Every emperor deserves a rebellion, and this is ours — a chance to show His Excremency and the dung beetles greedily eyeing his six that some of us won’t eat what he’s serving. Let’s preempt his must-see TV for a few hours. It’ll still be about him, of course — but he won’t like it, not one little bit.
You can find your local gathering at the No Kings website. Let’s get ready to grumble!
Herself and I slipped out for a short trail run before lunch yesterday, hoping to dodge the predicted rain.
She was taking a break from work, which continues although the feddle-gummint mostly doesn’t. I was taking a break from being indoors, the Monday Geezer Ride having been canceled due to the weather forecast. We are not Portlanders, ready and eager to ride nekkid in fair weather and foul, aiming wisecracks and buttcracks at Beelzebozo’s buttheads.
Our short-run loop is only a couple miles, and mostly flat — just 268 feet of vertical gain, with one lump going out and another coming back — and we were back at the ranch before the clouds opened for business.
And business was booming. Nothing like the Durango area, where Tropical Storm Priscilla really brung it and then some. The official tally here was 0.21 inch. But it felt like a lot compared with the usual nothing at all.
Just ask the lone bedraggled hummingbird who spent about 15 minutes camped at one of our feeders, which hang out of the weather beneath the back patio cover. Every so often s/he would glance skyward as though thinking: “Jaysis! Where is everybody? I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”
Since Tommy Orange scored himself a MacArthur Foundation award I’ve been rereading his 2024 novel “Wandering Stars,” the followup to his 2018 breakout hit “There There.”
The MacArthur people call it both “a sequel and a prequel” to the previous work, and it’s not a lazy bedtime read. The first pass through I found myself speedreading it, a vile habit I can’t seem to shake. It’s like driving the interstate instead of William Least Heat-Moon’s blue highways. You get where you’re going, but you miss a lot of scenery.
Now I’m taking my time and enjoying it more. Orange, a native of Oakland, Calif., and an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, covers a lot of territory as he takes us back and forth in time, from the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 to the echoes of the climactic gunfire in “There There.”
With one eye on another orange tale-teller I found one passage particularly apt for Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
Opal Viola Bear Shield, who is on the lam for a number of reasons — no spoilers here, read the book — is giving her unborn child a Cheyenne perspective on dogs, white people, and bloodlines (the child’s father is half white, and a white family’s dog, Cholly, is on the lam with them).
He’s one of these mutts you don’t know what kinds of breeds are in him and you don’t much care because he seems all his own in the eyes. Well he’s only got the one eye, but it’s got more life in it than I’ve seen in some men with two. And I’ve seen worse men than those with no life in their eyes. It’s worse when they know what they want and they’re hungry for it, white men in this country, they come to take everything, even themselves, they have taken so much they have lost themselves in the taking, and what will be left of such a nation once they are done?
What a gloomy day. The ceiling is all the way down to the deck and the drizzle is intermittent. Reminds me of Oregon, only without all the ICEholes and Natural Gourds wandering around, growing fungus in their footwear and moss on their north sides.
Ordinarily I’d slip out for a jog between sprinkles, but I’ve already logged two 5K runs this week and fear a third would leave me a smelly puddle of tears, shredded connective tissue, and bone splinters.
Still, slouching around indoors muttering over the news ain’t no day at the beach neither.
That Tennessee explosives factory? Holy hell.
Public “servants” trying to suppress free speech? Par for the course. Public excoriation for thee, but not for me. Shove the First Amendment right up their fat asses by attending your local No Kings! rally on Oct. 18.
Government employees being shown the door because … well, because Rumpleshitskin likes it? Remember his two-word catchphrase from the unreality show he keeps reliving over and over and over again in the throes of his growing dementia. He’s a man of few words, because he can only remember a few, and can pronounce even fewer.
And to top it off I’ve got one lonely, disheveled hummingbird parked at the backyard feeder, like the old soak lost in thought who just can’t seem to hear the phrase, “Last call. …”
Well, I didn’t get the Pulitzer for Blogging this year, or a MacArthur “genius” grant.
But that deranged bag of blubber didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize, either. Welcome to the Loser’s Club, you fat cunt.
Boy, the walls of the White House must be fairly running with ketchup this morning. I suppose we’ll be invading Norway now.
Mad Blog Media 