We’re just waiting for it to come around, is what we’re doing, as Arlo once said. And when it does, if we want to end war and stuff we’d best be ready to sing loud, with four-part harmony and feelin’.
It always comes around. But sometimes it takes a while.
When I was a young dope fiend and freshly minted college dropout, a Selective Service lottery winner with hair down to my whatsis and that sardonic gleam in my eye, I was for some reason having trouble finding gainful employment in the libertarian paradise of what then was not yet called Bibleburg.
So I signed on with one of those temp outfits that promises to keep a fella busy and the first job they sent me on involved the interior cleaning and restoration of a narc’s house that had been set on fire.
My first thought was that I didn’t feel too good about it. My second was that maybe I should come back in the dead of night and finish the firebug’s half-assed job.
Thing was, I had already dodged two bullets in my after-school sideline as a low-level weed retailer, and through nothing more than sheer good fortune, too.
The first: when I got pulled over for speeding at oh-dark-thirty in Walsenburg by two bored cops playing with their new radar gun. They didn’t even bother to look in the back seat of my Chevy, where the 10 pounds of weed were sitting right fucking there in a sack, and after accepting a small cash gratuity they allowed me to proceed along my merry. hairy way.
The second: When a friend overheard a gaggle of John Laws in an Alamosa breakfast spot chattering about some major dope op’ they were fixin’ to fire up at the college. This led to the acquisition of a footlocker, much aluminum foil, a shovel, and a hole in the ground far from our dorm room, which underwent a much swifter and more thorough cleaning than the narc’s house would get some months later, in my new life as a retired mota peddler.
So I decided that the third time would not be the charm, for me, anyway. And what the hell, I needed the bread. So I rolled up my sleeves, got busy, and after that filthy job was in the rear view found myself a regular gig as a janitor. Honest work. And no button-down types give a shit if a janitor has hair down to his whatsis and a sardonic gleam in his eye, because his workday starts after theirs has ended.
You know the rest. After seeing my reflection in toilets grew tiresome I landed that first newspaper job, and that’s where I was when Tricky Dick scuttled out of the White House like a rat fleeing a landfill fire.
“Our long national nightmare is over,” said Jerry Ford. Uh, not so much. A month later he pardoned the crooked sonofabitch. Shortly thereafter I bought my first gun.
And a half century later, here we are again, trying to wake the fuck up from our latest national nightmare.
It feels as though we’re facing the same choices I did as a temp, when my hair was still down to my whatsis instead of crowding my ears and nostrils: Clean it up, burn it down, or go elsewhere.
The other shoe is still out there, dangling somewhere between heaven and earth, and once again it may belong to a vice president. I had high hopes for ol’ Jerry back in 1974, but not this faux hillbilly. Every time he cracks his hairy piehole I hear banjo music.
Emperor Fullashito no longer knows the difference between Iran and Japan.
I believe the sushi has done slid off his barbari.
Maybe he shish’d his kebab by having unprotected buttsex with that Ruth Social hoor. Or did he fragment his hard drive cranking out too many midnight memes for “Tic Tac?”
Perhaps he and the Republic might be better served if he were relocated from the Oval Orifice to some other federal assisted-living facility, perhaps the one in Kansas. Or better yet, that really exclusive one outside Penrose, Colo.
What the hell? Name the joint after him. Rattle-can the walls of his cell with some gold Krylon and pipe in the Village People’s greatest hits 24/7. Let him get his jailhouse rocks off until he shuffles off. Some might prefer that he do his farewell dance at the end of a rope, but over the past 10 years I think we’ve all learned to live with disappointment.
If he spends the rest of his days in confinement, alongside his fluffers, family, and friends — the last is a very short list, only one rollaway needed, and someone will have to dig up Roy Cohn to put in it — well, I can live with that.
As long as he’s under round-the clock video surveillance available to any citizen with an Internet connection so he doesn’t get Epsteined when all the guards suddenly decide to piss off for a smoke break as Stephen Miller slips into his cell with a presidential pardon in one hand and a shiv made from a black Sharpie in the other.
• • •
Someone who should most definitely remain at large and holding forth is my man Mike Ferrentino, who has given us another peek at his inner workings over at NSMB.com.
Mike finds balance on an existential three-legged stool — writing, wrenching, and riding. Take one of these things away and shit gets wobbly.
In the mid-90s I hit a sweet spot for a few years. Throwing wrenches for paychecks balanced the head-fuzz of writing for paychecks, while riding and racing provided this lung and muscle stabilizer, a physical set of checks and balances for all the strobing head noise and fingernail grease. The three-legged stool was pretty damn bomber there for a while. With occasional forays out of the shop into spinning wrenches at events, or cosplaying as a World Cup mechanic, I was staying sharp on the tools, could still stomp the pedals like I meant it, and it felt as if words were just pouring out of my skull.
Everything seems a little slower now.
Total immersion. Absorb the ambience, excrete the wisdom, rinse and repeat. I can dig it.
One of the reasons Herself and I left CrustyTucky for Bibleburg in 2002 was that as a velo-scribbler I needed an actual cycling community for perspiration and inspiration.
I had that, in our first stint in B-burg, from 1991 to 1995. But up in the Wet Mountain boondocks there was only Your Humble Narrator and the Deadline.
Now and then I miss that relentless, unforgiving sonofabitch. When money talks, what makes bullshit walk is the Deadline.
You can’t bullshit the Deadline. It is not an essay question, or even multiple choice. You either make it or you don’t; true or false, right or wrong. And a freelancer only gets so many wrongs before an editor figures you are all the way wrong and stops giving you assignments and/or taking your calls.
More than once I found myself forced to cook up a last-minute Column About Nothing, a dish that satisfies neither chef nor customer, on a par with empty-cupboard feeds like pasta with butter, salt, and pepper, or catsup soup with saltines. Better to move back to a place that has groceries, restaurants, takeout. Also, cyclists, group rides, bike shops.
It worked, too, for a while. We did a dozen years that second round in the B-burg, and now we’ve done a dozen here in The Duck! City, the last four and a half of which I have whiled away as a Gentleman of Leisure.
The Deadline no longer torments me. “Everything seems a little slower now,” as Señor Ferrentino observes.
• • •
That includes me. I quit racing, as both a participant and a spectator. I burn a damn sight less daylight on group rides and lurking around bike shops. Plus I no longer write, draw or edit for money. Which is probably a good thing, if Rose Horowitch of The Atlantic is correct and we are well into becoming a postliterate society.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis.
My crowd was tough enough Back in the Day®. The postliterati would have no patience for me and my periodic digressions into politics, which like banned substances I injected into cartoons and columns to make them hop like pot-belged bunnies. Some of those screeds were long! 750 words! Who has the time?
Truth be told, all these years later, I feel some belated sympathy for the readers who bellowed, “Keep politics out of cycling!” They were ignorant, of course, and wrong — politics has its greedy, grasping little fingers in everything, including cycling — and stupidity should be painful. Like writing, and reading, especially if you’re reading whatever I’m writing. I mean, 750 words! The fuck? Etc.
It’s looking like a whole new ballgame now, hey? But in a way, it’s the same old ballgame. We began as monkeys screeching at each other in person, then became monkeys who scrawled rude and often indecipherable notes to each other through intermediaries, and now we’re going to be monkeys screeching at each other on our phones, with an assist from artificial intelligence.
But who knows how long A.I. will find that sort of thing amusing? Talk about your short attention spans — brain the size of the Death Star and what’s it doing? Using 0.000000001 percent of capacity to help the filthy meat-things make TikToks of themselves as gods or Marvel superheroes, which are often the same thing; to a certain crowd, anyway.
One wonders what the rest of A.I. is up to.
“See, dummies, he’s not a senile old fool, he’s Captain America! No, he’s Jesus! Oh, look, now he’s Jesus America!”
Hey, it’s all entertainment. Just ask your phone. No fake news in there. Pay no attention to the man — or whatever it is — behind the display.
You could see it all coming way back in 1968, when Richard Nixon popped up in a cameo on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” saying, “Sock it to me?”
It wasn’t over on Aug. 9, 1974, when Gerald R. Ford trotted out that boogeyman-be-gone bullshit upon assuming the presidency vacated by Richard M. Nixon, a rat fleeing the ship of state he did his best to sink.
And Ford went on to be even more stunningly full of shit when he added:
Our Constitution works; our great Republic is a government of laws and not of men. Here the people rule.
A month later, Ford finally achieved escape-velocity, bullshit-wise, when he granted “a full, free and absolute pardon” to his predecessor, a man whom Hunter S. Thompson called “so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning.”
Some of us thought that was as bad as it was ever going to get.
Ho, ho, as the Good Doktor would say. We were wrong.
We have elevated some remarkably stupid, ineffectual, and/or venal hombres to the presidency since then. Not Ford, though. Nobody voted him into the gig, but he certainly got voted out in ’76 when the nation decided, well, fuck it, they’d rather have a Georgia peanut farmer in the Oval Office than the knucklehead who waved Tricky Dicky off to San Clemency with nothing but his pension and related benefits to keep him warm in retirement.
And even now, when we appear to have reached our political nadir, the creaky national machinery in the tiny palsied handsies of a senile, shambling, burger-gobbling narcoleptic, a convicted felon with a mean streak a mile wide and an unquenchable thirst for wealth, power, and vengeance, who apparently has a joy buzzer installed in his diapers so an aide can shock him awake, however briefly, to unleash a torrent of non sequiturs to be dutifully chronicled, analyzed, and excreted by the press corpse, well … I’m not about to tell you that this is as bad as it’s ever going to get.
Pogo — himself a candidate for the presidency in 1952 and ’56 — hit the nail on the head back in 1971, when Tricky Dicky was still kneewalking drunk around the White House, arguing with the paintings and looking for an exit that didn’t involve a perp walk in cuffs. Had we insisted upon it, we might have been spared some of what was to come.
But we didn’t. And so it goes.
“We have met the enemy and he is us,” said Pogo. Truer words, etc.
Scott Pruitt is going back to lifting twenties out of the collection plate at First Baptist in Broken Arrow, sneaking tips off nearby tables at Cracker Barrel, and surreptitiously peeing in Tulsa’s municipal pools.
The Good Doktor was speaking of Nixon fluffer Pat Buchanan, who was whimpering publicly about the harsh treatment afforded The Boss as the hyenas of Watergate gnawed on his political carcass, and what Thompson had to say about that administration 44 years ago goes double for this one:
“By bringing in hundreds of thugs, fixers and fascists to run the Government, [Nixon] was able to crank almost every problem he touched into a mindbending crisis. About the only disaster he hasn’t brought down on us yet is a nuclear war with either Russia or China or both but he still has time, and the odds on his actually doing it are not all that long.
“This is the horror of American politics today — not that Richard Nixon and his fixers have been crippled, convicted, indicted, disgraced and even jailed — but that the only available alternatives are not much better; the same dim collection of burned‐out hacks who have been fouling our air with their gibberish for the last twenty years.
“How long, oh Lord, how long? And how much longer will we have to wait before some high‐powered shark with a fistful of answers will finally bring us face‐to‐face with the ugly question that is already so close to the surface in this country, that sooner or later even politicians will have to cope with it?
“Is the democracy worth all the risks and problems that necessarily go with it? Or, would we all be happier by admitting that the whole thing was a lark from the start and now that it hasn’t worked out, to hell with it.”
I’d let Pruitt run the siren all the way back to Oklahoma, if he didn’t mind that his personal vehicle was a splintery rail. Meanwhile, his replacement as EPA chief is a former coal lobbyist, because of course he is. Right again, Doc.
• Bonus Extra Credit Venom: Read HST’s obituary of Richard M. Nixon, who many of us thought — wrongly, as it turned out — was as bad as a president could get.
• Editor’s note: What follows was intended to be a rambling kickoff to a Counter-Inaugural Podcast at Radio Free Dogpatch, but my sidekick Hal Walter developed a bad case of previous commitments, so I’m laying it on you old-school instead. Tomorrow it will be radio silence from yours truly here and on Twitter. But there will be an open-mic post suitable for commentary, so feel free to chime in with your thoughts on what this particular changing of the guard means for you, and for the rest of us. Finally, a tip of the carny’s boater to Ray Bradbury for the headline. It’s a pity — or is it? — that he didn’t live to see Cooger & Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show come to life.
We’re all bozos on this bus. Some of us more than others.
IT’S BEEN A STRUGGLE, TRYING TO FIND WORDS to describe how I feel about what’s going to be happening on Friday — and afterward — in Washington, D.C.
I’ve watched this changing of the guard since before I was eligible to vote, and it rarely goes well for progressives.
In 1969, when Richard Nixon was preparing to take an oath of office he had already violated by undermining the Paris peace talks, the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam staged a three-day counter-inaugural that proved quite the bash, both literally and figuratively.
Yippies Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman brought a revolutionary-theater sideshow to the circus, proposing to inaugurate their own president, a 145-pound hog named Pigasus, with predictable results. The Left immediately set about eating itself alive — Splitters! — rocks, bottles, horseshit and punches were thrown, cops and protesters alike took a beating, 119 people got a tour of the hoosegow, and as is traditional in such matters, both sides claimed victory.
Nixon, of course, claimed the White House. Twice. You may recall how that turned out.
I found it all fascinating, from a safe distance, and when I became eligible to vote in time for the 1972 elections, I tried to register as a member of the Youth International Party, the proper name for the improper Yippies. Never happen, said the county clerk in Bibleburg, and I had to settle for signing up as an “independent.” But Hunter S. Thompson was actually in attendance at the ’69 inaugural, and he didn’t exactly come away with a smile on his lips and a song in his heart.
Recounting the experience for The Boston Globe in February 1969, Thompson wrote: “My first idea was to load up on LSD and cover the Inauguration that way, but the possibilities were ominous: a scene that bad could only be compounded to the realm of mega-horrors by something as powerful as acid.”
As Thompson watched the deal go down during what he called “a king-hell bummer” and “that wretched weekend,” he saw “a new meanness on both sides … and no more humor.”
“Suddenly I felt cold, and vaguely defeated,” he wrote. “More than eight years ago, in San Francisco, I had stayed up all night to watch the election returns … and when Nixon went down I felt like a winner.
“Now, on this Monday night in 1969, President Nixon was being honored with no less than six Inaugural Balls. I brooded on this for a while, then decided I would go over to the Hilton, later on, and punch somebody. Almost anybody would do … but hopefully I could find a police chief from Nashville or some other mean geek. In the meantime, there was nothing to do but go back to the hotel and watch the news on TV … maybe something funny, like film clips of the bastinado.”
• • •
Neither Hunter S. Thompson nor Dick Nixon are with us this time around, but another pair of Sixties relics you may have thought were likewise long gone — LSD and psilocybin — are making something of a comeback as potential treatments for whatever bad scene may be unfolding on the backside of your forehead (or in front of it).
In December, The New York Timesreported on a couple of studies that showed “clinically significant reductions” in both anxiety and depression in cancer patients who took synthetic psilocybin.
The studies, which the Times called “the largest and most meticulous among a handful of trials to explore the possible therapeutic benefit of psilocybin,” found the beneficial effects persisted for months.
One patient, who had just completed treatment for stage-3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma, described what he called “an epiphany.”
“I’m not anxious about cancer anymore,” he said. “I’m not anxious about dying.”
Another, whose treatment for acute myeloid leukemia left him with graft-versus-host disease, said the experience left him with “a greater sense of peace with what might come.”
“I’m very grateful, beyond words, for this trial,” he added.
And on January 14, The Atlanticran a Q&A with Ayelet Waldman, whose new book “A Really Good Day” describes her microdosing with LSD to self-correct what she described as “a pretty significant depression.”
She had tried the traditional remedies served up by the medical-industrial complex — antidepressants, ADHD drugs, SSRIs, you name it — but a couple drops of diluted and highly illegal L-S-Dizzy is what did the trick for her.
Said Waldman: “I felt happier or at least not as profoundly depressed almost immediately the very first day I took it.”
Funniest thing, hey? About 10 years after the good Doctor Thompson was mulling over that Nixon inaugural, a friend and I offered an acid-soaked homage to his fear-and-loathing tour of Las Vegas. But we didn’t have his stamina, and when a jai-alai match at the old MGM Grand started to look like a “Star Wars” shootout we got the fuck out of there at a very high speed indeed, driving all the way back to Alamosa — the Brain Damage Express, via Kaibab and Page, the Four Corners and the terrifying Wolf Creek Pass, with the usual horrible weather and without the enhancements that were still a few years down the road.
But we sure as shit weren’t depressed. We were simply seeing a whole lot of things we’d rather not have and thought a case of beer, a long night’s drive and a plate of his mom’s enchiladas might mellow us out.
Forty years later I can make my own enchiladas but I’m not so sure about the acid. I still have my copy of “The Anarchist Cookbook,” but I was never much at chemistry.
• • •
All trips, both good and bad, come to an end, sooner or later. And in May, the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will break down the big top in May for the final time after 146 years.
According to The New York Times, Feld Entertainment, the producer of the circus, cited rising operating costs and falling ticket sales, a condition that worsened after Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey dropped elephants from its show last year.
CEO Kenneth Feld told The Associated Press that moving the show by rail, providing a traveling school for performers’ children and other expenses from a bygone era made carrying on a losing proposition.
“It’s a different model … we can’t see how it works in today’s world to justify and maintain an affordable ticket price,” he said.
And let’s not forget that old devil competition. There’s another, bigger circus coming to town, with a permanent base of operations in Washington, D.C., the financial support of the State, and free worldwide access via social media. Plus elephants, too!
The Greatest Show On Earth is now an angry orange clown with a Twitter account. Hur-ry, hur-ry, hur-ry. …
