The hummingbird feeders are going back in the closet for now.
The quail are laying low. The hummingbirds have flown south. Yet one bird remains, flying more or less daily at the elaborate altars to fascism that The Duck! City MAGgots construct in their front yards.
I prefer the actual birds to the gnarly old featherless talon I flip to the yard signs, banners, and flags of the FreeDummies as I bicycle past their fauxdobe compounds in the foothills. Simultaneously a departure from and a riff on the traditional Halloween decor from China via Walmart, I suppose — but I like my goblins a little less, y’know, real. Y’know?
Now and then it seems I’ve pedaled into some hideous Mike Judge-Tim Burton reboot of “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown.”
Linus, who considers himself an intellectual but gets his news and analysis from Facebook and NextDoor, pesters Pendleton about adding a Kevlar “Security Blanket” to its line. He wants one for his annual Halloween stint in the pumpkin patch, just in case another assassin decides to have a go at the Great Pumpkin, assuming he actually shows up.
Charlie Brown is an “independent” (unless you count Social Security and Medicare). It’s a convenient political fiction that means he hasn’t got the stones to put a “Pumpkin 2024” sign in his yard for fear of offending the Little Red-Haired Girl, who has long since married someone with a job and a future.
Not so Schroeder, the lone clone of an unrepentant Nazi who fled Germany as the Allies closed in; he plays “The Horst Wessel Song” on a toy piano while gazing soulfully at a framed, life-size, autographed photo of the Great Pumpkin cheating at squash.
Lucy is now a brittle bottle blonde who’s “had some work done” to keep her job as a screeching harridan for Fox News. These days she kicks balls rather than snatching them away from Charlie Brown.
Peppermint Patty (field-hockey coach) and Marcie (librarian) share a one-bedroom apartment with a dozen or so rescue cats and not nearly enough ventilation. But plenty of joy.
Pig-Pen is actually Steve Bannon (because of course he is). He had planned a live podcast from the big Halloween party until the FCI Danbury warden refused to honor his “Get Out of Jail Free” card from the Goldman Sachs’ edition of “Monopoly,” in which all properties are Park Place and only poor people go to jail.
And Snoopy is an undercover K-9 informing on all of them to the FBI.
DeeCee being a rather long slog via Subaru, I decided I’d settle for a short mood-altering run on the neighborhood trails yesterday.
I won’t travel by air, as you know. And if I did, the airline probably wouldn’t let me take my torch and pitchfork, even as checked baggage.
Anyway, what do I know about taxidermy? Sure, I could collect a few souvenir heads in our nation’s capital with my handy-dandy Gomboy folding saw, but then what? The TSA says you can board a plane with fresh meat, but they may decide to add a cautionary note about “the severed heads of Supreme Court justices” after running your lumpy carry-on through the scanner twice because they didn’t believe what they saw on the first pass.
And if you do manage to make it home without incident, preserving and mounting your prizes for display in the den is not a chore you want to hand off to anyone who doesn’t owe you a really big favor.
Shucks, even a six-pack of ears pinned to a cork board in the garage can make for some pointed conversations you’d rather not have, even if you explain that the fuckers never used them for listening, only to keep their trifocals from falling into their black robes or onto the bench, and anyway, with the fat stacks of attaboys they get from their rich pals they can have a new pair grafted on before you can say, “Case dismissed.”
So, yeah. Herself and I went for a nice trail run in the sunshine, and afterward I decided I was still not in the mood to update myself on the latest news, so I changed costumes and took the Voodoo Wazoo for an enjoyable 90 minutes of light gnar-shredding in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
Today I see the courtroom drama has shifted back to Manhattan. Time for another run. I can’t remember where I put that saw.
Our backyard hummingbird shower.* *Hummingbird not included.
The GOP pestilential dogfight is shaping up into something like “The Lord of the Rings” as reimagined by Charles Bukowski with an assist from William Gibson.
Thus we get Scum Baggins, Douche Baggins, Colostomy Baggins, and so on.
In this Bukowski-Gibson cyberpunk edition the Shire is a casino built on a Superfund site, a former dogfighting venue called Slobbiton.
The Wizards are all off somewhere dicking around with AI, social media, and first-class-only rocket flights to nowhere special for the Elves (Dwarves can’t afford a ticket).
The Rings of Power are not limited to the Elite — they’re Watches of Power, and can be acquired by anyone with the do-rei-me — but all they do is let you answer the phone that’s perpetually in your hand anyway and tell you to get out of the La-Z-Boy for a couple minutes every hour, you great fat bastard. Mostly the Ring-wielders use that time to go to the fridge for some tasty Boar’s Head snacks.
Speaking of pigs’ heads, at some point our revised narrative careens off piste entirely into “Lord of the Flies” territory. The Wizards and Elves get voted off the island on charges of being woke, trans, or both; everyone left is some variation on Jack or Roger (though George Soros makes a brief cameo as Piggy); and the Royal Navy never turns up to set things aright because THIS IS AMERICA BUDDY! YEAH, BABY! USA! USA! USA!
All things considered we’d rather watch a sprinkler in the back yard. Now and then we get to see a hummingbird enjoy a brief shower.
“It is the job of a satirist to make people in power uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.”
That was Tony Hendra, and he knew whereof he spoke. Hendra, who died of Lou Gehrig’s disease on Thursday, helped make a lot of people very uncomfortable indeed with his work for National Lampoon and Spy magazine, among others.
Had it not been for the trailblazing Lampoon some of us would have laughed a great deal less over the past half century. The magazine had a nut-crushing stable of funnymen, among them Hendra himself. And its “Radio Dinner,” “The National Lampoon Radio Hour,” and “Lemmings” led directly to “Saturday Night Live,” “Animal House,” “This Is Spinal Tap,” and the “Vacation” movie franchise.
Hendra’s “Magical Misery Tour” was a brutal takedown of John Lennon using Lennon’s own words from an interview in Rolling Stone. I bet John wasn’t laughing when he heard that one.
Hendra may not be as familiar to you as Chevy Chase, John Belushi, P.J. O’Rourke, or Christopher Guest. But he was right in there among them, one of the ha-ha mechanics throwing shit, just to see what might stick, and to what, or whom. Making people in power uncomfortable. Really uncomfortable.
One of his last smiles before the disease took those from him came when he learned the results of the last presidential election, said his wife, Carla.
“He was an immigrant who sailed from London into N.Y. Harbor on the SS United States after being given free passage in exchange for performing stand-up,” she told The New York Times. “What was to be a two-week visit became 57 years, because he believed in the promise of America.”
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