Herself and I slipped out for a short trail run before lunch yesterday, hoping to dodge the predicted rain.
She was taking a break from work, which continues although the feddle-gummint mostly doesn’t. I was taking a break from being indoors, the Monday Geezer Ride having been canceled due to the weather forecast. We are not Portlanders, ready and eager to ride nekkid in fair weather and foul, aiming wisecracks and buttcracks at Beelzebozo’s buttheads.
Our short-run loop is only a couple miles, and mostly flat — just 268 feet of vertical gain, with one lump going out and another coming back — and we were back at the ranch before the clouds opened for business.
And business was booming. Nothing like the Durango area, where Tropical Storm Priscilla really brung it and then some. The official tally here was 0.21 inch. But it felt like a lot compared with the usual nothing at all.
Just ask the lone bedraggled hummingbird who spent about 15 minutes camped at one of our feeders, which hang out of the weather beneath the back patio cover. Every so often s/he would glance skyward as though thinking: “Jaysis! Where is everybody? I knew I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque.”
What a gloomy day. The ceiling is all the way down to the deck and the drizzle is intermittent. Reminds me of Oregon, only without all the ICEholes and Natural Gourds wandering around, growing fungus in their footwear and moss on their north sides.
Ordinarily I’d slip out for a jog between sprinkles, but I’ve already logged two 5K runs this week and fear a third would leave me a smelly puddle of tears, shredded connective tissue, and bone splinters.
Still, slouching around indoors muttering over the news ain’t no day at the beach neither.
Public “servants” trying to suppress free speech? Par for the course. Public excoriation for thee, but not for me. Shove the First Amendment right up their fat asses by attending your local No Kings! rally on Oct. 18.
Government employees being shown the door because … well, because Rumpleshitskin likes it? Remember his two-word catchphrase from the unreality show he keeps reliving over and over and over again in the throes of his growing dementia. He’s a man of few words, because he can only remember a few, and can pronounce even fewer.
And to top it off I’ve got one lonely, disheveled hummingbird parked at the backyard feeder, like the old soak lost in thought who just can’t seem to hear the phrase, “Last call. …”
I suppose I should be laser-focused on the doings in Manhattan, but I’m more interested in whether we’ll get some hummingbirds at the feeder this morning. We saw our first hummers of spring last evening, just before dusk, doing an aerial dance around the ornamental plum.
Speaking of feeders, do you think that when Porky hears “Order in the court!” he reflexively blurts, “Two Big Macs, two Filet-O-Fishes, and a large chocolate shake!”
The New York Times spent most of yesterday pitching live episodes of “Let’s Make a Deal” from the nation’s capital. And today they’re telling me that nobody could give a shit; they’d all rather be watching “The Golden Bachelor.”
Well. Sounds like poor editorial judgment to me. Should’ve led with another Taylor Swift story.
Well, I gave a shit — no, not about “The Golden Bachelor” or Taylor Swift, who gets more eyeballs than a TikTok video of kitties in a titty bar — but rather the brinksmanship peacockery so deplorably on display in DeeCee.
It’s a weakness. But I could afford to indulge it.
Dinner was leftovers from Friday night — Melissa Clark’s paprika chicken with taters and turnips — so cooking was a rerun, or, more precisely, a reheat, at 350° for 20 minutes.
This left me at liberty to observe, and screech, and curse, and place bets with myself about what would finally emerge from all the shit-talking, gesticulating, and shoving that usually precedes a whole bunch of nothing happening on the middle-school playground of your choice.
This is pointless idiocy, of course. Right up there with cashing out the 401(k) and putting it all into bitcoin and NFTs; playing poker with a man named “Doc;” or gambling in any of the various casinos masquerading as “sports” in this world.
By closing time, the can had gotten kicked another 45 days down the road and I had lost every bet.
Still, could be worse.
Ukraine must be wondering how they wound up out on the sidewalk with an IOU in one pocket of the fatigues puddled around their ankles. And the woodlice gnawing on Charlie McCarthy’s balsa-sack apparently found out this wasn’t an all-you-can-eat deal.
This morning I decided this class in Political Science Fiction 101 reminded me of a scene from “Cannery Row,” in which John Steinbeck describes the upshot of an uprising by “a group of high-minded ladies” in Monterey demanding the closure of “dens of vice” like Dora Flood’s Bear Flag Restaurant, which was not a sandwich shop but rather a “sporting house.”
Writes Steinbeck:
This happened about once a year in the dead period between the Fourth of July and the County Fair. Dora usually closed the Bear Flag for a week when it happened. It wasn’t so bad. Everyone got a vacation and little repairs to the plumbing and the walls could be made. But this year the ladies went on a real crusade. They wanted somebody’s scalp. It had been a dull summer and they were restless. It got so bad that they had to be told who actually owned the property where vice was practiced, what the rents were and what little hardships might be the result of their closing. That was how close they were to being a serious menace.
You think maybe the high-minded ladies in DeeCee got told who really owns this whore-House? And if so, did they get the message? Who knows? Not me, cousin. But we have 45 days to find out.
Anyway, once the cartoon was over we got straight to the featured attraction, which included the aforementioned leftovers; rewatching “Reservation Dogs,” which concluded its three-season run this past Wednesday; and debating whether we should take down our hummingbird feeders, which hadn’t been getting many (if any) customers the past few days.
I argued for staying open, and boom! Just like that a hummer appeared at one of the backyard feeders, which are visible from the living-room couch. Maybe he was an elder who didn’t care to make the trek to Mexico this fall. Maybe she likes the new landscaping. Maybe they like “Reservation Dogs.” Pronouns are a bitch.
Anyway, we reloaded those two feeders and called it a night. This morning, The Last Hummingbird Standing brought a cousin over for breakfast. It wasn’t Matt Gaetz. I’ll call that a win.
Our backyard hummingbird shower.* *Hummingbird not included.
The GOP pestilential dogfight is shaping up into something like “The Lord of the Rings” as reimagined by Charles Bukowski with an assist from William Gibson.
Thus we get Scum Baggins, Douche Baggins, Colostomy Baggins, and so on.
In this Bukowski-Gibson cyberpunk edition the Shire is a casino built on a Superfund site, a former dogfighting venue called Slobbiton.
The Wizards are all off somewhere dicking around with AI, social media, and first-class-only rocket flights to nowhere special for the Elves (Dwarves can’t afford a ticket).
The Rings of Power are not limited to the Elite — they’re Watches of Power, and can be acquired by anyone with the do-rei-me — but all they do is let you answer the phone that’s perpetually in your hand anyway and tell you to get out of the La-Z-Boy for a couple minutes every hour, you great fat bastard. Mostly the Ring-wielders use that time to go to the fridge for some tasty Boar’s Head snacks.
Speaking of pigs’ heads, at some point our revised narrative careens off piste entirely into “Lord of the Flies” territory. The Wizards and Elves get voted off the island on charges of being woke, trans, or both; everyone left is some variation on Jack or Roger (though George Soros makes a brief cameo as Piggy); and the Royal Navy never turns up to set things aright because THIS IS AMERICA BUDDY! YEAH, BABY! USA! USA! USA!
All things considered we’d rather watch a sprinkler in the back yard. Now and then we get to see a hummingbird enjoy a brief shower.
Mad Blog Media 