Tonight’s trick-or-treaters will want their heavy cloaks. Even hairy-toed hobbits may opt for mukluks.
“Misty mountains cold” indeed. The Sandias are up there somewhere, I suppose. Whether they host a fire-breathing dragon squatting on dwarvish gold is someone else’s problem. It’s chilly enough down below and there are no Tooks in my bloodline.
Speaking of trials and tribulations, The New York Times says the Southwest is in for it again as a new storm system sets up to hose us down, sloppy seconds from former Hurricane Vance.
“Hurricane Vance?” Seriously? I knew there was something I didn’t like about that guy. Many somethings, actually, and this is just one more.
And now we have another one rolling in, sharing a name with a smirking toady whose beard makes it look as though he’s sporting a second fat ass with three buttholes above his necktie, plus pistol-grip ears.
Well, shit. It is Halloween. Everybody’s gotta be somebody.
This morning we cleaned, refilled, and set out the hummingbird feeders for what may be the last time in 2026.
We didn’t see a single, solitary hummer all day yesterday, for the first time this fall, and we fear the beautiful little buzzbombs may have called it a year.
Maybe they stuck around just long enough to see that Combover the Barbarian didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize for starting pointless wars, threatening to shove this and that up people’s arses, and otherwise jacking his draft-dodging jaw on antisocial media while his Secretary of Snapping Little Guys with Wet Towels in the Gym Showers livestreams the execution by firing squad of the Fort Hood shooter, who is confined to a wheelchair.
It recalls the scene in “Blazing Saddles” where Boris is preparing to hang a man on horseback — and his horse, too.
The Rio Gonzo, as seen last Friday by Your Humble Narrator.
What a difference a day makes. Or even a few short hours.
On Friday I rode down to the bosque because why the hell not? I was sick of all my usual foothills routes and wanted to log some respectable mileage for a change, so off I went.
The New Albion Privateer sails the Paseo del Bosque.
Also sick of its usual route was the Rio Grande, which has buggered off to parts unknown. You can tell because rivers don’t usually sport tire tracks, not even if Jeebus is driving.
I knew the Rio had run dry since I last saw it back in April. But it’s one thing to know and another to see.
Anyway. The dearth of river notwithstanding, it was a lovely day, if warmish — 81° when I got a regrettably late start, 10 degrees hotter when I finished — and then Thor woke from his nap, got his clouds in a row, and began swinging Mjölnir like he meant business. Hammer time!
Boom! Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch in less time than it takes to type “Our rain gauge showed 0.90 inch.” The National Weather Service told the Urinal that 1.74 inches fell at Indian School and Moon in a half hour, with near-record winds that peaked at 78 mph.
Photo liberated from what remains of the National Weather Service.
I mean, that storm flat parked itself overhead and let go, like a cow pissing on a flat rock.
“Remind me to turn off the sprinkler system,” I said to Herself. And it stayed off. Y’can’t touch this.
• • •
Now, of course, Loki is back on the job. Regular heat advisories from 1 to 8 p.m., high 90s to low triple digits.
No records set, as far as I know, but 9 in the a.m. is starting to feel a little late for the twice-weekly Geezer Rides. A second bottle goes in the seat-tube cage. Attacks are few and far between.
And mowing the lawn post-ride, like I did yesterday? That’s just stupid.
Having a lawn in the desert is stupid in and of itself, but having one and mowing it noonish moves the bar up a few notches.
Still, there’s the lawn, growing, and it won’t mow itself. I’ve been watching. That shit does not happen.
Maybe what I need is a bicycle with rotary blades attached. A velo-mower. And an early start. I could create a whole new thang and a magazine to chronicle its adventurers.
Nah. That’s even dumber than having a lawn in the desert.
• • •
Speaking of greenery stuffed into the ground, it seems that we may finally be getting the fabled fiber optic here in the cul-de-sac.
The Company Formerly Known As CenturyLink, a.k.a. CenturyTel, Qwest, et al., now calling itself Lumen Technologies, has provided our internet service for ages, even before we moved here in 2014. But for some reason Duck! City DSL is twice the price for half the speed we enjoyed in Bibleburg.
Even there, the tales of comically inept customer service were endless. Once we had a modem croak on us and The Company agreed to send us a new one. In that they proved better than their word. They sent us five of them, one after another, like Red Chinese soldiers marching to B-burg from Beijing over the bodies of their comrades.
Miss Mia loved her some Qwest modems on a chilly day in Bibleburg.
I may still have one in an old-tech box around here somewhere. I’m fairly certain I brought one with us when we moved because, hey, you never know, amirite? Miss Mia Sopaipilla loved toasting her po-po on one of those Qwest-branded Motorola jobbers Back in the Day®.
But I digress. We were talking about getting some fiber in our digital diet.
The water-company boyos were out in the cul-de-sac yesterday afternoon, spraying their blue cryptograms and hieroglyphics ever’ whichaway, so I asked one what was up. Thus I learned that the diggers are coming to bring us The Future, which we had in the B-burg a dozen or so years ago before time-traveling back to the stone knives and copper wire of Albuquerque.
“Take photos of your property before they get started,” the water dude advised. And I followed his advice. At least three of the companies charged with bringing fiber optic to Duck!Burg have been slapped with temporary stop-work orders after reports that they made a shambles of various properties.
I won’t lie. It’ll be great to have a faster, cheaper on-ramp to the Infobahn. But be careful what you wish for. The news of the day — a river of sand in Duck!Burg, shit monsoons in DeeCee — is already bad enough at a piddling 13.5 Mbps.
And it comes in a whole lot faster if it’s breaking just beyond the office window, where some rando rocking a backhoe is uprooting your sewer line.
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?”
