Temporary quarters

November 11, 2015November 11, 2015 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments

When people think of the sacrifices made by the men and women in our armed forces, they tend to think in terms of deployment, combat and the strong likelihood of getting one’s arse shot off.

But there’s another forfeit that goes unnoticed — home ownership. While the military defends the nation’s homes and hearths, the citizens in uniform often must put their own American dreams on hold.

The old man (back row, right) in one of his earliest temporary billets, in New Guinea during World War II.

I don’t recall knowing any homeowners as a kid. We lived in Maryland, Virginia, Canada and Texas when I was a punk, and the old man either rented or arranged for quarters on base.

Sure, it’s possible to own a home while in the service, and we didn’t move around nearly as much as some folks did, but renting is still easier, even for officers. If you suddenly find yourself transferred from Ottawa to, say, Randolph AFB outside San Antonio, well, you have a house to sell. And in another country, too.

This shit rolls downhill to the dependents. When we lived in Ottawa I wanted a tree house. Nope, said the old man. That’s not our tree.

Between rental houses we got to experience the joys of Visiting Officers Quarters (VOQ), which were the early prototypes for what would become the Motel 6 chain. At least one unhappy customer said in 2008 that it was an open question whether the VOQ at Fort Drum were “preferable to field conditions.” I recall a few that were more KOA than VOQ, for sure.

But all things come to he who waits, and in 1967, when we were transferred from Randolph to Bibleburg, Col. Harold Joseph O’Grady finally got to buy his house (after 25 years of service and one final, astoundingly long run of stays in VOQ, BOQ and actual shitbox motels on Knob Hill, which was seedy even then).

He got to enjoy it for all of 13 years, and after that he took up permanent quarters at Fort Logan National Cemetery.

So here’s to all the troops waiting patiently for their slice of American pie. Try to save ’em some.

Some Zappantani for breakfast

December 4, 2014December 4, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

This just in: Marco Pantani is still dead. So is Frank Zappa, but nobody killed him, not even the Mafia, Darren Wilson or Daniel Pantaleo.

That’s right, kiddies, it’s Round One of Zappadan, also known as BummerNacht, the anniversary of FZ’s departure to The Big Studio In the Sky. But don’t freak out, working yourself into an imaginary frenzy — he shall rise again on Zero Day, December 21, the anniversary of his birth.

So whip up a tasty platter of hot rats in lumpy gravy, ring up Uncle Meat and the Grand Wazoo, and go cruising with Ruben and the Jets. But first clean up that cosmik debris (it’ll cure your asthma, too). Now, everybody sing along: “Look, here, NASA … who you jivin’ with that cosmik debris?”

Oz-some!

December 3, 2014December 3, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

Ozzy Osbourne turns 666 today (OK, so he’s only 66; sue me) and I expect that this surprises him nearly as much as it does the rest of us.

Now, you all know me as a discerning connoisseur of the arts, whether culinary, graphic or sonic, but there was a time in my misspent youth when I was something of a headbanger.

In those dark days all I required to drive everyone over 16 in the neighborhood completely witless was my parents’ Telefunken console stereo and any one of three albums: “Led Zeppelin,” the band’s debut LP; “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida,” by Iron Butterfly; and “Paranoid,” by Black Sabbath.

By laughing Satan’s spreading wings, ’tis a wonder my family was not chased from the ‘hood by angry villagers brandishing crucifixes, pitchforks and torches when I spun the volume knob all the way to the right for “War Pigs,” quite the anthem to hear thundering from the home of a WWII veteran.

You could actually see the picture window thrumming like the drums out of which Bill Ward was beating the shit, and Tony Iommi’s guitar licks killed all the flowers from Constitution to Maizeland. A neighbor’s canary almost chewed through the bars of its cage before exploding like a feathered M-80.

Today, of course, my tastes have become a good deal more refined. Either that or I’ve gone stone deaf. What?

High time to hit the road

October 30, 2014October 30, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments

It was 4:20 p.m. (smoke ’em if you got ’em) when I fired up the Forester for the latest six-hour drive from Bibleburg to Duke City.

Herself and I had been in the old hometown to prepare Chez Dog and The House Back East® for new tenants, a project I’d hoped would take only a couple of long, hard days, but I got there on Friday and didn’t get gone until Tuesday afternoon. Herself beat it on Monday, having one of them obnoxious “job” thingies that requires regular attendance.

So there I was, once again piloting a heavily laden Japanese automobile solo through the starry American night. It reminded me of the good old days, when all I needed for a cross-country jaunt was a bridge burned at one newspaper, a job offer at another, and a battered old rice-grinder that was nearly as full of shit as I was.

“What kind of sordid business are you on now? I mean, man, whither goest thou? Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?” — Jack Kerouac, “On the Road”

I used to love those long nights behind the wheel, in part because I generally enjoyed some sort of illicit chemical assist, having studied at the feet of Jack Kerouac, Ed Abbey and the redoubtable Dr. Hunter S. Thompson. Once a friend and I even took a page from the Good Doktor’s book — to be specific, a page from “Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas” — and ate some acid before stalking into the old MGM Grand to see what we could see, which proved to be much more than was actually there.

In short, it was a bad idea, like so many of the Good Doktor’s, and we quickly jumped back into our auto and drove straight through the inky darkness of the Intermountain West to Alamosa, Colorado, for a steaming plate of enchiladas and beans served up by my companion’s mom, who either didn’t notice or didn’t care that we were horribly twisted on LSD and Budweiser.

After a few hundred thousand miles of that sort of thing, coupled with deteriorating night vision, a bad back and a considerably diminished drug intake (I’m pretty much down to a cup and a half of coffee in the morning these days), I lost interest in snorting that long white line through the windshield and sleeping it off under the camper shell in some rest area or unpatrolled parking lot. When the sunlight started fading, so did I. A motel bed sounded a lot better than drumming on the steering wheel with ZZ Top, Bob Seger or the Allman Brothers cranked up to 11.

But I got a little of the old love back Tuesday night. As I motored southwest with the cruise control set at a safe and sane 75 mph a banana moon hung brightly in the sky dead ahead, the highway stripes rising up as if to meet it on the hills. Where to go? Mexico? San Francisco? Albuquerque, as it turned out. I left the stereo off and listened to the music in my head.

Hump Month

July 16, 2014July 16, 2014 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 48 Comments

nob-hill-sm — If I were to find work in this neighborhood, would I be justified in calling it a Nob job? No, don’t answer that.

I know, I know, the term is “Hump Day.” But it’s gonna be Hump Month around here, and maybe even Hump Quarter, because Herself has gone and landed a new job — in Albuquerque.

Ay, Chihuahua.

It will be a homecoming of sorts. We met and married in Santa Fe, but left New Mexico for Bibleburg in 1991 to take care of my mom, who was developing Alzheimer’s and had begun acting nearly as outlandishly as me. We’ve lived in Colorado ever since, either here (twice) or in Weirdcliffe (once).

We’ve been in residence at the ultra-chic Chez Dog in the upscale Patty Jewett Yacht & Gun Club Neighborhood for going on 12 years now — 12 years! — and I figured we were all done moving, that my years of rocketing pointlessly around North America like a turpentined ferret had finally come to an end.

I’ve lived in two countries, 11 states and 18 towns that I can remember, and in several of those towns more than once. Hell, I’ve lived in five different houses right here in Bibleburg. And the appalling state of three of them is none of my doing, no matter what you may hear from the few neighbors who survived.

Well, looks like we can toss No. 19 up there on the Big Board. Some people around here insist on having actual jobs, my shining example to the contrary notwithstanding, and next month Herself starts work as a technical librarian in electronic resources and document services at Sandia National Laboratories.

And me? Well, God willin’ and the creek don’t rise — which it appears to be doing as we speak — I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing since 1989, to wit, annoying the readers, staff, advertisers and ownership of various bicycle publications. My primary residence will always be a Mad Dog state of mind.