Category: FreeDumb®

Birthday bash

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Flag on the play: unpresidential conduct, personally foul.

The last time I took in one of those shabby little traveling carnivals that prowl the nation’s strip malls and fairgrounds was back in the Nixon years, when Hunter S. Thompson and I were both spending a lot of time, arguably too much of it, completely out of our minds.

Fear and Loathing, Campaign Trail style
The more things change, etc.

Hunter was, of course, a pro, and getting good copy out of his trips, especially that long one spent covering the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone that turned into “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.”

Me? I was strictly amateur hour, and as two hits of mescaline sent me reeling around that dime-store Disneyland across from the old Rustic Hills Mall in Bibleburg my only creation was an unbridgeable chasm between me and my horrified ex-girlfriend.

I think she was my ex-girlfriend. If she wasn’t, right at that particular moment, she soon would be.

A half-century later I have absolutely no recollection of what I saw that so enthralled me. But whatever it was, I doubt it could hold a candle to what’s happening at the White House today, Flag Day, in the Year of Our Lard 2026. Especially since I no longer indulge in the various brain erasers of my youth.

If only Hunter were still around to give us the 411 on this shit. We’ll have to settle for what he wrote way back when.

This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. … Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?

Words without song*

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 40 Comments
“I got nothin’ here,” says Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

How many different ways are there to write, “This fuckin’ mook is 300 pounds of bellowing bullshit in a 10-pound Brioni bag?”

Beats me. I’ve read a ton of variations on that theme, even had a few goes at it myself, to no particular effect. Manhattan Fats and his Brooks Brothers bandidos just keep rolling merrily along, stealing everything that isn’t screwed to the floor, stenciling his name in gold Krylon on whatever’s left, and bombing the rubble just to watch it bounce.

It’s like watching a CBS remake of “The Maltese Falcon” in which Kaspar Gutman grabs the bird, the real one, and gets away scot free, while Joel Cairo and Wilmer Cook announce their campaign for the White House, Brigid O’Shaughnessy gets a talk show and a book deal, and Sam Spade goes to jail. And we’re just supposed to sit down and watch.

Did I mention it’s a series, not a movie? On every channel and streaming service 24/7? And not so much as a tiny box of stale popcorn with a watered-down soda for the rubes. No fertilizer, no corn. Thanks, Obama!

Subscribe! Follow! Like! Share! CGI junk food in an A.I.-slop sauce. Eighty-six the side of fries. No fertilizer, no spuds. Thanks, Sleepy Joe!

It’s starting to feel like even the bots have run out of scrapes for this tepid potboiler. Take “It Can’t Happen Here,” “Idiocracy,” “Dr. Strangelove,” “It,” “Grapes of Wrath,” “Lost,” the final installment in “The Godfather” trilogy, and the entire Marvel Universe catalog (except for maybe “Iron Man,” which was really pretty cool), throw it all in a big-ass blender, purée the shit out of it until all the ingredients are completely unrecognizable, and serve with a side of Motel 6 toilet paper.

Are we all just hanging on in hopes the final season will include a riff on the “Godfather III” scene in which the Devil — like the rest of us, mumbling, “Awright, OK, enough awready” — finally cuts Michael Corleone’s strings, leaving him to topple out of his chair like the dirty old man Tyrone F. Horneigh falling off a park bench in “Laugh-In?”

Well … maybe that’s just me. And in any event, we should all remember that the rest of the mob did not perish alongside Michael.

*Apologies to Felix Mendelssohn and his “Songs Without Words.”

Tea by the pool

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
No diving.

It’s not summer yet, but that doesn’t mean I can’t crank out my little bit of bullshit on the patio instead of in the office. I mean, it’s 64°, just past 8 a.m., and there are a lot more hummingbirds out here than there are in there.

Birds of another sort abound elsewhere. Buzzards, mostly. The Benighted States have been at the polls again, hoping to find a few that shit gold instead of what we’re wading through at the moment.

It might help if we focused on finding a species that isn’t focused on eating our entrails.

A robin, maybe. One’s busily plucking bugs from the back yard as I type. Good, useful work, that. Many insects infest the American lawn; many, many of them. A hungry robin might be just the ticket.

Aw, hell, who am I kidding here? We don’t need a robin. We need a Batman.*

* Or a Batwoman, Batperson, someone who identifies as a bat, is transitioning to a bat, I don’t give a shit. As long as s/he/they kick ass.

    Today in hisssssssstory

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
    The devil you say. …

    Today in history, from The Associated Press:

    On May 30, 2024, Donald Trump became the first former American president to be convicted of felony crimes as a New York jury found him guilty of all 34 charges in a scheme to illegally influence the 2016 election through a hush money payment to a porn actor who said the two had sex.

    Also on this date: In 1431, Joan of Arc, condemned as a heretic, was burned at the stake in Rouen, France.

    Sorry about that, Joan. In a righteous world you would have lived to a ripe old age and this other would have been a fatty chunk of long pig sputtering on the grill.

    Flag on the play

    ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
    Lady Liberty? Naw, just another headless dummy.

    Anybody else feel as though they should tuck Old Glory away and fly the Jolly Roger this Memorial Day weekend?

    Whenever our fellow Americans get their bib-’alls in a bunch and saddle us with some featherbedding fascist who’s only passing through to rob the savings and loan, poke anything with a pulse, and then burn the whole town down to its foundations, why, I think about how refreshing it would be to rock the hammer and sickle, skull and crossbones, or an upside-down stars and stripes on national holidays.

    Someone up the road a ways is doing the latter, perhaps in response to a neighbor who did likewise during the previous administration. A quiet little tit for tat. Haven’t heard any raised voices or gunfire yet, anyway.

    I don’t know who I’d be trying to impress with any kind of alternative flag display, though. El Rancho Pendejo sits at the bottom of a cul-de-sac and is seen mostly by the people who live here, the mailman, various tradespersons, and the drivers of a steady stream of delivery vans, though that torrent has become more of a trickle as the economy struggles with a distinct kink in its hose.

    It all seems mostly performative, anyway. Like the mouth-breathers flying Trump flags from porch and pickup. Lets you know whom to visit at 2 in the morning come The Revolution, to be sure. But they’re starting to look like an endangered species in any event. Fingers crossed.

    Back when we were new to the Greater Patty Jewett Yacht & Gun Club Neighborhood in Bibleburg, our next-door neighbor Marv, a veteran, explained that he flew the flag to make sure that “those guys” (his words) didn’t think they were the only ones entitled to do so.

    Maybe that’s the example to follow. Memorial Day isn’t about “those guys.” If it were, we’d all be flying pirate flags for sure.