It’s a Dropkick Murphys kind of Fourth around the Dog House. Up the rebels!
As Dropkick Murphys release a new album, “For the People,” frontman Ken Casey has a few thoughts about the big red pickle in which we find ourselves during our annual Independence Day picnic.
Speaking with Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Casey said he was shocked that so many people in his life fell for Trumpism:
“My father died when I was young, and I was raised by my grandfather, who was basically like, ‘If I ever see you bullying someone, I’ll kick the shit out of you. And if I ever see you back down from a bully, I’ll kick the shit out of you.’”
“I’ve just never liked bullies, and I don’t understand people who do. It’s really not that hard. I wish more people would see that it’s not hard to stand up.”
So stand up with Dropkick Murphys and the people on this Fourth of July, and all the other ones, too, even after we kick the shit out of these bullies. And sing along, if you can keep up. Here are the lyrics for anyone who’s not fluent in Celtic punk.
Five-thirty in the morning. Doors and windows open to a cooling breeze. Birds and crickets singing up the sun.
The house totems: pig and bicycle.
An old analog clock ticks off the seconds. The clock is the front wheel of a bicycle. I don’t think of this as time rolling away from me, because this tiny bicycle’s wheels do not move. But the hands of its clock do — tick, tock; tick, tock — so maybe I’m mistaken. I’m a scribbler, not a theoretical physicist.
As dawn unfolds the lawn looks good from my perch on the couch. After yesterday’s ride on an actual bicycle I watered, mowed, raked, and just sort of generally tidied up back there. This morning I’ve set aside my traditional practice of washing down the news of the day — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Albuquerque Journal, The New Mexican, et al. — with the first cup of coffee. I’ve had enough of their squawking for the moment — call it a declaration of independence — so this limited reconnaissance from the couch will have to serve as my newsgathering as the sun comes up on this Fourth of July.
My first post this morning, like the ticking bicycle clock, was analog. I stepped outside and stuck our two cheapo plastic flags into the dirt at either side of the front walkway. Right side up, too.
I was thinking of our old Bibleburg friend and neighbor, Marv Berkman, who when asked why a freethinking old saloon picker like himself would fly the Stars and Stripes every morning replied, “I don’t want those people to think they’re the only ones who can do it.”
Incoming! No, that’s outgoing. And not very far, either. Them’s the rules.
The cul-de-sac was rockin’ last night.
Grandpa Doug was in charge of the boom-boom. We got a courtesy call from the fire marshals. And the crowd — well, you could actually call it a crowd. Lots of folks, not all of them residents of the cul-de-sac. Young and old, men and women, right and left, brown, black, white. Your basic melting pot.
Old Glory, catching some rays.
We stayed up a little later than is our practice, and I slept a little later than is practical for a Fourth of July with a heat advisory in effect.
So by the time we’d broken fast, handled our morning chores, and just kinda-sorta gotten our poop more or less in a group, the menu of exercise options had shrunk like a spider on a hotplate.
We settled on a short road ride, which inexplicably saw me roll off without a water bottle. Duh. So we had to circle back after a couple miles to collect that, after which I decided we might as well keep on heading south since that was where the wind was coming from.
For old times’ sake we noodled on over to have a look at Herself the Elder’s first residence here in The Duck! City, now a private home rather than an assisted-living residence.
Then we got a little random, hopping onto and off of a couple bike paths linking various suburban streets, before agreeing that it was just about as hot as we cared to have it and rolling back to the rancheroo for some light refreshment.
By noon the temperature was 93° if you believe our little weather widget, and 88° if you don’t. And the weather wizards say we ain’t seen nothing yet.
When the high temp matches my average heart rate on a road ride I sometimes think about getting back in the pool, churning out the laps in the cool, chlorinated fluids, where the distracted drivers and earbudded pedestrians mostly aren’t.
But I don’t know that I want to be the 69-year-old dude in the banana hammock trying to relive his glory years (Mitchell High School swim team, 1969 South Central League champs). Aren’t the bib shorts and Lycra jersey bad enough?
Hot plate, señor. No, not the one on the table; the one in your head.
Hotter, drier, and windier — that’s the prediction as regards monsoon season from the National Weather Service Forecast Office here in The Duck! City.
A heat advisory is in our immediate future, as in tomorrow, the actual Fourth of July, which this year seemed to start sometime around last Thursday and will end … well, who knows? Not me, Skeezix.
There are a few fires going, prescribed and otherwise, the largest being the Pass Fire in the Gila National Forest. Nothing like what’s been going on in Canada; not yet, anyway.
Yesterday I rolled out for a little 30-miler with 1,200 feet of vertical gain — the lion’s share of it coming in the final grind from I-25 to The County Line barbecue joint — and it got a little toasty there toward the end. The brain was not quite at a rolling boil but even a brisk simmer gets your attention a couple hours into what should be a two-bottle ride.
Today it seemed wise to skip the Monday spin with the ould fellahs and instead go for a half-hour trail jog with Herself. Early. Before Tōnatiuh fired up His comal.
Tonight brings the cul-de-sac’s Fourth fiesta, featuring non-explosive, ground-based “fireworks” of the type that would have caused my younger self to use descriptive language that would get the 69-year-old me canceled in a heartbeat if anyone paid any attention at all to what I thought, said, or wrote. Which mostly they don’t, lucky for me.
Neighbors to the east have two kids, neighbors to the west have three grandkids, and the couple on the northeast corner have a toddler, so there will be sprouts of various sizes gamboling around and about, shrieking at the pips, pops, and poots as the Buck supermoon rises.
If we’re lucky the skeeters will take the night off. It’s too bloody hot to don the Levi’s body armor, and I don’t have a sword small enough to behead the little bastards.
The morning clouds have been something to celebrate.
The only firecracker I personally set off today was a itty-bitty kiddie snap-pop left over from the previous night’s celebration in the cul-de-sac, a neighbor’s lightly explosive summertime labor of love. I hit it with a tire as I rolled out for an Independence Day bike ride.
Snap!
That felt about right, considering.
Albuquerque seemed unusually quiet for a Fourth of July, and I wondered once again whether The Duck! City is a place that people leave for a holiday, not one they visit.
Or maybe we’re all just wondering whether there’s anything left of America to celebrate.
We had a good group at last night’s fireworks show. Not exactly a representative sample of the U.S. population — hey, this is the ’burbs, and the foothills to boot — but if we were heavy on white-collar types from the university, the lab, and the government, we also had people of color and a sizable crop of kids, the most I’ve ever seen at one of these shindigs.
There were snacks and beverages and folding chairs. Squeals of delight from the young, and oohs and ahhs from the rest of us, with the occasional round of applause for a particularly percussive fountain.
The show didn’t start until 8:30 and so we were up a little later than we like, and I may have been a little grumpier than usual as I toured the foothills this morning on my old road-racing bike. Frowned as some oblivious tool blew right through a stop sign. Got mildly irked at an American flag protruding from a New Mexican zia with a security camera built in. (One nation, under surveillance.) And I actually flipped the bird to a banner reading, “Don’t Blame Us, We Voted for Trump!”
Finally, motorists eastbound on Paseo del Norte still haven’t figured out the new right-turn configuration at Tramway. Jesus wept, etc. You want to watch your ass cycling southbound if you ever want to see another fireworks show.
All this being said, there are bright spots. One of them is out there in the cul-de-sac right now with a leaf blower, clearing away any detritus he might have overlooked last night as the rest of us headed for bed.
He doesn’t have to do it. It’s a free country, amirite? But he’s doing it anyway, and not just for show, either. He does it because it’s a nice thing to do.
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