Leaf me be

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Hillborne on my trail.

Autumn remains delightful, if you avert your eyes from the nation’s capital.

I’ve been mixing things up a bit. For openers: riding my way through The Fleet. Six different bikes in a week, including the Rivendell Sam Hillborne, pictured Saturday on the Paseo de las Montañas Trail.

I’m also riding different routes, or old ones backasswards. More dirt, with the mango Steelman Eurocross yesterday and the red one today. Yeah, I know, embarrassment of riches and all that.

Off the bike, I’ve been revisiting neglected recipes, like pasta al cavolfiore from the “Moosewood Cookbook.” You want to add maybe a half teaspoon of a good ground red chile to the tomato puree for that one.

Another old fave — a conventional eggs-and-taters breakfast, generally reserved for Sunday — makes a nice change from the boring old oatmeal or yogurt. For Monday’s lunch, I’ll scramble a couple more eggs and dump them, any leftover spuds, a small handful of arugula, a scattering of diced tomato, and a sprinkle of sharpish cheddar, atop warm flour tortillas. Fold and eat.

If the spuds didn’t survive Sunday maybe I’ll whip up the makings for a classic tuna salad sammich a la Craig Claiborne. I leave out the red onions because Herself hates uncooked onions, and the capers because I hate capers. Instead I add some chopped bread-and-butter pickle chips, because we can both agree on those. Haven’t added any minced jalapeño yet, but I can see it happening. Possibly tomorrow. You can’t stop me!

Posole, in its most basic form.

Rooting through my recipe binder the other day I stumbled across one I’d gone to the trouble of printing, but couldn’t recall ever actually cooking. It’s a Greek stew, from Sarah DiGregorio, and once I started putting it together it came back to me. Why did I only cook it the one time? Very easy, very good, even better the next day, and nicely suited to the cooler weather.

But then, the basic posole I’m making as we speak is even easier, and like Sarah’s stew, improves with age. It takes about five minutes of prep and two hours of simmering. Even the Irish can manage it.

Meanwhile, I’m leaving our Halloween lights up for Thanksgiving. Take that, turkeys!

‘We have met the enemy,’ etc.

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments
Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech” revisited for the modern era.

“We have faults which we have hardly used yet.” — cartoonist Walt Kelly, from “The Right Freedom, for the Right People, in the Right Place, at the Right Time,” published in the fall 1955 edition of the University of Chicago’s Chicago Review

Choices.

At times when we cast our ballots it seems we’re doomed to choose between getting stomped by the Hell’s Angels or chain-whipped by the Gypsy Jokers when all we wanted to do was ride our motorcycles. Or decide whether we should buy our bacon and beans from Safeway or Albertsons when we feel peckish. Just another shift in the barrel, and the view through the bunghole rarely changes for the better.

There simply is no “good choice.”

“Boy, you sure get offered some shitty choices,” a Marine once said to me, and I couldn’t help but feel that what he really meant was that you didn’t get offered any at all. Specifically, he was just talking about a couple of C-ration cans, “dinner,” but considering his young life you couldn’t blame him for thinking that if he knew one thing for sure, it was that there was no one anywhere who cared less about what he wanted. — Michael Herr, “Breathing In,” from his Vietnam book “Dispatches”

Six decades later every can we open is full of worms. We couldn’t care less about what they want, and they feel likewise about what we want. Nobody loves us, everybody hates us, we’re gonna eat some worms. Thus we shit the bed that our forefathers built for us.

Oh, but we’ve done our research. A podcaster on YouTube, this gal on TikTok, a Facebook group. Even worse, some dipshit blogger.

Nope. Democracy is not a spectator sport. Sure, you can pick a side, be a fan, follow “your” team online, on TV, or even in the newspaper … if your town still has one, and informing the readership still outweighs entertaining an audience. But you didn’t pick a single person in the lineup, from the head coach right on down to the waterboys. “Your” team was presented to you by its owners, who won’t even give you a ball cap. Not for free, anyway.

Citizens of a republic have to come off the bench and find the time, somehow, to engage with The System: study its mechanisms, learn how (and whether) they work, decide who might be best qualified to pull its levers and punch its buttons, and dismiss the time-servers and shovel-leaners who always seem to be on a coffee break or beavering away at some more lucrative side hustle.

Many if not most of us gave that up long ago, just like that Marine gave up looking for Mom’s apple pie in those C-rat tins. There just aren’t enough hours in the day.

Examining voter turnout in 2020 and 2024 the Pew Research Center observed:

Most Americans are not regular voters. Even across the three most recent national elections, which featured higher-than-normal turnout, just 41% of adult citizens who were old enough to vote cast a ballot in all three. About one-in-four (26%) did not vote in any of them.

Nonvoters tend to be younger, with no college and lower family incomes, the Pew research indicates. So, the future’s not so bright that we need to wear shades at the old ballgame. Or so it seems to this geezer on the dole with his cowtown B.A. in journalism.

I could rave on, but it all seems kind of obvious, yeah? Back in the Day® there was a bumper sticker — a hippie riposte to the rednecks’ “America: Love It or Leave It” challenge — that read “America: Fix It or Fuck It.”

Hm. Which one do you think we picked? Pass the C-rats, bruh, maybe there’s some chicken salad in one of ’em instead of the usual.

O, brother. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 19 Comments
Some old traditions are worth revisiting.

I’ll spare you my “hot take” on the latest capitulation by the Democrats, noting only that if we were ever to get serious about governance in this Republic, we could revive the domestic splintery rail, tar, and feather industries in a fortnight. Maybe less.

Jesus H. Christ on a flatcar. I believe these eejits could fall into a barrel of tits and come out sucking their thumbs. Bringing a knife to a gunfight would be a remarkable escalation for this lot. A one-armed monkey could carve a better party out of a banana, using a single strand of al dente pasta.

Fuck these people. I’m going back to the commies. At least they go down swinging.

Meanwhile, to any who remain with the Jackasses: Primary ’em all, let God sort ’em out.

To the BikeCave!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
The BikeSignal appears in the foothills of the Gotham Mountains.

Always the Joker, hey?

Well, it can’t be politics 24/7 around here, even after a rare November blizzard of good news that nevertheless was not quite good enough to exorcise Beelzebozo from the body politic.

Denied the explosive hemorrhagic stroke of our dreams — well, mine, anyway, especially if it takes place on live TV — the Republic remains possessed. I’m surprised he’s not trying to grab the Beaver Moon with his stubby little fingers. We’re gonna need a bigger priest.

Happily, the weather has been spectacular for the distracting bikey ridey, with highs in the 70s and hardly any wind, which is unheard of in New Mexico. Shucks, it’s already just two degrees short of 60 at 9 in the a.m.

While we wait for winter to set in, if it ever does, I’ve been dialing back the weekly mileage and airing out some dusty machinery. Getting the callup in the past couple weeks: Rivendell’s Sam Hillborne, both Steelman Eurocrosses (it is cyclocross season), the Jones, DBR Axis TT, and New Albion Privateer.

The black sheep in my velo-family.

Today may see the Voodoo Wazoo getting a little dirt on its knobs. Or p’raps the Bianchi Zurigo Disc, which as the only alloy-framed, carbon-forked, SRAM-controlled steed in the shed is definitely the odd man out, especially when it’s sporting 32mm Conti slicks, as it is at the moment.

Whenever I wander off into these seasonal inspection tours, in the back of my mind I’m thinking idly about thinning the velo-herd. But I notice that despite my best intentions there remains nary a hook unburdened in the garage with a few more two-wheelers parked on the deck.

N+1, baby; n+1.