Thanks to His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered, Despoiler of Poorboxes and Underage Girls, it is now possible for a 71-year-old cyclist with zero upper body to grip $150 worth of groceries in the left hand — yes, the one with the two dislocated digits — while opening the hatch of the Forester with the right.
Small wonder he croaked all the offshore wind farms. We have all the ill wind we need and then some.
If I’d known how my Golden Years would turn out, I’d have acquired more gold.
The dump is closed, all the wrong people are in cuffs, and there ain’t enough SNAP in the EBT for turkey but there’s a big ol’ ham living large in the White House.
Oh, well. We can still sing. Sing loud. You know the words.
It’s been one of those Mondays.
Monday is a watering day. But the forecast called for rain, so early this morning I went out to shut off the irrigation system.
“Huh,” I thought. “Doesn’t look like rain to me.” So I left it on.
Monday is also Geezer Ride Day. So, naturally about the time the watering was done, the clouds started creeping in and the wind began ramping up.
“Huh,” I thought. “Better bail on the ride.” Which I did.
Monday is not Grocery Day. That would be Sunday. But I blew off Sunday’s grocery shopping for a two-hour bike ride in the wind plus a meet-and-greet with the mayor and a few dozen of his supporters.
So suddenly Monday was Grocery Day. And off I toddled to the Sprouts at Tramway and Central, en route nearly getting croaked by a street racer who roared up behind me in the right lane, then shot into the left and around me, barely missing both me and the dude slightly ahead of me in the left lane.
He then swerved onto the shoulder to pass everyone else in sight at about 25 mph over the 50-mph limit, which encouraged another jackass to do likewise, scattering dust, gravel, and debris from previous eejit-triggered crashes across the traffic lanes.
It happened so fast, in so much traffic, that I couldn’t grab the iPhone for a shot of either license plate. And it wasn’t the first time I’d wished I had some other sort of shooter with a tad more authority, like a Browning Hi-Power or a Colt 1911. I mean, you can’t AirDrop one or both of the silly sonsabitches.
Anyway, I got to the grocery without being killed to death, and only then did I notice that I’d left my grocery list at home.
“Huh,” I thought. “Maybe I can do it off the old internal hard drive.”
And I did! Didn’t miss a single item, and even picked up a bonus packet of ground turkey for a chili con carne in case the weather turned ugly.
Which of course it did, since I’d decided earlier to water the lawn. Our widget makes it 0.08 inch of precip slashing down sideways out of the north, and I expect that statistic does not include the hail.
“Huh,” I thought. “I suppose a run is out.” Which it was.
So instead of running, since a few of you seemed to enjoy our little Tour of Memory Lane, I decided to spend a couple hours collecting and posting PDFs of a few of my Adventure Cyclist reviews.
Naturally, I couldn’t find the one about the Rivendell Sam Hillborne, the bike I was riding in yesterday’s wind-fest (13 mph with gusts to 23). If I recall correctly, that one didn’t make the print magazine, but was posted to the Adventure Cyclist blog, where it languishes behind the membership paywall.
“Huh,” I thought. “I bet I have my original copy on another Mac.” And I do.
But I’m not gonna post it. Not yet. I got chili to cook.
Tuesday is a good day for chores.
It’s quiet around El Rancho Pendejo. Herself races off to the Lab at 5:30 in the a.m. and it’s just Your Humble Narrator and Miss Mia Sopaipilla manning the battlements. Cat’lments. Whatevs.
Sometimes I’m up before The Boss hits the door running, sometimes not. This morning I managed to see her off and then got down to brass tacks, as the kids don’t say anymore.
Miss Mia must be greeted, loved up on, given a second round of food and drink, and her litter box unburdened of its dark freight.
Then the Winter Palace is to be prepared for Her Majesty, after which I may offer myself a little sumpin’-sumpin’: coffee; toast with butter and jam; either oatmeal with dried fruit and nuts or yogurt with granola; an apple or mandarine; a scoop of crunchy almond butter; maybe a mug of tea.
The news is to be scanned but not dwelt upon lest it hamper the digestion.
This morning saw the last slice of bread slide down the rathole so a new loaf was in order, and I set that machinery in motion.
Next I congratulated myself for taking a moment yesterday to rake up the pine needles scattered across the lawn by last Thursday’s window-rattler, with the goal of restarting the irrigation system for a quick spritz this morning, when I noticed our bird feeders were getting low. So I filled those up. From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
This short detour threw a slight hitch into my gitalong. The next items on the schedule were exercise and grocery shopping. If I hadn’t stopped to pat myself on the back I could’ve squeezed in a quick trail run before the sprinklers came on (I wanted to be around to make sure nothing had frozen up during our short cold snap).
Running afterward would put me at the grocery noonish, which is not optimal; the amateurs scuttle out of their holes and get in everyone’s way at noon and 5 p.m. I like to do my shopping between 9 and 10, or sometime after 1, when only pro hunter-gatherers are working the aisles and the registers don’t look like The Big I at rush hour.
Thing is, the meal I have planned for tonight is a slow-cooker deal that wants four hours in the pot.
So, yeah. Here I sit, muttering to myself (and to you) while I update my grocery list, avoid the news, and wait to see whether the irrigation system erupts like Vesuvius.
You think you’re living on the edge, miles from home with a cargo area full of perishable groceries in early June and the low-fuel warning light giving you an orange mal de ojo from the dash.
Until you get passed by someone driving on the rim.
So there I was, motoring back from the Wholeazon Amafoods with a week’s worth of grub, and I knew my low-fuel light was on. It flashed me before I even got to the store to offload a hunk of my Socialist Insecurity entitlement funding on tasty bits of this and that.
Ah, bugger it, I thought. I still have a couple gallons in the tank. Shit, I could probably make it to Santa Fe for an early lunch at La Choza, if I had a cooler and some ice for all this chow. But it’s probably smarter to head for home, refrigerate the perishables, and gas up the next time out.
Thus I’m in the left lane on Wyoming, getting set to hang a left on Comanche, when I hear this hideous racket coming up fast in the middle lane.
I figure it’s the Devil finally come to collect, or maybe just some poor workingman’s beater truck fixin’ to retire before he does, and in some spectacular fashion, too. But it sounds even worse than either of those possibilities, about like three Terminators dry-humping an Alien in a junkyard full of feral cats.
As I make the left lane I glance right and screeching past shudders some shitbag sedan with the left front tire completely gone and the driver either deaf, drunk, or some combination of the two, ’cause he ain’t making any effort to get out of that middle lane and over to some safe place where he can maybe figure out why the hell all these assholes are staring at him and how come he can’t hear the radio goddamnit?
This may or may not be a metaphor for politics in 2023.
Some of us are low on gas, but we’re aware of the situation and hope to address it at our earliest possible opportunity.
Some others are gonna just drive it right into the ground and Dog help you if you’re standing anywhere near where the wreckage skids to a stop.
The good news is, you can hear it coming a long ways off.
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