Our young pistache erupted in leaves practically overnight.
It was a gloomy morning, or maybe it just felt that way because I slept poorly.
Weird dreams and plenty of ’em, with lots of abrupt and unscheduled wake-ups. I didn’t check the clock because I didn’t want to know. What little remains of my mind was churning like a Samsung clothes washer on the brink of catastrophic failure.
My restlessness could’ve been due to seasonal allergies, which have been unusually fierce this spring. Or perhaps it was the upshot of two consecutive nights of Sarah DiGregorio’s chipotle-honey chicken tacos. I did opt for two sizable chipotles in their preparation. And I did eat two of those fat tacos both nights, topped with diced avocado, accompanied by a large green salad.
Maybe at 70 it’s time to reconsider the spicy foods?
Nah.
I’ve been eating chile since I was 8 and it hasn’t killed me yet. And if it ever does, I’ll depart this vale of tears with a smile on my face and the bedclothes floating a few aromatic inches above the rest of me. I can sleep when I’m dead.
• Editor’s note: Speaking of my mind and how it works (or doesn’t), when I went to Radio Free Dogpatch for the Samsung-washer link I was reminded that it’s been a year since I recorded a podcast. So here it is, a rerun from April 16, 2023.
The final update from Mad Blog Media circa 2000. | Screen grab from the Wayback Machine.
Ken Layne at Desert Oracle Radio throws a bonus bone to his Patreon supporters now and then, and the latest was a podcast about his early adventures in bloggery, with one of his old running mates, Matt Welch of Reason magazine and the podcast We the Fifth.
Back in the Day™, when Layne and Welch were building their online presences, they were basically trying to find a new way to do The Work, have fun, and still get paid. They may still be looking. The experience “left both of us semi-internet famous and broke,” quipped Welch.
Me, I was just looking for a publisher-free zone where I could have the occasional public argument with the Voices in my head without frightening anyone’s advertisers.
“That? Oh, that’s just him being him. No, we’ve looked into it, and the Constitution and the ACLU both say he can do that. It’s kind of like the smellies at the off-ramps waving their cardboard signs, except he spells all the words right and he’s not asking for money.”
I’ve lost track of the precise timeline, but the Wayback Machine shows examples of prehistoric TrogloDogS(h)ites dating back to 1998, when I was but a baby blogger cooing and gurgling at the world via satellite Internet from our hillside hideaway in Crusty County.
But there were even earlier versions, long gone off the back and into the broom wagon. I know this because their URLs are in the copyright notices I attached to everything I wrote for the paying customers back then. The hosting outfits were small-timers in central Colorado, most of them no longer with us, and not even the Wayback Machine can find their bones.
I first mentioned a Mad Dog Media website in a 1997 column:
My very own Mad Dog Media Web site lets me slip the leash of conventional publishing and run at large, watering all and sundry with no regard whatsoever for the dictates of good taste or profit margin. Stuff that no one in his or her right mind would publish finds a home here.
—Patrick O’Grady, “Mad Dog Unleashed,” Bicycle Retailer and Industry News
In addition to wanting my own pot to piss in, there was an issue with boredom. The hours can pass very slowly indeed when you’re perched on a rocky hillside 10 miles from a town with no stop lights, more cows than people, and more churches than bars. I was traveling less than I had been when Herself and I did our first tour of Bibleburg in the early Nineties. Back then I’d dash off to Boulder to help VeloNews and Inside Triathlon with production, or venture further afield to cover races, trade shows, whatever. And the races were a lot closer when we lived on the Front Strange. Moving to Crusty County added about 150 miles to every round trip, so I made fewer of them.
Finally, the Crusty County cycling community was basically me, myself, and I. The Voices needed more of an audience than that.
So, yeah: Blogging. My toolkit included (in addition to the attitude and analog-publication experience): PageSpinner, Netscape Navigator, Photoshop, and Fetch; a series of analog and early digital cameras from Pentax, Canon, Sony and Epson; and Macs of various shapes and sizes, among them one of the ill-considered MacClones, a Power Computing PowerBase 200 that I described as “possessed by devils,” because it was.
I taught myself some extremely basic HTML and bounced the blog around those bush-league ISPs before killing off that model in February 2000 (bloggery from the remainder of that year and all of 2001 has gone walkabout); sampled just about every free prefab blogging package available; even tried a self-hosted WordPress build for a while. Then you lot decided you wanted to be able to comment on posts, and on comments, and on comments about the comments, and the simplest way to get all that was to hand the whole shebang over to WordPress.com.
So here we are.
It’s been a fair amount of labor just to run my mouth to no particular purpose for 26 years. But unlike a lot of other refugees from straight journalism, I never thought about trying to make it pay, not really. That would’ve added a whole new degree of difficulty: charging a membership fee; selling advertising; signing up with (and giving a cut to) Patreon, Medium, or Substack; doing some tip-jar beggary like Charles Pelkey and I did for Live Update Guy; and relentlessly self-promoting on social media (“Hey, lookit me, lookit me, LOOKIT ME!!!”).
Anyway, I was already earning something resembling a living by acting the fool for VeloNews, BRAIN, Adventure Cyclist, and anyone else who could stand the gaff and write a check that wouldn’t bounce. And some days that could really feel like work. I felt that if I started to charge admission to the blog, it would turn into a job, and I already knew how that sort of thing ended. Badly.
I may not get paid for this, but I derive other benefits from the work. It keeps me engaged with the world, however distasteful that may be at times. Some people like it, and even say so, in public. And it keeps the rust off this old pen that some folks think is mightier than the sword, possibly because they’ve never fallen afoul of an angry dude with a sword.
At times blogging feels like a training ride on the bike, taking photos that never make it out of the iPhone, or thumb-fingering my way around some John Prine tune on the guitar. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, or anywhere else? Practice, practice, practice.
I’ve been practicing bloggery for a quarter-century now. Who knows? One of these years I might just get it right.
This is not the work of Hurricane Hilary, which should carve a much wider swath through the high desert.
COVID finally came for Ken Layne of Desert Oracle Radio. But he did his usual Friday-night stint at the Z107.7 FM mic anyway, and you can catch the podcast of same at all the usual places.
“Some people say you should not do your radio show when you’re sick in the head. But I am not one of those people,” he explains.
Layne is waiting for Hurricane Hilary to visit the Mojave — it’s something new for a lot of the local desert rats, but as an old Nawlins hand he knows a little something about rigging for heavy weather.
This week’s episode is heavy on advice for riding out the storm. But he also recounts his bout with The Bug, a random prowler testing his door, and the apparent death and resurrection of a big ol’ spiny desert lizard who is a regular on his patio (but not the radio show).
“Be careful, friends,” Layne advises, adding, “And once you’re prepared, it’s time to hunker down. Enjoy the excitement — nobody ever says that on the weather report — but it’s exciting. It’s real life, it’s right here. No Netflix necessary.”
No excitement for us here in The Duck! City — Hilary will be giving us a miss — but we might catch a little wind burn from her passage. I guess it’s Netflix for us. How about you?
These two make quite a pair. It’s a pear tree! That’s a joke, son!
Spring isn’t a date on the calendar. It’s more of a feeling. A warm one, if you’re lucky.
For me, the vernal equinox is rarely the starter’s pistol. I don’t hear that big bang until Herself asks whether her Soma Double Cross is ready to ride after a long winter’s nap on its hook in the garage.
Turn your radio on.
By that reckoning, spring arrived in The Duck! City on April 9, Easter Sunday.
It was a few degrees short of ideal — I like to think of spring as that time when I can unsheath the arms and knees, charge those solar batteries, collect a little free vitamin D.
But if we had to roll out in arm and knee warmers, so what? As you know, you go to ride with the spring you have, not the spring you might want or wish to have at a later time.
And exactly one week later the experience gives rise to a spring-feverish episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. The doctor will see you now.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: Once again the sonic environment was less than ideal at the indifferently equipped Infernal Hound Sound studios, so I thought I’d try an audio experiment. This episode was recorded using an Audio-Technica ATR2100-USB microphone (now discontinued) hooked via XLR to a Zoom PodTrak P4, which in turn was connected to my 13-inch 2014 MacBook Pro. Recording and editing was handled via Hindenburg Journalist software (since rechristened Hindenburg Lite), with a sonic bump from Auphonic. Music and sound effects are courtesy of Zapsplat (shoutout to David-Gwyn Jones for “Looking Back Over the Hill”); the Free Music Archive (a snappy salute to the U.S. Army Blues for “Walk That Dog”, from “Live at Blues Alley”); Freesound, and Your Humble Narrator.
Calm down, ye amadáin, I’ve not a drop taken: That’s a Guinness 0 so.
Birthdays. Some of us get overserved, others get 86’d with the cork barely out of the bottle.
Whoever’s in charge of this party seems a bit random. Can’t tell the top shelf from the well, the class from the dross. Proper ladies and gents given the shove while the most appalling tossers have the run o’ the place.
Take me, if you can bear to. Here I sit, roaring up on an age at which I had fully expected to have been stone dead for at least 39 years. Upended many an office pool I did.
“Who picked 69? 69? Well, doesn’t matter, because the bugger is still alive!”
Turn your radio on.
Meanwhile, there’s many an empty stool in this shabby shebeen. Where’d everybody go? They were all here just a minute ago. …
Herself is back east with family and friends to raise a belated parting glass to a lifelong friend carried off by COVID last fall.
I’m right here, having charge of the cat. But recently I spoke with one of my old pals, the former Live Update Guy Charles Pelkey, who has taken a few sucker punches since a cancer diagnosis a dozen years ago but is still on his feet in Laramie, all bouncers be damned.
It may be my birthday that’s on tap come Monday, but I’d buy Charles a round to celebrate his most recent lap around the sun, may it not be his last. Lucky for me and my 401(k) I don’t drink anymore; I don’t think he does, either. ’Tis unknown the amount of money our younger selves could piss away in a proper pub.
At the publisher’s expense, of course.
But that’s neither here nor there.
And anyway, it’s the thought that counts.
So belly up to the bar — unbeknownst to the landlord, who is manhandling another tray of industrial lager to the hoops-watching gobshites glued to the TV in the back of the pub, we’re uncorking an 18-year-old, double-cask, single-malt episode of — yes, yes, yes — Radio Free Dogpatch. And sláinte to yis.
P L A Y R A D I O F R E E D O G P A T C H
• Technical notes: There was an inordinate amount of racket in and around El Rancho Pendejo this week, but after a series of false starts I was finally able to nail something down using my trusty Shure SM58 mic and the Zoom H5 Handy Recorder. Editing was in Apple’s GarageBand, with a sonic bump from Auphonic. Music and sound effects are courtesy of Zapsplat,Freesound, and Your Humble Narrator.
Mad Blog Media 