Category: Just mumbling along

Dognition

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
Laying down some hot tracks in the cerebral cortex. Or not.

No Bike Day at the Capitol for Your Humble Narrator. Instead, it’ll be Bike Day in Duke City.

Herself is slowly getting past that cold, though she still has a cough.  She’s made it to work the past couple of days, but is skipping her usual Saturday workout class, the way I’m skipping that trip to Fanta Se.

Goddamnit, he’s set up another checkpoint in the hallway.

Hoping to dodge contagion I’ve been kipping on the far side of our sprawling compound, which annoys Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment), who is deeply suspicious of any departure from standard security protocols.

My practice has likewise been upended, and I’ve felt slightly off all week, even more so than usual. Not sick, but not biking, not blogging. Creatively constipated. Irritable. There’s sand in my oyster, but no pearl.

I’ve been trying to get some ignition in my cognition by fiddling with GarageBand, but can’t get any kind of rhythm going (rimshot).

OK, so that wasn’t bad. The oyster bit was OK, too. Maybe I’m on the road to recovery. If not, at least I can get out on the road. …

The Great Zot

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
When The Zot speaks, a wise man listens.

And lo, I did find at last that the work was done, and while it was not good, at least it was Tuesday, and thus it was good enough.

Therefore did I step outside clad in cycling togs, and clutching a bike, and it was then that The Zot spoke to me, saying thusly:

“Boom.”

“The hell you say?” I replied. “The forecast said nothing about electrocution. Some cloudiness, tops.”

And yea, there was a cloud overhead, and it appeared dark and foreboding, yet also exceedingly small, and thus I rode on, the work having been done.

After a time The Zot spoke once more, saying thusly:

“Booooooooom.”

“Fuck right off with that noise,” I replied. “The work is done and this bike I shall ride, lest my inner fat bastard arise from the dead to take dominion over me, and also my new stainless-steel LG refrigerator, and the contents thereof. In any case, you do not appear to be The Great Zot, but only one of the Lesser Zots.”

And thus I rode on, ascending along Simms Road toward the Elena Gallegos picnic grounds.

‘Twas then that The Zot spoke a third and final time.

“BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!”

“Oh, ‘BOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM,’ is it?” I replied, putting it in the big ring and wheeling about. “Why didn’t you say so? There’s always something needs doing around the house, especially the inside of it. And it’s not so bad being a fat bastard, I suppose. Must be something on TV. Right, I’m off.”

I’m not dead yet

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments

Yeah, I’m still on the right side of the lawn. But that doesn’t mean I’m not covered in deadlines, allergens and whatnot.

The few times I’ve surfaced for a peek at the news my outlook was not improved. It seems everyone’s nuts, armed and lawyering up.

Well, at least I don’t need any lawyers. Not right this moment, anyway.

Meanwhile, as a respite from the tyranny of evil men, have a listen to Hal Walter, who is trying really hard to be the shepherd.

No foolin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The wisteria is going wild out front.

We don’t do April Fool’s Day around El Rancho Pendejo, reasoning that it’s a sort of amateur hour, on a par with New Year’s Eve, St. Patrick’s Day and Election Day for the serious drinker.

Plus, I mean, like, damn. Reality is a tough act to follow lately. At any given minute you can point to eleventy-seven things on the Innertubes that seem outrageously improbable and yet are demonstrably true, or demonstrably false and improbably outrageous. Like just about everything else, the high art of bullshittery has been swamped by low-quality mass production.

Meanwhile, it’s 40-something and raining sideways in Duke City, so Herself has passed the morning paying her respects to various elders — phone calls with her dad’s second wife and our tenant in Bibleburg, FaceTime with her mom — and just now she hung up to scamper off to yoga, which can be done indoors.

Cycling indoors is more of a stretch — for me, anyway — and so I may go for a short run.

I’m also contemplating a sweeping purge of the family electronics. We have far too much of that crap around here, thanks to someone’s penchant for collecting Apple products, and it’s long past time some of them went away.

I mean, who needs an 800 MHz G3 iBook from 2002, or a 1.5 GHz G4 PowerBook from ’05? A scroll-wheel iPod from the same year? A 2011 iPad 2 that peaked with iOS9? They still work and all, unlike democracy, but they’re about as cutting-edge as a soup spoon.

The elderly iPod came in handy when I still rode the trainer, but see paragraph four. Come to think about it, there’s that stationary trainer cluttering up my meditation room-slash-podcasting studio. And those furshlugginer heart-rate monitors! Everything must go, going out of business going out of business. …

Jailhouse rocks with turkey

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
I’m goin’ down. I’m goin’ down, down, down, down, down.

I’m still not very interested in what I have to say about anything, possibly because I just wrapped one deadline and am wrangling another.

Plus the weather has been, in a word, top notch (OK, so that’s two words, but you get the idea). So I’ve been spending a whole lot of my free time outdoors. Yesterday I ran in the morning and rode in the afternoon. Fat city, is what.

So while I slack, feel free to kick back and sing along with some of today’s greatest hits, unearthed between bouts of work and play.

• If You Don’t Have a Dime, Don’t Do the Crime: Deep-pockets offenders can buff the rough edges off their jailhouse stays in Southern California. Says a guy paying $100 a night for a 90-day stretch for driving while smacked (it was his third DUI): “I’m really happy I was able to come here. But you need the money to do it.” Everybody sing!

• Make America Gravel Again! The cash-strapped folks in Omaha City Hall have been “reclaiming” some crumbling roads — if your idea of reclamation involves helping them crumble all the way down to gravel to cut upkeep costs. Kids quit riding their bikes on one street after the asphalt was torn out, said one retiree living next to what is now a dirt road a block from a busy Starbucks. “During the summer, it’s just a dust bowl,” she said. Everybody sing!

• It’s Nobody’s Business But the Turks’. Seems Mike Flynn was working for two turkeys at once during last year’s pestilential election. Which one came first? Sounds like a turkey-and-egg tale, or maybe a porno. Everybody sing!