Bear with me

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 31 Comments
It’s all downhill from here. That itty bitty green stripe in the distance is the bosque.

More distraction: Sick of being a spectator at our latest national disaster, I hightailed it to the hills yesterday.

It was a short ride, just 25 miles, but a hilly one, meandering up and down the foothills streets before tackling the star of the show, the short, steep climb to La Cueva picnic grounds.

There’s bears in them thar hills.

The road surface is what we like to call “heavy,” which is to say the chip-seal is mostly thick tar and old boulders. But the views are pretty damn’ fine and well worth the effort to get there.

School having started, there was mostly no one at La Cueva but me. One young gent, who was backpacking his kid up and down the trails, said he was maintaining a wildlife camera up there. He’s getting plenty of bear pix, but no cougars. Might check the bars down by the university, I thought.

The lack of cougars aside, it was nice to take a break from that ruptured sewer line disguised as the news that leads to my MacBook, and thence to the overworked leach field in my head.

And speaking of news, let’s: I can write all day long about the walking, talking Superfund site farting Mickey D’s into the ordinarily rarified atmosphere of the Oval Office like some malignant tuba, but you folks can get better, smarter stuff elsewhere, and plenty of it, too. I’m starting to feel as though we already enjoy an overabundance of words on this topic and rather than picking the scab over and over again we might be better served by taking action to resolve the problem.

So what do you come here for? Politics? Bike stuff? General yuks? Filthy language? Pet pix? Let me know your preferences in comments. But do keep in mind that it’s my shop, and I’m likely to stock many of my favorite products no matter what the customers crave.

Fire on the mountain, lightning in the air

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 11 Comments
Just another gorgeous sunset in Duke City.

Last evening it seemed that the whole ’hood was out to walk their dogs and enjoy the sunset, which was on the epic side.

The monsoons continue, on and off, and when high clouds and hydrocarbons team up you can get quite a show.

This proved a nice distraction from the news, which unlike the hydrocarbons does not give me a warm feeling.

But you have to turn your gaze away from the sky sometime, and the view down here on the ground ain’t exactly picture-postcard.

We have a lazy, casually vicious, unhinged, racist ignoramus in the White House, surrounded by a cadre of fascists who are at least as mean as he is and considerably smarter. Or they think they are, anyway.

They have a base (adj., lacking the higher qualities of mind or spirit; see also ignoble) whose adherents seems to suffer little in the way of consequences — not even a prompt, stern talking-to from their president — when they turn up armed and dangerous in public. One wonders how law enforcement might respond if a troop of Black Panthers carrying AK-47s attends one of these little Klan-bakes.

Yes, we have a firmly worded right to free speech. But it seems to me that if you fetch clubs, shields, chemical irritants, helmets and firearms to the rally, you’re not really there for the speechifyin’.

And yes, the oft-litigated right to bear arms applies here, too. But if you can’t make your case in a public forum without an AR-15 slung over one shoulder, I’d suggest you don’t have much of an argument. What the right forgets is that the left can bear arms, too. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 21st-century Abraham Lincoln Brigade at the next Nuremberg picnic.

It’s all going to get much worse before it gets even a little bit better. Politicians, preachers and captains of industry are putting some daylight between them and Bozosaurus Rex, but he’s just a symptom. Treating the disease will require heroic measures.