Tick, tock

March 27, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

“You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”
—Taisen Deshimaru

When I awakened on the morning of my 70th birthday, March 27, 2024, my heart was still beating. Tick, tock; tick, tock. Fifty-two beats per minute, just like clockwork.

I was pretty sure I wasn’t in Hell. I don’t know if we take heartbeats with us to Hell, but if we do, I expect they’re slightly more elevated, what with the pitchforks and roasting and screaming and all.

Also, it was almost six o’clock, and it seemed I had been allowed to sleep in. I’m almost certain that’s not part of the drill in Hell. If there’s any extra sack time in Hell it’s probably spent in an actual sack, being dipped like a teabag into a giant iron mug of boiling shit that you have to drink instead of coffee in the mornings that look just like midnight, only more so, while a grinning D.I. who looks like a cross between R. Lee Ermey and Hellboy screams at you: “You gotta be shittin’ me, Joker! You think you’re Mickey Spillane? You think you’re some kind of a fuckin’ writer? Now get on your face and give me infinity!”

When I finally crawled out of the sack I was 99 percent convinced I was not in Hell.

For one thing, instead of Gunnery Sergeant Beelzebub demanding an eternity of pushups I found a sweet little kitty-cat purring happy birthday to me. Like Herself, who had slipped silently off to work, Miss Mia Sopaipilla had granted me a little extra catnap instead of yowling me up at stupid-thirty to fill her bowl and/or empty her litter box.

And for another, it was 29° outside, with a dusting of snow on the green grass.

Huh. Not Hell. Albuquerque. Some people think it’s Hell, but everyplace is Hell to someone. Especially in March.

So I enjoyed two cups of coffee instead of a bottomless mug of Lipton Shitfire Hellbroth, attended to Miss Mia, and got back to the bloggery. Tempus fugit. Tick, tock; tick, tock.

Thanks to one and all for the birthday wishes. And apologies to anyone who had 69 in the office pool. I had 30; imagine my surprise.

A Report in January 2024

January 14, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

The weather outside, frightful, etc. | *Photo: Hal Walter*

There are many reasons why I do not miss living in Crusty County and this is one of them.

My man Hal Walter has been enjoying the sort of lifestyle E.B. White wrote about in his 1958 essay “A Report in January,” in which White observed that “just to live in New England in winter is a full-time job; you don’t have to ‘do’ anything. The idle pursuit of making-a-living is pushed to one side, where it belongs, in favor of living itself, a task of such immediacy, variety, beauty, and excitement that one is powerless to resist its wild embrace.”

Sixty-six years later and several thousand feet up at his snowbound acreage in Colorado, Hal has had his good truck develop a sick headache, just as he prepared to take his son, Harrison, to the dentist in Pueblo, 50-some-odd miles east and down; borrowed his wife’s SUV for the trip only to bury that vehicle up to the axles in a snowdrift on the return trip, just 50 yards from his gate; shoveled it out in a single-digit wind chill; returned to doctoring his own rig, successfully, without having to call a tow truck (“If I were to need to have this thing towed, nobody could even get in here.”); and dug a path for it up his driveway to the county road, newly plowed.

This was in addition to the usual chores: delivering hay to the burros, grub to the family, wood to the stove, Harrison to Colorado Mountain College in Leadville (slated today, the last I heard), and so on and so forth.

If, like White, Hal wonders when he would once again “get a chance to ‘do’ something — like sit at a typewriter,” or even his MacBook Air, he has not mentioned it to me.

Up the old Wazoo

January 11, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Anyone watch the Debate to Determine the First Loser last night?

Of course you didn’t. Because you already know that life, like the GOP pestilential campaign, is nasty, brutish, and short.

I haven’t read any of the coverage and don’t intend to because see previous graf.

In other news, Chris Christie finally conceded that he’s not enough of an asshole to out-trump You Know Who, but just enough of one to hot-mic’ his rivals for the roses in what has been a one-horse’s-ass race since the starter’s pistol fired. All the other entrants are basically carousel ponies, going up and down, and around in circles, and winding up right back where they started, a reminder that money can’t buy everything.

Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S. Thompson has taught us. Better yet, get someone else to buy your ticket. That way you don’t wind up a few hundred million in the red and sitting atop a suitcase on the curb in front of what used to be your home.

Elsewhere, one of You Know Who’s judges decided he didn’t want to hear “Mein Kampf” as filtered through a damp XXXL set of gold-lamé Depends in YKW’s civil-fraud trial and thus we are spared “a closing argument” that would have made the Delta House charter hearing in “Animal House” sound like “Inherit the Wind.”

Finally, here in The Duck! City the weather is fixing to take a turn for the worse, so yesterday I decided to slip out for a short ride on the Tramway bike path.

While motoring around on errands I had noticed that while the roads were still covered in red salt and sand, the bike path was clean as a whistle, so I opted for a quick spin to the County Line BBQ and back, just to keep the muscle memory from toppling over into dementia.

Today is looking more like a run type of situation, as the wizards are calling for plummeting temps, gusty winds, and plenty of the old suckee-suckee. Cycling was cold enough yesterday; no point in adding to whatever wind chill Itztlacoliuhqui has queued up. Coals to Newcastle, that is.

Happily, I’m not running for anything. Not even Christie’s people are dim enough to chuck good money down my little pasatiempo.

Runday

January 7, 2024January 7, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

When life gives you lemons, make lemonade, they say.

But when life gives you snow — what then? Make snowcones? Snowballs? Snowpersons?

Nah. Just go for a run.

I thought I was underdressed yesterday when I headed out for 5K on the trails. Lately I’ve been wearing Darn Tough wool socks, some toasty old Head tights and this long-sleeved Gore cycling jersey over an ancient Patagonia Capilene base layer because it has pockets for the phone and any bits I might feel compelled to remove or add, like the Smartwool gloves or Sugoi tuque, as conditions dictate.

But I wasn’t taking anything off yesterday. I only felt overdressed at the outset because I had the wind to my back. Once I turned around into it at the Menaul trailhead I tugged the tuque down over my ears and the Gore’s zipper up over my Adam’s apple. The wind caused my right eye to tear up behind the Rudy Project shades, making me seem to be half crying, like I wasn’t really all that worked up about whatever was bothering me.

All in all, a good day for a run, though. Not many people out and those that were seemed to feel that we were all members of some open-air private club for the genially insane.

The trails were pretty crunchy; a bit of mud where the sun had shone, icy in the shade. But I managed to not fall down and/or roll an ankle, so, winning, etc. ’Ray for me.

This morning I’m getting a loaf of bread started while I try to talk myself into a bike ride. But I think it’s gonna be another run. We’re talking 33°, feels like 25°, wind from the south at 10-15 mph, and if there’s any blue in the sky I’m having trouble making it out.

Then again, tomorrow looks worse. Maybe a short ride on a fendered bike? Thank Itztlacoliuhqui we have one more meal’s worth of green chile stew waiting patiently in the fridge. Also, there is a sack of pintos that needs cooking, and it will be a frosty day in The Bad Place when I don’t have the ingredients for some variety of south-of-the-border rice, either rojo or verde.

Now that I think of it, if I just had some shredded chicken and some corn tortillas, I could make enchiladas.

Shit, I better get outside pronto. I can feel myself dollaring up like something a fella might use in a stew.

No!vember

November 2, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

Here it is November, from the Old Norse for “I’m freezing my nuts off, pass the akvavit.”

Sacred to Capilene, god of baselayers, November is the month in which one expends more time and energy unearthing long-buried sport-specific garments than actually engaging in the sport to which they are specific.

It’s a triathlon of sorts, and sportswear is not required for the first leg: finding the toilet in the dark.

“Whoops, nope, that’s not it. …”

Next leg: Not scaring the cat. This means putting on some clothes before heading to the kitchen to make coffee, because nobody, not even a cat, wants to see some wrinkly sack of snot, spasms, and bad ideas hobbling around in the dark with his leaky bidness hanging out, especially if he just peed in the bathroom trash can.

“Hm. Wool socks don’t slide smoove like butta through the old polyester jogging pants, do they? More like trying to shove overcooked spaghetti through shifter-cable housing. Shit, forgot underwear. (Do the Dance of the Sugar Plum Geezers, trying to pull the pants off over the wool socks, after which it’s time to pee again, this time in the toilet.) Goddamnit, did the little woman eBay all my long-sleeved pullovers? Nope, here they are, underneath the cat.”

And finally, after coffee, toast, and oatmeal: “The hell are my leg warmers? It’s too cold for knee warmers, but not cold enough for tights, and I can’t find those either. The wool socks stay on, if only because once I’m kitted up with winter bibs, leg warmers, and three long-sleeved jerseys I can’t bend over.”

This, of course, is when the toilet sings its siren song once again, with a tad more urgency. Flailing transpires. Superman never got out of a Clark Kent suit so fast. If this were an Olympic event I’d be on a Wheaties box for sure.

Oh, well. “Drit skjer (Shit happens)”, as the Vikings say. Pass the akvavit.