My (Euro)cross to bear

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments
Blazing saddles: Not Mongo, but mango.
Blazing saddles: Not Mongo, but mango.

More cycling yesterday. I think I’ve finally broken my annual post-Interbike slump.

For some reason, probably that we’re suddenly in the middle of October, I decided to pull my favorite Steelman Eurocross off its hook, give it a bit of a wash and brush-up (plus two new Michelin Jets), and go chase myself around the Elena Gallegos Open Space for an hour or so.

I like to enjoy this sort of foolishness on a weekday, during business hours, the trails come weekends being thick with body-armored double-boingers, texting dog-walkers, the iPlod People and other impediments to forward motion. No need to have an audience while one struggles up a rocky pitch in the 36×26, with 700×30 tires.

One of these days I need to give the old beast more than some fresh rubber. Nine-speed Ultegra, maybe? That eight-speed STI is the velo-equivalent of stone knives and bearskins these days, though it seemed just the ticket back when I still had a song on my lips and a spring in my steps.

Let me forget about today until tomorrow

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun, it’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run.
Though you might hear laughin’, spinnin’, swingin’ madly across the sun, it’s not aimed at anyone, it’s just escapin’ on the run.

I probably should have been conspiring with my fellow journalists about how best to speed the ongoing decline and fall of Ronald McDonald McTrump, but I felt like riding a bike, so I did that instead.

Anyway, it doesn’t look to me as though this virulent orange ball of flatulence needs my help to sink slowly in the west, into a sewage lagoon of its own making.

When I got back home I cranked up iTunes and worked my way through my admittedly limited Bob Dylan collection (“Blonde On Blonde,” “Blood On the Tracks,” “Bringing It All Back Home,” and “Highway 61 Revisited”).

I’m not sure ol’ Bob merits the Nobel Prize for Literature, but right offhand I can’t think of anyone else who has it coming, either. I know that I like him, and so I’m happy for him, and shall defer in matters literary to Thomas McGuane, whose opinion on Dylan (from “Nothing But Blue Skies”) I have poached before:

No one compares with this guy, thought Frank. I feel sorry for the young people of today with their stupid fucking tuneless horseshit; that may be a generational judgment but I seriously doubt it.

 

 

Fears of a clown

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Send in the clown(s).
Send in the clown(s). (Lifted from fanpop.com)

Goddamnit, I guess we’re gonna have to watch tonight’s “town hall debate” between The Hilldebeast and whichever Ronald McDonald McTrump decides to show up, if any.

I can’t say I’m happy about it. Herself and I had agreed before the first matchup had even ended that we would watch no others.

But when I see Insane Clown Pussy furiously digging himself ever deeper into a hole, my natural inclination is to stand on the lip and watch. Maybe pee a little. OK, a lot. Call it “trickle-down journalism.”

Charlie Pierce says this big orange chicken has been a long time coming to roost, and I believe him, having once worked in a newsroom full of young, apparently intelligent people who were all hellbent on voting for St. Ronnie of Hollywood.

Will he lay a golden egg on stage, or will the end product be something entirely different, yet all too familiar? Don’t touch that dial.

The sky is crying

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
Can you see the tears roll down the street?
Can you see the tears roll down the street?

This is what we have today. Heaven must be weeping over the stumbles of the Chosen One, who spake loudly and profanely of his desire to be fruitful and multiply with ladies of the female persuasion to whom he was not bound by holy matrimony.

Some of the lesser rats are leaping over the side of this leaky, gold-plated yacht, but it’s too early to tell whether they’ll swim to safety or sink like furry little stones.

The fattest rodents remain on deck, however, with dampened pinkies and flared nostrils testing the wind. Is that water down there or just more of the shit we’re already in, only deeper?

Paul “Lyin'” Ryan is stuck in a Shylockian crisis of his own making (“O, my daughter! O, my ducats!”). He wants it bad in 2020, but does he look principled or premeditated if he rescinds his support now, despite all the other crimes against the Republic committed by Agent Orange?

It’s enough to give a man the blues, for sure.