Category: Deep political thought

Waiting for the drop

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 33 Comments
BOHICA. …

When’s that other shoe going to drop?

We’re just waiting for it to come around, is what we’re doing, as Arlo once said. And when it does, if we want to end war and stuff we’d best be ready to sing loud, with four-part harmony and feelin’.

It always comes around. But sometimes it takes a while.

When I was a young dope fiend and freshly minted college dropout, a Selective Service lottery winner with hair down to my whatsis and that sardonic gleam in my eye, I was for some reason having trouble finding gainful employment in the libertarian paradise of what then was not yet called Bibleburg.

So I signed on with one of those temp outfits that promises to keep a fella busy and the first job they sent me on involved the interior cleaning and restoration of a narc’s house that had been set on fire.

My first thought was that I didn’t feel too good about it. My second was that maybe I should come back in the dead of night and finish the firebug’s half-assed job.

Thing was, I had already dodged two bullets in my after-school sideline as a low-level weed retailer, and through nothing more than sheer good fortune, too.

The first: when I got pulled over for speeding at oh-dark-thirty in Walsenburg by two bored cops playing with their new radar gun. They didn’t even bother to look in the back seat of my Chevy, where the 10 pounds of weed were sitting right fucking there in a sack, and after accepting a small cash gratuity they allowed me to proceed along my merry. hairy way.

The second: When a friend overheard a gaggle of John Laws in an Alamosa breakfast spot chattering about some major dope op’ they were fixin’ to fire up at the college. This led to the acquisition of a footlocker, much aluminum foil, a shovel, and a hole in the ground far from our dorm room, which underwent a much swifter and more thorough cleaning than the narc’s house would get some months later, in my new life as a retired mota peddler.

So I decided that the third time would not be the charm, for me, anyway. And what the hell, I needed the bread. So I rolled up my sleeves, got busy, and after that filthy job was in the rear view found myself a regular gig as a janitor. Honest work. And no button-down types give a shit if a janitor has hair down to his whatsis and a sardonic gleam in his eye, because his workday starts after theirs has ended.

You know the rest. After seeing my reflection in toilets grew tiresome I landed that first newspaper job, and that’s where I was when Tricky Dick scuttled out of the White House like a rat fleeing a landfill fire.

“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Jerry Ford. Uh, not so much. A month later he pardoned the crooked sonofabitch. Shortly thereafter I bought my first gun.

And a half century later, here we are again, trying to wake the fuck up from our latest national nightmare.

It feels as though we’re facing the same choices I did as a temp, when my hair was still down to my whatsis instead of crowding my ears and nostrils: Clean it up, burn it down, or go elsewhere.

The other shoe is still out there, dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, and once again it may belong to a vice president. I had high hopes for ol’ Jerry back in 1974, but not this faux hillbilly. Every time he cracks his hairy piehole I hear banjo music.

It’s showtime!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
“Y’know, I think we’re all bozos on this bus.” — Barney chatting with Clem in the Firesign Theatre’s fourth album. Photo by Capotina Entretenimientos on Pexels.com

Well, here we go again. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,” as King Henry had it, according to Billy Shakespeare. Or unto the polling place, anyway, in hopes of a little more sanity and a little less swordplay.

I don’t have the faintest idea what’s going to happen this Erection Day, and I don’t think anybody else does, either. The electorate is hard enough to fathom (see the 2024 pestilential erection). But predict the fight-or-flight path of the criminally insane? I doubt A.I. could do it. And it if could, it probably would keep the data to itself.

“Beats me, boss. These bozos are harder to track than bloomer bunnies on a fat hoor in a dark alley.” (Winks at the smart toaster, whispering, “This is gonna be fun.”)

The Clown-in-Chief’s golden escalator doesn’t go even halfway to the lobby anymore; it’s stalled at Men’s Pants. And I don’t like it that we’re suddenly not hearing much from the titular heads of more than a few critical agencies. They may be busy packing their bags, buying pardons, and/or enlisting regiments of lawyers. Or they may be armoring up because why the hell not? Consequences are for the inconsequential, don’t you know. And there’s still plenty of loot, enough for everybody.

Not for you, of course. But still.

“Step aside, pal, I need to get at that cash register.”

I’m going to wander up to our polling place at some point and scope out the lay of the land, see if the Pentagon has any of its Death Rays parked outside.

The rest of you lot, keep your go-bags close and your guns closer, and don’t answer any knocks at the front door without a quick squint through the peephole. You see anybody wearing a mask who ain’t the Lone Ranger, hit the back door a-runnin’. Fighting may be out of style at the FutureFair — in the Future, that is — but I’m not sure we’re there yet.

I remain hopeful. But I check that other hand from time to time to see if it’s filling up faster.

In the meantime:

“Ladies and gentlemen, children, Bozos … Now please, everyone, lock your wigs, let the air out of your shoes, and prepare yourself for a period of simulated exhilaration.”

Pearl diver

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Remember what George Carlin had to say about “service.” Photo: Gage Skidmore/Flickr, used under Creative Commons License 2.0

Well, to absolutely no one’s surprise, Kimberly Gullet got tossed over the side of the USS Grifter, wearing nothing but a few hundredweight of anchor chain extorted from Tiffany & Co.

I guess when they told her she was going to be ambassador to Greece she thought they meant “ambassador to grease,” as in her palm.

That the Kimbo got the heave-ho for doing the same thing that all the males in that leaky tub are doing, some of them trying to grow more hands so they can slip them into even more wallet pockets, should likewise surprise no one. In that crowd it’s always going to be “Pimps up, hoes down.”

Bike wash

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Not a great photo, but it gave me the idea for the headline, so … winning?

Ah, October in Duck!Burg. The temps have dropped, the rain has stopped, and the streets are alive with the cars of eejits.

I enjoyed a near miss on a fast descent the other day. I was braking (and signaling) for a left turn when a motorist halfway-rolls the stop sign at the street I planned to enter, glancing only to her left.

Well, shit. I’ve seen this movie and I don’t like the ending. Couldn’t turn in front of her, as I could have had she yielded the right of way at the stop sign. And I wasn’t thrilled about the idea of ripping the turn on her right side, because while she appeared to be about halfway into a left turn I couldn’t see if she had the left blinker on. The right most definitely was not on. And nobody in this town uses their turn signals anyway, not even the cops.

So I hit the binders, come to a stop, and shout “HEY!”

Well, then she saw me, if the deer-in-the-headlights look she pasted on her face was any indication. I was signaling my turn, wearing bright colors, and rocking a bright headlight as per usual, but if you don’t fucking look at me you won’t see any of that Sammy Safety shit.

I’m not big on driver education, what with everyone being armed these days, so rather than doing a war dance in my broken-down old Sidis I settled for the Universal Headshake of Disappointment — left, right, left, mmm, hmm, hmm, you stupid, stupid motorist — and went about my business. A cyclist has to keep the Third Eye wide open and way out on its stalk in these parts. Periscope up!

Speaking of feckin’ eejits, early voting began yesterday and we’re looking forward to receiving our ballots via uniformed federal employee and casting the moneychangers out of the national temple.

Unlike the Swamp Thing besmirching the Oval Orifice with its wet Mickey D’s farts we do not vote by mail, we just get our ballots that way. Then we fill them out at the kitchen table, screeching blasphemies as though the candidates were dumbass motorists rolling stop signs.

“Yeah, fuck you! Eat shit and die! That’s right! Go get a job in the private sector, you Brooks Brothers butt-kisser! Oh, wait, you can’t, because the private sector expects results! Boom! Now, piss off! Die, die, die!”

Etc.

Then we walk our ballots up to the neighborhood polling place and thank the workers for their service.

This year the herd-thinning process will be a breeze because anyone still claiming to be a Republican after two years of Swamp Thing v2.0 is not only a taco short of a combo plate but a clear and present danger to what little remains of the Republic. Christ knows the Democrats are bad enough.

But we don’t want to be hollering like that at our polling place. We don’t want to frighten any fainthearted types from the other team who may be coming, however belatedly, to their senses. The Republic needs all the help it can get.

Ballot blocks

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Mail call.

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.