Category: Stupidity

Indica ciclavia

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Roll another one. ...
Roll another one. …

Meanwhile, hot on the heels of the news that Apple wants to get drivers playing with their cars instead of driving them comes this tale of stoned cycling from “The Cannabist,” The Denver Post‘s ganja gazette (hey, it can’t be all Broncos, all the time; not after that Super Bowl, anyway).

I’m old enough to have cycled while stoned in an era when (a) you couldn’t buy the shit at Buds ‘r’ Us, and (2) if you wrote about it for your city editor he wouldn’t read it because he was on a three-day bender somewhere. The assistant city editor would chuckle, tear it up, and reassign you to cover the cop shop until you got your mind right.

Being that old, and having grown less resilient over the decades, especially when it comes to high-speed contact with the ground, I’d prefer that the folks sharing the trails and streets with me have their minds right and keep ’em that way until they get home, where they can do whatever they please.

Plenty of my fellow cyclists appear to lack many basic skills already, and piling impaired judgment on top of that regrettably sparse skill set strikes me as … well, as impaired judgment. Add a pair of earbuds and what you have is a dumb bomb seeking a target.

Jesus. MFA poets writing about stoned cycling for The Denver Post. Another thing I’m old enough to remember? When The Post was a real newspaper.

Meanwhile, congratulations are in order to a cyclist who almost certainly was not stoned, though he was certainly burning a fatty — Ned Overend, who over the weekend won the inaugural U.S. National Fat Bike Championship in Wisconsin.

A gay old time

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
"Don't we have anything to read in here that isn't a bicycle magazine?"
“Don’t we have anything to read in here that isn’t a bicycle magazine?”

That little Albuquerque training camp spoiled me for the remainder of February in Colorado.

After a week of long, steady distance in springlike temperatures, coming back to winter flat crawled up my butt. Twenty, feels like 10, y’say? Well, to hell with that, I think I’ll just stay inside and eat everything, watch Arizona try to out-stupid Colorado. Next these sunburnt simpletons will be issuing 55-gallon spray cans of Homo-NoMo® to the National Guard. Send the bill to the po’ folks, sonny, this here’s a Christian state.

Anyway, I was in danger of reaching that tipping point at which my inner fat bastard says, “Fuck a bunch of bicycles, let’s sell ’em all and buy a pie factory.” And it struck me that the problem wasn’t so much the weather as it was riding other people’s bikes all the damn’ time. Inspecting this, questioning that, making notes about it all — this is not unlike riding a couch in the company of a psychotherapist.

“How does that 30-inch low gear make you feel, Patrick?”

“Like a fat little girl with polio, you head-shrinking halfwit. Now shut the fuck up, I’m trying to climb this hill without chowing on the handlebar tape.”

So today I dragged the old Voodoo Nakisi out of the garage, aired up its Bruce Gordon Rock n’ Roads, and rode off to see how many times I could fall down on the ice in Palmer Park (none, though one sneaky patch in the South Cañon nearly got me). It was a beautiful day and I hardly endured any shrinkage at all, being covered from tonsure to toenails in colorful fossil-fuel weather repellent.

I even saw one bozo riding in shorts. Take that, Arizona.

Looney Tunes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 23 Comments

If you ever feel the urge to drive yourself stone batshit crazy, I recommend shooting a bunch of video with two GoPro HERO 3 Black Editions, only one of which works with any degree of reliability, and then editing the pile in iMovie 10, which you have never used, on an 11-inch MacBook Air, which is basically an iPhone with delusions of grandeur and a keyboard.

Good God awmighty. My brain hurts. Especially when I recall that I did this for free, just to see if I could. The next time I see a beach ball spinning that wildly, that often, I’d better be on an actual beach, and full of drugs, too.

Oh, Atlanta

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

Man — talk about things that suck. And no, I’m not talking about the State of the Union, though, yes, that too, come to think of it.

No, I’m talking about Ragnarok coming to Atlanta.

I’ve always heard that the traffic in Atlanta made Chris Christie’s arteries look like the wide-open spaces, but still, damn.

I was mystified, shortly after my family was transferred from Ottawa, Canada, to Randolph AFB, Texas, to see school and pretty much everything else canceled the two times in five years that it snowed (about a gram’s worth each time).

But I didn’t have a driver’s license, or any urgent tasks to perform, so I suppose my ignorance was excusable. Plus a guy could pretty much walk or ride a bike everywhere on base, so the potential for fatal collision and/or extended naps in Dad’s Cad’ was greatly reduced.

Gee. Y’think suburban sprawl ain’t all it’s been cracked up to be?

Dope and doper

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 36 Comments
Shit makes you smart, man.
Shit makes you smart, man.

Cheech and Chong* must be laughing their asses off.

“By a 3-to-1 margin, journalists inside 3D Cannabis outnumbered customers waiting outside before the shop opened,” reports The Denver Post in its coverage of today’s first sales of legal recreational marijuana in Colorado.

“This is history I just made,” crows a Georgia gent who slept in his car, with his dog, in order to spend $180 on 6 grams of smokable herb and some munchies.

Well, Stoney, let’s get real here. Buying a legal bag of shit is not quite up there with integrating a redneck lunch counter, landing on the moon or inventing the Internet. But we take your point. Folks in Colorado — certain parts of it, anyway — can now purchase the fabled Whacky Tobacky over a counter instead of under the radar, and from someone who doesn’t look the way I did when I was selling $12 lids in Alamosa, too.

Bibleburg, naturally, decided not to participate in this making of the history. Retail sales of firearms, tattoos, payday loans, superstition, fuck books, tonsil polish in a thousand-and-one flavors, and all manner of other smokable products? Fine, fine, go about your business.

But the recreational mary-joo-wanna? Nossir. Might set the younguns to rubbing theyselfs in public, cause the Army to make bongs of its M203s, maybe even lead to dancing on Sunday.

So Manitou Springs, Pueblo and Denver will get the mota-related jobs and taxes, and Bibleburg will get the mumbling stoners. Assuming said stoners have recourse to money and reliable transportation, anyway. So we got that going for us.

Pretty silly, hey? But not as silly as the 62-year-old masters racer who just drew himself a two-year ban for using amphetamines, testosterone and EPO. Talk about hitting the trifecta. It’s a wonder the cup didn’t dissolve when he pissed in it. Doping to win masters races is like standing tiptoe on a stack of prescription pads to make yourself the biggest midget in the room.

* Looks like Tommy Chong is going to be paying a visit to an area dealer. Dave must finally be here.