Chicken enchiladas in red sauce, potatoes roasted in red chile, and Anasazi beans in chipotle. The blank space on the plate is for the side salad that I did not make.
Weird dreams this morning. I was working for a newspaper (!) again, so I guess it qualifies as a nightmare.
So I walk into the newsroom, late as usual, and a receptionist type hands me a note with a short clip attached, whispering in dire tones about some class of tragic typo.
I reply, “D’you have any idea how many people we have reading copy these days? I tried to get the city desk to read one fucking thing yesterday, but nooooooo. …”
Then, since John McCain is sitting in front of this person’s desk for some reason, perhaps awaiting an audience with the publisher, I whip a Three Stooges routine on him, poking him in the chest with one finger and then, when he glances down, flicking his nose.
Moving on, I notice that nobody is at their desks. They’re all in the big conference room, and the mood is not evocative of a holiday party.
The road to Mandalay (Bay) continues this morning from the Luxor, which is named after a famous Egyptian laxative.
LAS VEGAS, Nev. (MDM) — It figures that the first familiar face I would see this morning was draped over the skull of Bruce Gordon, who like me is a perennial contender for the title of Grumpiest Old Guy At the Show. I’ve spared you the mugshots. You’re welcome.
We were standing in line at dark-thirty for a cup of Starbutt’s finest and got straight to the kvetching, as a guy will before java is made available in a 20-year-old shopping mall masquerading as a casino-hotel. And afterward, too, come to think of it.
Well, some of us, anyway. One of these years Bruce and I should bring a small square of Astroturf and a couple of patio chairs to the show and while away the hours hollering at people to get the hell off our lawn.
I don’t feel like standing in another Vegas queue this morning — one thing America’s paean to the Triumph of Capitalism shares with the defunct Soviet Union is the requirement that one queue for everything, no matter how worthless and unsatisfying — so breakfast today consists of a grande Americano and a Larabar.
And now I got to shake a leg. Mandalay Bay awaits. It’s showtime.
The Soma Double Cross in semi-touring configuration at Blodgett Peak Open Space.
Yesterday was a rare day indeed, one largely free of responsibility for Your Humble Narrator (save for meal preparation), so I pissed off for a couple leisurely hours of cycling.
I chose the Soma Double Cross, which had been undergoing refitting for touring before the plumber took his monkey wrench to my plans for a little post-Tour getaway; I had reattached the rear rack, but hadn’t gotten around to the low-rider or fenders.
The Double Cross is not particularly light, but neither am I, so who cares? I felt like riding it, I felt like climbing some middling hills, and the ride proved as delightful as free beer on a hot day.
You may be disappointed to hear that there was some performance enhancement involved. Before heading out, I ate a sandwich of Niman Ranch applewood-smoked ham and Alp and Dell Muenster on rustic Italian bread. That little piggy (and not all that little, either) sure flattened out those inclines. A sign of the Aporkalypse? Perhaps.
Thank Buddha that nobody from USADA was around to catch my Zoom-Zoom impersonation. My sweat smelled like bacon, which is a dead giveaway that I’m on The Program again. They don’t even bother to draw blood once they get a whiff.
I dined at the exclusive Vitamin Cottage in Dillon, selecting a delicious potato salad and San Pellegrino from the extensive menu of shit one can eat in one’s car.
Yesterday I visited, briefly, what the late, lamented Ed Quillen once called the Interstate 70 Industrial Tourism Sacrifice Zone. Nothing wrong with the place that Peak Oil can’t cure.
It had been several years since my last visit to the Zone, and peer as I might between the rare gaps in traffic I could detect no signs of intelligent life.
There was existence, of a sort — the Breckenridge-Frisco-Silverthorne-Dillon clusterplex remained as relentlessly active as an anthill, busily raising a bumper crop of orange road-construction cones with one pincer and separating rubes from their rubles with the other.
I was in the Zone to meet a shooter from Steamboat Springs, whose current project required the Co-Motion Divide Rohloff I’ve been evaluating for Adventure Cyclist. Time was of the essence, and shop mechanics are crushed this time of year, so we didn’t care to wait for the lengthy disassembly-shipping-reassembly process, which can involve brown-suited gorillas using the box as a trampoline in between ZIP codes.
So I drove north from Bibleburg, and Doug drove south from Steamboat, and we met in the parking lot of a Silverthorne Wendy’s, as seemed appropriate, given the locale.
We were clearly members of the same tribe — Doug was driving a black Subaru with a bike on the roof, and I was driving a silver Subaru with a bike in the back — and neither of us was overjoyed to be in the Zone, though in its defense I will note that it was not on fire at the moment.
We discussed the Divide Rohloff, cycling and our own communities’ respective revenue-enhancement models — his, a vastly enhanced network of cycling trails (Welcome to Steamboat 2013!); mine, a downtown stadium for the Colorado Rockies’ farm club and a U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame (Welcome to Bibleburg 1913!).
Then we shook hands, jumped into our respective Subarus, and off we went.
Having taken the scenic route north, through Woodland Park, Hartsel, Fairplay and Breck’, I decided I owed it to science to take the interstates home. It being seven-ish I enjoyed mostly smooth sailing despite the $160 million Twin Tunnels expansion project until I approached the Air Force Academy, where I began a 40-minute crawl through three more road “improvement” projects to Chez Dog.
Those should do wonders for tourism. It certainly made me want to go somewhere. Take me out to the ball game. …
Today started and ended well, lightly toasted slices of metaphorical bread comprising an actual shit sandwich.
On arising I recalled that we had a huge slab of meaty Ranch Foods Direct bacon in the fridge, so breakfast included coffee, eggs over easy, American fried potatoes, buttery English muffins and great thick rashers of pigmeat. Your basic heart-attack special, but I like it.
My plans for the workday hinged on breaking a piece of new technology to harness, but despite a hearty breakfast I couldn’t even get my rope on it, much less my brand.
Being something of a persistent cuss — you may call it “obsessive-compulsive,” I call it “persistent” — I kept working at it, trying first this and then that and finally the other, all the while taking copious notes on each fresh dysfunction with an eye toward eventually tattooing same on someone using an icepick and ball-peen hammer, with a sack of wormy dogshit for ink.
Thus the hours passed and the daylight faded, and the technology breezily countered my every move. By late afternoon, which saw the mailperson deliver an overdue check for services rendered that was redeemable for slightly less than half the expected quantity of Dead President Trading Cards, I was at a rolling boil, hissing like a teakettle full of vipers, blistering steam boiling out of both ears.
Herself and I had earlier scheduled a joint birthday dinner with friends, so I stuck my head in the freezer, counted to a thousand in Irish, and off we went to The Blue Star, where the four of us ate all manner of good things while discussing music, metaphysics and literature. Also, we solved every last one of the world’s problems save mine (you’re welcome).
Now I’m hardly pissed off at all. But tomorrow is another day.
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