The Fourth of July holiday weekend is upon us, we are urged to park our bad selves at home, and here comes The New York Times to torment us with an article headlined “The #Vanlife Business Is Booming.”
Because of course it is. If you have a few hundred thou’ burning a hole in your skinny jeans, that is.
The hoi polloi may find the Mercedes Metris conversion more their style (or the lack thereof, ho ho ho). You can get one of those for under a hundred large.
Or you can just knucklehead it on the cheap. Throw a surplus pup tent, a Coleman bag, and an Igloo full of PBR and weenies into the Wagoneer, break down a gate at some national forest, and shoot the ol’ AK until you can’t hear the voices in your head anymore.
Anyone tells you to knock it off, or asks where your face mask’s at, tell the sumbitch he’s gonna wish he was wearing a catcher’s mask and give ’im the butt in the beezer.
The Bug® has put AAA’s Memorial Day travel forecast up on blocks.
It’s the first time in two decades that AAA hasn’t had a stab at guessing how many Americans might be traveling over the holiday weekend, according to PR manager Jim Stratton.
No worries, Jimbo. I haven’t been big on holiday travel since, well, forever.
If Tony Stark had been a cat, Iron Man might look something like this.
When I was still a newspaperman it was possible (and pleasurable) for a single fella to piss off for points unknown while the breeders were juggling work, school, and the juvenile justice system.
My shift was generally something like 4 p.m. to 1 a.m., with oddball days off like Tuesday and Wednesday, and I got spoiled by not having to deal with crowds whenever I wasn’t on the clock and wished to make a nuisance of myself without billing someone for it.
After mutating into a cycling scribe I often frequented Durango on Memorial Day weekend, getting my ass handed to me en route to Silverton, in the crit at Fort Lewis College, or on whichever stretch of hilly, rocky dirt Ed Zink was using for a mountain-bike course that year.
But holy hell, a long haul to an ass-whuppin’ loses its appeal faster than a kissing booth at the state fair in a plague year. So I decided that if I ever craved a beating I could sass the wife, save myself all that driving time and gas money.
We’ve had the ingredients for this bench lying around the rancheroo for the better part of quite some time.
This time around, as it happens, it is a plague year. So we kicked off the long weekend with a short road ride and some light landscaping.
Parts of the back yard were looking like that part of your neck you always miss with the razor because at age 66 you’ve taken to shaving in the dark to avoid panic attacks, myocardial infarctions, and suicidal impulses, and the whole concept of shaving at all has become meaningless since nobody gives a shit about that part of your neck because mostly they are not looking at it or any other part of you, unless they think you may have wandered away from a nursing home or insane asylum and are wondering whether there might be a cash reward for your return, dead or alive.
But I digress.
So we pulled weeds and dug up junk elms, laid down weed block and river rock, and bagged up unsightly piles of this, that, and the other. There will be more of this sort of thing as the holiday weekend progresses. Or so I am told, anyway.
If Herself posts any FaceButt pix of a new “flower bed” that’s 6 by 6 by 3, you’ll know I’ve given up shaving and yard work for good.
Saddle up, buckaroos. We’re fixin’ to mosey into the heart of the Holiday Roundup.
As is often the case, the weather seems likely to suck come Eat the Bird. Some big-ass storm is poised to gallop from Californy right through Fort Fun, taking a giant dump on many a carefully devised travel plan. Why, we may even get a dash of the white stuff here in the Duke City.
Happily, we ain’t goin’ nowhere. The mom-in-law will be joining us here at El Rancho Pendejo for the holiday feast, but this will entail a round trip of about eight miles tops. Not like those 260-mile, stop-and-go death marches we used to endure between Bibleburg and Fort Fun, watching our fellow travelers take high-speed diggers in the median and/or ditches and then clog the breakdown lanes and/or frontage roads trying to find a workaround.
Mind you, this was on dry roads. If the weather were turble bad, why, then we might really see something.
I could feel it yesterday. The day was sunny but cool, and nobody would have sneered if I’d started my ride with arm warmers, even knee warmers. The hairy legs might have drawn a few hoots back in the day, but that was … well, back in the day.
“Yes indeed, this will do nicely,” says Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
Miss Mia Sopaipilla was inspecting the Winter Bunker on behalf of His Excellency, Field Marshal Turkish von Turkenstein (commander, 1st Feline Home Defense Regiment).
Spike the Terrorist Deer has slipped inside the wire a time or two in recent days and The Leader often feels it wise to devise strategy far from the distractions of frontline combat.
Why, yes, funny you should ask, Herself is still a-roving around County Sligo with her younger sister, inspecting waterfalls and poets’ graves, quaffing pints of the black, and shooting iPhone video of a harpist playing “The Foggy Dew,” one of the tunes collected from the Belfast Harp Festival of 1792 by Edward Bunting, a 19-year-old organist from Armagh.
When I was 19 the only Harp I knew came in bottles. You don’t want to know what I was doing with me organ.
Now this is amusing: Jason Wilson visits five Trump-branded properties to get a squint at Il Douche, “promiser of luxury experiences, through the eyes of a travel writer.”
And what did the travel writer perceive, luxury-experience-wise? A profoundly unsettling boredom, “a relentless, insistent, in-your-face mediocrity,” even for a pro “who has stayed in many soulless hotels and eaten in many overpriced restaurants in many disappointing places.”
“Nothing was bad, and much of what I was experiencing was even pleasurable,” Wilson writes. “But these were not great places. These places didn’t even seem like they were trying to be great.”
What Wilson experienced was not exactly a reverse Midas Touch, but something very much like it. With Trump, what you get is not the Warhol, but the actual can of soup (and not at Campbell’s prices, mind you). And now this half-assed hotelier has laid his tiny little hands on our country.
Mad Blog Media 