Category: Just mumbling along

Cat nap

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments
No, he won't go down the drain. We've tried.
No, he won't go down the drain. We've tried.

Turkish is a creature of ritual. Every morning when I drag ass out of the sack he leaps from the couch and joins me in the bathroom, where he launches into a clockwise series of bows and stretches, getting back rubs twice a lap.

After a few go-rounds, he curls up in the sink or on the carpet; if he picks the latter, one is permitted to scratch his chin and belly without the need for disinfectants and stitches afterward.

After a few minutes of what for the Turk’ is fairly lovey-dovey behavior he suddenly remembers who he really is — Mighty Whitey, the Blue-Eyed Bully of Bibleburg, Turkenstein, The Turkinator, et al. — and he commences stalking about the house from door to door, demanding his freedom in a keening sound like helium leaking from a balloon, or maybe Glenn Beck with his teensy nuts in a vise.

Let him out and my schedule is in his large, massively clawed paws. The sonofabitch is harder to catch than bin Laden, and should I manage to lay hands on him, there will be blood. Not his. The good news is, once he’s fined me a pint or two, he has no objection to taking a bracing nap in a window, or perhaps our bed, under the ceiling fan.

Every now and then Turk’ wants the lap, generally while I’m working, and if I don’t give it up he sets about turning the office carpet into confetti. Once aboard, he becomes a critic — not of my writing, but of my typing, which interrupts his carnivorous dreams. He also enjoys supervising my situps from a perch atop my navel.

Come bedtime, Turk’ briefly becomes cuddly again, until Herself plucks him off the bed to take him downstairs for the night. A guy going to the gas chamber complains less, and he’s not gonna be coming back tomorrow.

Maybe that’s why he’s so cheery in the mornings. “Hey, cool, you didn’t take me to the pound again! Dude, scratch my belly!”

Screwed

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

“We always said that once the Internet took off, we’d be OK. It never crossed our minds that we’d be competing with people who just give it away for free.”

A newspaper publisher? Record exec? Movie mogul? Nope. That would be Bill Asher, co-chairman of porn giant Vivid Entertainment, who told The Los Angeles Times that his company’s revenue is down more than 20 percent this year as hard times lead to soft sales (har de har har).

For working stiffs like Savannah Stern, things are even worse. The 23-year-old once took in nearly $150,000 per year doing the ol’ mattress mambo, but is down to a third of that and thus will be giving up her Mercedes-Benz CLK 350 for a used Chevy Trailblazer given to her by her parents.

“I wish I would have never gotten into (porn),” says Stern. “When you get used to a certain lifestyle, it’s really hard to cut back and realize this may not be forever.” Poor baby.

Work, work, work

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

After a fun reunion with the Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux mob it was back in the barrel with a vengeance. Sundays get a little hectic when there’s only one of us working at VeloNews.com (everyone else pissed off to their country chateaus). We got a whole lot of nothing all day long, and in French, too. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried to decipher a French story about a Basque bike race for an American audience. Happily, I ate a lot of acid as a young man and now I understand everything.

I had a Bicycle Retailer and Industry News deadline lurking in the background, too, but it’s tough enough to write comedy when things are funny, so I pushed that to the back burner. Ain’t nothin’ funny about trying to translate a language you haven’t spoken since you were 8.

Meanwhile, I see my man Bill Clinton is so desperate for poontang that he has to go all the way to North Korea for some takeout. What do you want to bet he makes ’em both wear blue dresses for the flight home? I got a choice between 12 years at hard labor and 12 hours in a pressurized aluminum tube with Bubba, I’m busting rocks and eating kimchi, know what I’m saying?

Blast from the (recent) past

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
"It's just this little chromium switch here," mumbles Mombo.
"It's just this little chromium switch here," mumbles Mombo.

The first Mombo Club-El Rancho Delux Welcome Back Summer Party in many a moon erupted Saturday night in Gabacho Heights, Colorado, a sprawling Aryan Nations compound just south of Bored Housewives Buttes, under the dark, phallic shadow of Pool Boy Peak.

Held at the palatial manse of Larry and Sheryl Martinez (“Oye, pendejo, make sure you call us ‘the Martins’ while you’re here!” hissed Larry upon our fashionably late arrival), the 2009 MC-ERDWBSP (Geezer Edition) reunited several members of a filthy fraternity that predated National Lampoon’s “Animal House,” which, contrary to popular mythology, was not a comedy but a documentary.

In attendance were the Martins, retired El Rancho jefe Jethro, Mombo Hisself and his wife Kimmie-Boats, Mudbone, Sarah and Charley Ellisonwonderland and of course Your Humble Narrator and the lovely Herself. The part of Fast Eddie was played by a potted plant, but the much-anticipated Dance of the Potato Salad had to be canceled in the absence of Chris Intercoursey, who advised via e-mail that he would be with us in spirit, if not in spirits.

The always-fastidious Jethro incinerates a turd he found on the deck.
The always-fastidious Jethro incinerates a turd he found on the deck.

“Say hey to the gang for me,” wrote the alleged writer, who now has something nebulous to do with trains in a northern suburb of San Francisco (yeah, I know, it sounds dirty to me, too). “Tell them I’m here in my back yard, sleeping with the toaster, snoring and blowing chicken feathers out my mouth every time I exhale.”

I was pleased to note that despite the passage of time and kidney stones that I remain the cutest member of the band, a perky Paul backed by a mangy pack of Ringos. Still, Mudbone has a kind of George thing happening (pre-Maharishi) and Mombo evokes John (pre-Mark David Chapman). That would make Larry George Martin, as he arranged the music for the evening, a typical El Rancho party mix of Jerry Jeff Walker, Tom Waits, Parliament-Funkadelic and Commander Cody and His Lost Planet Airmen.

But the annual MC-ERDWBSP was always as much about comedy as it was about music, promiscuity, firearms, substance abuse and encounters with law enforcement, and though we were long on Cheeches and short on Chongs we laughed long and loud, winking to one another as we fraudulently cast absent friends as the stars in the worst of our reminiscences in order to avoid death by spouse (although the tale of Fast Eddie and His Faithful Dog Blowjob the Wonder Pooch remains wholly unexpurgated and unprintable, even on this site).

"Pull my finger," says Larry to Mudbone, who is trying to squeeze one off himself without soiling his Hello Kitty thong.
"Pull my finger," says Larry to Mudbone, who is trying to squeeze one off himself without soiling his Hello Kitty thong.

I snapped a few pix of the gathering, thinking that with journalism circling the bowl I might make a buck or two with the local gendarmes. But the only contraband these elderly maricons were smoking turned out to be a pair of old El Vestido Azul cigars left over from the Clinton administration, and the cops said no sale.

As space is limited here, we’ll put the rest of the pix up on Herself’s Flickr account as soon as I’ve finished Photoshopping everyone’s clothes back on.

Alas, the Ellisonwonderlands are not pictured, as they arrived even later than we did, and Sarah was carrying a great big stick.

Tour ends, chile season looms

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

Oh yeah. Word comes from New Mexico that this year’s chile crop should be killer. Hatch Valley farmer Jimmy Lytle told The Associated Press that his crop is about two weeks ahead of schedule and he hasn’t had “any problems whatsoever.” I can’t wait. I went through last year’s chile more rapidly than expected and have been making do with whatever I can find fresh at the grocery plus (ick) canned. It just ain’t the same.

The parade into Paris is on as we speak. Ho hum. Out comes the champagne. A quick sip for the cameras and the plastic cups get tossed. What a waste of good wine. The only suspense remaining is who wins the finale on the Champs-Élysées. I’d love to see Thor Hushovd pip Mark Cavendish, but I think one of his teammates would have to grab a fistful of the little bastard’s jersey for it to happen.*

Meanwhile, a real race is going on right here in Colorado — the World Championship Pack-Burro Race in Fairplay, a 29-mile out-and-back footrace for men and jackasses alike to the top of 13,185-foot Mosquito Pass and back. My man Hal Walter is in the thick of it with his burro, Laredo, and you’ll be able to read all about it sometime in the next day or so at Hardscrabble Times.

* Jeebus. Mark Renshaw gassed it so hard out of that final corner he sucked all the oxygen out of Garmin-Slipstream’s lungs. That Manx git can flat make a bike hop.