Cleared to land

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Heading home, to where the coffee is.

The thing I hate most about driving to the airport at dark-thirty, surrounded by one-eyed, high-beam tailgaters, lift-kitters’ lugnuts, and Fruehauf mudflaps, is that I am never the person actually flying anywhere.

Other than to the airport, that is.

I have not flown through the air with the greatest of unease since March 2014, if memory serves. Unless you count my unscheduled short-range trips on the local trails, which cause only physical trauma.

Could I even remember how to navigate the unfriendly skies after nearly a decade on the deck? Unlikely. Also unnecessary. If the trip is under 2,000 miles and involves no bridgeless water crossings I will travel via Air Subaru, where the pilot is unreliable but a close personal friend, we go and stop at my convenience, and all the mechanicals take place at ground level.

But Herself, who is made of sterner stuff, blazes a trail straight through the customer-disservice wilderness without batting an eye.

She did it again this morning, far too early, in order to visit a friend in Minnesota. I was the first stage of her launch vehicle and burned up during re-entry, which necessitated a short nap.

But now Herself is safely in orbit around Minneapolis and I’m back at my desk in Mission Control, where the temps are inching toward triple digits with winds of 25 mph and up.

Say, did someone ship me to Mars while I was napping? Anyone seen Elon lately? You can’t take your eyes off that bozo for a nanosecond. That’s his mission, anyway. I find myself rooting for simultaneous knockouts.

No sweat

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Hm. Hard to hide from Tōnatiuh with pissant cloud cover like that.

Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime. …

Funny how it just kinda sneaks up on us every year. Maybe not.

One minute we’re enjoying a refreshing 65-degree spin on the old bikey bike; the next, Tōnatiuh has cranked up his celestial broiler and is basting us with our own sweat.

“Can you crank up the a/c? Some of us can’t peel down to nylon shorts and wife-beaters.”

The sun god called in sick for the last day of spring. I went out for a short trail run 8-ish and the cool temps and overcast skies made for a most enjoyable outing, if running — even at my casual pace — can ever be termed “enjoyable.”

But yesterday he was back to stoking the furnace and it looks like highs in the mid- to upper 90s for as far as the weatherperson’s instruments can see. Ninety-four yesterday, and b’gosh and b’golly it looks like more of the same today, only more so.

Meanwhile, we are not in Texas, with its tornadoes, triple-digit temps, and tinpot tyrants. We are not fish food in the Mediterranean off Greece. There are no Russian conscripts and mercenaries creeping over the Sandias.

So, no sweat here, not really. Shoot, we haven’t even turned on the air conditioning yet.

Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
Homeless? Not hardly. I had the tent, the Toyota, and the house where both were usually parked.

“They had all the news from all around the world just crammed into four pages. Didn’t even have any funnies in there, you know? Every time you turned a page something just jumped right out at you. …” — John Prine, “Dear Abby”

Read enough news and something will definitely jump right out at you.

Sadly, we no longer have John Prine to write songs about it.

Nevertheless, there I was, sipping my morning coffee, slouching aimlessly from pillar to post on the Interwebs, just waiting to get jumped by something.

And suddenly, boogity boogity boogity, there it was.

The Colorado Sun had a piece about the Moosejaw Business Accelerator, which in conjunction with Western Colorado University in Gunnison helps entrepreneurs with the theory and practice of launching outdoorsy businesses.

The story featured a fellow with an 18-pound, thousand-buck ruck that comes with most everything a larval backpacker needs; a duo working on a clothing line for “plus-sized” adventurers; and a bikepacker whose outfit makes “plant-based, gluten-free dehydrated meals for backpacking.”

They were all enthusiastic and effusive and by golly, good for them. I hope they’re all thundering successes.

And then I stumbled onto a New York Times story about how the end of pandemic-era federal funding for emergency housing is forcing Vermont to evict homeless people from subsidized motel rooms and into (wait for it) tents.

With waiting lists for shelter beds and transitional housing, the only option available to most of those forced from hotels this month was a free tent. Across the state, social service workers handed out camping equipment, a gesture that pained providers like [Jess Graff, director of Franklin Grand Isle Community Action, a nonprofit agency in St. Albans], who saw 28 households displaced from hotels in her area of northern Vermont on June 1.

“Even purchasing the tents is awful, because you’re in the store with a cart full of camping equipment, and people are saying, ‘Looks like a fun weekend!’” she said.

“A fun weekend.” Like, say, camping in a Brattleboro cemetery. Might see the odd plus-sized person out there trying to stay dry among the tombstones. But I bet s/he’s not sporting a thousand-buck ruck.

Some days I wonder whether we have the right foot on the wrong accelerator.

Offsprung

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 37 Comments
“Sorry, but I don’t want to go to college.”

I was just scratching Miss Mia Sopaipilla behind the ears while watching a ladder-backed woodpecker tend to his knothole in the backyard maple and thinking how fortunate I am to have been blessed with zero offspring.

That I am aware of, anyway.

My mother laid a powerful curse on me early on. You know the one.

“I hope that someday you have a son and he’s just like you.”

Ouch. I knew I’d get dealt one of those, too, straight from the bottom of the Devil’s deck.

And by “just like you” Mom didn’t mean a smartass beer-addled dope-fiend college-dropout hippie layabout. No, she meant the exact opposite of whatever it was I had been hoping for, sprinkled with a hefty pinch of my own least attractive qualities, which were numerous.

For openers: A son? No, thank you, please. Smelly little dick-twiddlers who hide nose boogers under every horizontal surface when they’re not busy lighting fires in the crawl space.

Plus you know you’re gonna have to fight him one day, and if you pull your punches the best you can hope for is a draw. Then you have that to think about for the next few years as you try to lay down the law while he mumbles into his plate across the dinner table.

A daughter? Cuter, maybe, at first, but still a hard no. A daughter might not punch your dentures down your windpipe — she’ll be savvy enough to hit you where it doesn’t show — but she’ll have other ways to put you in the hurt locker, and I’ve seen a few of them.

Anyway, boy, girl, they, them, whatever. You feed and water them for a couple decades, try to teach them not to stick their tongues in an electrical outlet or have sex with the vacuum cleaner or just coax them out of the basement and into the sunlight, and one day they turn into Seventh-Day Opportunists or Realtors or born-again vegans or just hack your 401(k) for the down payment on a survivalist bunker outside Road of Bones, Idaho, from which they sell secondhand Chinese-made cargo pants to the Patriot Front.

Whoa. Did I say “you?” I meant “me.” My mom didn’t have anything against you. Though if she’d met you I’m sure she’d have come up with something.

You’re probably doing just fine with your kids. Probably. So happy Father’s Day, you poor, miserable bastards. Miss Mia sends her regards.