“Holy hell, hon’, better start filling the sandbags.”
Winter finally came a-calling yesterday.
More of a “ring the doorbell and run” deal, actually. Left 0.06 inch of rain on our doorstep instead of a flaming sack of dog shit.
We’ll take it. Don’t gotta stomp it out or nothin’.
Today dawned clear and cold, and the furnace and humidifier were harmonizing on what sounded like some sort of mariachi tune as I awakened just before 4 to “shake hands with the governor.”
“Are you getting up or going back to bed?” Herself asked as she set about her day.
“Back to bed,” I mumbled, and made it so. The next two hours of sleep were top shelf, curled up like an old dog under blanket and comforter. The news cycle can’t get me in there, with the phone locked and in silent mode. No wonder Miss Mia Sopaipilla loves the bed-cave I make for her every morning after coffee. And she doesn’t even read The New York Times.
The press is deep into “The Year in Review” mode now, which reminds me of the last time I went to a Broncos game at the old Mile High stadium, back in the days when the Donkeys would have had their hands full going up against a Pop Warner squad from Saguache.
Anyway, the Donks were getting their asses handed to them, by whom I can’t recall, and though there was plenty of time remaining on the clock, the stands were emptying faster than bladders overloaded by the industrial lager the fans were slamming to drown their sorrows.
In mid-exodus the PA gives out with a cheery, “And don’t forget to watch ‘Bronco Replay'” on whatever local TV channel was playing the piano in that whorehouse. After which some tosspot a few tiers downhill from us lurches to his unsteady feet, bellows, “Wasn’t it bad enough the first time?” and then tumbles down the stairs.
All these years later three hundred and sixty-five steps seems like quite a tumble, especially since I’m not wearing any protective gear — like, say, sinuses lined with cocaine, a beer-swollen liver, and a couple dozen extra elbees of adipose tissue.
So please excuse me if I skip the replay. It was bad enough the first time.
“What’s in a name? that which we call a hose / By any other name would smell as sour.” Apologies to The Bard.
Man, did I ever have to take the scenic route to this post.
This morning as I scanned the news, I noticed a headline at The New Mexican‘s website:
“Delays, bankruptcy let nursing-home chain avoid paying settlements for injuries, deaths.”
This sort of revelation is always of interest to me, as I am of a certain age, Herself’s patience is not without limits, and I have seen my mother, her mother, and an old friend renting rooms in such places.
But I don’t subscribe to The New Mex, and didn’t bother trying to hurdle their paywall.
And then, in a sidebar beneath the main story, I saw the name of the nursing-home chain: Genesis.
Aha! As it happens we know someone who had a family member installed in one of their Duck! City facilities. This person failed to thrive, and the tales told did not recommend the joint as a comfy bench upon which to await the Greydog to the Hereafter, though it seemed a stint there might have made good training for a triathlon featuring Cormac McCarthy’s Road and Dante’s Sea of Excrement.
Our source called the outfit “Genocide.”
So I launched a quick search and hey presto: Turns out the piece by Jordan Rau was not by a New Mex scribe. It came from KFF Health News, the news arm of KFF, an endowed national nonprofit that calls itself “the leading health policy organization in the U.S.” (You may remember it as the Kaiser Family Foundation.) They have a very liberal reprint policy, but I’m just gonna give you the links and a free taste:
Once the nation’s largest nursing home chain, Genesis says it was spending $8 million a month defending and settling lawsuits over resident injuries and deaths in recent years. But the company is now poised to wipe the liability slate clean by seeking refuge in the most protective corner of the legal system for the nursing home industry: bankruptcy court. The Genesis case, one of 11 large senior care bankruptcies this year, illustrates how health care companies can dodge public and financial accountability for alleged negligence through delays, confidentiality clauses, and bankruptcy maneuvers, a KFF Health News investigation found.
It seems a bankruptcy judge has declined to sign off on one typical evasive maneuver (the sale of its nursing-home business, reportedly to an insider). Everything I was able to find on that was paywalled.
In other news, though the story mentioned three incidents in Duck!Burg facilities (Genesis has 10 of them here), and despite the ease of reprinting or citing KFF’s heavy lifting in this matter, I’ve seen nothing about this in the Albuquerque Journal, which has been otherwise occupied trying to make its grotesque website easier to look at and navigate.
A “Local” drop-down under “News” would be a plus. Recaps of gruesome murders in California and Australia I can get elsewhere.
And if I were a working editor instead of just another doddering old ink-stained wretch in queue for the Soylent Green treatment I might bookmark KFF Health News, too. The Genesis locations I visited today had full parking lots. Surely the visitors can’t all be personal-injury attorneys. Some might be subscribers visiting loved ones.
The ever-readable Mike Ferrentino has a meditation on “garbage miles” in his “Beggars Would Ride” column over at NSMB.com.
No spoilers. Pop over and have a squint. I will say only that his thoughts on the topic have evolved over the decades, because he is mos def one of the higher primates.
This photo was taken three days before my 36th birthday. I was single, I had a job, and yes, that is a ponytail you see peeking out of the back of my helmet. Photo by Larry Beckner | The New Mexican
I first encountered the concept of garbage miles back in the Eighties, while racing bikes out of Fanta Se. Logging a ton of miles I was, and getting ruthlessly flogged on race day by people doing half my weekly average, or less.
“The fuck?” I inquired.
“Too many junk miles,” they replied.
Junk miles, garbage miles, all samey same. Unfocused and thus unworthy. Or so they said, the rotten, podium-hogging sonsabitches.
But not me. Because whenever I was in the saddle spinning I was not parked at the The New Mexican‘s copy desk, where I had to log many junk miles indeed to underwrite my cycling habit. Many, many of them.
At least the bike miles, like crucifixion, got me out in the open air.
Once we moved to Bibleburg in fall 1991 I kept it up. The Sept. 15 entry in my training journal after a 157.5-mile week was: “A few respectable miles. Nice to not work — nothing like a job for fucking up your training.”
The fabled 115 ride from B-burg to Penrose and back, circa 1995 or thereabouts.
“Training,” he calls it. This is the hee, and also the haw. Oh, I was riding on road and off, first with Rainbow Racing, then later with the Mad Dogs. And I was running regularly, even doing a little inline skating and snowshoeing because I was freelancing pieces to a sports-and-fitness outfit in Boulder between my chores for VeloNews (see, I was actually trying to work and earn, kinda, sorta).
But at my first few Colorado cyclocrosses I was either OTB or DFL, eventually settling into a fairly reliable fourth-place kind of fella, out of the money yet very much in the way. Seventh of 11 finishers at the state championships at Chatfield State Park that year, after which I called it a season.
Too many junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.
Oh, I got better. Or maybe they got worse, as one of the fast guys mused in my presence after I finally managed to finish a race in front of him. In any case, by the mid-Nineties I could podium at a ’cross every now and then, even win, rarely, if the weather got truly evil and the fast guys stayed home.
Solo on the home course.
This could’ve been because I actually trained for cyclocross, which by this time was the only cycling discipline I really cared about.
I worked on technique, ran a ton to counter my lack of snap in the saddle, and even built my own course at altitude (at the base of our 43-acre plot at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe in CrustyTucky).
During the seven years we lived there I rode a ’cross bike just about everywhere, because pavement was miles away and when I finally got to it I didn’t want to be herding the old mountain bike with its 26-inch knobbies and boingy fork. Though I missed its 24-tooth granny ring while cursing my way up the long dirt mile back to the house, 430 feet up from the washboarded county road.
Dogging it at Chatfield.
Not a lot of junk miles in CrustyTucky.
In those years I logged my junk miles behind the wheel of a Toyota pickup, with my bikes in the bed. Our Mad Dog cyclocrosses were in B-burg, a 150-mile round trip from home base. The bulk of the state race series meant an even longer slog up the Front Strange, to Littleton, Denver, Franktown, Boulder, Mead, and Fort Collins. The weather was frequently wintry, masters were always first to race, and more than once to make the start I had to hit town the day before, overnighting in some low-rent motel.
Talk about your junk miles.
After a few years of that my training logs crumbled into random entries followed by none at all. It was starting to feel a whole lot like work — which was also suffering in part because the cycling community in CrustyTucky consisted of me, myself and I. It felt like being sentenced to Stationary Trainer Without Parole. I was taking all the pulls and yet going nowhere. In terms of fiscal and mental health it seemed prudent to seek out a few voices that weren’t coming from inside my head.
Dennis the Menace and Dr. Schenkenstein take the long view atop Bear Creek East, a once-active cyclo-cross venue.
In those first years back in Bibleburg I had a good crew. Quite a few of the Mad Dogs owned the clocks we punched and could rearrange at least one business day a week to log junk miles and devise solutions to the various crises facing the world (you’re welcome). Big Bill “Shut Up and Ride” McBeef and his bro Other Bill. Usuk and The Geek. Dr. Schenkstein and Dennis the Menace. The Old Town Bike Shop crew. And the rest of you lot; you know who you are. So in 2002 we went back there.
Took me right back to my riding roots it did. I no longer felt as though everything was uphill and into the wind in all directions. A couple years later I quit racing because I didn’t need it anymore. I had my junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.
In 2011, the Army decided to get its soldiers new pistols. The odyssey that followed included a 350-page list of technical specifications, years of testing and a protracted battle on Capitol Hill between competing gun makers. The Pentagon won’t complete delivery until 2027 at the earliest. The Army could have raised an infantryman from birth to within two years of enlistment age in the time it will have taken to get him a new handgun.
Unsurprisingly, our elected representatives are part of the problem:
As the House and Senate work toward the country’s first trillion-dollar defense budget, over $52 billion is for things members of Congress added, unbidden, to the Pentagon’s wish list, according to the independent budget watchdog Taxpayers for Common Sense.
Jaysis. Planes that can’t fly. $13 billion sitting ducks. Millions for retrofitting Vietnam-era helicopters to carry and launch drones. For Ike’s fabled Military-Industrial Complex it’s like robbing the same bank, over and over and over again, because you have a guy on the inside. You don’t even need to bring that pistol you can’t seem to acquire for some mysterious reason.
I shouldn’t do any deep reading on a single cup of joe at stupid-thirty on a Tuesday.
Then again, maybe I should do it more often. I might be inspired to compose a new Zen text: “Empty Stomach, Empty Mind.”
If artificial intelligence hasn’t already beaten me to it.
Thus we arrive via the usual scenic route at the first item that got my attention this morning: “A Tool That Crushes Creativity,” by Charlie Warzel, a staff writer at The Atlantic, who fears that generative A.I. slop, once a toxic byproduct of our latest technological Great Leap Forward, has become the shit sandwich du jour.
The second, also from The Atlantic, was “What the Founders Would Say Now,” Fintan O’Toole’s speculation about how the deep thinkers who got our national party started might be surprised that the Republic — as stove-up, surly, and senile as we perceive it to be today — survives at all.
That first one may have been more depressing than the second. The Republic has been in a state of collapse ever since I first took note of it. Maybe even longer. America’s very own Leaning Tower, possibly of pizza, almost certainly from Domino’s. We knew it was wrong, but we ate it anyway.
But creativity — an appeal to hearts and minds with words, sounds, and images — freed me to sing for my supper, the tab paid by all the poor suckers who actually had to work for a living. And now Warzel says that, like made-in-China Marxists, my tools have risen up against me.
Writes Warzel:
The people selling these tools are doing so with a powerful narrative: Generative AI supposedly supercharges all that it touches, democratizing creativity, eliminating friction, increasing productivity, and pushing the boundaries of what is possible. … [But] the loss of friction deprives people of something crucial. What happens between imagination and creation is ineffable—it entails struggle, iteration, joy, and frustration, disappointment, and pride. … It is how we make meaning and move through the world.
I have not consciously employed any form of A.I. as I move through the world, making meaning. If I sniff its spoor in an online search, I tiptoe gingerly around it, trying not to get any on my shoes. WordPress offers a “Generate with A.I.” option when inserting images in a post, but I mostly generate my own images.
Or do I?
I’ve been a scribbler for as long as I can remember, and probably longer. Created my images in crayon on Big Chief tablets; in pencil, pen and ink on Bristol board, augmented with Zip-A-Tone; using Adobe Photoshop or Apple’s Preview; whatever was handy and could enhance my limited skillset.
“Enhance,” you say? Yup. The legendary editorial cartoonist Pat Oliphant tipped me to the Zip-A-Tone crosshatching shortcut when I interviewed him in the late Seventies for the Gazette. And I discovered the value of Photoshop a couple decades later when the bicycle magazines I worked for decided they wanted my cartoons in digital form, and in color, too.
I was no artist, as you probably already know. I tried using colored pencils and pens after first penciling an initial sketch and then inking it in. But when I fucked up — as I did, frequently — I had to start over from scratch, penciling and then inking and finally risking everything yet again on the whim of a Prismacolor Premier or Sharpie in my pig-ig’n’ant fingers. Digitizing the original black-and-white ’toons and coloring them in Photoshop let me magically undo what I had done and keep on keepin’ on.
It was so much easier. Frictionless, you might say.
I’ve been writing nearly as long, since George Gladney at the Colorado Springs Sun suggested I start keeping a journal back in 1974. Started with a Bic pen and a Vernon Royal composition book, then shifted to manual typewriter when I became a sure’nough reporter like Gladney, and finally went digital when the newspapers did.
If spell-checkers, grammar-checkers, and autocorrection had been available I might have used them, but back then we had angry editors for that sort of thing, and it was either learn or leave. I had bills to pay, so I learned. When I became an angry editor myself word-processing software had made everyone a writer, or so they thought. The software processed their words and I processed what the software shat out.
And yet some people wondered why I was angry.
Well, soon I had company.
I was a terrible photographer and filmmaker when cameras still used film. I had something of an eye — woefully uneducated, in need of vision correction, yet basically operational — but there were so many aspects of the craft to learn if I really wanted to make the magic happen.
Happily for me — and unhappily for pro shooters — digital cameras came along, followed by phone cameras. And before you could say “Ansel Adams” three times fast even I could make an image for a blog post on the cookie-cutter, dot-com version of WordPress (shout-out to the folks at Automattic), with a little help (OK, sometimes a lot) from software (Photoshop early on, and now Apple’s Preview).
I never thought I was a photographer, but plenty of other people thought they were, including one middle-management type who emailed a lame phone-camera snap of a sprint and expected us to use that as “art” for an online race report.
Video got a whole lot easier about the same time, for the same reasons, and I actually made a little money off that, using GoPros and iMovie to assemble bike-review shorts for Adventure Cyclist. Occasionally, and strictly for laughs, I called myself Quentin Ferrentino (h/t to the Grimy Handshake). Meanwhile, podcasting let me walk a few squeaky klicks in the Firesign Theatre’s inflatable clown shoes, with an assist from Zoom, GarageBand, Auphonic, and Libsyn.
So am I a photographer? A moviemaker? A spoken-word artist? Is the driver a car?
The only legit titles I can claim are writer and cartoonist, I think. I can write or draw with a Bic pen on a blank sheet of paper and then staple that shit to a telephone pole if I want to. Less effort than Ben Franklin put into his Pennsylvania Gazette. Nothing between me and you but a little time and sweat equity.
A.I. won’t help me make it, and Google probably won’t help you find it.
But at least we’d know we made the effort while we wait to see whether these new tools become trusted advisers instead of questionable servants — or worse, malevolent masters. That teetering Republic ain’t gonna prop itself up.
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