I’ve spent the past couple of days rassling various techno-gators in my undrained swamp of a media landscape and that gaudy championship belt remains elusive.
Most of the hitches in the gitalong of the latest Radio Free Dogpatch revival we have already examined, save one: The 2014 MacBook Pro I use as a podcast editor is not only long in the tooth, it’s short in the stomach, which is to say that its 121 GB SSD is about 3 GB short of full.
So over the weekend I sez to myself I sez, “Maybe it’s time I finally installed that 1 TB SSD that’s been gathering dust around here for the better part of quite some time.”
Well, sir, before a fella does that he wants to back that internal sumbitch up to an external drive. Which my backup software decided it didn’t wanna do, it being the Lord’s day and all.
So I emailed tech support, which was Johnny on the spot, especially considering that even the Deity takes Sundays off. And we got that issue resolved and the backup created after a couple of false starts and a promise to download the latest software update “for security reasons,” which “for not-in-the-mood reasons” I postponed until some later date.
Because by then it was time for a bike ride, and then a shower, and finally dinner with a bit of TV, which the day before required a bit of Kentucky windage because some streaming services are getting pissy about shared user accounts, the oinking capitalist swine.
And this morning I decided the MacBook Pro upgrade could wait a while because I wanted to address some other issues, this time with a email/website-hosting outfit (not WordPress) whose company has changed hands and/or names about eleventy-se’m times in the last year or so, and holy hell did that ever turn into an A.I./ESL/Subcontinental clusterfuck of epic proportions.
About which the less said, the better, because I don’t want to stroke out before His Excremency, who from the look of him lately might just oblige us tomorrow by exploding in a pinkish-gray, shrieking shit-mist of curdled Mickey D’s grease, aspartame, and prescription drugs during the State of the Union, one of the many things about which he knows exactly jack shit. I won’t be watching, of course, but someone’s bound to post the video online.
Anyway, when I’m struggling to get all my kazoos, whoopie cushions, and aaaooogah horns to play from the same sheet of music, I think of Beth in “Diner,” as Shrevie is berating her for failing to shelve his records properly.
“It’s too complicated, Shrevie. You see, every time I pull out a record, there’s this whole procedure I have to go through. I just want to hear the music, that’s all.”
For reals. Makes me long for the days of typewritten underground newspapers and CB radio.
Uh, whatever it is, I’ve got it penciled in … or not.
Whenever Herself zips off someplace for an extended stretch I suffer from delusions of creativity.
The idea is that somehow a window will open onto a shining world full of possibilities — blogging, podcasting, cartooning, etc.
Ho, ho. Miss Mia Sopaipilla gets more accomplished in one trip to the litter box than I do all day.
Here’s that annoying poet again, poking his big beezer through my window:
Between the idea And the reality Between the motion And the act Falls the Shadow — T.S. Eliot, “The Hollow Men”
In Herself’s absence Mia and I both find our daily routines disrupted, but Mia bounces back faster. Initially, upon discovering that her support staff has been halved, there is a related increase in vocalization, perimeter inspection, game-playing, and other attention-seeking practices related to separation anxiety.
“You may amuse us.”
But then she rockets right through all five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance — and simply takes more and longer naps in various sunny spots, reasoning that time passes more quickly that way, and soon she’ll awaken to Herself offering a soupçon of half-and-half while preparing her breakfast coffee instead of that old baldheaded sonofabitch grumbling over a mug of tarry black heart-starter.
Me, I get to pick up a few more shifts in the barrel.
Herself gets up at 4 a.m. most days, so when she is not around to arise and deal with Mia, well, this means that I get up at 4 a.m. most days. This cuts deeply into my beauty sleep, which anyone who has seen me in the flesh knows I need desperately, the way Stephen Miller needs a walk-in freezer full of dead teenage runaways. (“Time for a cold one. …”).
Then there’s the cooking for one. Takes as much time as cooking for two, but now I have to handle the post-dinner cleanup.
Laundry. Won’t do itself. I’ve done the research. Same goes for taking out the trash and recycling, and loading/emptying the dishwasher.
And don’t get me started on the whole “making money” thing. Lucky for me it rolls in like the tide. I ain’t got nothin’ to do with it.
Birds gotta be fed. We were out of seed, so it was off to our seed dealer, who is a talker. Hummers are back, so their feeders had to get filled and distributed around the yard, which was in need of mowing.
Somehow mowing is one of my regular chores. I’ve argued that it should fall to Herself, since it’s basically vacuuming outdoors, sort of like the parkour of hoovering. But she just chuckles and reminds me who makes all the fucking money around here.
Then my old VeloNews comrade Casey Gibson happened to be rolling through town to spectate at the Tour of the Gila, so it goes without saying that we had to get together for a couple of meals and complain about all the money we weren’t making.
And of course bicycles must be ridden and runs ran. Run? I’ll get back to you on that.
Thus a whole lot of my daylight (and best-laid plans) went up in smoke. And all I’ve got to show for it is clean laundry, washed dishes, a trimmed lawn, a couple extended chats over restaurant meals, empty trash bins, full birds, and a happy cat.
Because Herself just came home. Half and half is back on the menu. And I’m sleeping in tomorrow.
Weird-looking Christmas tree. Isn’t even decorated.
Well, our white Christmas finally showed up around 4 p.m. yesterday.
Better than never, I suppose. But 0.04 inch is hardly for the dashing through in a one-horse open sleigh.
Our “white Christmas.”
Ours was a modest celebration at El Rancho Pendejo. We broke fast with coffee, toast, oatmeal, and tea, went out for a short trail run, and lunched on leftover pasta with a mildly lively sauce of tomatoes, sausage, rosemary and olives.
Afterward, while I made the tee-hees here at the blog, Herself whipped up a giant cookie using a shortbread pan she scored from Goodwill. Background music was from The Chieftains, The Pogues, Mozart, Robert Earl Keen, Hozier, Tom Waits … you know, the usual holiday suspects.
Dinner was jambalaya with a green salad. Beverages included Guinness 0.0 and Sierra Nevada Pale Ale.
Gift-giving was restrained. I have this fine new MacBook Pro, and Herself has the green light for a getaway with a friend.
Gotta save our pennies for those tariffs, $50 cartons of eggs, and $20-per-gallon gas. Also, moreover, furthermore, and too, bribes for the guards at the camp. A fella can’t eat rat tartare three meals a day, y’know.
The final update from Mad Blog Media circa 2000. | Screen grab from the Wayback Machine.
Ken Layne at Desert Oracle Radio throws a bonus bone to his Patreon supporters now and then, and the latest was a podcast about his early adventures in bloggery, with one of his old running mates, Matt Welch of Reason magazine and the podcast We the Fifth.
Back in the Day™, when Layne and Welch were building their online presences, they were basically trying to find a new way to do The Work, have fun, and still get paid. They may still be looking. The experience “left both of us semi-internet famous and broke,” quipped Welch.
Me, I was just looking for a publisher-free zone where I could have the occasional public argument with the Voices in my head without frightening anyone’s advertisers.
“That? Oh, that’s just him being him. No, we’ve looked into it, and the Constitution and the ACLU both say he can do that. It’s kind of like the smellies at the off-ramps waving their cardboard signs, except he spells all the words right and he’s not asking for money.”
I’ve lost track of the precise timeline, but the Wayback Machine shows examples of prehistoric TrogloDogS(h)ites dating back to 1998, when I was but a baby blogger cooing and gurgling at the world via satellite Internet from our hillside hideaway in Crusty County.
But there were even earlier versions, long gone off the back and into the broom wagon. I know this because their URLs are in the copyright notices I attached to everything I wrote for the paying customers back then. The hosting outfits were small-timers in central Colorado, most of them no longer with us, and not even the Wayback Machine can find their bones.
I first mentioned a Mad Dog Media website in a 1997 column:
My very own Mad Dog Media Web site lets me slip the leash of conventional publishing and run at large, watering all and sundry with no regard whatsoever for the dictates of good taste or profit margin. Stuff that no one in his or her right mind would publish finds a home here.
—Patrick O’Grady, “Mad Dog Unleashed,” Bicycle Retailer and Industry News
In addition to wanting my own pot to piss in, there was an issue with boredom. The hours can pass very slowly indeed when you’re perched on a rocky hillside 10 miles from a town with no stop lights, more cows than people, and more churches than bars. I was traveling less than I had been when Herself and I did our first tour of Bibleburg in the early Nineties. Back then I’d dash off to Boulder to help VeloNews and Inside Triathlon with production, or venture further afield to cover races, trade shows, whatever. And the races were a lot closer when we lived on the Front Strange. Moving to Crusty County added about 150 miles to every round trip, so I made fewer of them.
Finally, the Crusty County cycling community was basically me, myself, and I. The Voices needed more of an audience than that.
So, yeah: Blogging. My toolkit included (in addition to the attitude and analog-publication experience): PageSpinner, Netscape Navigator, Photoshop, and Fetch; a series of analog and early digital cameras from Pentax, Canon, Sony and Epson; and Macs of various shapes and sizes, among them one of the ill-considered MacClones, a Power Computing PowerBase 200 that I described as “possessed by devils,” because it was.
I taught myself some extremely basic HTML and bounced the blog around those bush-league ISPs before killing off that model in February 2000 (bloggery from the remainder of that year and all of 2001 has gone walkabout); sampled just about every free prefab blogging package available; even tried a self-hosted WordPress build for a while. Then you lot decided you wanted to be able to comment on posts, and on comments, and on comments about the comments, and the simplest way to get all that was to hand the whole shebang over to WordPress.com.
So here we are.
It’s been a fair amount of labor just to run my mouth to no particular purpose for 26 years. But unlike a lot of other refugees from straight journalism, I never thought about trying to make it pay, not really. That would’ve added a whole new degree of difficulty: charging a membership fee; selling advertising; signing up with (and giving a cut to) Patreon, Medium, or Substack; doing some tip-jar beggary like Charles Pelkey and I did for Live Update Guy; and relentlessly self-promoting on social media (“Hey, lookit me, lookit me, LOOKIT ME!!!”).
Anyway, I was already earning something resembling a living by acting the fool for VeloNews, BRAIN, Adventure Cyclist, and anyone else who could stand the gaff and write a check that wouldn’t bounce. And some days that could really feel like work. I felt that if I started to charge admission to the blog, it would turn into a job, and I already knew how that sort of thing ended. Badly.
I may not get paid for this, but I derive other benefits from the work. It keeps me engaged with the world, however distasteful that may be at times. Some people like it, and even say so, in public. And it keeps the rust off this old pen that some folks think is mightier than the sword, possibly because they’ve never fallen afoul of an angry dude with a sword.
At times blogging feels like a training ride on the bike, taking photos that never make it out of the iPhone, or thumb-fingering my way around some John Prine tune on the guitar. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, or anywhere else? Practice, practice, practice.
I’ve been practicing bloggery for a quarter-century now. Who knows? One of these years I might just get it right.
Thanks to everyone who tooled around the dimly lit, undermanned, and poorly maintained corners of the Innertubes to inspect and comment upon the options for a virtual urban-renewal project here at the DogS(h)ite.
I think I’ve touched all the bases, repackaged the necessary bells and whistles, and preserved all data for the Permanent Record. And thus, sometime today or tomorrow, I will probably tell the WordPress Blog-O-Mat 9000™ to knock down this old hovel and erect in its place a Shining City on a Hill.
Or maybe it’ll look more like rattle-canning a fresh coat of camo’ on the old single-wide, hoisting a new Anarchy flag, and raking up 15 years’ worth of dessicated dog turds. I tell the neighbors they’re Art, but they don’t believe me, about that or anything else.
If all goes well, you shouldn’t notice a great deal of difference. I anticipate a round or two or three of Whac-a-Mole, but the plan remains to hawk the same old hooey, just out of a new window, minus the bullet holes and duct tape.
If it all goes horribly wrong, well … let’s not think about that, shall we? You’ll probably be able to hear from me without need for a computer, browser, or Innertubes. (“Gaw dam cog sug muh fug sum bidge. …”)
But if you can’t hear the caterwauling, leave a message at the New Wheeled Order sandbox or email me at maddogmedia (at) gmail (dot) com.
Mad Blog Media 