“Joe’s not quick on the draw!
“Won’t lay down the law!”
The GOP croons
But as the Chinese keep spyin’
Joe sends jets a-flyin’
And busts their balloon.
-pop-
I’m tired
Oh, no, there goes the barrio
Rock on: This morning Rockzilla saw his shadow, which as you know means six more weeks of fiery breath, stomping things flat, and general devastation in the Greater Duck! City Metropolitan Area.
Jonesin’
Now and then I think it’s time to thin the velo-herd, so I start taking neglected bikes out for re-evaluation.
“Why are you still on a hook here after all these years?”
“Uh … because you’re a bike hoarder?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Carry on. Next!”
Now, anybody who talks to his bicycles when he’s not arguing with the voices in his head probably should not be evaluating anything without the guidance of trained mental-health professionals in a residential setting.
Yet, here we are, with all these voices and bicycles and daylight to burn. Someone has to take hold. Herself is slightly preoccupied, having the full-time job, plus the eBay side hustle and her volunteer work for the local Donk collective on behalf of The People, whoever they might happen to be.
And anyway, she only has two bikes and one voice, the one she uses to rebuke me for scattering bikes and bits all over the house.
But I digress. As usual.
The Co-Motion Divide Rohloff was getting a lot of love in January. There is no good reason on God’s green earth that I should (a) own this bike, and (2) like it. But I do, with its stout German gizmo hub and shifter mounted near the stem, the Gates carbon belt drive, and even the disc brakes.
And every time I think I should send it away, I treat it to some trail-and-tarmac combo platter by way of a fare-thee-well and come away cooing, “Nope, naw, nuh-uh, not gonna get rid of you. Not this time.”
Yesterday it was the Jones and I who were getting reacquainted in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.
Both tires were flat when I pulled the Jones off its hook — no surprise, since I hadn’t ridden it in nearly nine months, and I only run 15 psi front and 20 rear. I pumped ’em up, they held air, and off we went.
Now, in my garage, the Jones is something of a weirdo, with its 170mm triple crank, wildly upright position, and swept-back H-bar atop a fork that looks like the uprights at State Farm Stadium. At a prom it would be the oddball in the oversized thrift-store duds slouching in a corner, looks like he cuts his own hair with a Buck knife and no mirror.
But it’s XT all around, with a 19.3-inch low end, and those plump 29×2.4-inch Maxxis Ardent tires soak up an awful lot of rough stuff that a 33mm cyclocross tire just ricochets off of like a stray round from the passenger window of a Civic street racer blowing the red at Central and Pennsylvania.
So, anyway, what was envisioned as a casual one-hour afternoon outing turned into 90 minutes of trails with the sun dropping faster than the New Year’s ball in Times Square.
And once again I came away cooing, “Nope, naw, nuh-uh, not gonna get rid of you. Not this time.”
“Next!”
Antisocial media
Brooding is one of those many useful parts of life that you cannot admit to anymore. People will jump all over you, try to get you committed, drop you off at a yoga retreat. — Ken Layne, “Encounters with Coyote-Man,” on Desert Oracle Radio
I wasn’t brooding, exactly. But I had seen something like the 89,261,254th story on how E. Lawn Mulch has beshat Twatter. Or maybe it was the 63,294,204th “hot take” on how Orange Hitler skirted Buttface’s Maginot line.
Whatever the cause, the effect was my consultation via Apple Messages with colleagues Steve Frothingham and Hal Walter about undertaking a little urban renewal on the virtual town square.
“How about ‘TarPit™?'” I pitched to Steve. “‘Stumble into TarPit™ and start sinking today!'”
Instead of a page, users would get a Morass. Instead of tweets or posts, Bubbles:
“Dumbo’s going down for the third time!”
“Hey, I gotta reBubble that … whoops, too late, he’s a goner.”
“I think you are on to something,” replied Steve, who has a magazine and a website to put out and probably included that “to” out of professional courtesy.
As Steve seemed busy for some reason, I took the proposal to Hal, fronting him a couple of Bubbles I thought might be representative of the TarPit™ community.
“Help, help, I’m sinking!”
“Good! ’Bout time, you libtard cuck! Die! Die! Die!”
Hal found the concept interesting but, as is his practice, gave it a redneck spin.
“I’ma launch one called ‘Skillet,’ he announced. “Posts will be referred to as ‘Farts,’ as in, ‘I just Farted about ——.’ And they will be Farts in a Skillet.”
Well sir, I don’t mind telling you we got right on down to some cowboy cooking.
“Instead of ‘Friending,’ people will ‘Sniff’ each other,” Hal declared. “As in, ‘She sent me a Sniff request so I Sniffed her.'”
“ReFarting will be called ‘Lighting,” I added. “‘Hey, I just Lit your Fart!'”
Some unresolved discussion followed about whether direct messages (DMs) should be rebranded “Silent But Deadly” (SBDs) or “Pull My Finger” (PMFs).
As regards a logo, I was thinking — since we’re talking social media here and probably poaching more than a few red hats from Twatter — that we needed something monstrously racist, like a cartoon of a grinning pinto bean sporting a garish sombrero, a huge mustache, and a prominent gold tooth. Good draw for the NextDoor-OffMyLawn shutins, too.
Nope, said Hal. “The logo is just a frying pan: ‘SKILLET.'”
“That would be simpler,” I agreed. “Avoid the DOJ. Also, the Brown Berets.”
“Fucking A,” said Hal. “They don’t play.”
In the end nothing came of all this spitballing, which is probably just as well. It starts with a noble quest — help people heap abuse upon each other without getting punched (and while making bank for yourself) — and next thing you know you’re going off-piste into virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and space travel to places that make Ash Fork, Arizona, look like Maui.
Pretty soon you’re wearing a goggled helmet for real because you can’t breathe what Nuevo Arizona (the planet formerly known as Mars) has for an atmosphere. Orange Hitler’s Meata avatar runs your HOA. And E. Lawn Mulch is doing donuts outside your pod in his AWD Testo with an AI Sex-O-Bot 9000™ working his lap like a Sherwin-Williams paint shaker.
“There goes the neighborhood,” you grumble on NextPod-OffMySand. And then Mark Schmuckerberg Farts at you, and Jeff Bozos Lights it, and your pod explodes before you can create a GoFundMe to underwrite your return trip to Earth.
Resurrection
Weirdos and those who love them, rejoice: Ken Layne says he’s reviving his Desert Oracle quarterly, which many of us thought had died and was buried without ceremony somewhere in the desert, like Cactus Ed Abbey.
I bought and enjoyed the first book, a collection, compendium, companion, whatevs. And I help underwrite Desert Oracle Radio, the only audio project I support, though I subscribe to a wide range of virtual and actual magazines.
My next step along this twisted trail is probably subscribing to the quarterly. In for a penny, in for a pound, as the fella says.
In his “An Ode to ‘Desert Oracle'” in Alta Journal, Layne cuts straight to the heart of the beast:
Publishing a little magazine is attractive to exactly one kind of person: a writer who doesn’t want to work for somebody else’s magazine.
My old Pueblo Chieftain bro’ Hal Walter, who didn’t want to work for somebody else’s newspaper anymore, did something similar with Mountain Athlete, which lasted about six or seven years back in the late Eighties and into the early Nineties. Denver Post columnist Ed Quillen did likewise with Colorado Central, which has outlived him.
I contributed to both efforts in small ways, once loaning Ed one of my trucks so he could make it to a speaking engagement.
“Now remember, Ed, you can’t smoke in my truck,” I told him before he motored off. The trip took him about twice as long as it would have taken me because I wouldn’t have stopped and climbed out to burn one at every other mile marker.
But the closest I ever came to “publishing a little magazine” is this comosellama you’re looking at right now. The deadlines are flexible and the audience tolerant, and I can bear the small expense without having to sell a few bikes or vintage Macs.
Not adding books, podcasts, and road shows to the to-do list helps, of course. Saves trees, eardrums, and gasoline, too.
Besides, someone’s got to rustle up the grub around here. There are only so many hours in the day.
Mad Blog Media 