When I haven’t been watching crazed seditionists screeching about immigrants living high on the dog or feeding less startling dishes of my own to visiting in-laws there’s been plenty of time for the ol’ bikey ridey around The Duck! City this past week.
The turnaround point.
On Wednesday my geezer brethren and I pedaled south and east through Tijeras and up to the Morning Star Grocery, just past Oak Flat on NM 337.
This annual outing is one of those “your mileage may vary” deals. A couple of us start from home; for me, the ride from El Rancho Pendejo and back is 42 miles with about 2,300 feet of vertical gain. Others drive to the meetup spot, a corporate grocery at Tramway and Central.
Our youngest (59) and oldest (82) riders were a little concerned about completing the entire ride this year. The first was undertrained due to travel and other distractions, while the second confided he felt a little less snappy on the hills lately.
But both soldiered on and finished with honor. Huzzah to one and all.
Miss Mia does her Bill the Cat impression.
With the Morning Star ride and a few lesser outings in the rear view I’ll top 150 miles for this week, which is a lot for me. Also, a good excuse to eat everything in the house. Veggie quesadillas, bolognese over egg noodles, pizza, you name it.
Not the cat, though. Not even with homemade pico de gallo.
“They’re eating what?” exclaims Miss Mia Sopaipilla.
In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.
You know how you can tell this is bullshit? Because if it were actually happening, TFG would have a piece of the action, through a shell company incorporated in Delaware with headquarters in Saudi Arabia and a board of directors drawn from Interpol’s Red Notices.
Remember Trump Steaks? Ran out of the money at Aqueduct and straight into your refrigerator.
How much capital would it take to start snapping up struggling animal shelters and add drive-through windows? Poach the Chihuahua that used to shill for Taco Bell? (That’s a cookin’ joke, son!) Better yet, make J.D. Vance wear a Chihuahua suit, see if the hillbilly sonofabitch can generate a little positive cash flow. The dog’s cuter, but Vance is already on the payroll. Put Stephen Miller on the job; he’d deep-fry his own mother if he had one.
Before you could sing a bar of “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” TFG would have franchises out the wazoo. Most of them along the border, of course. Your customers are your workforce and vice versa. It’s practically a perpetual-motion money machine.
It’s not about the bicycle, unless of course it is.
During Herself’s recent visit to Aspen she was compelled to endure a bit of the hee and the haw and the ho ho ho directed at her bicycle, a 2006 Soma Double Cross.
My own Soma Double Cross.
As you know, we are not slaves to velo-fashion here at El Rancho Pendejo. Shucks, I have been known to turn up for a road ride aboard my own slightly newer Double Cross, which has cycled through a number of incarnations — cyclocross bike; light touring bike with fenders, rack, and sacks; townie with swept-back bars; you name it.
At present it’s an eight-speed, “all-road,” drop-bar bike with two bottle cages, IRD Cafam cantis, Dura-Ace bar-end shifters, a triple XT crank (46/34/24T) with Ultegra/XT derailleurs and an 11-34T cassette for a low end of 24x34T (19.2 gear inches), bar-end shifters, Shimano 600 brake levers, IRD Cafam cantis, Mavic Open Pro rims (Dura-Ace hub up front, Velo-Orange behind), and 700×36 Donnelly X’Plor MSO adventure knobbies. Just the vehicle for a short dash around the Elena Gallegos Open Space or a rolling road ride through the foothills.
If you’re me, anyway.
Herself rarely leaves pavement and never rides in foul weather, and so a bike’s capacity for fat-tire fun and fenders isn’t even on her radar. Especially when we consider that while her Double Cross is a 42cm and mine a 55, hers actually outweighs mine by (wait for it) three pounds.
Steel is real — real heavy, if you’re a 5-footer and not rocking the lightweight components.
Don’t get me wrong. The Double Cross is a fine frameset, and I’d buy another in a heartbeat if Soma still did a canti version. But we outfitted hers on the cheap.
She’s pushing about 1.2 pounds more rubber than I am with every pedal stroke, and hasn’t got that 24T granny for the steeps. Plus her saddle, handlebar, seat post and wheels are all heavier than mine. Ditto the controls: chunky 105 STI brifters instead of my bar-cons and pre-Ultegra brake levers.
So, even though I’ve been dropped like an empty bidon by dudes rocking raggedy-ass kit and rattle-canned DUI-mobiles, I can see how the “you get the lunch, I’ll buy the bicycles” types might find Herself’s whip a tad plebeian.
In my defense, I will note that at 5 feet tall and under a hundy, she’s hard to fit. Still, since she makes all the money around here while I do … uh … hold on, gimme a sec’, it’ll come to me. …
Shit. Not much, it seems. I should probably do a bit of shopping, hey?
Call it an impulse, if only because I’ve heard one pitch from a friend of a friend of a friend for something along the lines of a Bianchi Impulso GRX 600. Anyone else got a recommendation they’d like to share?
If the TV hucksters are going to pitch these affairs as though they were sporting events I think the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency should drug-test the competitors.
I’ve been in rooms with people who behaved like Felonious Punk did last night, thanks to various and sundry powders and potions, and we never once thought about running them for president. We thought about running away from them before the cops came, is what.
One dark night in the Seventies I didn’t run fast enough and wound up in the Denver sneezer with a couple of pals. At some point around stupid-thirty our jailers emptied the drunk tank, stuffing all of us minor offenders into cells, so a PCP fiend could have the run of the joint without mayhem.
Dude is bouncing off the walls with his eyes out on stalks, screeching like a banshee about this, that, and the other, when finally a screw marches in and purrs, “If you don’t settle down I’m going to have to consider you an asshole.”
As he turns to leave our duster suddenly had a moment of clarity.
“What’s an asshole to you?” he asks.
At which point one of our cellmates shouts, “You an asshole, motherfucker! Now shut the fuck up! We tryin’ to get some sleep!”
It’s a shame these two dudes weren’t moderating last night’s “debate.”
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