You can have my shorts when you pry them from my cold, dead legs.
I’m a late adopter. Hardware, software, pants in autumn.
Herself cracked this morning and pulled on the long johns — plus long sleeves, socks, and a vest — but not me. No, sir.
The uniform of the day until further notice remains Columbia shorts from the previous millennium, a mildly pilled Paddygucci T-shirt, and some battered old Tevas. Shucks, I even went outdoors in that kit to water the shrubs.
Not for long, mind you. But still. It keeps the blood flowing briskly and the neighbors at a comfortable distance.
“Don’t get too close, now. You might catch whatever it is he has.”
“Do you mind? You’re letting the cold air in.”
Miss Mia Sopaipilla, meanwhile, welcomes the advent of cooler weather. That means the Return of the Bedcave, a passive-solar getaway that’s like a day at the beach without the sand in your undercarriage. It’s the cat’s meow, if you will.
The proletarians have nothing to lube but their chains!
Wait a minute. That’s not right. …
The proletarians would also want to butter their chamois, lest they suffer knots on their knuts during pedal revolutions. When V.I. Lenin wrote “What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement” in 1902 he was not recommending remedies for saddle sores.
I’d been invited to smash the State at a rally in Fanta Se, but that was looking like an all-day affair, and with (a) it being Monday, and (2) Herself inbound from a long weekend in Minnesota, I had trash and recycling bins to set out and retrieve; sheets, pillowcases and towels to launder; plants to water; hummingbird feeders to wash and refill; the usual feline maintenance; and a general all-round, stem-to-stern, rapid reassembly of a living space in which only one-third of the occupants really cares about any sort of Better Homes & Gardens tidiness.
Guess who. Here’s a hint: It ain’t me or Miss Mia. I’ve always done my best work under deadline pressure, but I can guarantee you I’ve cut a few corners here today. The self-criticism session will be grueling.
So, anyway, instead of invading the capital with my socialist brethren and sisthren I spent a couple hours cycling around the foothills with my geezer comrades in what proved to be a delightful debut for September 2025 before buckling down to the task(s) at hand..
I flew the red jersey and took all my pulls. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” etc. And I stood by valiantly as one of our number was waylaid by a reactionary goathead or shard of glass. The lumpenproletariat traditionally recycles beverage containers at roadside, via passenger-side windows, during revolutionary holiday weekends.
“Glassholes,” as one comrade muttered.
When I returned home to a frugal working-class lunch I discovered that there were two — two! — Labor Day rallies right here in The Duck! City. And I had missed both of them.
The comrades in PR are way off the back here. I’m gonna have to start paying closer attention to my socialist-media accounts.
A thunderclap yesterday afternoon startled Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who was curled up in her favorite sack, enjoying her eleventy-seventh nap of the day.
I did not tell her, as did Johnny Lundgren’s dad in Jim Harrison’s “Warlock,” “That’s God barking at you for being such a miserable little pissant.”
No, I reassured her that it wasn’t God, probably, or even the work of a (much) lesser (would-be) deity — say, Felonious Punk, commanding a few of his masked ICEholes to shock-and-awe us back to wherever we came from, or didn’t, whatever.
Even if fascism were to come a-calling at El Rancho Pendejo, Miss Mia should have nothing to fear. She’s a Russian blue, and since the Punk just blew a Russian, she should be A-OK with him and his goons. Cream for all my apparatchiks!
Now, me, I’m an Irish-American Red, so who knows where I’d wind up? Where would a Adderall-snorting asshat send a sober Mick scribbler with a bicycle fetish? A Boston pub to pull pints on St. Patrick’s Day? The International Space Station, to chronicle its “retirement,” slated for 2030? Couldn’t log much saddle time up there over the next five years, but I’d get to rip one helluva descent when NASA — if it’s still around — pulls the plug.
And Herself? Conscripted into the Punk’s platoon of librarians, I expect. Condemned to catalog the pestilential archives of fuck books, Truth Social screeds, and unpaid bills.
And she wouldn’t be allowed to shush any of his minions, who never ever give their festering gobs a nanosecond’s respite from telling the FreeDummies that Making America Great Again requires chop-shopping it into a Dollar Store knockoff of Pooty-poot’s Russia.
Troops to Ukraine? Hell no! But troops to DeeCee? That’s the real global trouble spot, amirite?
The best intel I can muster tells me that the enemy is bunkered up at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW. Careful with the arty and airstrikes, lads, and try to avoid damage to the facility if it’s feasible — it is a National Heritage Site, but may have been desecrated beyond resurrection.
I mean, have you seen what these terrorists have done to the Rose Garden?
Lots of schmutz in the air today. Our air purifier started sounding like a 747 trying (and failing) to take off from Newark, so I figured Elon was back to blowing up Starships in Texas between Special K binges and using his face as a catcher’s mitt for some pitcher’s high hard one.
But nope. Just windblown wildfire smoke and dust from Mexico, according to the local press. A health alert* has been issued. And warmish, too, so much so with the doors and windows closed that I finally caved and turned on the air conditioning. We must think of Miss Mia Sopaipilla, after all.
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.
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