Dick Cheney dies, goes to Hell

November 4, 2025November 4, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

“Welcome, Dick. Been a long time since we struck our bargain back when that other Dick was running the White House.”

If you can’t say anything nice … well, let’s get started!

Dick Cheney was smart, mean, and a brass-balled traitor to the spirit of America who thought the Constitution a motley collection of outdated recommendations and never missed a chance to pants Lady Justice whenever she had her back turned.

He made his bones in Richard Nixon’s White House, hitching a ride there on Donald Rumsfeld’s coattails, and then hung around DeeCee in various capacities, improving the nation’s governance in the same way an untended and freshly dead raccoon under a porch improves a home’s resale value.

A five-deferment draft dodger turned back-office warmonger, Cheney helped leave a trail of bodies, ours and theirs, in Panama, Haiti, Somalia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, and Iraq. He shot one of his own friends in the face during a quail hunt and the friend apologized for all the fuss. But Cheney never copped to fucking up, in that instance or any of the other bloody debacles in which he played a role.

Cheney was a big fan of the sort of fascist cosplay we’ve come to see from the present occupant of the Oval Office — the USA Patriot Act, warrantless surveillance, indefinite detentions sans hearings or charges, brutal interrogations, etc. — but only when he had the president’s ear. Thus he was not a fan of his fellow draft dodger, the serial bankrupt and convicted felon presently turning the White House into a Gilded Palace of Sin (h/t Gram Parsons and Charles P. Pierce).

So, when he finally got the “strong, robust executive authority” of his dreams, Cheney decided he didn’t care for it. It wouldn’t take his calls.

Now he’s off to join his old mentor Rumsfeld in the afterlife, where — according to some religious traditions, anyway — another strong, robust executive authority awaits him.

I don’t know whether that head of state will require his advice, either. He seems to be doing just fine without it. Shucks, Hell isn’t half full.

Leaf me alone

September 27, 2025September 27, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Following the news was starting to feel like losing a shit-eating contest, so I stepped away from the Mac and treated myself to a little expedition down to the bosque.

It was something of a whim, actually. I just grabbed the Soma Pescadero and without a plan in place took the Paseo de las Montañas trail down to I-40, rolled up and over the bike-ped bridge, and then risked life and limb riding Indian School and Washington to the brief I-40 Trail at Carlisle, which leads to the North Diversion Channel Trail.

But instead of turning northward as per usual, to head back to the Mac via Osuna-Bear Canyon, I swung south. What the hell? I thought. Why not? Let someone else gnaw on that shit sandwich for a few hours.

Ridden south the NDCT has an exit onto Indian School, which becomes Odelia as it traverses I-25. It’s the sort of auto-friendly shooting gallery that bicycle advocates call a “stroad,” with a bike lane, and drops past Albuquerque High School (pay no attention to the graveyard on your right). To avoid the equally dicey Broadway at the bottom I hung a left off Odelia onto Edith, then a right onto Mountain.

This is the same route I ride to collect the Forester whenever it needs a little love from the Subaru wizards at Reincarnation. But Mountain also winds through Old Town to the Paseo del Bosque trail.

Mountain can be a little sketchy, being a narrow two-lane shared with street people and gas-guzzlers. A seemingly endless construction project that I first dodged in June added a small degree of difficulty, taking me off the street and onto a series of sidewalks from Tiguex Park to the Albuquerque Museum. After dodging a dog-walker, dropping off the sidewalk onto Mountain, and crossing to the opposite sidewalk to punch the bike-ped button at Mountain and Rio Grande, it was smooth sailing to the bosque trail, which I joined just south of I-40.

Then another whim: Check the state of the Rio Not-So-Grande. Up the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge I rode. Yikes, etc. Back to the bosque trail.

The cottonwoods weren’t showing a lot of fall color so early in the season. Just a hint of yellow here and there. No matter; just happy to be here. I brought arm warmers but never needed them as I cruised along at a pleasant skull-flushing pace.

I shared the trail with kindred souls. E-bikes, recumbents, mountain bikes, gravel bikes, even road bikes (how quaint). One long lean type on a flared-bar, fat-tired gravel bike ahead of me was riding no hands, swaying gently to some music in his mind.

They call me the breeze / I keep blowing down the road

Was he was thinking about ways to drag hapless strangers into unmarked vans and out of the country, or into court to fight some half-baked rap, strip them of their jobs, health care, and reputations, sic’ the thugs in his cult on them, or simply shoulder his way in front of a cluster of cameras so the rest of us have to look at him and listen to his bullshit? If so, I wasn’t seeing it. Just another dude on his two-wheeler, enjoying some fresh air between shifts in the barrel.

As I turned north off the bosque onto the Paseo del Norte Trail and headed for home I thought about how the barrel is with us always. We need a broader view than the one we get through the bunghole.

Me and the Pescadero, just blowin’ down the road. Trail. Whatevs.

Turn the page

April 15, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Drawing a blank instead of drawing a bead.

I’ve been finding it hard to write lately.

It’s not the infamous “writer’s block.” The problem is that the only thing I want to write about is all the you-know-what coming from you-know-where.

And isn’t there enough of that sort of thing available pretty much everywhere? Every day? Every second?

I find myself belatedly having some sympathy for the mouth-breathers who squealed like maladjusted brakes whenever my columns would veer off the course laid out in the race bible and careen into the real world. Which, if we’re being brutally honest here, was pretty much all the time.

“Stick to cycling!” they’d wail.

“Everything is political!” I’d bark.

Now I’m just a blogger and don’t have to meet a regular deadline or wrestle with nervous editors, penny-pinching publishers, and illiterate critics.

Too harsh? Hey, I read the letters.

“Go back to waxing your chain, Spanky,” I’d grumble. “Leave writing to the pros.”

These days I write for free, because I like it. Anyone who doesn’t like it is likewise free, to fuck off.

Still, I’m not entirely sociopathic. I have you hardcores, my small, deeply disturbed audience, to consider. And I don’t want every single brain-dump here to be of the rancid, greasy, orange variety. There are only so many different ways to say ‘BOHICA!'”

Thing is, to write about anything else feels vaguely criminal. Borderline treasonous. Anyone with a voice, however small, should be sounding off like they have a pair.

What’s a poor mad dog to do?

Well, you may imagine my delight when I stumbled across another scribbler in similar straits. Chuck Wendig is a published author — like, of actual books, an’ shit — and he has a new one due out April 29, “The Staircase in the Woods.”

I first noticed him when The New York Times included “Staircase” in a roundup of 24 new works of fiction to read. Then his name came up again over at Daring Fireball, the free-ranging blog by John Gruber, who promoted this “crackerjack essay” Wendig had written while trying to write about other stuff and promote the new book and basically just live his fucking life.

It’s titled “What It Feels Like, Right Now.” Here’s a sample:

Writing is hard right now. Releasing a book is hard. Promoting that book is, say it with me, hard. It’s not trivial but it feels trivial. Like performing a puppet show in the town square as the town burns down. It feels good to do it and you want others to feel good while reading it but you also know feeling good right now also feels somehow bad, and maybe that’s one of the most fucked up things of all. They didn’t take joy but they took the joy of feeling joy away, made it feel wrong and strange. Turned happiness into a hot stove.

Top-shelf stuff here, folks. Rage and comedy, despair and hope, the whole ball of wax. Writing as an escape and an act of resistance. Inspirational.

In fact, I liked it so much that I immediately ordered up his new book from my favorite local bookstore, Page 1 Books.

Shit, I’d have given him the $32.29 just for the essay.

Hands on

April 6, 2025April 6, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments

We smashed the State yesterday. You’re welcome.

Herself and I were part of a crowd guesstimated in the thousands that piled into Civic Plaza for our local Hands Off! rally, taking a raucous stand against fascism.

We carpooled with two friends to the thing, and met up with a few others at the plaza. Frankly, I was not expecting a big turnout — the “high” temperature of 43° just missed the record low, set in 1983, by a single degree — but I was delighted to be proven unsmart as per usual.

In Bibleburg it was easy to think we were the only libtards in town, though we knew better; it just felt that way sometimes. As in almost always, especially during election years.

In Duck!Burg, we’re surrounded by fellow travelers — but even here, with the endless cascade of caca pouring out of DeeCee, some days it seems that no umbrella, no matter how all-encompassing, can keep the stink off you.

So, yeah — even I, Captain Cynicism, was moved to see the throng hooting and hollering along with emcee Robert Luke, legendary activist Dolores Huerta, Mayor Tim Keller, former Interior Secretary turned gubernatorial candidate Deb Haaland, state Attorney General Raúl Torrez, former Albuquerque poet laureate Mary Oishi, and others.

There were so many excellent, creative, handmade signs in evidence that I regretted dogging it and downloading prefabs from the Hands Off! people. My faves included “Shut Your Heil Hole,” the ever-popular “Elect a Clown, Expect a Circus,” and “Deport This Pendejo,” with an image of everyone’s favorite Swasticar salesman. There was even an excellent “Chingatumaga” placard, which we praised to its grinning creator.

So, props to Hands Off! and their partners for pulling off this nationwide dance party, which grabbed a whole lot of headlines. Now, the question is … where do we go from here? Or as that old troublemaker V.I. Lenin put it, “What is to be done?”

Saints preserve us

March 17, 2025March 17, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

It being St. Me Day, and with a nod to The New York Times for its story on how the DOGEbags have been taking a shillelagh to the National Nuclear Security Administration — which is said to have lost “a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation” — we present The Bothy Band performing, “Old Hag You Have Killed Me.”