The grand Wazoo

June 26, 2026 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 16 Comments

The weatherperson’s Magic 8-Ball must’ve been on the fritz yesterday.

Every time s/he shook the sumbitch a new alert popped up. Heat warning. Thunderstorm warning. Dust-storm warning.

Herself had things to do, people to see, and places to go, so she cast a critical eye at the sky and went out for a run. Almost immediately the rain began to fall.

Lacking any pressing engagements, I waited awhile, dithering. Run? Ride? Throw in the towel and spend the morning swapping SSDs in the 2014 MacBook Pro?

Then the rain took five, so I thought I’d try to squeeze in a short trail ride, just to get outdoors and mix things up a bit. Mostly I’ve been riding the road. But I was tired of that itchy feeling between the shoulder blades one gets riding the shoulder of Tramway Boulevard, where the 50-mph speed limit is considered the minimum rather than the max.

I didn’t plan to be out long, so I pulled down a bike that would make me work for it: the Voodoo Wazoo.

When I snagged this frame with its Reynolds 853 main tubes back in 2005 I set it up pretty much in my typical cyclocross style, based on what was on hand and what I could scrounge: drop bar, XT double crank (48/36T), Shimano 600 derailleurs with bar-end shifters, 600 brake levers and some Avid cantis that had to date to 1995 or even earlier, and — just because I had ’em — a Rock Shox suspension post and Flite saddle, a True Temper Alpha Q carbon fork, and a set of Dura-Ace weirdo wheels, probably wearing Michelin Jets.

As I wrote back then:

Haven’t had it on a scale yet, but I suspect it’s the lightest bike in the bunch. The top tube is a centimeter shorter than my (Steelman) Eurocrosses, and the stem sits a tad higher, so I’ve a nice upright position on this rascal, which is nice when you’re riding something that says “Voodoo” in a town full of Bible-thumpers. You want to be able to see ’em coming.

Four years later what I didn’t see coming was a patch of ice hiding under a puddle on a Bibleburg bike path. Down I went, dislocating my left communications digit, leaving me wearing a splint and unable to handle a road bar and its various levers, STI or otherwise, with a multiday bike tour of southern Arizona coming up, my first gig for Mike Deme and Adventure Cyclist magazine.

Well. Shit.

I had to train, and I didn’t want to do it on a 26-inch-wheeled mountain bike, so I got the gang at Old Town Bike Shop to redo my Voodoo as a flat-bar, single-ring, thumb-shifting, seven-speed. The weirdo wheels went away, replaced by a mismatched set of Mavic hoops laced to Hügi Compact hubs cannibalized from an old set of MTB wheels. The cantis went unchanged, but got a pair of Real levers operable by two of the fingers that still functioned on that left hand.

Bingo.

And 17 years down the road that’s pretty much how the bike remains, with a few changes to accommodate failure and/or necessity.

The rear Avid brake finally croaked, so I swapped in a Dia-Compe 986. The Flite got moved to another bike and after a few candidates auditioned only to be found wanting the Wazoo now sports an Ergon SMC4-M atop an old Control Tech post. The tires are Continental CrossRides in 700×42. A Tange Infinity fork replaced the carbon model. When the Shimano 600 rear derailleur was needed elsewhere I plugged in a 105, with a tab extender that lets me run an 11-34T cassette with that 38T chainring.

I hadn’t ridden it since February. And that “short” ride I had planned turned into two hours of giggles on the trails, from El Rancho Pendejo south past Copper and then back north to the Elena Gallegos.

When it really started getting good to me I thought, “Maybe I should turn this back into a drop-bar cyclocross bike. I’ve got the parts. Who knows? I might spend more time riding it if it were a ’cross bike again.”

And then I thought again. The Wazoo is perfect just the way it is.

For now, anyway. …

Phone home

September 9, 2025September 9, 2025 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Full moon? Two consecutive days of medium-hot posole for dinner? Whatever … Herself and I both had weird dreams last night that seemed to peak around 2 this morning.

In these dreams both of us had lost our phones. Herself was able to borrow one to have an extended chat with her dead mom.

I had a gun, which trumps the phone in anyone’s game. You got a gun, you can talk to anyone and they have to listen. That’s a call doesn’t go to voicemail, y’follow me, Skeezix?

I was talking to someone in a Batman mask without the ears.

Hoo-boy.

To flush that out of my skull I went for a 5K run right after toast and coffee, lifted weights when I got home, and following a more substantial breakfast hit the Elena Gallegos to ride a few trails I’ve been neglecting.

If that doesn’t hit the reset button I don’t know what will.

The usual nightmares continue in DeeCee, of course. But we can’t blame them on posole. Maybe the moon. …

Up the Wazoo

April 26, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

It’s always happy trails on the Blue Wazoo.

DeeCee being a rather long slog via Subaru, I decided I’d settle for a short mood-altering run on the neighborhood trails yesterday.

I won’t travel by air, as you know. And if I did, the airline probably wouldn’t let me take my torch and pitchfork, even as checked baggage.

Anyway, what do I know about taxidermy? Sure, I could collect a few souvenir heads in our nation’s capital with my handy-dandy Gomboy folding saw, but then what? The TSA says you can board a plane with fresh meat, but they may decide to add a cautionary note about “the severed heads of Supreme Court justices” after running your lumpy carry-on through the scanner twice because they didn’t believe what they saw on the first pass.

And if you do manage to make it home without incident, preserving and mounting your prizes for display in the den is not a chore you want to hand off to anyone who doesn’t owe you a really big favor.

Shucks, even a six-pack of ears pinned to a cork board in the garage can make for some pointed conversations you’d rather not have, even if you explain that the fuckers never used them for listening, only to keep their trifocals from falling into their black robes or onto the bench, and anyway, with the fat stacks of attaboys they get from their rich pals they can have a new pair grafted on before you can say, “Case dismissed.”

So, yeah. Herself and I went for a nice trail run in the sunshine, and afterward I decided I was still not in the mood to update myself on the latest news, so I changed costumes and took the Voodoo Wazoo for an enjoyable 90 minutes of light gnar-shredding in the Elena Gallegos Open Space.

Today I see the courtroom drama has shifted back to Manhattan. Time for another run. I can’t remember where I put that saw.

Up the old Wazoo

January 11, 2024 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments

Anyone watch the Debate to Determine the First Loser last night?

Of course you didn’t. Because you already know that life, like the GOP pestilential campaign, is nasty, brutish, and short.

I haven’t read any of the coverage and don’t intend to because see previous graf.

In other news, Chris Christie finally conceded that he’s not enough of an asshole to out-trump You Know Who, but just enough of one to hot-mic’ his rivals for the roses in what has been a one-horse’s-ass race since the starter’s pistol fired. All the other entrants are basically carousel ponies, going up and down, and around in circles, and winding up right back where they started, a reminder that money can’t buy everything.

Buy the ticket, take the ride, as Hunter S. Thompson has taught us. Better yet, get someone else to buy your ticket. That way you don’t wind up a few hundred million in the red and sitting atop a suitcase on the curb in front of what used to be your home.

Elsewhere, one of You Know Who’s judges decided he didn’t want to hear “Mein Kampf” as filtered through a damp XXXL set of gold-lamé Depends in YKW’s civil-fraud trial and thus we are spared “a closing argument” that would have made the Delta House charter hearing in “Animal House” sound like “Inherit the Wind.”

Finally, here in The Duck! City the weather is fixing to take a turn for the worse, so yesterday I decided to slip out for a short ride on the Tramway bike path.

While motoring around on errands I had noticed that while the roads were still covered in red salt and sand, the bike path was clean as a whistle, so I opted for a quick spin to the County Line BBQ and back, just to keep the muscle memory from toppling over into dementia.

Today is looking more like a run type of situation, as the wizards are calling for plummeting temps, gusty winds, and plenty of the old suckee-suckee. Cycling was cold enough yesterday; no point in adding to whatever wind chill Itztlacoliuhqui has queued up. Coals to Newcastle, that is.

Happily, I’m not running for anything. Not even Christie’s people are dim enough to chuck good money down my little pasatiempo.

Some rides are better than others

April 14, 2023 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments

While a 21-year-old Air National Guard tech-support REMF was getting rousted in his skivvies on charges of playing Sun Tzu for an online audience of teeny-boppers, I was out riding the old bikey-bikey on a fairly glorious spring day.

If I have a choice, I’m always gonna go for the latter over the former. It’s hard to shift and brake with the bracelets on.

Thursday’s conditions were not quite as sunny as they were Wednesday, when the high was a blistering 81° (!).

But they had to be a whole lot better than the atmosphere in the SUV with the FBI as they ferried our man Airman First Class Jack Teixeira down to the federal jug and a date with Magistrate Judge David Hennessy of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, who ordered him jailed until a detention hearing next Wednesday, according to The Associated Press and The New York Times.

My conversations with judges have mostly been brief and costly — the dollar-to-word ratio is appalling — and I try to avoid them whenever possible.

So, yeah. The bike ride. The single-ring, seven-speed Voodoo Wazoo and I went for a leisurely spin around the Elena Gallegos Open Space, which is generally a low-traffic area on Thursdays, as was the case yesterday.

The water feature remains in operation, as you see. I hurdled it cyclocross style and went along my merry way. Here’s hoping that pleasant little rivulet helps dilute the shitshow downstream from Jemez Springs, where spring flooding has overwhelmed the sewage-treatment plant.

Ain’t much gonna dilute the shitshow over OG, The Great and Powerful, Duke of Discord. The Creature from the Sewage Lagoon, Margarine Trailer Greenhorn, has already expressed her “thoughts” on the issue (link not included), and the less said about that the better.