‘A grave matter’

August 17, 2026August 17, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 21 Comments

I beg to urge you, everyone:
life-and-death is a grave matter,
all things pass quickly away;
each of us must be completely alert:
never neglectful, never indulgent.
—The evening message of sesshin at the Diamond Sangha, from “Taking the Path of Zen,” by Roshi Robert Aitken

Well, they finally caught me.

Not the cops. The court.

Specifically, the Second Judicial District Court, which needed a few good people — more than a few, actually — to help them resolve a number of pressing legal matters on what one court staffer last week called “a typical busy Monday.”

I thought voir dire would put me back on the streets with all possible speed, for reasons obvious to readers of this blog. When the lawyers started asking if anyone present had ever been in a car crash I opened with getting hit by a train when I was 20. I have other, lesser tales, and usually save getting creamed by an 81-car, 7,000-ton Burlington Northern for the closer, which, frankly, I thought it would be.

“All right, I’m out of time — thanks for coming out, everybody, you’ve been a wonderful audience!”

But the number of pressing legal matters was high and the bar for jury service low and I got yanked over it and into a jury box.

• • •

I won’t tell you I was eager to serve, but I was curious, because the case was auto vs. two-wheeler. Reckless driving resulting in death. If the defendant were found not guilty of the top charge, the jury would consider a descending series of lesser charges.

Our jury seemed a well-chosen crew. Two of us had owned Vespas, a third rode some lesser scooter, and at least one was a motorcyclist. Three or four of us also bicycled, on asphalt, dirt, and gravel. I assume we were all motorists. One was a freshly minted driver who’d only been prowling the mean streets of The Duck! City for a few months. We were old, young, and in between; white collar, blue collar, retired; brown, white, black; men and women.

As the lawyers did their thrust-and-parry thing, questioning eyewitnesses, police officers, crash reconstructionists, and a medical examiner, it seemed clear why the state felt comfortable going to trial. Even the defense conceded that their client was speeding in the center lane, ran a red light, struck the two-wheeler, and its rider died. The state’s case made a bathysphere look like a $2 Walmart tea ball.

I’ll spare you the gory deets. And while I doubt The Algorithm will splash this bush-league blog post far and wide across the Innertubes, for reasons that will be made clear I’m not going to give chapter and verse of the facts in the case. Speeding, ran the red, someone died. Pretty basic stuff.

• • •

Anyone who’s spent any time in court knows it lacks the polish of the TV shows. Attorneys fumble for words and thumb through reams of paper. The technology is temperamental. Witnesses can be confused or combative. Questions you might have raised as lawman or lawyer go unasked.

The burden of establishing proof of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt lay with the state, the judge reminded us, and toward that end the prosecutors supplied the bulk of the witnesses, along with surveillance video from two businesses near the scene of the crash; police lapel-cam footage with audio; audio from a 911 call; information downloaded from the auto’s airbag-control module (event data recorder); and stills of the scene, crash debris, both vehicles, and “the decedent,” as the defense insisted the crash victim be called.

The defense insisted upon a number of things, among them their client’s actions after the crash. The defendant did not flee the scene; wasn’t argumentative when interviewed by police; and did not try to foist responsibility for the crash onto “the decedent.”

The defendant’s attorneys, focused on reasonable doubt, were less generous in that regard. The strategy seemed to be, “If it were not for this rando rocking the two-wheeler we wouldn’t even be here, wasting everyone’s valuable time.”

• • •

The usual hokum ensued. Did the two-wheeler make an improper right turn while exiting a gas station, entering the center lane rather than the curb lane? Possibly, but there was no concrete evidence of this; the rider may have entered the curb lane and then moved left to the center.

Was the rider’s helmet properly secured? This hoary old trope, decades past its sell-by date, is lifted straight from the F1 key on any lazy cop-shop reporter’s computer keyboard: (tap) “The victim was not wearing a helmet.”

That helmet? It was a full-face model. Could it have prevented the rider from hearing the defendant’s vehicle as it accelerated through the red light? If you are sensing a theme here, it is that when it comes to helmets, you are damned if you wear one and damned if you don’t.

Footage from the gas station’s surveillance camera showed rider and two-wheeler as they actually were at the time: bright colors, tail light and headlight, helmet. And when leaving the pump for the pavement, it appeared that the rider glanced left, possibly to check for oncoming vehicles.

• • •

That was just the sound check. Next, the rock ’n’ roll.

The defense argued that it made sense in terms of safety for their client to run the light. The defendant, already a few minutes late for work, was speeding, after all; it would’ve been impossible to stop before entering the intersection. Traffic at that hour was light, no other vehicles had begun crossing under the green, and the center lane ahead seemed free of any and all obstructions.

Further, once it became evident that such was not the case, it appeared that their client tried to avoid the collision, coming off the gas, braking, and steering slightly to the left. But it was too late. The impact destroyed the two-wheeler and hurled its rider up the road, with helmet ripped off. The rider sustained a number of severe injuries and died at the scene.

That’s pretty much it. The disputants rested their respective cases, then delivered closing statements. And the judge sent us off to the jury room.

• • •

It seemed clear to me that the defendant’s decision to put foot through firewall and run the red was the first and most important link in the grim chain of events that followed. It was reckless. The judge’s instructions regarding the law and how we must proceed were complex, but we muddled through, and after we picked a foreperson and discussed areas of concern a few jurors who had been on the fence picked a side. Guilty as charged. The vote needed to be unanimous.

It was not.

The defense had found the one weak link in our chain. The magic words that broke it were “reasonable doubt.”

Several of us tried to bring our lone holdout around but it was fruitless. Our foreperson reported the deadlock to the judge, who gave us more time to deliberate. Heels remained dug in. Not even a solid alternate-universe hypothetical from a juror with a strong schoolteacherish vibe could prevail. It went something like this:

What if the defendant had not been speeding? Then it would’ve been possible to stop for the red light. The rider of the two-wheeler would have turned from the gas station into the road without incident and shortly thereafter would have been sitting in a café somewhere, eating a breakfast burrito. The motorist would have been a few more minutes late for work.

No sale. We remained at 11-1.

Once again the judge asked us, one by one, whether more time for deliberation might help us reach a unanimous verdict.

No, your honor.

And that was that. Dismissed.

• • •

As a junior-varsity cartoonist and columnist I grew accustomed to seeing my arguments dismissed. Not everyone was buying what I was selling.

I try to be a tough customer myself, but I’ve been played often enough to know that refreshing breeze cooling my nether regions means my pants are puddled around my ankles again. About three times out of five, if I’m on form and the wind is right, I can I.D. bullshit if I catch a good, strong whiff of it. And in that courtroom I smelled it coming from the defense. Eleven people agreed; one did not. That’s all it took.

Could/should our holdout have avoided jury service through a more vigorous winnowing process or by pleading extenuating circumstances and requesting a rescheduling or excusal? Maybe. The doubt seemed unreasonable, more emotional than intellectual. But what it seemed like to me was irrelevant. Move to strike, your honor. …

• • •

As a young reporter I was dragooned into covering a water-board meeting. The information was made available and I couldn’t for the life of me make any sense of it. The editor was not amused. Was I a poor choice for the task? Could I have declined the assignment, or tried harder? Yes, yes, and yes. In any event, somebody had to do it and it was my turn in the barrel.

As it happened, another reporter was able to cobble together the story I could not write. Journalism is a team sport.

And, as it turns out, so is the law. It’s my understanding that a new trial has already been scheduled and a new jury will be selected. Maybe I’ll go back as a spectator, if there’s nothing good on TV.

Help!

April 30, 2026May 2, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

“Won’t you please, please, help me?”

Is the pen the writer? The brush the painter? The motor the cyclist?

Grumbling over coffee about the lack of interesting reading material online — just about any old thing that wasn’t about fascists, eejits, or fascist eejits— I stumbled first across a piece about artificial intelligence worming its way into the handmade world of ’zines, and then another about bearing your own burdens from the deep, deep well that is Mike Ferrentino.

I appreciate ’zines, with their homemade artsy feel. In January our friend Lo sent us a tiny one she’d made, about the size of a hang tag, that was miles above the tired old “What we’ve been up to” family newsletter.

The niche seems to share some DNA with the underground newspapers I enjoyed Back in the Day®. I did a little cartooning for a few of those, and even helped start a short-lived one while wrapping up that B.A. in journalism from the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley.

This may have followed my ouster as cartoonist for the college newspaper following a series of mildly vile attempts to bring Bay Area Rip Off Press-style hijinks to Weld County. My derivative bullshit failed to dollar up on the hoof in cattle country.

And the new venture somehow managed in short order to crawl right up the arse of some student-government numbnuts who threatened a lawsuit over a bit of unpleasantness we’d published.

“Good luck with that,” I said, referring him to our paper’s masthead, in which my dog Jojo was listed as editor. “Not only are you a public figure for the purposes of this story, but my dog is the editor. You’re the only person I can think of who is taking us seriously.”

Still, one longs to be taken seriously. Or at least laughed at for the right reasons. Also, paid. The Revolution was not only untelevised, it was underfunded.

So I left handmade hellraising for “straight” journalism, overstayed my welcome there, and now, here I am, a half century later, comfortably underground again and still waiting on the Revolution.

• • •

Blogging the way I do it has some ’zine-like qualities, I think. But what once was called a “weblog” actually has its roots in “journaling,” another handmade, offline sort of pasatiempo that’s enjoying a comeback of sorts. Though like everything else you can take it digital if you must — your iPhone has had a “Journal” app since 2023.

George suggested I start keeping a journal, and Lord, have I ever kept ’em.

I started keeping a journal in 1974, at the urging of George Gladney, then a reporter at the Colorado Springs Sun. In the Year of Our Lard 2026 I have 15 pounds of them, a cardboard box overflowing with old-school composition books defaced with ballpoint graffiti. And what a ’zine they would make, if anyone could decipher my scribbling (cursive early on, block lettering afterward).

The cops could clear many a cold case on the evidence therein.

“Honey, you’re making a scene!” Herself would exclaim as the John Laws burst through the door.

“No, I’m making a ’zine,” I would quip as the cuffs went on and the flashbulbs popped.

Those bracelets would come off again, and quickly, too, thanks to various statutes of limitations and a general unavailability of surviving/credible witnesses.

And then I could forget about ’zines and get back to the blogging, which I’ve been beavering away at since the Nineties, shortly after I abandoned newspapers for freelancing — basically trading one boss and regular paychecks for several bosses and “It’s in the mail. …” — and thought it might be fun to be my own underground, unpaid, hands-on publisher again, if only as a sideline.

Sadly, my editor Jojo was long gone, and his daughter Fuerte had no interest in journalism.

• • •

In the Nineties scribblers didn’t have to worry about A.I., unless they’d read a lot of science fiction. Some of us were short on intelligence of any sort, artificial or innate. My comp books and Bics got demoted from deep thought to training logs as I acquired a series of Macs, modems, and text editors. I taught myself some basic HTML, paid a rural hosting outfit to house my monstrosity in one of their cages from which it could screech and throw shit at passers-by, and hey presto! A blog.

The rest, as they say, is history, and quite a bit of it. My earliest efforts are lost in cyberspace, but the Archives contain about a quarter-century’s worth of bloggery in various states of decomposition.

What I brought to my little peepshow in the virtual carnival was decades of experience in newspapers and magazines as a reporter, editor, and cartoonist. I turned pro in the journalism racket just as newspapers were stumbling through the transition from hot type — for-reals hot, lines cast in lead by a clanking Linotype machine — to cold type, which meant computers. The times they were a-changin’.

Your Humble Narrator in the Mitchell High School *Echelon*‘s newsroom, circa 1971.

And once the Internet became A Thing, and those computers evolved from rumbling gods behind locked doors to perky little desktop numbers that anyone could own for the price of a decent used car, they were a-changin’ again. If you wanted to keep your head above water you had to go with the flow.

Which brings us back to the process of creation, and how — for me, at least — it’s changed since I submitted that first cartoon to the Mitchell High School Echelon back in 1971.

• • •

I had only ever been a cartoonist.

Self-taught, of course. A comics junkie from jump. Superman and Batman, Mad magazine, Bill Mauldin, Herblock. I learned that you draw in pencil so you can erase your mistakes, and then try very very hard not to make more mistakes when you finally ink the penciled sketch because then you have to start over. Add ink washes or sticky halftone film to achieve shades of gray; use watercolors or colored pencils to go full Disney.

But mostly I stuck to pencil, eraser, and black ink on paper because (a) I fucked up a ton, and (2) anything that got published was going to be in black and white anyway. Simple.

So I was I. Lord, was I ever.

And one day I found myself hired as a copy boy at the Sun, stripping wire-service copy from the teletypes, walking photos to engraving and page proofs to the copy desk, and waiting to be recognized as the next Pat Oliphant, who was then at The Denver Post.

Shortly after I’d proved competent at the basics the city editor handed me a press release to rewrite.

“But I don’t know how to type.” I said.

“Better learn,” he replied while walking away.

So I learned. My typing style remains unique, three fingers on the left hand and two on the right. Oddly fast, but a thing of beauty it is not; “touch typing” in the sense that each of those five fingers will eventually touch a key. The endless rewrites ordered by the city and/or copy desks were heavy lifting for a rookie scribe who couldn’t even fucking type, pounding away at the keys of a manual typewriter that was probably past retirement age when Damon Runyon was learning the newspaper racket down south at the Pueblo Star.

Nevertheless, I persisted. Learned. And adapted.

• • •

A few years and one B.A. in journalism later I was at the other newspaper in town — not as a cartoonist, but as a reporter — and I was delighted to see computerization finally rear its ugly head. Instead of going 10 rounds with that typewriter I could do a brain-dump into the terminal, then root through the pile and pick out a few shiny objects that might amuse an assistant city editor. If they didn’t, the rewrite would be a lot faster. And they couldn’t wad up my copy and throw it at me anymore.

Some of the veteranos in the Gazette Telegraph newsroom were less gung-ho. They would pound out their reports as per usual, on their ancient typewriters, and then with hard copy in hand retype them into their computer terminals as smoke billowed from ears at the city desk. Eventually the typewriters were removed. Some of the typists, too.

Forty-nine years, five newspapers, and countless magazines later I have written and/or drawn on just about everything using whatever was handy: pencils, pens, crayons, and keyboards; comp books, reporter’s notepads, bar napkins, and hotel stationery; manual and electric typewriters, dumb terminals hooked to mainframes, Macs connected to the Internet, and iPhones. Even shithouse walls.

Writing is never easy, because I have read so much of it, by more talented people. But it has become easier, with the advent of computers, and especially the laptop, which liberates you from the desk. Tip over the cranium wherever you are, let its contents spill out onto that solid-state floor, then root around in the pile until you find what you need.

A 14-year-old hammer and chisel: My 2012 MacBook Air.

It should still feel a lot like work. Sweaty, irksome, a daylight-burning, down-the-rabbit-hole time-suck, just one goddamn thing after another. Michelangelo looked at a block of marble and saw David within. But he needed a hammer and chisel to get to him. Got his hands dirty.

I’m no Michelangelo. Just some fool with the brain farts in search of a few perverts who like the smell. Pull my finger! And I’ve tried to choose my tools wisely.

For instance, while I love me some laptop and text editor, I hate spellcheckers and grammar widgets. If I want something looking over my shoulder I’ll get a parrot. I do my own stunts, bub, and I work without a net. Now stand back and watch. Gimme room!

The cartooning got a little involved there for a while, once color became available. I needed a flatbed scanner and a lot of pig-ign’ant careening around in Adobe Photoshop to deliver 300-dpi CMYK images to the masses. But the ideas all came from the same old place (behind the increasingly powerful spectacles), and first sprang to hideous life using the same old tools (paper, pencil, pen, and ink).

Between you and me, I think the march of progress developed a hitch in its gitalong a few years back. I work on a 14-inch 2024 M4 MacBook Pro now, but it’s no great improvement over my 11-inch MacBook Air, which dates to 2012. Better display, faster processor, yadda yadda yadda. I write a blog using a browser. I could do it with an iPhone from a tent. And I have.

So, if I ever run out of things worth saying, and interesting ways to say them, I won’t acquire some RoombaRite 9000® to hoover up all the words on the Internet and empty its bag into this blog. A.I.? N.O. It’d be like bolting a motor onto one of my Steelman Eurocrosses. Ferrentino and his father got it right: If you can’t lift it, don’t drive it.

No creative sort ever goes it completely alone, of course, unless they have a paper ranch, an ink well, a canvas farm, and a paint horse (har de har har). Find the lever and fulcrum that suit your needs and see if you can move the world. Without breaking it, if you please.

It doesn’t matter how you do the work as long as you do the work.

Fortune-telling, chats, and algorithms

January 16, 2024January 16, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 20 Comments

This sunset actually happened. It was not predictive of anything other than the sun setting.

I was wandering idly along the trashy shoulders of the Infobahn this morning, trying to not step in or trip over any particularly toxic bits of debris, when I noticed a newsletter from veteran scribe James Fallows that had gone overlooked in my in-box.

In it, Fallows proposes that cash-poor news organizations invest their limited resources in what’s actually happening now in politics instead of what might happen, “which the reporters can’t know when they’re writing the stories, and which readers will eventually find out anyway.”

For readers, he cites three types of stories that suggest you’ve been lured out of the newsroom and into the fortune-teller’s tent:

A story based on polls, which are manufactured “news” for those sponsoring them but only shakily connected to reality;
A story based on framing any development in terms of “how this will play” politically, which is the reporter’s guess about what voters will think, and;
A story on which candidate has “momentum” or traction” based on the vibe at events.

Predictive stories like these, Fallows says, “are like stock-market picks or the point spread on football games, but with less consequence for being wrong. And if news organizations had limitless time, space, and budgets, you could perhaps say, “What’s the harm?”

Alas, stories like these are also easy and cheap. Any half-bright wordslinger with Internet access and a comfortable chair can shower dubious wisdom upon you from a considerable height, like a buzzard with the runs. Be deeply suspicious of anything slugged “Commentary,” “Analysis,” or “Opinion.” Also, items headlined “Five takeaways from [insert actual news event here].”

However, sometimes the “takeaways” story can contain an actual glimmer of enlightenment. In one such at The New York Times this morning we have the concession — in this case, the fifth of five takeaways — that “Iowa doesn’t mean much for the fall.” This, after wall-to-wall coverage for Christ only knows how long of a non-event that saw 15 percent of registered Republicans (about 110,000 people) turn out to caucus. Thanks for sharing, Lisa, Maggie, and Jonathan.

For my part, I tip my fedora to Fallows and add a prescription of my own: Just because the Internet is endless doesn’t mean a story should be.

I read two things this morning that I knew would piss me off, mostly because I like being pissed off in the morning. That, and two cups of strong black coffee, are the jumper cables that get my heart started.

The first, from The New York Times Magazine, headlined “How Group Chats Rule the World,” was tagged “12 MIN READ.” I won’t link to it. Just because I enjoy spitting coffee into my keyboard and screaming “What the actual fuck?” doesn’t mean everyone does. We must consider the children. Also, cats, houseplants, and the homeowners’ association.

The second, from The Guardian, didn’t give me an ETA. But it was slugged, “The Long Read,” so I knew I was in for it. Headlined, “The tyranny of the algorithm: why every coffee shop looks the same,” this 4,200-word slog should’ve been headlined “I spend far too much time in coffee shops.”

I won’t link to that one, either. If that’s your idea of a good read you can chase it down yourself, or buy Kyle Chayka’s book, “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture,” from which it was adapted.

But can you lift this mighty tome to read it? There may not be enough coffee in the shop. Or the world.

Space cowboy

April 24, 2021April 26, 2021 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments

“Night has fallen on the desert.” That’s Ken Layne, beginning each episode of “Desert Oracle Radio.”

Daylight has fallen on the desert — and in celebration, I just dropped a few coppers into Desert Oracle Radio’s tin cup over to Patreon.

It felt overdue. I’ve been eavesdropping for free, the way you do when you can. But suddenly, while listening to this week’s episode, I thought: “If I’m gonna keep riding this old greydog through the Mojave, I should really buy a ticket.” So I did.

There’s a lot of talk lately about what new “technology platforms” are doing to “traditional media companies.” Yeah, I suppose. You get to write, or talk, or whatever, with a minimum of interference from “gatekeepers.” And if you’re lucky, maybe the audience will forget that information wants to be free, become subscribers, and kick a few Dead President Trading Cards your way.

Most of what I read about the newsletter boom centers on its threat to old-school newsgathering operations. But Will Oremus at Slate seems to hit the nail on the head when he notes that the Substackers are mostly about commentary and analysis, not straight, original reportage of the kind we used to get from our daily blats before Gannett snatched ’em up.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that the commentariat has snuck off the reservation. Even in my little backwater, cycling journalism, management realized early on that “analysis” was a whole lot cheaper than sending staffers to the scene because it could be done on the cheap, at the office, where they could keep both eyes and at least one thumb on the indolent tippling slackers. No airline travel or rental cars, no hotel rooms or restaurant meals, no credentials, no worries. Plus the office has reliable internet. Crank up those MacBooks and pound out the thumbsuckers, bitches.

Now the commentariat has realized they don’t need management skimming the cream from their milking of the audience, assuming they’ve built one and can monetize maybe 10-15 percent of it. Good for them, and good for us, especially if it drives management at “traditional media companies” to think about actually suiting up for the game, which is to say covering the news.

As a bush-league blatherer myself I try to keep semi-informed, so I help nurture a variety of operations, from large to small, outfits and individuals I’d like to see thrive. The New York Times and The Washington Post. The Atlantic. Charles P. Pierce at Esquire. Adventure Journal. Padraig and the gang over at The Cycling Independent. And now Ken Layne at Desert Oracle.

Sometimes it’s about the news. Sometimes it’s about the commentary. I’m a sucker for a nice bit of writing, like I heard in last night’s Desert Oracle Radio episode. It put me in mind of some of the grumbling I’ve heard from Hal Walter lately as Weirdcliffe starts to seem a little too big for its Wranglers.

What if, some day … what if we stopped working hard and stopped doing what we’re told? What if we moved to little specks of towns all over the country? Not the places that already have an organic bakery and four coffee shops with more almond milk than coffee beans, but the places built for things that no longer happen and where nobody ever came up with another workable idea. Old mining towns, old cattle-ranch crossroads, the mostly abandoned towns on Nevada’s U.S. 50 or U.S. 6. The real Las Vegas, an hour east of the wealthy island of Santa Fe. Far-eastern Oregon and Washington state. Places where you could maybe afford a house for your family, your friends, whatever arrangement makes sense. Clean air; hopefully, enough water. Clean streams for fishing. Walk your dog out the back door and into the wild. Keep a garden to attract the bees and the hummingbirds. Why not? What are you waiting for?

Shoveling

January 7, 2017 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 18 Comments

Jaysis. Some days, the writing, it goes smooth like butta.

And some days, it goes more like shitting broken bottles into a flaming toilet. Something of a pain in the keister, is what.

This is the grotesquely scenic route toward explaining the recent dearth of bloggery in these environs. With mots of the bon variety proving elusive I felt compelled to corral the few I was able to catch, hoping eventually to assemble them into a remuda of paying copy.

Nix.

Notions kept arising with malicious intent, like Martin Sheen surfacing in the lagoon en route to snuffing Marlon Brando in “Apocalpyse Now.” False paths with bad endings. Curiously shaped bricks that, while fascinating in their own right, didn’t quite fit in the wall.

Gah.

Also, it snowed. One of those obnoxious, featherweight snows that, coupled with a stiff north wind, basically glazes a steep, north-facing driveway like a cop’s donut if the homeowner is distracted by journalism and forgets to clear it first thing.

Sheeeeeeeeeeeeyit.

While all this was going on I was striving mightily to avoid the actual news, which, wow, talk about your false paths and bad endings. The road goes ever on and on. Here be dragons. This way to the Dark Side. Thus I shunned The New York Times and NPR in order to remain blissfully ignorant and focused on the task at hand, viz., to wit, earning the meager handful of coppers I require to purchase my common groats and lentils.

And now I believe I need a break from all that. It’s the weekend, f’chrissakes. The toilet will still be on fire come Monday morning.