O, Lawd — can I say, “O, Lawd,” in this connection? — Ozzy and I made some powerful noise on South Loring Circle back in 1970.
I played “Paranoid” on the folks’ console stereo so loud, so many times, that they finally told me to take it with me when I left. It had been ruined as a stage for Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, and Benny Goodman. It had become the Devil’s Juke Box.
Don’t get me wrong — I liked the big bands. But I liked a big noise, too. Thus I rattled the windows with Led Zep’, Iron Butterfly, and of course, Black Sabbath.
I was born in 1954. We spent a lot of time under our desks, hiding from nuclear weapons and/or the Selective Service System. Some of us came out humming “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” Others shrieked about “War Pigs.”
Day of judgement, God is calling On their knees, the war pigs crawling Begging mercy for their sins Satan, laughing, spreads his wings Oh, Lord, yeah
Eventually I wound up somewhere in between, with John Prine and “Sam Stone.” But man, did I ever enjoy rattling those windows. Thanks, Ozzy. Peace to you and yours.
And if you happen to see Hunter S. Thompson on the Other Side, the two of yis stay the hell away from those goddamn bats.
The Pestilence has been diagnosed with Chronic Penis Insufficiency*, which should surprise approximately no one.
According to the usually fabricated sources his condition has become so dire that two aides are compelled to help him find it come time to pee.
As the first sprinkles pepper into his unzipped trousers, the second stands at the ready, holding a powerful magnifying glass and tweezers. When the little fella reveals its location by sneezing, the second aide spots it with the glass, grabs it with the tweezers, and aims it at the gold-plated toilet.
Mission accomplished!
It’s a process both delicate and cumbersome, as the two aides are immediately fired, gagged with NDAs, and deported to Lower Spaminacanistan before they can run giggling to the press. And thus replacements must be found. Repeat ad infinitum.
*Oh, pardon me. He has chronic venous insufficiency, not the other thing. As far as we know. …
The Rio Grande, pictured July 11, two days before it was declared officially dry in The Duck! City.
Welp, piss on the dogs and call in the fire — the Rio Grande is now the Rio Ground.
John Fleck reports that the “official” call is that the Rio ran dry in the heart of Albuquerque last Sunday evening, for only the second time in the 21st century.
I was down by the river last Friday (not to shoot my baby; I was on a longer-than-usual bike ride) and took the above snap from the Gail Ryba Memorial Bridge paralleling Interstate 40. A stone bummer it was and will be; the future does not look bright, but we’ll have to wear shades anyway. And possibly Assos stillsuits as well.
Happily, I took two tall iced water bottles on this 45-miler. And I had drained both of them before I saw something that made me smile, in Lynnewood Park just short of The Old Home Place.
The Paseo de las Montañas Trail runs right through the park, and on the concrete path someone had drawn a rough square with a message inside: “Dance Here.”
I would’ve, too. But I was hot, tired, and thirsty, and the soles of my ancient Sidis have been ground down to nubbins by the years and miles. Plus it would’ve felt a little like dancing on my own grave.
Coming home from a grocery run yesterday I turned into the cul-de-sac to see a nondescript white Chevy SUV parked in front of the new neighbors’ house.
Didn’t think anything of it at first — new neighbors mean strange vehicles full of inspectors, handymen, and new neighbors.
And then, as I rolled past, three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests stepped out of the vehicle and stalked across the street to the Bulgarians’ place.
I call them Bulgarians because I think that’s their nationality. Can’t quite remember. It’s a multigenerational, multilingual household, and the owners have adult children in the area who are always popping round in a variety of top-shelf vehicles bearing dogs and grandchildren and whatnot.
They’re probably the neighbors we have the least amount of contact with, mostly because they seem a self-contained unit. Describing them to a reporter after a capital-E Event of some sort you’d say something like: “They were quiet. Kept to themselves. We never had any problems with them.”
Still, with one eye on the rear view as I punched the button to raise the garage door, I was thinking what I was going to say to the three largish individuals in light-blue shirts, dark-blue trousers, and thick black vests if they suddenly stopped talking to the Bulgarians, slapped the cuffs on their wrists and the hoods over their heads, and dragged them shrieking into the white SUV.
Time to earn that democratic-socialist street cred, bruh!
So I snapped some quick pix of the SUV, ran the groceries inside, grabbed the binoculars, went back outside, jotted down the deets from the license plate — which was not easy, it being a typically sun-bleached New Mexico plate and barely readable — and just generally made myself realobvious standing there in my driveway three houses down, waiting to see whether I needed to go over there and get my ass kicked for some people I barely know.
And then the discussion ended without violence and the authorities ambled down the cul-de-sac to the next house over. It was then that I saw, stenciled on the back of one dude’s stout black vest, not “ICE,” but “PSA.”
“PSA?” I mumbled to myself. “Public Service Announcement? Prostate-Specific Antigen? Pi Sigma Alpha?”
And then it hit me. Police Service Aide. The unarmed crew that helps the Albuquerque Police Department with traffic control, writing reports on property crime, and other low-risk chores while sworn officers focus on scraping the stiffs off the streets.
And as that neighbor stepped out to speak with the PSA posse I recalled that he does have a problem with the Bulgarians, who have kept a broken-down rust-bucket with a right front flat and weeds growing through the engine compartment parked at the curb for the better part of quite some time, and whose functioning vehicles have been known to take up a fair amount of the limited parking in our little cul-de-sac, occasionally blocking his mailbox and/or making it tough to find a spot for the bins on trash-pickup day.
Well … at least he didn’t call the ICEholes on them. He is a Trumper, after all. And I’m not at Alligator Alcatraz, picking worms out of the chow I can’t eat with my jaw wired shut.
One of the many books Sam Abt wrote about his summer vacations.
The great Sam Abt is finally done following the Tour de France. He went west this week at age 91.
I never met Sam, much less worked with him. He was an editor at The New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, a real chain-smoking pro who worked on the Pentagon Papers and other top-shelf stories and covered the Tour de France — in his spare time — because he loved it. I was a editor at a series of lesser papers who read Sam at work (if the paper subscribed to the NYT wire service) and rode bicycles in my spare time because I loved it.
But my friends Charles Pelkey and Andrew Hood knew and worked with Sam, as did James Startt, who has a fond remembrance of him over at Velo.
Writes James:
Simply put, his writing was exceptional. It was at once efficient, witty, insightful and at times downright transcendent. Oh, and his fans went well beyond the press room, as at least one head of state would call him during the Tour to get his take on the race. All of this from a chain-smoking reporter who never really rode a bike. But he knew the sport like few others did.
Sam was covering Le Tour in those dark days when an American fan had to settle for a soupçon of “Wide World of Sports” coverage, a couple grafs from The Associated Press in your local paper’s sports section (if you were lucky), and Winning: Bicycle Racing Illustrated, which would hit your mailbox about three months after the race was done and dusted.
When VeloNews moved to Boulder in the late Eighties I latched onto the back of that breakaway and hung on for dear life, doing what I’d always done for newspapers — cartooning, writing and editing. I even helped cover a few Tours, from a distance, as an editor. The magazine offered to send me abroad a time or two, but I always declined, thinking I could get more done at home.
But that meant I never got to meet one of the titans of the Tour. Not a racer — I met more than a few of those folks — but Sam, who fed the monkey for all us bike-racing junkies.
Abt was a mentor and inspiration for a generation of English-language journalists who later came to cover a once-exotic sport that’s since gone global.
Peace to Sam, his family and friends, and to his many, many devoted readers.
Mad Blog Media 