So happy together — Flo & Eddie and The Mothers of Invention.
Mark Volman, a.k.a. The Phlorescent Leech, or “Flo” for short, has gone west. He was 78.
You may remember Volman from The Turtles. Or p’raps from Flo & Eddie, his two-man band with fellow ex-Turtle Howard Kaylan, a change of identity required in 1970 when they got sideways with their label and were contractually forbidden to perform as either The Turtles or even under their own names.
As a teenage weirdo in the magical Seventies I recall a mentor at the Colorado Springs Sun, Bill McBean, turning me on to Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention — specifically, their “Fillmore East — June 1971” album, which includes, as the wrapup to an insane musical tale of Seattle’s Edgewater Inn, a mud shark, and the Vanilla Fudge, a stellar performance of The Turtles’ No. 1 hit from 1967, “Happy Together.”
“Wow,” sez I, or something very much like that (it was the Seventies, after all). “That’s an excellent take on that old Turtles tune.”
“No shit,” replies Bill. “That’s Flo & Eddie you’re hearing.”
Further explanation was required — thank Dog for mentors — but I eventually came to understand that former Turtles Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan were now Flo & Eddie and rockin’ with The Mothers.
Talk about happy together. It still rocks, a half-century down the road.
The Shit Show! Coming to a … well, it’s already here. Has been since Jan. 20.
Is there a wall left unbeshitted in the Benighted States? If he flings it, it might stick?
“Department of Defense” to be rebranded as “War Department?” OK, one syllable instead of two, so I suppose he might be able to say it without drooling all over his tie. And he could even spell it, maybe. The first word, anyway. If someone spots him the “W” and the “r.”
But when his country wanted him to go to war Cadet Bonespurs was all about playing defense, right here at home.
Hundreds of Koreans ICEd at the construction site of a Hyundai-LG battery plant in Georgia as our two nations struggle to negotiate one of his fabled “deals?” Are these the drug mules with cantaloupe-size calves that screeching racist dipshit Steve King was raving about when some folks — the press, mostly — gave a runny shit what he thought or had to say?
No, this lot had to cross an ocean instead of a river. Talk about your “bad hombres.”
And taking over the 9/11 memorial and museum in New York City? Which commemorate a disaster in which he did … fuck-all? Other than jack his jaw in complete and utterly pampered safety, like the REMF he is and always will be, that is.
Damn. Those Epstein files must really be the shit. He’d bomb Harvard to keep that story out of the news cycle.
I was thrice blessed as I prepared to leave Bibleburg last Wednesday, an hour earlier than I had planned.
First, I had slept in a bed, in a room, not in my car parked in front of the hotel. I gave a thumbs-up to the stealth camper I spotted as I left to get coffee, for hiding in plain sight in the rain-drenched parking lot. But s/he got two thumbs down for being so obvious about it: a towel tucked into the top of a cracked rear window; clothing, water jugs, and other “not a guest here” hints strewn all over the front seats; and so on. Respect your adversary, dude.
Could’ve been a hotel employee, times being what they are. But still, style counts.
Second, the Starbucks across the road had that very morning begun opening at 5 a.m. instead of 6. Ordinarily I brew my own coffee on the road, but lately the hotels inflict these Keurig monstrosities upon us instead of mini-coffeemakers whose carafes can be repurposed for an AeroPress brew.
Pity that the smoke detectors dislike my little MSR IsoPro camp stove. “Outside use only,” kids. Just ask the guest in the Honda Hilton.
And finally, third: I was leaving Bibleburg an hour earlier than I had planned.
I always like leaving the B-burg, and leaving early is even better than not going there at all. I find myself in sympathy with my mom, who when we were transferred there in 1967 looked at downtown through a prism of memory from the 1940s and recoiled.
Yes, they let this work at the Gazette. I guess they really were libertarians.
Ten years later a colleague at the Gazette would say that anything east of Hancock Avenue wasn’t Colorado Springs, and mom would’ve agreed. I certainly did.
In my Gazette years I was living in an old Victorian carved into apartments at Cascade and San Miguel, right next door to The Colorado College, just north of what was still called “downtown.”
But when the O’Gradys first arrived we set up housekeeping east of Academy Boulevard, 3.5 miles into the prairie from my colleague’s Hancock border. Nearly six decades later, South Loring Circle feels almost urban.
The town goes ever on and on, to paraphrase Bilbo Baggins. In this instance toward Kansas, not Mordor, though the differences between the two may be undetectable to political scientists. (Hint: Mordor had mountains.)
I’ve left the place more times than anywhere else, which probably says more about me than it does about B-burg. And this trip I was ready to skedaddle again after just four days. The rain, the postapocalyptic state of the roads, the endless high-speed conga line of traffic — two final tallboys of Starbucks and I was on my way.
• • •
It was hairy from jump. Pitch black and still raining, with fog to boot, and despite mopping all my windows and mirrors with a towel before leaving I was flying blind for a few scary minutes until the a/c defogged the glass. Not optimal when you’re merging onto I-25 from Briargate Parkway at 75 mph with a few thousand of your closest — and I mean closest, as in halfway into the hatchback — friends.
Paging Graham Watson. …
The weather remained gloomy. I didn’t bother putting on sunglasses until I was past Raton. Creeks had become rivers and rivers were inland seas. Ponds appeared magically like Brigadoon. Folks who parked their trailers in low-lying areas found themselves with rudderless houseboats.
There were enough sunflowers at roadside for a regiment of Graham Watsons, guarded by ravens perched on fenceposts. Lots of fat black cattle living large in the tall salad. I fought the urge to stop at McDonald’s and instead yelled “Go home!” at vehicles with Texas plates.
Skidmarks demarking various unscheduled off-ramps to left and right with “Damaged Guardrail Ahead” signs for headstones. A giant shitbox bearing a plate reading “IH8UALL.” Making America great again, one vanity plate at a time.
My Steelman puddle-jumper, sans puddles.
In six hours flat, with one stop for gas, I was back at the ranch. My training-log entry for the day reads, simply, “Nothing.”
But the next day I was on the old Steelman I’d hauled with me to Bibleburg, tooling around the sun-splashed Elena Gallegos Open Space, a smile on my lips and a song in my heart.
Home again, home again, jiggity-jog; the desert’s the place for this salty ol’ dog.
The proletarians have nothing to lube but their chains!
Wait a minute. That’s not right. …
The proletarians would also want to butter their chamois, lest they suffer knots on their knuts during pedal revolutions. When V.I. Lenin wrote “What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement” in 1902 he was not recommending remedies for saddle sores.
I’d been invited to smash the State at a rally in Fanta Se, but that was looking like an all-day affair, and with (a) it being Monday, and (2) Herself inbound from a long weekend in Minnesota, I had trash and recycling bins to set out and retrieve; sheets, pillowcases and towels to launder; plants to water; hummingbird feeders to wash and refill; the usual feline maintenance; and a general all-round, stem-to-stern, rapid reassembly of a living space in which only one-third of the occupants really cares about any sort of Better Homes & Gardens tidiness.
Guess who. Here’s a hint: It ain’t me or Miss Mia. I’ve always done my best work under deadline pressure, but I can guarantee you I’ve cut a few corners here today. The self-criticism session will be grueling.
So, anyway, instead of invading the capital with my socialist brethren and sisthren I spent a couple hours cycling around the foothills with my geezer comrades in what proved to be a delightful debut for September 2025 before buckling down to the task(s) at hand..
I flew the red jersey and took all my pulls. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” etc. And I stood by valiantly as one of our number was waylaid by a reactionary goathead or shard of glass. The lumpenproletariat traditionally recycles beverage containers at roadside, via passenger-side windows, during revolutionary holiday weekends.
“Glassholes,” as one comrade muttered.
When I returned home to a frugal working-class lunch I discovered that there were two — two! — Labor Day rallies right here in The Duck! City. And I had missed both of them.
The comrades in PR are way off the back here. I’m gonna have to start paying closer attention to my socialist-media accounts.
The O’Grady family mansion, circa 2025. I like what the latest owners have done with the place.
When someone asks me, “Where are you from?” I reply: “We were an Air Force family. Moved around a lot. I’m not really ‘from’ anywhere.”
But if I am “from” somewhere, it’s probably Colorado Springs.
Several versions of me have lived there off and on since 1967, when the old man got transferred for the final time, from Randolph AFB, Texas, to Ent AFB, Colo.
The Mitchell High School swim team in 1970, the year we went 11-0. Find the dork, win a prize.
Junior-high dork. High-school swimmer, gradually making the transition from dork to drinker and doper. College dropout sampling the blue-collar lifestyle. Rookie newspaperman. Rookie freelancer, freshly married, the two of us trying to make a few bucks while riding herd on my demented mom for free rent in the family castle. Pro freelancer, in our own home, the wife having reinvented herself as a librarian after a whirlwind tour of the University of Denver’s masters program. The drugs were long since in the rear view, and before we left for Albuquerque in 2014 the tonsil polish would be history, too.
I make my tour of duty there about a quarter-century, all told, which may be a long-enough stretch for Bibleburg to qualify as a hometown. For sure I have a love-hate relationship with the place.
And isn’t that practically the dictionary definition of “home?”
The place has a reputation for conservatism, which is ironic, in that the last actual conservative to run the joint was its founder, Gen. William Jackson Palmer, who saw to it that his successors would not be permitted to plant endless hectares of ticky-tacky rooftops and retail on every square inch of the place when he was gone.
Monument Valley Park, briefly the home of the Mad Dog cyclocrosses.
His legacy includes the donation of land for Monument Valley Park, North Cheyenne Cañon Park, Palmer Park, and Bear Creek Cañon Park, all of them stellar places for riding the ol’ bikey-bike or just hanging around in. He founded the Gazette, too, but we can hardly blame him for what happened there.
The place has been a haven for Birchers, Klansmen, and Nazis in my own lifetime, along with various tribes of generic libertarian fuckwits whose fontanelles closed up too soon (see Doug Lamborn, et al.). Indeed, there was a time when our cyclocrosses in Palmer’s parks drew about half the entrants typical of a Boulder or Denver race, because those posie-sniffing tree-huggers were afeared someone might beat some Jesus Goldwater into them if ever they dared venture south of the Palmer Divide.
In the Springs, “conservative” means “penny-wise, pound-foolish,” or in the vernacular, “We ain’t paying for shit until it breaks, and maybe not even then.”
Back in 2010, the city was shutting off streetlights — 8,000 to 10,000 of them — to save money, suggesting that anyone who liked to be able to see the muggers creeping up on them should “adopt” their friendly neighborhood light.
The adoption fee “may be tax-deductible,” one city mouthpiece noted, suggesting donors “consult a tax expert.” Because nobody wants to pay taxes to keep the fucking lights on, amirite?
Part of our old circuit in Bear Creek Regional Park.
During my most recent visit, it seemed nearly every street in town was either broken or being rebuilt. Whether this was due to decades of “conservatism” or the ravages of an unusually wet summer remains a mystery. I know the town pretty well and have more than one way to get from point A to point Z. But this trip all the letters of the alphabet were buried under orange cones.
Happily, Palmer’s parks seemed in great shape as per usual. In Monument Valley Park, I saw hard-hats using the trail-maintenance equivalent of ice-rink Zambonis to groom the goo right out of them.
Classic Bibleburg, man. Can’t keep the lights on, the fascists out, or the potholes patched, but when it comes to Gen. Palmer’s parks, it’s nothing but happy trails to you. He must’ve written it into his will.
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