The Devil is in the details

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Old Pueblo Road, just south of Hanover Road.
Winding down a three-day tour of Colorado in 2012.

I’m a sucker for a good road-trip story.

“On the Road.” “Travels with Charley.” “Blue Highways.” “Not Fade Away.” The list goes on and on and on.

Here’s another one, from Colum McCann, author of “Let the Great World Spin.”

Headlined “The Church of the Open Road” — perhaps a riff on “The Church of the Rotating Mass,” which may be a Maurice “Dirt Rag” Tierney creation — it’s McCann’s recollection of a bike tour some four decades ago. On the road to nowhere, or so he thought when he set out.

A Catholic when he began, he encountered tiny Louisiana chapels and Texas megachurches, Southern Baptists and holy rollers (no pun intended). Slept in a pew, worked in a church camp. Inclined to listening, open to revelation, he collected stories as he went.

I won’t spoil this story by summarizing it. Give it a read.

Also, cast not your eyes upon the illustration. There may be some hidden meaning in there, but if so, it is obscured by a lack of historical verisimilitude. Forty years ago bicycles had neither integrated brake/shift levers nor disc brakes (especially not on the drive side). They did, however, have chainrings (and chains), freewheels, pedals, and external cables.

A journey of a thousand miles may begin with a single pedal stroke. But for Christ’s’ sake, you gotta have the pedals.

First 100 days, blah blah blah

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 4 Comments
“Wake me when it’s my turn in the litter box..”

Much chin music among the chattering classics lately re: the hackneyed “his first 100 days” bushwa.

This is the ho, and also the hum.

In his first 100 minutes he took a giant shit on us and then wiped his ass with the Constitution.

We’re just waiting for him to come out of the toilet now, is what.

Maybe the old bastard nodded off in there. Smells like he died in there. Christ, light a match, can’t ya?

Crosstalk

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Some Seattle crosswalks are playing a tune you can dance to. | KUOW Photo/Monica Nickelsburg

As all old comrades know, the political mantra around here is, “Remember, kids, when you’re smashing the State, keep a smile on your lips and a song in your heart.”

So, today’s Hero of the Revolution medal goes to whoever hacked a few Seattle crosswalk signals to play a deepfake of Jeff Bezos’ voice urging caution … not when crossing the street, but when taxing the rich.

Instead of the little robotic voice that tells you to wait until it’s safe to cross, at least five intersections in Seattle last week played something like this: “Hi, I’m Jeff Bezos. This crosswalk is sponsored by Amazon Prime with an important message. Please don’t tax the rich, otherwise all the other billionaires will move to Florida, too.”

The Seattle recordings ended with a song by comedian Bo Burnham.

Too bad there isn’t a video component to these easily-hacked signals. Someone could add a clip from Monty Python’s sketch “The Ministry of Silly Walks,” with deepfakes of Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, et al., screeching about how they’ll all goosestep off to Epstein’s Island, submarine bunkers, or Mars if they’re not left unmolested to use all us little people as household help and/or fuck-puppets.

Call it “The Ministry of Silly Shits.”

Smoke ’em if you got ’em

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 27 Comments
“Does that mean new pope or new SecDef?”

I see The Media have a couple new chew toys this morning — a brain-dead SecDef and a completely dead pope.

That should fill The Void for a nanosecond or two.

Now we await the various conclaves. If we see black smoke from the Pentagon, that means that SecDef Yog-Sothoth has burned his Signal passwords and has gone back to using NextDoor for all secure communications involving war plans, pub crawls, and no-strings hookups.

White smoke means that Baby Daddy Musk has sent him on ahead to set up shop on Mars.

Red smoke from the Office of the Vice President means that Hillbilly Boy has failed to convince his god that he had nothing to do with his pope’s death, even though he was one of the last people to see him alive.

Fwooosh! Straight From servicing Beelzebozo to serving Beelzebub in one seriously hot DeeCee minute. Not exactly upward mobility, is it? Sure as shit ain’t the golden escalator Beelzebozo rode down back in 2015, either. More like that elevator ride that Mickey Rourke took at the end of “Angel Heart.”

And the pope? Well … Dad was a ring-kisser, Mom was a Presbyterian, and I turned out to be neither. So I haven’t paid much attention to Holy Mother Church since 1978, when I was still a newspaperman in Bibleburg and we burned through a couple of popes in a month.

If I recall correctly, which is unlikely considering the circumstances, we had finished newspapering for the evening and had retired to Jinx’s Place for cocktails.

A late arrival burst in, as they will do, and told us the pope had just died.

“Catch up,” we replied. “That was last month.”

“That was the old guy,” our informant revealed. “This was the new guy.”

And soon we had a new new guy, to be dubbed “J2P2,” because back then newspaper people knew how to treat anyone who claimed to speak with God’s voice, whether they were in Vatican City or DeeCee.

The cruellest month

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
“And now, here’s T.S. Eliot with the weather!”

I’m gonna go out on a snowy limb here and say it was probably a good idea that the Soma Pescadero and I had our maiden voyage yesterday rather than today.

Yesterday it was knickers and arm warmers; today it’s green tea and bloggery.

Cruel it isn’t, though. Not at the northern edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, where we haven’t seen any sort of precip’ in the better part of quite some time.

Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink
Amongst the rock one cannot stop or think
Sweat is dry and feet are in the sand
If there were only water amongst the rock
Dead mountain mouth of carious teeth that cannot spit
Here one can neither stand nor lie nor sit
There is not even silence in the mountains
But dry sterile thunder without rain

Whew! That Eliot feller would’ve made one helluva blogger, amirite? “The poet’s mind,” he once said, “is in fact a receptacle for seizing and storing up numberless feelings, phrases, images, which remain there until all the particles which can unite to form a new compound are present together.”

He also wrote: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.”

F’sure, bruh. Same thing m’self.