Lift with your legs

October 14, 2024October 14, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 15 Comments

I got to throw a rare double bird during a ride this past weekend.

Rounding a corner I saw a yard sign for TFG to my left … and then another across the street to my right.

“O! The Joy!” William Clark must have felt like this when he thought he’d finally seen the Pacific “ocian.” In honor of the Corps of Discovery I gave the placards the salute they deserved.

It’s little things like this that keep me on a slow simmer instead of a rolling boil.

As a longtime observer and occasional chronicler of our national political bed-wetting, I have felt compelled for some years now to watch and describe what appears — to me, anyway — to be a brain-damaged orangutan dry-humping the Statue of Liberty.

But damme if the lifting doesn’t get heavier every day. And I’m an old man, with a bad back.

So I lift with my legs. Which is to say that when I feel some crucial part of me starting to give way, I go for a ride, letting my legs lift my flagging spirit.

A bicycle can bear a lot of weight. You can trust me on this: I was a great fat bastard when I returned to cycling after a long absence, and that first two-wheeler had to carry a lot of baggage.

So have its descendants. But the tonnage these days is less Marlboro breath and whiskey sweat, more inchoate rage and existential dread.

That’s hard weight to shed, and not even the bicycle can get it all off you. But it definitely helps, especially if you try not to put the pounds right back on as soon as you get home.

• Pro tip: Try wearing a heart-rate monitor when you scan the news. When you find yourself surfing a hate-wave through Zone 5, remember that there is no Zone 6. Not in this lifetime, anyway. Grab a bike and get the hell out of the house.

Oh, eat me. …

July 5, 2024July 5, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments

¡Basta ya! I embarked on a news diet yesterday. As in “fasting.”

Throughout the long Fourth I consumed exactly zero news, save for checking the weather to see if it was suitable for the healthy outdoor exercise.

And really, I could’ve just stepped outside for that.

But still. Shit.

The media had been keening without letup at a pitch that made an Irish wake look like sitting zazen. The Internet is said to be bottomless, the way a cup of joe used to be, but they came perilously close to filling the fucker up.

The fans in my 10-year-old MacBook Pro were approaching a Boeing level of failure. Every hot take a platter of steaming horseshit, smack in the gob. In my Father’s Bistro there are Many Dishes, I mused blasphemously. I sure as hell don’t have to eat this shit.

So I pulled a Level One Roberto Duran: “No más, no más.”

As mentioned in the previous post, yesterday I took my coffee on the couch, not at the desk. After breakfast Herself and I went for a short trail run. I followed that up with a 90-minute ride.

Then I set a loaf of bread to baking, poured the fixings for Sarah DiGregorio’s chipotle-honey chicken tacos into the Crock-Pot, argued with the Voices in my head about which of our many subscriptions we should cancel, entertained Miss Mia Sopaipilla, and served up the grub.

The three of us dined in front of the TV, streaming a couple episodes of “The Bear,” season three. (Spoiler alert: There was less hollering, even when Sugar was in labor.)

Afterward we joined the neighbors for their annual fireworks extravaganza in the cul-de-sac. No flyers or boomers, just ground-level sparklers and sizzlers. But an enjoyable tradition nonetheless.

One of the grandkids was leaping and cavorting throughout, trying to grab a handful of smoke, as grandpa performed his pyrotechnical wizardry. I caught my share of the exhaust while sitting down, in my clothing, eyes, and windpipe, and both Herself and I had to hit the showers afterward to hose off the residue of whatever those wily foreign devils put in their whizbangs.

The Republic I left to its own devices. I expect there was no shortage of counsel, and plenty of fireworks, too.

• Meanwhile, a housekeeping note: If any of you have tried and failed to post a comment recently, and you are using an Apple device, the problem may reside with the Safari browser. Herself was able to comment from an M1 Mac Mini using Firefox. I’ve pinged the WordPress people and will get back to you with whatever they have to say. But in the meantime, you might try using another browser to make your voices heard.

Double dumbstruck

September 11, 2022 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments

“This heat’s not good for the brain. Turns out nothing much is good for the brain in the 2020s. TV rots it, the Internet turns it to jelly, the miserable climate bakes it, 90 percent of what we call ‘work’ is deliberately designed to actually erase the human brain; this has been proven. Podcasts: Now there’s a guaranteed way to reverse years of book-learning and social skills. There’s online gambling, TikTok … and then Queen Elizabeth II passed away and it was like a Bat-Signal in the sky to make everybody go extra double-dumb. … Only in Ireland did they seem to sort of be enjoying it all.” — Ken Layne, “Like a Hurricane,” Desert Oracle Radio

You said a mouthful, brother.

The news has been so relentlessly grotesque that I found myself double-dumbstruck, which is to say rendered speechless by astonishment while simultaneously catching a puck in the gob from a wildly flailing eejit.

The prospect of commenting on any of our ongoing Dumpster fires felt like pissing into the drinking water in Jackson, Mississippi — an enhancement, to be sure, but not a solution any sane person would swallow.

So I kept it zipped. Averted my eyes. Instead I watched the hummingbirds mobbing our feeders; the little buzzbombs will be leaving us shortly. Played with Miss Mia Sopaipilla, who remains extraordinarily kittenish for a 15-year-old cat. Rode the bike(s) — 130 miles last week, 140 this week.

With “Better Call Saul” in the rear view we branched out a bit in our evening TV-watching. I can recommend “Letterkenny,” (absurdly funny Canadians); “This Fool” (snarky South Central working-class vatos); “Belfast” (The Troubles through a child’s eyes); and “The Sandman,” derived, like “Watchmen,” from a high-gloss DC comic of which I had been ignorant.

• Honorable mention: “Funny Pages,” a bent coming-of-age story about a teenage cartoonist who gets an up-close-and-personal look at the subterranean bits of “underground comics.” Could be straight out of “Zap,” “Bijou,” or pretty much any other comic you read back when weed was still illegal. And yes, Your Humble Narrator recognized more than a few unsavory aspects of himself in this film.

What about literature, you ask? Check out a couple road-trippers on the ragged edge: the cabbie Lou in Lee Durkee’s “The Last Taxi Driver,” and the shaggy mercenary Will Bear in Dan Chaon’s “Sleepwalk.”

• Honorable mentions: “Night of the Living Rez” by Morgan Talty (his first book; dark tales of a Native community in Maine) and “Homesickness” by Colin Barrett (his second; darkly funny tales of the Irish at home and abroad).

If none of these diversions from the daily disaster does the trick for you, find a hummingbird to watch or a cat to play with.

Read, then rip

October 18, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 14 Comments

OK, so I’ve been trying very hard to ignore the dismal political news, but it’s a kind of gloomy Monday (ever seen any other kind?) and so I’ll just direct you over to Steve Benen’s Political Animal, where he seems to be running a News to Make You Pull off Your Own Head roundup.

Just start at the top and work your way down as far as you can bear it. But unload all your weapons first and give the ammo to a neighbor for safekeeping. Also, remove all breakable objects from your immediate vicinity.

Finally, should you decide to pull off your own head, congratulations! You are eligible for a leadership role in the Republican Party!