While we await reports from the Thunder in the Tundra, at which Vlad the Impaler will punk The Goldbug at one of our own Air Force bases, we’re enjoying a colorful sunrise behind the Sandias and some spirited aerial combat over the backyard hummingbird feeder.
It’s a good thing rufous hummingbirds don’t weigh 300 pounds. They’d rule us all.
Actually, now that I think about it, it just might be an improvement over what we have now.
Gautama H. Buddha on a flying zabuton, how does someone get this fucking stupid in just one lifetime?
Best argument for reincarnation I’ve ever seen.
We are in the moist and clammy paws of the Bizarro World Buddhists, and this slobbering eejit is their Dalai Lama. His Assholiness.
Speaking of the actual DL, there is absolutely no truth to the rumor that His Holiness has declined reincarnation, saying, “If Yosemite Samsāra over there keeps coming back, I’m giving it a miss.”
Paranoia strikes deep, as the fella says.
Coming home from a grocery run yesterday I turned into the cul-de-sac to see a nondescript white Chevy SUV parked in front of the new neighbors’ house.
Didn’t think anything of it at first — new neighbors mean strange vehicles full of inspectors, handymen, and new neighbors.
And then, as I rolled past, three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests stepped out of the vehicle and stalked across the street to the Bulgarians’ place.
I call them Bulgarians because I think that’s their nationality. Can’t quite remember. It’s a multigenerational, multilingual household, and the owners have adult children in the area who are always popping round in a variety of top-shelf vehicles bearing dogs and grandchildren and whatnot.
They’re probably the neighbors we have the least amount of contact with, mostly because they seem a self-contained unit. Describing them to a reporter after a capital-E Event of some sort you’d say something like: “They were quiet. Kept to themselves. We never had any problems with them.”
Still, with one eye on the rear view as I punched the button to raise the garage door, I was thinking what I was going to say to the three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests if they suddenly stopped talking to the Bulgarians, slapped the cuffs on their wrists and the hoods over their heads, and dragged them shrieking into the white SUV.
Time to earn that democratic-socialist street cred, bruh!
So I snapped some quick pix of the SUV, ran the groceries inside, grabbed the binoculars, went back outside, jotted down the deets from the license plate — which was not easy, it being a typically sun-bleached New Mexico plate and barely readable — and just generally made myself real obvious standing there in my driveway three houses down, waiting to see whether I needed to go over there and get my ass kicked for some people I barely know.
And then the discussion ended without violence and the authorities ambled down the cul-de-sac to the next house over. It was then that I saw, stenciled on the back of one dude’s stout black vest, not “ICE,” but “PSA.”
“PSA?” I mumbled to myself. “Public Service Announcement? Prostate-Specific Antigen? Pi Sigma Alpha?”
And then it hit me. Police Service Aide. The unarmed crew that helps the Albuquerque Police Department with traffic control, writing reports on property crime, and other low-risk chores while sworn officers focus on scraping the stiffs off the streets.
And as that neighbor stepped out to speak with the PSA posse I recalled that he does have a problem with the Bulgarians, who have kept a broken-down rust-bucket with a right front flat and weeds growing through the engine compartment parked at the curb for the better part of quite some time, and whose functioning vehicles have been known to take up a fair amount of the limited parking in our little cul-de-sac, occasionally blocking his mailbox and/or making it tough to find a spot for the bins on trash-pickup day.
Well … at least he didn’t call the ICEholes on them. He is a Trumper, after all. And I’m not at Alligator Alcatraz, picking worms out of the chow I can’t eat with my jaw wired shut.
I was idly cooking up a pot of Pierre Franey’s turkey chili yesterday when some doglike portion of my brain not focused on the task at hand hopped the wall and came back with a bone for me to gnaw.
It was the Fourth of July. I was preparing a meal of Mexican origin that Texas claims as its own (along with a sizable portion of Mexico) using a Frenchman’s recipe in a New Mexican kitchen.
This particular recipe was “fairly traditional,” according to Franey, and not so very different from my Iowa-born mother’s take on the dish, which dates back to the O’Grady family’s stint on Randolph AFB at San Antonio, circa 1962-67. But Franey’s version uses turkey instead of beef, with a particular season in mind — not the Fourth of July, but Thanksgiving, which is when his recipe was published in The New York Times in 1992.
Franey’s journey to a quick, simple, and delicious chili recipe certainly took the scenic route, if we use his biography as our map. As a young man he left France to join “an impressive team of cooks” at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York. When World War II erupted a few years later, he took another job — with the U.S. Army.
Offered a cushy berth as personal chef to Gen. Douglas McArthur, Franey declined, saying he’d rather help his countrymen fight Nazis in France. Thus, after boot camp at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he shipped out to Europe as a machine gunner, rising to the rank of sergeant and collecting a Purple Heart for his troubles.
After the war, Franey went on to work with Craig Claiborne on recipes and restaurant reviews for the NYT, and in 1975 hung out his own shingle there as “The 60-Minute Gourmet.” A decade later he was cooking on public television, too.
Imagine that.
What might an 18-year-old Pierre Franey encounter upon his arrival in today’s America? An immigrant … and from France? Taking American jobs? Willing, even eager, to fight Nazis rather than serve his betters in the kitchen?
He’d be in a Salvadoran slammer before he could get his apron on. And without machine-gunning any Nazis, more’s the pity. If the kid could channel the Pierre Franey from that other timeline I expect his 1942 self would be astonished that 83 years later we’re fighting brownshirts in America as Lady Liberty hides her face in shame.
Me, I’d still be using Mom’s chili recipe. Which is fine. But it takes a lot more time, and runs light on peppers and long on tomatoes.
As Dropkick Murphys release a new album, “For the People,” frontman Ken Casey has a few thoughts about the big red pickle in which we find ourselves during our annual Independence Day picnic.
Speaking with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Casey said he was shocked that so many people in his life fell for Trumpism:
“My father died when I was young, and I was raised by my grandfather, who was basically like, ‘If I ever see you bullying someone, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you back down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”
“I’ve just never liked bullies, and I don’t understand people who do. It’s really not that hard. I wish more people would see that it’s not hard to stand up.”
So stand up with Dropkick Murphys and the people on this Fourth of July, and all the other ones, too, even after we kick the shit out of these bullies. And sing along, if you can keep up. Here are the lyrics for anyone who’s not fluent in Celtic punk.
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