Fall back

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments
Whoops. …

Halloween 2025 is dead and buried, but the boogeymen remain very much among us.

And now it’s time — well, nearly so, anyway — to fall back.

This is fine, for as far as it goes, which is not very. It’s 8:45 a.m. as I write this, the temperature is a brisk 42°, and the sun has yet to pop round from behind the Sandias. So tomorrow, once Daylight Saving Time ends, it will be 7:45 a.m. and I’ll have an extra hour to dither over whether I’ll need arm and knee warmers for the day’s ride or can just let it all hang out.

Well, not all, as in everything. One must consider the neighbors. Also, the police.

In any event, getting back one measly hour isn’t going to cut it. Not this year. I want to go all the way back to Nov. 5, 2024, this time to see a different result in that year’s pestilential erection, with the Republican candidate headed for the Big House instead of the White House.

Perhaps the day of reckoning would only be postponed, not eliminated. So be it. All I know for sure is that this timeline ain’t working for me. And I’m not alone. Hell, I’ll bet a bicycle or two that a critical number of people who actually voted for this mess would like to have a do-over, and pronto.

Where’s H.G. Wells when we need him? Lost in the dim mists of Time, more’s the pity.

He I know — for the question had been discussed among us long before the Time Machine was made — thought but cheerlessly of the advancement of mankind, and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end. If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so.

Boo!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
I always hate having my picture taken.

“My mommy always said there were no monsters — no real ones — but there are.” — Newt, in “Aliens”

Sing it, sister. I see one first thing every morning, if I dare to turn the lights on in the bathroom. And it follows me around all day, until I turn them out again.

Mama said there’d be days like this. I just didn’t think there’d be so many of them.

When did I stop ringing doorbells on Halloween and start answering them? Oh, Lord.

Thanks to outfits cobbled together by me sainted ma I have been a cowboy, Superman, and Mike Nelson from “Sea Hunt,” among other American icons. I even managed to talk mom into helping me suit up as Loadedman, a cartoon character I devised shortly before dropping out of college and going to work as a janitor.

She must’ve been so proud.

As an “adult” I have been a space pirate, Che Guevara, and once, memorably, Jesus H. Christ himself. Indeed, there was a time when I felt all that hair I was sporting limited not only my employment opportunities, but my costume options come All Hallows’ Eve.

All. That. Hair.

Sigh.

I didn’t know shit about limited options back then. Now the menu is down to a single item — basically, “Ugly-Ass Old Bald Dude.” The good news is, all I have to do for that one is get out of bed, take a leak, and put on some clothes.

In the dark, of course. Because there are monsters. I’ve seen them. They live in my bathroom mirror.

One bodhisattva for Katmandu, please

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments
Buddha don’t need no Rand McNally, yo.

The body may be at rest, but the mind wanders as it will.

Two songs have been getting heavy play on my cranial jukebox: “Katmandu,” by Bob Seger, and “Bodhisattva,” from Steely Dan.

The first, from 1975, ostensibly about salvation via relocation, is actually what Seger described as “an exasperated song” written near the end of a decade-long stretch “where I was going nowhere fast. …  I still had some of that defeatist mentality and you can hear it in there.”

The second is a 1973 critique of cookie-cutter spiritualism and its related divestiture of worldly goods that co-writer Donald Fagen once summarized as: “Lure of East. Hubris of hippies. Quick fix.”

Thomas McGuane was scouting that territory even earlier, in his 1971 novel “The Bushwhacked Piano,” in which the peripatetic Nick Payne’s father tells his wayward son: “I just find the Rand McNally approach to self-discovery a little misguided. … My rather ordinary human response has been to resent having to go to work in the face of all that leisure.”

That these musical and literary ingredients are suddenly bubbling to the top of my consciousness, such as it is, may be a consequence of having just finished McGuane’s latest story collection, “A Wooded Shore,” in which a selection of the damned find themselves adrift in various fashions and locations, Dante’s Sea of Excrement being among the hot spots. “I’m a realist, you see,” says that particular voyager.

“Sure rings a bell these days,” as McGuane told The New York Times. On the mark as usual, Tommy me boyo.

Mr. Jones and me.

Or perhaps it’s that I’m rocking a streak of vivid dreams about bicycling in outlandish circumstances, perhaps as a reaction to getting myself locked into a small selection of predictable 20-milers, your basic hamster-wheel loops, for no good reason that I can think of beyond sloth and convenience. An assist from Rand McNally is not required for this sort of tour de meh. Trying to break the chain I recently took two rarely ridden bikes on short outings, one of them involving a few miles of singletrack I hadn’t ridden since January. I dabbed frequently and shamelessly.

I suppose it could just be that fall is upon us, and with it our local elections and the fabled “fall back,” slated for Sunday, Nov. 2. Oh, good, an extra hour of nightmares.

When swimming the Sea of Excrement, I recommend the backstroke.

Chillin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
You can have my shorts when you pry them from my cold, dead legs.

I’m a late adopter. Hardware, software, pants in autumn.

Herself cracked this morning and pulled on the long johns — plus long sleeves, socks, and a vest — but not me. No, sir.

The uniform of the day until further notice remains Columbia shorts from the previous millennium, a mildly pilled Paddygucci T-shirt, and some battered old Tevas. Shucks, I even went outdoors in that kit to water the shrubs.

Not for long, mind you. But still. It keeps the blood flowing briskly and the neighbors at a comfortable distance.

“Don’t get too close, now. You might catch whatever it is he has.”

“Do you mind? You’re letting the cold air in.”

Miss Mia Sopaipilla, meanwhile, welcomes the advent of cooler weather. That means the Return of the Bedcave, a passive-solar getaway that’s like a day at the beach without the sand in your undercarriage. It’s the cat’s meow, if you will.