Housecats gone bad

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment
Cyclo-cross, schmyclo-cross, lemme sleep.
Cyclo-cross, schmyclo-cross, lemme sleep.

I used to be hard core. Lately I’m all brittle exterior and soft interior, like a Tootsie Pop, but not as sweet. Why, there was a time not so long ago that if the temperature rose to the freezing point, I was out the door like a congressman fleeing the vice squad. I had my own private cyclo-cross course, and at 8800 feet, too. Used sunning rattlesnakes for obstacles and carried a pistol just in case the course decided to redesign itself in a hostile fashion.

Somewhere along the road from there to here I turned weaker than 7-Eleven coffee. Maybe it was moving from the mountains back to town, or switching my pet preference from dogs to cats. Dogs must go out, we will go out, let me out, for the love of God. Cats find the one sunny spot in the house and cover it like Sherwin-Williams. Fuck a bunch of winter, I shit in a box. What’s t’eat around here, anyway?

But there must be some small, vestigal hint of a whiff of mutt in me somewhere, because today I ventured out for 90 minutes on the Eurocross despite a high pegged right at freezing and a dampish breeze that took the wind chill 8 degrees lower. Rode the sonofabitch over to Palmer Park and zipped around the single-track, skirting the occasional icy bits when possible and generously yielding trail to various porky nitwits sporting headphones and unleashed dogs.

Then I rolled home, whipped up a skillet full of peppers, potatoes, chicken, parsley, onion and garlic, topped it with some hard-boiled eggs, and gobbled it all down, refusing to share so much as a single solitary nibble with the housecats. Stand back and let the big dog eat, you pussies.

Stimulate my package

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Don't leave home without it.
Don't leave home without it.

I’m not an economist. I don’t even play one on TV. So I don’t feel qualified to comment on the arcane machinations under way in Congress. But I do like this economic-stimulus proposal from Dan Newman, owner of a retail food store in Seattle: Send every U.S. taxpaper a $2,000 debit card.

Sure, the Repugs will call it socialism, a convenient catch-all phrase meaning “anything Rush Limbaugh doesn’t like.” But if I got me two large, I’m buyin’ something with it — goods, services or both — and someone has to provide them. Jobs, baby, jobs.

Case in point: Right now I’m not enjoying my usual week of “training camp”  at McDowell Mountain Regional Park outside Fountain Hills, Arizona, in part because of extended labor negotiations and in part because we just spent a ton of cash repairing Herself’s Subaru. But give me a debit card with a picture of Lady Liberty on it and I’m a gone dog, enriching gas stations, brewpubs, hotels, restaurants and campgrounds in three states.

New computer? Same old problem. This ol’ sumbitch limps worse than a three-legged hound with a butt full of buckshot, and I’d put it down in a New York minute if I had a brand-new one in line to replace it, but we seem to be short of simoleons in these parts. Where’s my ObamaCard®, honey? Whaddaya mean, there’s an elephant sitting on it? Well, shoot the fucker and at least we’ll have meat in the freezer!

Dog day afternoon

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments

Gave myself the day off in honor of William S. Burroughs’ birthday. I can do that, because Mad Dog Media is a one-dog shop. Unsnap the leash and off I go.

It being 60-something and sunny, I broke out Old Reliable, my Reynolds 853 Steelman Eurocross, and rode the trail to Fountain and back. It’s about a two-hour U-turn, if you throw in a few didos on the return leg, like a lap of Monument Valley Park for extra vitamin-D absorption.

A couple largish downed trees this side of Highway 85 require a quick zig and zag; a short pair of run-ups around a washed-out concrete climb follow. Other than that it’s smooth sailing. A guy could do it on a road bike. Not me, though. Not as long as I have five ‘cross bikes taking up space in the garage. Put those fat bastards to work and save the skinny rubber for the streets.

Ike got a fine crop of tulips to keep her company last spring.
Ike got a fine crop of tulips to keep her company last spring.

A bit of drama greeted me on my return home. An elderly neighbor needed an assist with her equally aged greyhound, which has been having balance issues and today lost control of its front legs. Being creakily past my own prime I commiserated briefly and then helped load the dog into her car for a trip to the vet. She was expecting bad news and got it. The vet prescribed a dose of steroids, but confessed it was a delaying action, the equivalent of locking up the cantis on a sandy descent. You may slow that long downhill slide but you ain’t gonna stop it.

Upset me, it did, in part because I have a beloved cat — Ike, a.k.a. Chairman Meow — buried in the back yard. I miss any one of my departed animal pals more than all of my deceased relatives. So I showered the grit off and went to Trinity Brewing Company for a couple of IPAs and a bowl of their mac’ and cheese. I’d never been there, and the online reviews were not encouraging, but I was not in the mood for my usual haunts, so I took a chance and it paid off. Good beer — the brewmaster used to whip up the popskull over at Bristol Brewing — and a friendly, attentive staff. Just what the doctor — or, in this case, the vet — ordered.

BRAIN damage

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

Ho, ho. My colleagues at Bicycle Retailer & Industry News have finally bitten the new-media bullet and launched a blog, in which they mention the likes of Interbike’s Rich Kelly, Masiguy Tim Jackson and BikePortland’s Jonathan Maus — while saying nary a word about your humble narrator, their very own columnist and cartoonist, who has been blogging about this, that and the other since before the millennium.

Hell, I have archived posts dating back to three years before BRAIN wrote its first story on bike-biz bloggery. I’m on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, Blogger and WordPress and Hostcentric. I’m so Web 2.0, I’m virtually digital. Or digitally virtual. And yet I get no respect. Oh, the humanity.

Late update: BRAIN honchette Megan Tompkins feels my pain and responds to my NastyGram® thusly: “Sorry for failing to mention one of our own in our initial post. I didn’t mean to overlook you; indeed I was hoping that we might be able to collaborate between the two blogs. How can we work together to drive traffic to both our blogs?”

This is exactly what BRAIN needs in order to more tightly wrap its sucker-tipped, Cthulhu-like tentacles around the rocklike thighs of cycling trade journalism: regular congress with a minor-league blog whose proprietor says “Fuck” more often than The Dude in “The Big Lebowski.” Naturally, I am happy to oblige, and insist that all of my readers — yes, all three of you — visit the BRAIN Blog at least thrice daily, clicking this and that until your mouse fingers bleed.