this installation, OWC recommends that this battery replacement be performed by a trained professional,” advised Other World Computing, my go-to source for Apple bits and fix-it tips. I followed their advice and took it to one, but shit, I could’ve fucked it up myself and saved a few bucks. More than a few.
The botched MacSurgery turned my baby into a 500 GB SSD with a keyboard and trackpad, sharing another 24-inch external LG display with a 1999 G4 AGP Graphics Power Mac, and the less said about that Rube Goldberg clusterfuck the better because I don’t wanna jinx it. All this stuff is old, like me, but none of us is dead. Yet.
Still, the inexorable march to the grave seems like more of a sprint these days, so in a moment of weakness I acquired a modern MacBook Pro for what little heavy lifting I still do. It’s a 14-inch M4 Pro model from 2024 — 24 GB of memory and a 1 TB SSD — plugged into another LG display, with external keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc. So it’s likewise a desktop that can become a laptop if need be, which mostly it doesn’t.
But sometimes I get sick of the office and want to move around the house without stripping that beast down for travel. Maybe I want to stand for a while in the kitchen come morning, tsk-tsking the news with a cup of joe next to the Mac on the counter. When I get tired of standing there’s a comfy couch in the living room. Also, a chair with footstool facing a picture window that takes in the backyard maple and a slice of the Sandias. A large table in the dining room. Patio furniture for when the back yard isn’t overrun by terrorist skeeters.
So the other day I finally bit the bullet, dug out the 1TB SSD I bought from OWC — what, two, three years ago? — and replaced the stock drive in my old 13-inch road-tripper from 2014, installing a fresh copy of the “newest” OS it can handle, Big Sur (11.7.11).
I am no Genius, as all y’all already know. Shucks, I will never even be smart. But I’ve gotten under the hood of almost every Mac I’ve ever owned, starting with that SE from way back when in Santa Fe.
The things were easy to wrench on for a few years, even for a guy with five thumbs on each hand. Which was good, because I was often far from an actual Apple mechanic and/or too strapped to pay him. Thus I installed drives (disks, DVD, Zip), added memory, plugged in Airport cards, upgraded processors and video cards, and like that there.
I can afford professional assistance now, when and if I can find it, and even new machinery (see “14-inch M4 Pro” above). But frankly, for the kind of “work” I do these days — blogging via browser using DSL, some basic image capture and manipulation, etc. — the ’spensive new machinery just isn’t that much better than the old gear long since paid for.
Plus I like to assign myself these little penances from time to time, gauge whether I have any mad skillz left to me atall atall or have I finally become a doddering old fool, one slip-and-fall away from a lumpy cot with a thin blankie in The Home.
So it’s reassuring to learn that I can still manage a bit of simple MacSurgery without electrocuting myself, burning down the house, or killing the patient.
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?”
Betsy Ross would like to know who left the lid up, among other things.
Someone up the road a ways is flying the flag upside down.
It’s fair, I thought. Someone across the street had been doing likewise under the previous administration. What’s good for the goose, etc.
I had been debating whether to fly a flag at all on this Fourth of July, right side up or otherwise. Part of me feels that to fly the flag at all hints of complicity with the brigands, featherbedders and toadies who snuggle up to it as though Old Glory were a young girl on Epstein Island.
It’s one of the reasons I never wear the stars-and-stripes jersey some wiseguy at USA Cycling awarded to me for being a National Champion Pain in the Ass, or something very much like that.
Sure, I earned it. But actually wearing it? I dunno.
“Hey, check out the senior citizen in the national-champ kit. He must’ve been something before electricity. I didn’t know Depends made bib shorts. And what’s that thing he’s riding? Steel? Bar-end shifters? Rim brakes? Yo, Rip Van Weinmann! Wake up and smell the future! Haw haw haw!
• • •
Your Humble Narrator and Herself.
So, yeah. When Herself and I rolled out for this morning’s ride I was not wearing the stars-and-stripes. Yet I was rockin’ the red, white, and blue, as hard as I could, for anyone who cared enough to take notice.
Red Steelman Eurocross (USA) and Giro gloves (Vietnam). White Rudy Project helmet (China), cotton headrag (ditto), Patagonia undershirt (USA), and Gore socks (?). Blue Voler jersey (USA), a match for the decals on the Eurocross and the Cane Creek Crono X Cross wheels (?). The bibs were Voler (USA) — not Depends— in basic black, to match my Sidi shoes (Romania) and my aura.
Quite a few of our fellow Americans were getting their heart rates up despite the smoky haze applying a gray filter to the normally beautiful blue skies. Joggers, dog-walkers, e-bikers, you name it. The quail were mostly under cover, but we saw a few bunnies and one deer curled up in a shady spot against a Sandia Heights house for sale.
And what’s with all the crows lately? Could be ravens, I suppose. Quite a conspiracy of them, too. Someone should write a poem.
• • •
When we got home a few of the Spanish-speakers that so frighten the nation’s mismanagement were prepping a neighbor’s place for stucco in the 94-degree heat. Another will be working a checkout lane at a nearby grocery until 10 p.m. I know this because she told me so.
“Gonna miss the barbecue and everything,” she said, ringing up my purchases, mostly the ingredients for that most American of condiments (salsa).
Our post-ride lunch was some Mexican red rice and savory ground beef left over from last night’s dinner, that most American of dishes (tacos), with a couple of scrambled eggs and a sprinking of Irish cheese. The last of the taco filling will be put to use tonight in that most American of meals (pizza).
• • •
The star-spangled banner yet waves.
But we were talking about flags, yeah? I put ours out, right side up. They’re nothing special, just a couple of cheap promotional items dumped on the property years ago by some long-forgotten real-estate shithead with zero respect for flag etiquette. Nevertheless, Herself and I agreed that we should hew to the gospel preached to us by our late friend and neighbor Marv’ Berkman.
Shortly after we moved in next door to Marv’, once I had gotten the feeling that he wasn’t your standard-brand, hard-right Bibleburger, I asked him why he flew the flag day in and day out.
And the old Chicago saloon picker sez to me he sez (stop me if you’ve heard this one before):
“I just want those guys to know they’re not the only ones who can fly it.”
To drain the swamp, one must become the swamp. Or something like that.
Swamp Thing doesn’t want anyone (other than himself) peeing in “his” pool.
It wasn’t enough to flush $16 mil’ or so through the Lincoln Memorial Septic Tank and into some cronies’ wallets, only to see it mutate into a bubbling cauldron of goo that could dissolve Aquaman into a scattering of bleached bones.
Now he’s installed National Guardpersons, U.S. Marshals, and a couple of A.I. FinkBot 9000s™ to catch any passing “terrorists,” “antifa,” or “citizens” who happen to pause while passing the National Terlet to remark: “What is that hideous stench? Is there a dead raccoon on the premises or is Hair Füror dropping a deuce in his drawers behind one of those trees over there?”
Nope. Swamp Thing he does his doody in plain sight — it’s how he marks territory since he can’t win a war, not even the ones he starts — and then makes his knaves, varlets, henchmen, fluffers and fixers compose spontaneous poetry like “How shall we compare thy loaf-pinching to a spritz of Chanel No. 5 at Neiman Marcus?”
Reflect on that, if you feel so inclined. Me? I need some air.
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