Category: Deep political thought

Dogfights, flies, and hummingbirds

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Our backyard hummingbird shower.*
*Hummingbird not included.

The GOP pestilential dogfight is shaping up into something like “The Lord of the Rings” as reimagined by Charles Bukowski with an assist from William Gibson.

Thus we get Scum Baggins, Douche Baggins, Colostomy Baggins, and so on.

In this Bukowski-Gibson cyberpunk edition the Shire is a casino built on a Superfund site, a former dogfighting venue called Slobbiton.

The Wizards are all off somewhere dicking around with AI, social media, and first-class-only rocket flights to nowhere special for the Elves (Dwarves can’t afford a ticket).

The Rings of Power are not limited to the Elite — they’re Watches of Power, and can be acquired by anyone with the do-rei-me — but all they do is let you answer the phone that’s perpetually in your hand anyway and tell you to get out of the La-Z-Boy for a couple minutes every hour, you great fat bastard. Mostly the Ring-wielders use that time to go to the fridge for some tasty Boar’s Head snacks.

Speaking of pigs’ heads, at some point our revised narrative careens off piste entirely into “Lord of the Flies” territory. The Wizards and Elves get voted off the island on charges of being woke, trans, or both; everyone left is some variation on Jack or Roger (though George Soros makes a brief cameo as Piggy); and the Royal Navy never turns up to set things aright because THIS IS AMERICA BUDDY! YEAH, BABY! USA! USA! USA!

All things considered we’d rather watch a sprinkler in the back yard. Now and then we get to see a hummingbird enjoy a brief shower.

Surprise

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

“Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” — Proverbs 16:18

Boy, looks like Yevgeny Prigozhin got way out over his Wagner skis, hey? You need a real big stick to poke the bear, and it seems as though he couldn’t find one when he reached into his fatigues for something to wave at Vladimir Putin. I haven’t seen a bootlegger’s turn that snappy since “The Rockford Files.”

Watching bloodthirsty fascists bumping dickheads over the best way to fuck up someone else’s country is not my idea of light entertainment, especially when I have no idea how much of it is performance art.

Some smart folks say Prigozhin is a dead man walking, a bad dog who snapped at his master and got shipped off to a farm in Belarus where he’ll have the run of the back 40, happily chasing bunny rabbits all day.

Others say Prigozhin caught Pooty-poot with his Stalinist drawers down, the inept Russian army overcommitted and outmaneuvered, and forced him to cut a deal using Belarus boss-fella Aleksandr Lukashenko — who seems to be a bro-brah of both belligerents — as a go-between.

The guys to watch, it seems, are Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov. Prigozhin would like to have their jobs, their stature — and, not incidentally, their nuts for a necklace.

And since Shoigu and Gerasimov are fucking up in spectacular fashion what was supposed to be a cakewalk in Ukraine, maybe Vlad the Impaler is using Prigozhin as an adjunct to the Kremlin’s HR department.

If one or both of them suddenly decides to retire to spend more time in their dachas with the family, Putin gets another KGB merit badge from the media, and Prigozhin starts to look less like Steve Buscemi and more like Steve McQueen.

Doesn’t mean Putin won’t croak him too, of course. Talk about your toxic work environments.

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.