Well, not exactly. There’s some gobblin’ at the corner of Tramway Road and Tramway Boulevard, all right, but it involves barbecue at The County Line.
The place smells wonderful when your snotlocker works, which mine mostly does not, thanks to seasonal allergies (oak, cottonwood, juniper, mulberry, grass, etc.).
Between being all boogered up and tweaking my lower back the other day I have been in something of a mood. Maybe watching part one of the Hemingway documentary on PBS last night helped a bit. Wasn’t anyone pulling a couple hundred bits of shrapnel out of my legs in an Italian hospital, and I’ve managed to hang on to my first wife, too. So, yeah, winning, an’ shit.
True, global literary fame has proven elusive, but that’s not exactly a surprise. My agent warned me against titling my debut novel “A Farewell to Arfs.”
“He’s done it again. It’s coming up. It’s coming up.”
The only thing I have in common with Ernest Hemingway* is that occasionally I find myself at a loss for words.
Then I remind myself, as he reminded himself in “A Moveable Feast”: “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now.”
And so I have: The Bicycle Retailer column is finally in the can. Next, the “Shop Talk” cartoon, also for BRAIN, followed by the Specialized Sequoia review for Adventure Cyclist.
“There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day.”
Charles “Live Update Guy” Pelkey and I were discussing anniversaries the other day, and I was reminded that I’ve been working in my chosen profession for nearly 39 years now; 40, if you count the time I spent as a copy boy at the Colorado Springs Sun back in 1974.
No wonder I fail to amuse myself now and then.
This week was one of those times. Mornings spent working the Giro at Live Update Guy. Back-to-back ship dates at Bicycle Retailer and Industry News, which meant I had to crank out two “Mad Dog Unleashed” columns and two “Shop Talk” cartoons in two weeks. And two bike reviews ongoing for Adventure Cyclist. Thousands and thousands of words.
There are harder ways to earn your biscuits and beans — for example, maglia rosa Steven Kruijswijk went ass over teakettle into a snowbank coming off the Cima Coppi in today’s Giro stage — but nevertheless, now and then it feels very much like work.
Other things take a back seat. Cooking (lots of cold suppers lately). Chores (you should see the laundry pile). Cycling (I went for a 45-minute run yesterday because I was sick of bicycles).
And this blog, of course.
In “A Moveable Feast,” Ernest Hemingway wrote of a line he refused to cross:
“I learned never to empty the well of my writing, but always to stop when there was still something there in the deep part of the well, and let it refill at night from the springs that fed it.”
I’m no Hemingway. I don’t write novels, or short stories; I don’t even do journalism anymore, not really. More of a rumormonger, actually.
But still, damn. I look in the bottom of the well lately and all I see are rusty pesos, a couple of dead silverfish, and … and. …
Yes, those smelly old elves are at it again in the basement.
Tell you what: When it rains, it pours, especially in our basement.
The water heater is on the fritz now, pissing all over the floor like a badly trained dog, and I would shoot the fucker two or three times if I weren’t afraid of inflicting collateral damage upon the humidifier, which in this climate is the only thing keeping me from bleeding to death through the nose.
Speaking of noses, when the temps creep up into the high 80s, low 90s, what a man wants is a basement free of raw sewage. They say that shit rolls downhill, and speaking as a longtime resident of the valley I will say that they do not lie.
But the stink from same, like the sun, also rises. And a man with a litter box in his office upstairs doesn’t need any more of that sort of annoyance than he can achieve through a diet rich in the foodstuffs of Northern New Mexico, which at least smells good going in.
So much for the bad news. The good news is that chats with the insurance company have not led to extended bouts of weeping; an expert is en route today to lay hands upon the water heater (rather than 158-grain, semi-jacketed, .357 Magnum hollow points); and Ted at Old Town Bike Shop resolved an issue with the front disc brake on the latest test bike, for which I owe him some beer and many thanks.
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