Crossing over I-40 near Winrock Town Center aboard the Soma Saga (canti edition).
We’ve been enjoying the occasional sprinkle in late July, all told about a half-inch of moisture in our dusty little corner of the sandbox.
Sure helps keep the mercury on the down-low. The air conditioning gets to take five, as does the irrigation system.
Why, a fella can even wait until 9 in the a.m. to get out for a bike ride without risking spontaneous combustion. Luxury!
I’ve been logging more miles lately — 131 last week, 123 the week before, 130 the week before that — not just because the weather has been delightful, but because it gets me away from the MacBook Pro, which seems to have visited Taco Bell without me and has been shitting all over my desk.
I’ll spare you the links. You’ve seen them all anyway.
Now, I could take a claw hammer to that laptop, make it shut up. But the MacBook Pro is not the news; it’s just a delivery system. It’s not the Beast; it’s not even letting it in. It’s just making it available in case I want a peek.
“And now, here’s Ash with the weather!”
Remember Parker beating the tar out of Ash in “Alien” and all the good that did him? Ash was a grinning, disembodied head in a puddle of goo — literally a talking head, still bringing the news and analysis, like some interstellar anchorman for “The Weyland-Yutani Newshour” — and before long everyone on the Nostromo was Purina Alien Chow except for Ripley, Jonesy the cat, and the alien.
And Ripley was still getting nothing but bad news. Especially when, just as she was getting ready to back the escape pod out of the garage, up pops the alien with a solid impression of Jack Nicholson in “The Shining” — “Heeeere’s Johnny!” — and she had to have been thinking, “Goddamnit, all I wanted to do was take a little ride, get away from all this ‘Wet cleanup on Aisle 4’ shit for a while. …”
And Ripley didn’t even know about the next three movies in the queue. Talk about your long days in the office.
The bike is my escape pod. I check it for aliens before I hop aboard.
And while I bring a bot along, I keep that sumbitch locked down tight. If he manages to pop off somehow, well … he’s just a feeble old iPhone 13 Mini, and I’m pretty sure I can whup his ass in a fair fight.
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.
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?”
Betsy Ross would like to know who left the lid up, among other things.
Someone up the road a ways is flying the flag upside down.
It’s fair, I thought. Someone across the street had been doing likewise under the previous administration. What’s good for the goose, etc.
I had been debating whether to fly a flag at all on this Fourth of July, right side up or otherwise. Part of me feels that to fly the flag at all hints of complicity with the brigands, featherbedders and toadies who snuggle up to it as though Old Glory were a young girl on Epstein Island.
It’s one of the reasons I never wear the stars-and-stripes jersey some wiseguy at USA Cycling awarded to me for being a National Champion Pain in the Ass, or something very much like that.
Sure, I earned it. But actually wearing it? I dunno.
“Hey, check out the senior citizen in the national-champ kit. He must’ve been something before electricity. I didn’t know Depends made bib shorts. And what’s that thing he’s riding? Steel? Bar-end shifters? Rim brakes? Yo, Rip Van Weinmann! Wake up and smell the future! Haw haw haw!
• • •
Your Humble Narrator and Herself.
So, yeah. When Herself and I rolled out for this morning’s ride I was not wearing the stars-and-stripes. Yet I was rockin’ the red, white, and blue, as hard as I could, for anyone who cared enough to take notice.
Red Steelman Eurocross (USA) and Giro gloves (Vietnam). White Rudy Project helmet (China), cotton headrag (ditto), Patagonia undershirt (USA), and Gore socks (?). Blue Voler jersey (USA), a match for the decals on the Eurocross and the Cane Creek Crono X Cross wheels (?). The bibs were Voler (USA) — not Depends— in basic black, to match my Sidi shoes (Romania) and my aura.
Quite a few of our fellow Americans were getting their heart rates up despite the smoky haze applying a gray filter to the normally beautiful blue skies. Joggers, dog-walkers, e-bikers, you name it. The quail were mostly under cover, but we saw a few bunnies and one deer curled up in a shady spot against a Sandia Heights house for sale.
And what’s with all the crows lately? Could be ravens, I suppose. Quite a conspiracy of them, too. Someone should write a poem.
• • •
When we got home a few of the Spanish-speakers that so frighten the nation’s mismanagement were prepping a neighbor’s place for stucco in the 94-degree heat. Another will be working a checkout lane at a nearby grocery until 10 p.m. I know this because she told me so.
“Gonna miss the barbecue and everything,” she said, ringing up my purchases, mostly the ingredients for that most American of condiments (salsa).
Our post-ride lunch was some Mexican red rice and savory ground beef left over from last night’s dinner, that most American of dishes (tacos), with a couple of scrambled eggs and a sprinking of Irish cheese. The last of the taco filling will be put to use tonight in that most American of meals (pizza).
• • •
The star-spangled banner yet waves.
But we were talking about flags, yeah? I put ours out, right side up. They’re nothing special, just a couple of cheap promotional items dumped on the property years ago by some long-forgotten real-estate shithead with zero respect for flag etiquette. Nevertheless, Herself and I agreed that we should hew to the gospel preached to us by our late friend and neighbor Marv’ Berkman.
Shortly after we moved in next door to Marv’, once I had gotten the feeling that he wasn’t your standard-brand, hard-right Bibleburger, I asked him why he flew the flag day in and day out.
And the old Chicago saloon picker sez to me he sez (stop me if you’ve heard this one before):
“I just want those guys to know they’re not the only ones who can fly it.”
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