Category: Deep political thought

No sweat

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Hm. Hard to hide from Tōnatiuh with pissant cloud cover like that.

Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime. …

Funny how it just kinda sneaks up on us every year. Maybe not.

One minute we’re enjoying a refreshing 65-degree spin on the old bikey bike; the next, Tōnatiuh has cranked up his celestial broiler and is basting us with our own sweat.

“Can you crank up the a/c? Some of us can’t peel down to nylon shorts and wife-beaters.”

The sun god called in sick for the last day of spring. I went out for a short trail run 8-ish and the cool temps and overcast skies made for a most enjoyable outing, if running — even at my casual pace — can ever be termed “enjoyable.”

But yesterday he was back to stoking the furnace and it looks like highs in the mid- to upper 90s for as far as the weatherperson’s instruments can see. Ninety-four yesterday, and b’gosh and b’golly it looks like more of the same today, only more so.

Meanwhile, we are not in Texas, with its tornadoes, triple-digit temps, and tinpot tyrants. We are not fish food in the Mediterranean off Greece. There are no Russian conscripts and mercenaries creeping over the Sandias.

So, no sweat here, not really. Shoot, we haven’t even turned on the air conditioning yet.

Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Homeless? Not hardly. I had the tent, the Toyota, and the house where both were usually parked.

“They had all the news from all around the world just crammed into four pages. Didn’t even have any funnies in there, you know? Every time you turned a page something just jumped right out at you. …” — John Prine, “Dear Abby”

Read enough news and something will definitely jump right out at you.

Sadly, we no longer have John Prine to write songs about it.

Nevertheless, there I was, sipping my morning coffee, slouching aimlessly from pillar to post on the Interwebs, just waiting to get jumped by something.

And suddenly, boogity boogity boogity, there it was.

The Colorado Sun had a piece about the Moosejaw Business Accelerator, which in conjunction with Western Colorado University in Gunnison helps entrepreneurs with the theory and practice of launching outdoorsy businesses.

The story featured a fellow with an 18-pound, thousand-buck ruck that comes with most everything a larval backpacker needs; a duo working on a clothing line for “plus-sized” adventurers; and a bikepacker whose outfit makes “plant-based, gluten-free dehydrated meals for backpacking.”

They were all enthusiastic and effusive and by golly, good for them. I hope they’re all thundering successes.

And then I stumbled onto a New York Times story about how the end of pandemic-era federal funding for emergency housing is forcing Vermont to evict homeless people from subsidized motel rooms and into (wait for it) tents.

With waiting lists for shelter beds and transitional housing, the only option available to most of those forced from hotels this month was a free tent. Across the state, social service workers handed out camping equipment, a gesture that pained providers like [Jess Graff, director of Franklin Grand Isle Community Action, a nonprofit agency in St. Albans], who saw 28 households displaced from hotels in her area of northern Vermont on June 1.

“Even purchasing the tents is awful, because you’re in the store with a cart full of camping equipment, and people are saying, ‘Looks like a fun weekend!’” she said.

“A fun weekend.” Like, say, camping in a Brattleboro cemetery. Might see the odd plus-sized person out there trying to stay dry among the tombstones. But I bet s/he’s not sporting a thousand-buck ruck.

Some days I wonder whether we have the right foot on the wrong accelerator.

Running on empty

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
And miles to go before I eat.

You think you’re living on the edge, miles from home with a cargo area full of perishable groceries in early June and the low-fuel warning light giving you an orange mal de ojo from the dash.

Until you get passed by someone driving on the rim.

So there I was, motoring back from the Wholeazon Amafoods with a week’s worth of grub, and I knew my low-fuel light was on. It flashed me before I even got to the store to offload a hunk of my Socialist Insecurity entitlement funding on tasty bits of this and that.

Ah, bugger it, I thought. I still have a couple gallons in the tank. Shit, I could probably make it to Santa Fe for an early lunch at La Choza, if I had a cooler and some ice for all this chow. But it’s probably smarter to head for home, refrigerate the perishables, and gas up the next time out.

Thus I’m in the left lane on Wyoming, getting set to hang a left on Comanche, when I hear this hideous racket coming up fast in the middle lane.

I figure it’s the Devil finally come to collect, or maybe just some poor workingman’s beater truck fixin’ to retire before he does, and in some spectacular fashion, too. But it sounds even worse than either of those possibilities, about like three Terminators dry-humping an Alien in a junkyard full of feral cats.

As I make the left lane I glance right and screeching past shudders some shitbag sedan with the left front tire completely gone and the driver either deaf, drunk, or some combination of the two, ’cause he ain’t making any effort to get out of that middle lane and over to some safe place where he can maybe figure out why the hell all these assholes are staring at him and how come he can’t hear the radio goddamnit?

This may or may not be a metaphor for politics in 2023.

Some of us are low on gas, but we’re aware of the situation and hope to address it at our earliest possible opportunity.

Some others are gonna just drive it right into the ground and Dog help you if you’re standing anywhere near where the wreckage skids to a stop.

The good news is, you can hear it coming a long ways off.

‘Where’s the money, Lebowski?’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments

The after-action reports are rolling in, and the general consensus seems to be that Congress spent the latest debt-ceiling “crisis” either jacking off, letting its mouth write checks that its ass can’t cash, or some combination of the two.

Performative government at its finest. Hollywood dreams of getting a script like this. Alas, the writers are on strike.

At The New Republic, editor Michael Tomasky says the mouths that roar over at the FreeDumb CuckUs basically brought a spork to a gunfight. At The Atlantic, staff writer Russell Berman suggests that the GOP really doesn’t want to cut spending in any significant way because — hey, guess what? — their leadership recognizes “that what the federal government funds is more popular than they like to claim.”

And at Esquire, Charlie Pierce dismisses the whole magilla as a matter of the money power flexing a pinkie:

“In other words, politics as usual, a basic Washington transaction conducted in the most basic of Washington ways, a Swamp Thing from start to finish. And all in service to the money power, to the corporate elite, woke and otherwise. [Jim] Jordan, [Marjorie Taylor Greene], et. al. are about as much a threat to the real established political order as a water pistol would be to the Nimitz. ”

That’s the bad news. The good news is that cracker-barrel regular Pat O’B turns 74 today. Happy happy joy joy to him and his. Dog willin’, we won’t be singing “The Parting Glass” to the oul’ fella anytime soon.

A wee bit of civics

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
The backyard maple is trying to coax a bit of rain from those clouds.

June 1. Good gawd awmighty. Three weeks until the first day of summer.

Where the hell does the time go?

It doesn’t feel very summery, not yet. We’re slathering on the sunscreen when we go out and about, but highs have only reached the mid-70s to mid-80s, which are very much bearable.

Thus, we have no excuses for staying inside to watch Sleepy Joe and Charlie McCarthy make the sausage. We’ll be eating it soon enough.

It all reminds me very little of what we were taught in junior-high civics classes. Or home economics, for that matter.

What it reminds me of is gym class, specifically the shower portion, wherein a jock occasionally would pee surreptitiously on some poor geek’s leg while distracting him with conversation.

The geek was usually so astonished to be having a chat with one of his betters that he didn’t notice the augmented fluids coursing down his calf until the giggling began.

And then he couldn’t do anything about it anyway.

The geek didn’t yet know about the sausage. He still thought it was just something mom put on his plate with the scrambled eggs and toast. He still thought Bob Dylan was just singing a song.