It’s a pretty view, a’ight.
Pretty enough to get me into a Sandia Peak Tram car with 19 other dummies in plague season?
Nope.
I wanna get up there, I’ll ride the ol’ bikey bike up the other side. It’ll hurt like hell, and it’ll take a lot longer than 15 minutes.
But at least I’ll know where I’ve been, and how I got there.
Holy hell. What we have here is what Chazbo Pierce likes to call “a chewy cluster of fk.”
Though there apparently were more cops than Black Bandanas, New Mexico Highly Irregulars, or failed city council candidates at Monday’s Shootout at the Oñate Corral, nobody — the APD, the district attorney, or the state police — seem to have a choke hold on just who did what to whom and why, and what should happen to him. Them. Whatevs. Instead of occupying the moral high ground, they squabble over territory.
Fuck me running. No wonder everyone in this town is packing. Some days it just doesn’t matter if everybody at the dance is a cop except for you and the dude who shoots you. It’s the wild wild West out there.
As Thomas McGuane wrote in “Panama”:
Something about our republic makes us go armed. I myself am happier having a piece wthin reach, knowing if some goblin jumps into the path, it’s away with him. Here in Key West, we take our guns to parties.
It rained like a mad bastard here last night, with lightning strikes aplenty and one thunderclap that sounded like the SWAT team triggering a flash-bang before hitting the door.
The weather probably kept the cops and citizens from doing it hand to hand again downtown, as they did on Sunday night. Call me simple, but I don’t see how setting Dumpster fires and trashing the KiMo Theatre advances the Revolution.
Nor do I believe one achieves peace through superior firepower. The Albuquerque Police Department apparently broke out the flash-bangs, tear gas, and rubber bullets in honor of the occasion, saying some miscreant fired on them.
But hey, this is Albuquerque. If you don’t hear gunfire when the sun goes down, that just means everyone’s busy reloading.
The journalism performed in honor of the hullabaloo was so comically inept that it’s hard to get any sense of what actually went down. Much noise, very little signal.
Why, it’s enough to make a fella open up one a’ them whatchamacallits? Social-media accounts! I hear they come with cute kitten videos and everything.
“And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute — one minute — and is there a way we can do something like that by injection inside, or almost a cleaning?” he asked. “Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that.”
Jesus, this guy is dumb. Dumber than a bag of sunsplashed hammers. Dumber than a sack of freshly bleached hair. A few French fries short of a Happy Meal.
Sure thing, Dr. Demento. Let’s all mainline some Clorox, with tactical flashlights up our keisters. You go first.
Felix Magowan, one of the original Trio that acquired what had been called Velo-news from founders Barbara and Robert George, had long wanted to add Bicycle Retailer and Industry News to the Inside Communications portfolio.
He never got it done. Eventually Inside Communications sold VeloNews to a passing crew of brigands, and Felix wandered off to do other things.
Imagine giving Dave Stohler’s Masi Gran Criterium to your meth-addict nephew as a present for graduating from reform school. A bleak period ensued, thick with the sort of belligerent dumbassery once found only in high-school locker rooms, family trees shaped like flagpoles, and the lower houses of state legislatures in the Deep South.
I finally sat up and slipped off the back because VeloNews seemed to be careening into the sort of future in which plague-carrying aliens burst out of people’s chests while they’re battling killer robots. The Old Guy Who Gets Fat in Winter went with me, to do the occasional walk-on in Bicycle Retailer’s “Shop Talk” comic strip.
And then, shazam! Felix reappeared as part of Pocket Outdoor Media, and not only reacquired VeloNews, but snapped up BRAIN and a couple other properties as well.
The Fat Guy and I didn’t go back to the old home place. I didn’t care about bicycle racing anymore, and anyway, we weren’t invited. But it seemed like a good time to make a meta joke about how Fatso was a spy for his old bosses.
Unlike the vulture capitalists who nearly burned VeloNews down to its foundation, the “Shop Talk” dudes seem to know they’re cartoon characters.
Also, unlike vulture capitalists, they’re funny.
• Editor’s note: Today’s blast from the past includes a bonus audio component — episode 19 of Radio Free Dogpatch from February 2019.
Mad Blog Media 