When you’re out of tune and singing off key, volume is not the answer.
Sounds like Fats Nightingale’s Healing Schmealing Afflict the Afflicted Tour went about like we expected.
He performed his greatest hits: “Be Quiet,” “Fake News,” and “Sleepy Joe Biden,” but if he’s been working on any new tunes, he kept them to himself.
There were just two stops on the tour, but some critics felt that was two too many.
Noted one observer: “Imagine Carrot Top in a suit, with a couple hundred extra pounds of blubber and a head full of ketamine. That shit wouldn’t even play in Vegas, much less Dayton and El Paso. He needs to get back in the studio and work on his act.”
Look what snuck over the Sandias when the weatherperson wasn’t paying attention.
The weatherman must have missed a memo while compiling today’s forecast.
That “20 percent chance of showers and thunderstorms after noon” turned out to be 100 percent, and by 7 a.m., too.
It reminded me of the Yiddish proverb, “Man plans, God laughs.”
Last week I logged nearly 150 miles on the bike, and come Sunday evening the legs were lobbying for a bit of R&R. So although Monday was a beautiful day for the old bikey ridey, I checked the forecast for the rest of the week and said, “OK, I’ll take today off. Haul the glass to the recycler, put a new chain and cassette on the Voodoo Nakisi, whip up a bowl of hummus. And tomorrow I’ll do a nice, long ride.”
Get bulletproof backpacks on the cats? Dream on. I can’t even get them to stop napping in front of a window. Worse than sitting with your back to a door.
Ho, ho, etc.
Tuesday dawned warmish, bleak and breezy, and soon I had to close all the doors and windows I had just opened because the vertical blinds were clattering like skeletons dancing the Charleston.
It was the flip side of Sunday, when, after Saturday’s deluge, I added fenders to Herself’s bike and a rack trunk full of rain gear to my own.
Naturally, the only water we saw on our ride was confined neatly to roadside puddles and ditches.
Man plans, etc.
Dark mornings breed dark thoughts, especially for a lifelong news addict. For example, did you know that the hot back-to-school item is a bulletproof backpack?
Look for them at big-box retailers everywhere. I recommend shopping online until you get one, and maybe even afterward. See if you can find a new congressperson while you’re at it, one of those action figures, not the kind that just sits there between massacres, cashing checks while the NRA pulls its string.
“Thoughts and prayers … thoughts and prayers. …”
Speaking of which, I could use a few of those myself. The sun has finally made an appearance, and even though I don’t have my bulletproof backpack yet, I’m going out for a ride.
Looking down toward the valley from just below the tram.
Herself wanted to do a 30-mile ride this morning, so I laid out a loop east of Tramway that took in a few of the “fingers,” a scattering of popular short suburban climbs that rise from the northbound rollers toward the open space east of us.
Grind up, fly down, next finger. You get the idea.
As suburbs go, this one ain’t half bad.
We were not breaking any speed records, and we skipped more than a few fingers, as Herself is a 95-pound recreational cyclist on a 23-pound steel cyclocross bike, while I am a feeble old fart on (in this case) a 31-pound steel touring bike (before I strapped the Arkel TailRider full of spares, tools and rain jackets onto the rear rack).
Anyway, this young roadie comes roaring up on us as we were doddering along, and I’m expecting the blank fuck-you-I’m-training face, but what we get is a hearty greeting and a brief give-and-take before he rockets up the road.
A little further along, here he comes again. “I’m really not stalking you!” he shouts, then zooms off.
And again, a bit later: “OK, now you’re stalking me!” Zip, etc.
I’ll confess that I found this oddly cheering. There may be hope for the species after all.
Nor have I watched “American Idol,” “The Bachelor,” “American Ninja Warrior,” or “The Circus.”
I did, however, read Hank Stuever’s appraisal of the “debate.” And he said pretty much everything about it that I wanted to say, save for “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Somewhere in the Beyond, Hunter S. Thompson is fitting another cigarette into its holder, ordering another round of mescaline and margaritas, and chuckling to himself over having gotten it so right so long ago.
“Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”
