We vote. But not by mail, not in the strictest definition.
Yes, we receive our ballots via the U.S. Postal Service, but only so we can fill them out at the kitchen table, where last-minute research is easier and the lines shorter.
And then we march them over to the local polling place, an easy milelong stroll along the Tramway bike path. We exchange pleasantries with the nice folks doing the People’s Business, thank them for their service, and feed our sealed ballots into the box.
Then we stroll back to El Rancho Pendejo, secure in the knowledge that we have performed one of the most basic — and most important — duties of a citizen. Tossing rascals out and planting a fresh crop.
But you may vote by mail, for one reason or another, and that’s why you might want to check the shed for pitchforks and torches. Because the federal government — executive, legislative and judicial — seems to think that if they keep putting more roadblocks in our path, a critical number of us might not bother to vote at all.
Why is a Steelman Eurocross better than a BMW 7 Series?
Well, for openers, it’s a Steelman Eurocross. And you can’t just slide on down to your local Steelman dealer and drive one off the lot, because Brent Steelman isn’t making them any longer.
Even if you could, its touchscreen wouldn’t be showing you an ad for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” the instant you climbed aboard, which BMWs are doing. My Steelman Eurocrosses ain’t got no steekeeng touchscreens. Oh, sure, they share an ancient Cateye Velo 8, but it doesn’t say shit to me because it saw what I did to Herself’s sportswatch with a claw hammer when the fucker started beeping and wouldn’t shut the hell up.
I knew this day was coming the first time I pulled into a gas station for a tank of the cheap stuff and the pump started shrieking advertising bullshit at me. I nearly drove off right then and there, but I was running on fumes, and figured that if one station was doing it, they all were.
And they all are.
The Eurocross “touchscreen.” One button, no Spider-Men.
So, guess what? If six-figure BMW 7 Series sedans are inflicting advertisements upon their owners — and nobody at BMW gets fed feet first into a wood chipper over it — your $24K Kia Shitbox will soon be pitching Happy Meals, weight-loss programs, and boner pills at you.
My 2005 Subaru Forester? Not so much. The only screen in that sucker is the windscreen, as the Brits call it. The clear one I look through to see where in the hell is it that I’m going.
This is absolutely insane, especially for cars that people own. If you own a car and an ad is shown in your car, you should get paid for the ad. And you should need to agree to it first. BMW is supposed to be a luxury brand, and one meant for driving enthusiasts. This is so absurd it’s hard to believe it’s real.
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?”
Mad Blog Media 
