Flag on the play: unpresidential conduct, personally foul.
The last time I took in one of those shabby little traveling carnivals that prowl the nation’s strip malls and fairgrounds was back in the Nixon years, when Hunter S. Thompson and I were both spending a lot of time, arguably too much of it, completely out of our minds.
The more things change, etc.
Hunter was, of course, a pro, and getting good copy out of his trips, especially that long one spent covering the 1972 presidential campaign for Rolling Stone that turned into “Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.”
Me? I was strictly amateur hour, and as two hits of mescaline sent me reeling around that dime-store Disneyland across from the old Rustic Hills Mall in Bibleburg my only creation was an unbridgeable chasm between me and my horrified ex-girlfriend.
I think she was my ex-girlfriend. If she wasn’t, right at that particular moment, she soon would be.
A half-century later I have absolutely no recollection of what I saw that so enthralled me. But whatever it was, I doubt it could hold a candle to what’s happening at the White House today, Flag Day, in the Year of Our Lard 2026. Especially since I no longer indulge in the various brain erasers of my youth.
If only Hunter were still around to give us the 411 on this shit. We’ll have to settle for what he wrote way back when.
This may be the year when we finally come face to face with ourselves; finally just lay back and say it — that we are really just a nation of 220 million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns, and no qualms at all about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable. … Jesus! Where will it end? How low do you have to stoop in this country to be president?
The ever-readable Mike Ferrentino has a meditation on “garbage miles” in his “Beggars Would Ride” column over at NSMB.com.
No spoilers. Pop over and have a squint. I will say only that his thoughts on the topic have evolved over the decades, because he is mos def one of the higher primates.
This photo was taken three days before my 36th birthday. I was single, I had a job, and yes, that is a ponytail you see peeking out of the back of my helmet. Photo by Larry Beckner | The New Mexican
I first encountered the concept of garbage miles back in the Eighties, while racing bikes out of Fanta Se. Logging a ton of miles I was, and getting ruthlessly flogged on race day by people doing half my weekly average, or less.
“The fuck?” I inquired.
“Too many junk miles,” they replied.
Junk miles, garbage miles, all samey same. Unfocused and thus unworthy. Or so they said, the rotten, podium-hogging sonsabitches.
But not me. Because whenever I was in the saddle spinning I was not parked at the The New Mexican‘s copy desk, where I had to log many junk miles indeed to underwrite my cycling habit. Many, many of them.
At least the bike miles, like crucifixion, got me out in the open air.
Once we moved to Bibleburg in fall 1991 I kept it up. The Sept. 15 entry in my training journal after a 157.5-mile week was: “A few respectable miles. Nice to not work — nothing like a job for fucking up your training.”
The fabled 115 ride from B-burg to Penrose and back, circa 1995 or thereabouts.
“Training,” he calls it. This is the hee, and also the haw. Oh, I was riding on road and off, first with Rainbow Racing, then later with the Mad Dogs. And I was running regularly, even doing a little inline skating and snowshoeing because I was freelancing pieces to a sports-and-fitness outfit in Boulder between my chores for VeloNews (see, I was actually trying to work and earn, kinda, sorta).
But at my first few Colorado cyclocrosses I was either OTB or DFL, eventually settling into a fairly reliable fourth-place kind of fella, out of the money yet very much in the way. Seventh of 11 finishers at the state championships at Chatfield State Park that year, after which I called it a season.
Too many junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.
Oh, I got better. Or maybe they got worse, as one of the fast guys mused in my presence after I finally managed to finish a race in front of him. In any case, by the mid-Nineties I could podium at a ’cross every now and then, even win, rarely, if the weather got truly evil and the fast guys stayed home.
Solo on the home course.
This could’ve been because I actually trained for cyclocross, which by this time was the only cycling discipline I really cared about.
I worked on technique, ran a ton to counter my lack of snap in the saddle, and even built my own course at altitude (at the base of our 43-acre plot at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe in CrustyTucky).
During the seven years we lived there I rode a ’cross bike just about everywhere, because pavement was miles away and when I finally got to it I didn’t want to be herding the old mountain bike with its 26-inch knobbies and boingy fork. Though I missed its 24-tooth granny ring while cursing my way up the long dirt mile back to the house, 430 feet up from the washboarded county road.
Dogging it at Chatfield.
Not a lot of junk miles in CrustyTucky.
In those years I logged my junk miles behind the wheel of a Toyota pickup, with my bikes in the bed. Our Mad Dog cyclocrosses were in B-burg, a 150-mile round trip from home base. The bulk of the state race series meant an even longer slog up the Front Strange, to Littleton, Denver, Franktown, Boulder, Mead, and Fort Collins. The weather was frequently wintry, masters were always first to race, and more than once to make the start I had to hit town the day before, overnighting in some low-rent motel.
Talk about your junk miles.
After a few years of that my training logs crumbled into random entries followed by none at all. It was starting to feel a whole lot like work — which was also suffering in part because the cycling community in CrustyTucky consisted of me, myself and I. It felt like being sentenced to Stationary Trainer Without Parole. I was taking all the pulls and yet going nowhere. In terms of fiscal and mental health it seemed prudent to seek out a few voices that weren’t coming from inside my head.
Dennis the Menace and Dr. Schenkenstein take the long view atop Bear Creek East, a once-active cyclo-cross venue.
In those first years back in Bibleburg I had a good crew. Quite a few of the Mad Dogs owned the clocks we punched and could rearrange at least one business day a week to log junk miles and devise solutions to the various crises facing the world (you’re welcome). Big Bill “Shut Up and Ride” McBeef and his bro Other Bill. Usuk and The Geek. Dr. Schenkstein and Dennis the Menace. The Old Town Bike Shop crew. And the rest of you lot; you know who you are. So in 2002 we went back there.
Took me right back to my riding roots it did. I no longer felt as though everything was uphill and into the wind in all directions. A couple years later I quit racing because I didn’t need it anymore. I had my junk miles. Garbage miles. Whatevs.
The O’Grady family mansion, circa 2025. I like what the latest owners have done with the place.
When someone asks me, “Where are you from?” I reply: “We were an Air Force family. Moved around a lot. I’m not really ‘from’ anywhere.”
But if I am “from” somewhere, it’s probably Colorado Springs.
Several versions of me have lived there off and on since 1967, when the old man got transferred for the final time, from Randolph AFB, Texas, to Ent AFB, Colo.
The Mitchell High School swim team in 1970, the year we went 11-0. Find the dork, win a prize.
Junior-high dork. High-school swimmer, gradually making the transition from dork to drinker and doper. College dropout sampling the blue-collar lifestyle. Rookie newspaperman. Rookie freelancer, freshly married, the two of us trying to make a few bucks while riding herd on my demented mom for free rent in the family castle. Pro freelancer, in our own home, the wife having reinvented herself as a librarian after a whirlwind tour of the University of Denver’s masters program. The drugs were long since in the rear view, and before we left for Albuquerque in 2014 the tonsil polish would be history, too.
I make my tour of duty there about a quarter-century, all told, which may be a long-enough stretch for Bibleburg to qualify as a hometown. For sure I have a love-hate relationship with the place.
And isn’t that practically the dictionary definition of “home?”
The place has a reputation for conservatism, which is ironic, in that the last actual conservative to run the joint was its founder, Gen. William Jackson Palmer, who saw to it that his successors would not be permitted to plant endless hectares of ticky-tacky rooftops and retail on every square inch of the place when he was gone.
Monument Valley Park, briefly the home of the Mad Dog cyclocrosses.
His legacy includes the donation of land for Monument Valley Park, North Cheyenne Cañon Park, Palmer Park, and Bear Creek Cañon Park, all of them stellar places for riding the ol’ bikey-bike or just hanging around in. He founded the Gazette, too, but we can hardly blame him for what happened there.
The place has been a haven for Birchers, Klansmen, and Nazis in my own lifetime, along with various tribes of generic libertarian fuckwits whose fontanelles closed up too soon (see Doug Lamborn, et al.). Indeed, there was a time when our cyclocrosses in Palmer’s parks drew about half the entrants typical of a Boulder or Denver race, because those posie-sniffing tree-huggers were afeared someone might beat some Jesus Goldwater into them if ever they dared venture south of the Palmer Divide.
In the Springs, “conservative” means “penny-wise, pound-foolish,” or in the vernacular, “We ain’t paying for shit until it breaks, and maybe not even then.”
Back in 2010, the city was shutting off streetlights — 8,000 to 10,000 of them — to save money, suggesting that anyone who liked to be able to see the muggers creeping up on them should “adopt” their friendly neighborhood light.
The adoption fee “may be tax-deductible,” one city mouthpiece noted, suggesting donors “consult a tax expert.” Because nobody wants to pay taxes to keep the fucking lights on, amirite?
Part of our old circuit in Bear Creek Regional Park.
During my most recent visit, it seemed nearly every street in town was either broken or being rebuilt. Whether this was due to decades of “conservatism” or the ravages of an unusually wet summer remains a mystery. I know the town pretty well and have more than one way to get from point A to point Z. But this trip all the letters of the alphabet were buried under orange cones.
Happily, Palmer’s parks seemed in great shape as per usual. In Monument Valley Park, I saw hard-hats using the trail-maintenance equivalent of ice-rink Zambonis to groom the goo right out of them.
Classic Bibleburg, man. Can’t keep the lights on, the fascists out, or the potholes patched, but when it comes to Gen. Palmer’s parks, it’s nothing but happy trails to you. He must’ve written it into his will.
A wee dose of winter in the backyard, just in time for Election Day.
My brother geezers were already abandoning the Monday ride on Sunday. Cold, wet, no thank you, please, etc.
I bailed too, mostly because I’m taking antibiotics and steroids to beat down a sinus infection, but also because I had my fill of cold and wet in the Before-Time™, when I fancied myself a cyclocross racer.
My interest in the activity started to flag after a few years living on our wind-whipped rockpile outside of Weirdcliffe, in Crustytucky County, Colo. (“Gateway to Gardner”).
I actually had some of my best races while we lived there, because I was living at 8,800 feet and training even higher, running a ton, riding a ’cross bike almost exclusively on the indifferently maintained and largely unpaved roads, and doing laps on my own short homemade course.
But evil weather was both my strength and my undoing. I needed a course with lots of running to have a chance against the roadies, who are like cowboys, reluctant to dismount from their steeds and proceed on foot. So, yeah: rain, mud, snow, anything to suck a few mph out of those tree-legged, leather-lunged sonsabitches.
But getting to the races in the kind of conditions that favored my limited skillset — run around for 45 minutes while wearing a perfectly rideable bike — could be something of a project. The nearest one was 90 minutes down and north in good weather, and it was the race I and my club put on twice a year in Bibleburg. The others were in Franktown, Littleton, Lakewood, Longmont, Boulder, Mead, Fort Collins, and like that there.
It got to where I would book a motel room, drive north the night before a race, eat dinner out, breakfast on coffee and energy bars in the room, get my ass handed to me at the event, clean up in a car wash, find something to eat, and drive home. After a while it began to feel a lot more like work than recreation, even if I did well, which mostly I did not.
Unless I saw heaps of snow on the deck when I got up on race day. Yay. And even then I had to drive home in it.
The travel got a little easier when we moved back to Bibleburg, but the racing never did. I was working a lot while training less, and at a lower altitude, too. The flesh was unwilling and the spirit was weak.
I could tell I was over it in 2004, when I rode my main race bike to a ’cross in Bibleburg . No spare bike, not even a spare wheel. And when I flatted about halfway through my race, I wobbled off the course, resolved the puncture (who brings a pump and saddlebag with spare tubes and tire irons to a friggin’ race?), and rode home.
Shortly after we settled here back in September 2014 a handyman told me that The Duck! City was a much smaller town than one might think on short acquaintance.
On the surface, it seems a lot like Bibleburg or Tucson: All three are sprawling, medium-sized Western cities dependent upon military installations, universities, and tourism, with transient, ever-changing populations.
But dig a little deeper and The Duck! City feels more like Pueblo, where some folks really put down roots.
I don’t know that I ever met a native Tucsonan, and born-and-bred Bibleburgers were likewise rare. But in Pueblo, and The Duck! City, it’s easy to meet people whose attachment to location runs generations deep.
Longevity breeds networking, and this can work for you or against you. I took the handyman to be hinting that outlandish douchebaggery gets broadcast faster than a triple murder on local TV.
More often it’s a case of meeting some rando in the course of doing a bit of business and finding out that he or she knows everyone you know, and probably a whole lot better, too.
This was the case with the landscaper we engaged to tackle our back yard. North Valley guy, of an age with meself, and in one of our first chats it turned out that he knew more than a few of the guys I used to race bikes with when we lived in Fanta Se back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.
Then last night we’re chatting about the final touches to the project and learned that his mom saw the same doctor as Herself the Elder, lived in the same assisted-living home (albeit a few years earlier), and passed on there, just like HtE.
He knew the owner of the place, and the staff, and also was familiar with the operator of HtE’s previous digs, noting with discretion that he decided against housing his mom there.
A small town indeed. In a town this size, there’s no place to hide. Everywhere you go, you meet someone you know.
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