The Irish should not be entrusted with any technology more advanced than the hoe and wheelbarrow.
Looks like I picked a good day to ignore the news in favor of fiddling with the dark corners of GarageBand (yeah, take cover, you might have to endure another podcast before much longer).
The homepage of The New York Times looks like the mounts of all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse shat on it in a driving rain, which oddly enough is what we’re experiencing at the moment here in Duke City. The rain, not the horseshit, though that can be had aplenty too, if I am not otherwise occupied, which I am.
Even Charles P. Pierce is starting to make me nervous. When the headline is “Saddened, Angry, Sickened, Defeated,” it’s a solid tip that the guffaws will be few and far between.
Me, I’m just glad I don’t have any pressing deadlines. It was tough to bring the funny for the final Bicycle Retailer of 2016, and while delving into the mysteries of GarageBand is giving me a headache, it is in a largely unused corner of what remains of my brain.
McDougall collected Sherman after a Mennonite neighbor discovered the poor critter penned up in a cramped shed. He was, in a word, a mess:
Its fur was crusted with dung, turning its white belly black. In places the fur had torn away, revealing raw skin almost certainly infested with parasites. He was barrel-shaped and bloated from poor feed and his mouth was a mess, with one tooth so rotten it fell right out when touched. Worst of all were his hooves, so monstrously overgrown they looked like swim fins.
McDougall was something of a mess himself not that long ago, a self-described “broken-down ex-athlete battling constant injuries and 50 excess pounds.” Running saved him, and he wondered whether it might do the same for Sherman.
I’d stumbled across a ragtag crew in the Rocky Mountains who kept alive an old miners’ tradition of running alongside donkeys in races as long as 30 miles. Was it possible? Could I bring Sherman back from this calamity so that he and I, side by side, could run an ultramarathon?
I immediately pinged my pal Hal Walter, who has been doing this sort of thing for as long as I’ve known him, and even longer, which is to say for the better part of quite some time.
He replied that yep, he knew about the column, and might even be a part of it down the road, since McDougall interviewed him for the series.
“Might be the only time I’m in the NYT this lifetime, though I did tour the building during a high school journalism field trip,” he added.
I’m looking forward to the rest of the articles in this series. Maybe we’ll learn some way of rescuing that other crippled donk and teaching it how to run.
Around and around and around we go, and where we stop, nobody knows.
Sometimes you have to start the machine to stop it.
The ticking in my head seemed a little ominous today, so after I finished a “Shop Talk” cartoon for Bicycle Retailer, consulted with a few colleagues,and walked The Boo, I stepped away from the Mac for a short, “fast” cyclocross ride, in which “fast” was in comparison to, oh, I don’t know — continental drift?
Anyway, it was a beautiful afternoon, nearly everyone I encountered seemed to be in a good mood for no good reason, and as a skull-flusher I recommend it to you without hesitation. The world will still be there when you get back.
My parents never divorced, though I sometimes wished they would.
We were not a close-knit clan, especially after I hit my teenage years. Mom and Dad didn’t seem to like each other much by then, and being an ungrateful little shit I found them an impediment to self-exploration, so I spent a lot of time away from home, either living in my head or completely out of it.
Some of my friends’ parents had split up, and their lives seemed very different from mine. Sometimes it was the dad who had left, and sometimes the mom, but no matter which player had left the game there was always a hole in the disciplinary line you could drive a Mack truck through. A one-parent household infested by teenagers can give you a few hints about how anarchy might play out in the real world.
And if mom or dad remarried? Sometimes that could get even wilder, because when conventional weapons failed the kid could always drop The Big One: “You’re not my [insert absent birth parent here]!” That would always throw a 20-megaton monkey wrench into the social order and open up a little maneuvering room, though it also left Ground Zero slightly radioactive for a good long while, if not forever.
Fast-forward a few years and it was my friends who were getting divorced, sometimes more than once. Heartbreak, vitriol and vengeance; wash, rinse and repeat. Families shattered and scattered to the four winds as I observed from a different perspective, but still a safe if not exactly comfortable distance.
Now here we are on the brink of a national breakup, and I think I’m finally starting to get a personal feel for the experience.
Dad seemed OK, an eat-your-spinach type and a bit of a geek, to be sure, plus a little too shameless about thumbing through your journal to see what you were really up to while you were pretending to be a good citizen. Still, he was smart, and he tried to be cool, and sometimes he even succeeded.
But one day he’s gone and this other dude is sitting in his chair.
You have brothers and sisters, and some are saying how they’re glad Old Dad is gone and how New Dad is a real wild man, works in TV or real estate or something, and anyway he has a lot of money and we’re all gonna get some. And some others are saying, no, fuck this guy, he talks a line of shit but that’s all it is, and have you noticed he never really seems to go to an office or anything? Plus his kids are all dicks and his friends are all creeps, and we don’t like the way he looks at our littlest sister.
For sure he thinks he’s tough, tough enough to shove your brothers around, anyway, especially the adopted one. And you know one day soon he’s gonna have a go at you, too, and he looks soft, but he’s still pretty big and it’s been a long time since you got into a fight.
And as you look around the table, waiting for the deal to finally go down, that’s when you realize that some of your brothers and sisters are OK, some are assholes, and the rest don’t give a shit who Dad is or what he does as long as they don’t miss the next episode of “Game of Thrones.”
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