Category: Plague

Doing time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Miss Mia knows how to be jailin’.

In his loosely autobiographical novel “Homeboy,” ex-con Seth Morgan had a character offer some advice for a new fish worried about doing time.

“The time does itself,” schooled Smoothbore. “You jist got to live with it.”

A few pages closer to the penitentiary, the narrator elaborated:

Jailin’ was an art form and lifestyle both. The style was walkin’ slow, drinkin’ plenty of water, and doin’ your own time; the art was lightin’ cigarets from wall sockets, playin’ the dozens, cuttin’ up dream jackpots, and slowin’ your metabolism to a crawl, sleepin’ twenty hours a day. Forget the streets you won’t see for years. Lettin’ your heart beat the bricks with your body behind bars was hard time. Acceptin’ the jailhouse as the only reality was easy time. Jailin’.

Staying at home, social distancing — these aren’t jailin’, but they’re not exactly freedom, either. Sure, the cell is a little bigger, the guards a little less visible, and the food better. Still, you’d rather be out on the street.

But listen to Smoothbore. Let the time do itself. Live with it.

With any luck at all, you have a short stretch and an agreeable cellmate. You know — someone who doesn’t mind doing the laundry while you stretch out on your bunk and listen to the latest thrilling episode of Radio Free Dogpatch!

P L A Y    R A D I O    F R E E    D O G P A T C H

• Technical notes: The bargain-basement broadcasting continues. I used the Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB mic,recording directly to the MacBook Pro using Rogue Amoeba’s nifty little app Piezo. Editing was as usual, in GarageBand. Once again the background music is by Your Humble Narrator, assembled from bits and pieces in the Mac and iOS versions of GarageBand. Other sonic adornments come from the iMovie and GarageBand sound libraries.

Beaned

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The ornamental pear is blooming … just in time for the morning low
to dip below freezing again.

We’re not down to eating the backyard foliage like Spike the Terrorist Deer. Not yet, anyway.

But it has been about 10 days since our last grocery trip, and we’re having to get creative.

Last night I was scrounging around in the pantry like an old bear fresh from hibernation and thought: “Hmm. Must be something I can do with canned beans other than make emergency burritos.” This is the kind of burrito you make when you don’t feel like going through all the rigamarole involved in making a proper pot of frijoles.

Which I was not. It was my birthday, f’chrissakes.

So I hit The New York Times Cooking site. This is well worth the price of a subscription to The Old Grey Lady. It’s not geared strictly for the condo chef with an eight-burner Wolf gas range and All-Clad out the arse. You’ll find plenty of pantry possibilities too.

And whaddaya know? I unearthed one perfectly suited to my supplies: Cheesy White Bean-Tomato Bake.

I made a few adjustments. Didn’t have any mozzarella, so I used Monterey Jack. Also, I tossed a generous dollop of cilantro-jalapeño salsa in with the tomato paste, and added a pinch of smoked paprika to the spices.

And when it came out of the oven I sprinkled it with some coarsely chopped cilantro and a bit of grated Parmigiano-Reggiano.

Herself contributed a side salad and that was that.

Ali Slagle, who provided the recipe, also offers a snazzier black-bean version. We may try that one down the road. We’re flat out of Jack now, but we still have some sharp Irish Cheddar.

All hope abandon, ye who exit here!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 49 Comments
Happy trails or highway to hell?

What’s a safe social distance?

I’ve been discussing this with a few folks away from the blog, and consensus is proving elusive.

So let’s discuss it here.

First, some ground rules: Mind your tone. Respect others’ opinions, even when you disagree. Cite authoritative reports to support your arguments, with links, when possible. That should about cover it.

Keep in mind that this is my little shop here and I’ll run it as I please. Bad behavior will not be tolerated, and I’ll decide what’s bad.

Now then: We’ll start with me, because see previous paragraph.

I may be an unusual case study. I’ve been working from home since 1991, and am presently recovering from a broken ankle, so my contact with the general public has been and continues to be limited.

Herself and Herself the Elder get some analog FaceTime through a closed window.

We haven’t been to a grocery in a week and probably have at least another week’s worth of pretty good eatin’ on hand. I decided against physical therapy for the ankle because that’s just one more point of contact. We have indoor (or backyard) exercise routines we can use to minimize loss of fitness and alleviate boredom. And we haven’t had a dog to walk since Mister Boo shoved off.

That said … since breaking the ankle during a trail run on Feb. 21, I have taken four walks around the ’hood. Herself has done a couple-three runs since becoming a home-worker on March 16. And we have cycled to the Dark Tower four times to resupply Herself the Elder, who has been on a no-shit lockdown for longer than any of yis, because her assisted-living home is full of at-risk elders. No one gets in; no one gets out. Deliveries and pickups are made at the porch.

Now, I consider this fairly reasonable behavior. If I were 100 percent, I might consider longer recreational road rides, but I would be concerned about injury, because clearly I have trouble staying upright on two feet. The hospital doesn’t need to see my dumb ass right now. Trail rides would be right out, because (a) I’m not 100 percent; (2) riding trails poses an even greater risk of injury, and (III) some sections are too narrow and spiky for minimal social distancing.

As for running? Hee, and also haw, etc.

However, I deem the cycling to and from the Dark Tower to be of comparatively low risk. The side streets we use are mostly wide, with light traffic, so social distancing no es una problema, as we say south of the border. And since I’m not exactly crushing it these days, our speeds are low.

But even this may seem like too much personal and societal risk for some of you. So I’m tossing it out there for discussion — what are you doing to help keep yourself and others healthy, physically and mentally?

Going viral

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
The Menaul trailhead, shot from a social distance.

Beyond hoarding beans, buttwipe and bullets, people don’t seem to be taking The Bug seriously in these parts.

Or they didn’t on Sunday, anyway.

When Herself and I bicycled over to the Dark Tower to deliver some vino to Herself the Elder, we passed three trailhead parking lots that were jam-packed and overflowing onto neighboring streets.

Call me crazy, but this seemed like antisocial distancing to me, on a par with slow dancing in a burning building, the New Mexican equivalent of sunburned bro-brahs wearing bikini babes like earbuds during spring break in Florida.

Maybe the authorities were watching, too. Maybe our crowds were not out of the ordinary.

Because come Monday, Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham went on TV to lay down the law. Or the advisory, anyway.

The nut graf? Keep your distance, preferably behind closed doors.

“There are a lot of people out and about,” she said. “This creates risk. This creates exposure.”

The Piedra Lisa trailhead, which looked like the drop-off lane at an elementary school.

I created a few exposures myself with the old iPhone camera, and here they are, all shot from a proper social distance, if only to avoid an ass-kicking (“Hey, man, whatchoo taking pictures of, huh? You work for my old lady?”).

And when I got back to El Rancho Pendejo I created another podcast.

Yes, yes, yes — it’s a socially distant, viral episode of Radio Free Dogpatch!

 

 

 

P L A Y    R A D I O    F R E E    D O G P A T C H

• Technical notes: I recorded this episode with an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB mic straight to the MacBook Pro, using Rogue Amoeba’s nifty little app Piezo. Editing was in GarageBand. The background music is “Buddy,” an iMovie jingle. The other sound effects were liberated from the GarageBand loops library. And those musical references? The musicologists among you will be familiar with “Highway to Hell” (AC/DC); “Stairway to Heaven” (Led Zeppelin); “Happy Trails” (Roy Rogers and Dale Evans); “Get It While You Can” (Janis Joplin); “The Last Waltz” (The Band); and “When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder” (Johnny Cash). These are not necessarily the folks who wrote the music, but the ones who came to mind as I was writing the podcast.