Dude is off his rocker. Coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs. A couple apple slices short of a Happy Meal.
What I’m saying is, his golden escalator don’t go all the way to the lobby no more.
Can we please drop a 25th Amendment net over the sonofabitch before he invades Chipotle for their cooking oil? Impeach, convict, and remove? Any adults in the room with this angry toddler?
This is one reason why the Missus and I don’t have kids. Sometimes they turn out to be Hitler.
Author George Saunders is much in the news of late, chatting up the press in preparation for going on tour to promote his latest book, “Virgil,” due out later this month.
Speaking with The Guardian, Saunders said he was still trying to decide how to speak about politics when he hits the road. Preaching to the converted feels “a little too good, like it’s too much sugar,” he said, adding that while his nature is to seek peace, “that’s dangerous right now because I don’t want to be a peacemaker for this regime.”
I’m not a celebrated author, prepping for a book tour, or a Tibetan Buddhist. I blog irregularly and without distinction, the only tours I take are by Subaru, and the only thing I’m promoting is my own mental health. My devotion to Zen is sporadic at best.
But I sure dig where Saunders is coming from when he says The Work is the thing.
The one thing I’m doubling down on is: just keep making fictive worlds. Improve the quality of your thought, improve the quality of your compassion, by that sacramental exercise, then whatever you have to do you’ll be better equipped.
It reminds me of the Zen proverb, “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.” Also, and too, of the Epistle of James, which goes, “For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.”
And I was pleasantly surprised to see Saunders prescribe a spoonful of sugar to help his medicine go down: “Also start weightlifting, build a machine-gun turret. …”
Sounds like the right sort of work for an old blogger short on faith as the reign of His Excremency Donald the Dozy barrels along unhindered. We’re running out of water to carry in the Southwest, and we don’t burn wood. But you never know when a buffed-up bod’ and a machine-gun turret are liable to come in handy.
Doesn’t look like we’ll be needing the ol’ kiva fireplace in the master bedroom for a while, if the long-range forecast is any guide.
Actually, we’ve never needed it, nor the bigger one in the living room neither. We both got our fill of wood-burning Back in the Day®, when we lived at 8,800 feet in frosty CrustyTucky and tossed big chunks of aspen, cedar, piñon, and oak into the Lopi fireplace insert faster than ICE Barbie’s masked goons throw brown people out of the country, only with less horseshit and gunfire.
Here in scenic cosmopolitan Duck!Burg, a couple-three thousand feet lower and more than a few Fahrenheit degrees higher, we manage to skate by with fossil fuels. This keeps Your Humble Narrator away from chainsaws, always a good idea, especially in these dark days. Will he do an injury to himself or someone else? Stay tuned!
The chainsaw always made me nervous, actually. What I liked was splitting rounds with the ax, another implement that should probably be under lock and key for the duration. The chainsaw is long gone, but I still have an ax, a couple smallish camping hatchets, and a few handsaws in case I need to dispose of a body … uh, of some downed limbs! Tree limbs!
Goddamnit, this is what comes of reading the news of a morning. Some days there just isn’t enough coffee in the world.
But it does look like we will have oddly springlike conditions for the near future, and so instead of burning wood or anything else, I can expend a few calories on the old bikey-bike. And without all the heavy-weather gear, too.
At this rate, an old white guy could find himself browning up enough to get deported. I hear South Sudan is lovely this time of year.
Foreground, from left: Jim Martinez, who advised a mayor; Chris Coursey, who became a mayor; and Your Humble Narrator, in his final incarnation as a newspaperman, who would go on to blog about whatever to a small, deeply disturbed audience. Background, from left: Rudi Banuelos and Michael Brangoccio.
Chris James Martinez, a.k.a. Jethro, Santiago, Jim, et al., gave us the slip one year ago today.
You left us way too soon, homes. Some of us never got the chance to say “Adios” until you were dust in the wind.
Well, dust in a Chock full o’ Nuts coffee can, anyway.
After you hit the door running for the final time Larry, Kelly, and William got the old band back together and then some, first at the Bull & Bush in Glendale, and again in Alamosa, trying to sing you back home.
Sorry if it sounded more like the howling at the moon that was No. 1 on our El Rancho Delux hit parade Back in the Day™. Weren’t none of us exactly Jimmy Ibbotson, even then. More like Jimmy Beam, and near the bottom of the bottle, too. Talk about your long, hard roads.
Anyway, our serenades kept going to voice mail, or maybe to that answering machine I bought you way back when. It’s probably under those Glendale mondo-condos next to the Bull, with the rest of El Rancho. There’s an artillery piece at the Alamosa boneyard in case you want to call us back.
Thinking of you today, my brother. And of Lucy and Lawrence, too. Give them un abrazo for me.
Bob Weir fronting the Grateful Dead in Switzerland back in 1972.
“Lately it occurs to me / what a long strange trip it’s been.” — Robert Hunter, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh
Bob Weir is off truckin’ for real now. The Grateful Dead mainstay was last seen headed west at 78. Years, not miles per hour.
I was never a huge Grateful Dead fan, though for years I looked more or less like their target market.
But who in their right minds, or even the wrong ones, didn’t love “Truckin’?” I mean, other than Robert Crumb, who came to hate his iconic “Keep On Truckin'” cartoon after it took off without him seeking someone else’s fortune, copyright law be damned.
I saw the Dead just once, on Sept. 3, 1972, at Folsom Field in Boulder. No idea how I got there — I may have had a driver’s license by then, but certainly no car. Could be I caught a ride with my old high-school bro’ and fellow music lover Bruce Gibson, if he wasn’t already in the Navy by then. I was in my first year at Adams State College in Alamosa, missing the dean’s list by light-years but probably making it onto a few less sought-after rosters.
We were way up in the cheap seats, and someone in the band — Jerry Garcia, maybe? — started throwing shiny objects to the crowd. Couldn’t quite make out what they were, thanks to our distance from the stage and the platoon of brain invaders setting up a perimeter in my cerebellum.
“Hell’s that?” I mumbled. “Cans of beer? Silver dollars?”
Nope. It was lids. Of weed. Oh, how I wanted me some of that San Francisco treat. But I seemed to have been lag-bolted to my seat in the nosebleed section and my mind soon wandered off by itself, muttering, “Forget this dude, he ain’t going nowhere.”
It came back, of course. Hence this blog.
It may be a while before we see Bob Weir again, Dog willing. But when we do, he’ll be jamming with Jerry, Phil Lesh, Pigpen, Robert Hunter and the rest of the old gang. Peace to him, his family, friends, and fans.
Mad Blog Media 
