A bowl, empty

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 5 Comments
This bowl would be super with some soup in it.

I’m not very interested in my opinion of football.*

A scrawny child, I clearly wasn’t cut out for the game, and never really paid it any mind growing up. That I chose competitive swimming as my sport at age 8 should tell you much. It certainly told my dad a thing or two.

Swimming was a great sport for a bookish kid who mostly lived for the undiscovered country in his head. Especially the distance events. Back and forth I’d glide between flip turns, undisturbed by cheering spectators (our meets never drew much of a crowd, and what you hear in the pool is mostly a dull rumble) or the jeering of teammates (that would come in the locker room, after the meet).

Frankly, the whole attraction of sports — especially the stick-and/or-ball variety — eluded me. Just one more opportunity for public failure and vituperation. I had school for that; a new one every couple of years. I liked being outdoors doing things, but bristled at structure and governance.

I just wanted to, y’know, like, do shit, an’ shit.

Swimming in its individual aspect was basic. “Swim fast.” That about covers it. The sportiest components were the relay events, medley and freestyle. Teamwork was very much in play there. If one guy screwed the pooch, three others had to unfuck that mutt. Lots of shrinkage in the ol’ Speedo if you were swimming the anchor leg and starting a handful of seconds down.

Too much pressure for The Kid. I just wanted to go back up into my head and play with my toys. And after 10 years in the pool I did exactly that, after a half-hearted attempt to make the swim team at Adams State College in my first quarter there.

I’d discovered drugs and alcohol in high school, and turned out they had them in college, too. Even better, my parents were back in Bibleburg, where I couldn’t hear them asking why I was growing all that hair, digging Jimi at top volume (“Actin’ funny and I don’t know why. …”) and quitting the swim team after we went 11-0 in the South Central League in 1969-70 (coach didn’t like all that hair either, and I didn’t like coach trying to repo my varsity letter).

I did eventually get into sports, obviously. Bicycling was my gateway drug. I started cycling to lose weight, tackled the occasional century, and began watching what little of the Tour de France I could find on American TV. Eventually I entered a time trial, just to see what would happen, and the bug bit. To coin a phrase, I was off to the races.

When I quit newspapering to freelance for bicycle magazines I described it as a marriage of profession and passion. And I watched the marquee events the way my countrymen watched football, only with less frequency and considerably more difficulty. American TV didn’t cover bike racing the way it covered football — it was strictly soft-focus, personality-driven, 30-seconds-of-action fluff, centered on the Tour, with a soundtrack nobody could dance to, especially in cleats.

Some years later a cyclocross promoter once gave me a pirated videotape of a World Cup race that had been converted from PAL to NTSC so we Yanks could get in on the fun. It was like watching cyclocross underwater, through swim goggles, on acid. Dieter Runkel was pioneering top-mounted brake levers. John Tesh was conspicuous by his absence. I watched it over and over and over again.

But over the decades it got to be too much of a good thing to stay good. Everything I did to earn a living — reporting, writing, editing, cartooning, website maintenance, live updates — had something to do with bicycling. And I burned a lot of daylight doing those things instead of doing the actual bicycling. I quit racing, skipped group rides, and finally lost all interest in watching the races. Does a line cook watch cooking shows on his days off?

I knew bicycling was a business. One of the magazines I worked for covered the business of bicycling. After the Pharmstrong years anybody who didn’t know pro cycling was a business would definitely flunk a dope test. But it was starting to feel like bicycling was giving me the business.

In the end, I got my own dope-slap from the invisible hand of the market. The vulture capitalists swooped down and did what buzzards do — eat and shit, eat and shit — and as my earning opportunities dwindled my love for cycling rekindled. I quit watching, and got back to doing.

First to go was pro cycling. Leave that noise to The Wall Street Journal, I thought. Or The Lancet. And maybe Interpol.

Now I can’t remember the last Tour I watched. So you can bet the farm that I didn’t watch the Super Bowl yesterday. I don’t have any idea who won — hell, I don’t even know who played.

Herself tells me that the MVP was someone name of “Bad Bunny.” Bugs I know, but he played baseball and raced cross country, dabbled in bullfighting, even boxed a bit.

“Bad Bunny?” Jesus. And they call football a “sport?” At least pro cycling had Cannibals and Badgers.

* Hat tip to Jim Harrison, who was speaking of Boston in his book, “Wolf: A False Memoir.”

Just another ink-stained retch. …

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 29 Comments
One of Your Humble Narrator’s clips from The New Mexican, circa 1991.

I suppose I should be raving about what’s happening to The Washington Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and just about every other newspaper or magazine in this misbegotten country.

But hey, if we’re going to be dumb enough to elect a venomous orange man-baby as the Pestilence of the Benighted Snakes — twice! — I guess we deserve to be pig-ign’ant of what he’s doing, too.

Anyway, the only thing raving about shitty newspapers ever got me was an invitation — more than one, actually — to leave the one I was raving about and drag my surly ass off to some other shitty newspaper, posthaste, s’il vous plaît, don’t let the door hit ya where the good Lord split ya, etc. I managed my final escape from The New Mexican in 1991, one step ahead of the publisher’s spike heel, and that was that.

You regulars know the story. I had joined that paper in 1988 as a copy editor, then cycled (har de har har) through a number of gigs — assistant sports editor, assistant features editor, and finally features editor, doing a little cartooning and cycling reportage on the side — before taking it on the Jesse Owens in ‘91 to do as a freelancer what pretty much every Damon Runyon character did on Broadway, to wit: “the best he can, which is an occupation that is greatly overcrowded at all times. …”

Boy howdy.

Still, 15 years of newspapering set me up pretty well for freelancing, because while I wasn’t exactly great at anything, I had learned to be OK at a number of things: writing hard news, soft features, and commentary (and fast, too); editing other people’s work and proofing pages; drawing cartoons and taking photos. I would try just about any old thing for any old crook who could spell my name right on a check and remember to mail it while I could still remember what I did to earn it.

So there I was, just doing the best I could and plenty of it, because freelancing paid less than newspaper work, and the kind of newspapers that would hire a hairy pain in the ass like Your Humble Narrator didn’t pay shit. If you wanted to get a raise, you had to move to another newspaper, and without being kicked, too.

Or maybe that was just me.

Happily, freelancers basically pioneered the concept of “remote work,” which kept my pain from manifesting itself daily in various editors’ asses. For a while, anyway. I developed a long reach. Nevertheless, I managed to log 30 years as a freelancer, twice the time I spent raving my way through a half-dozen Western dailies and one weekly outfit, and only had to move four times.

And newspapers taught me how.

I liked newspaper work, when I wasn’t hating it. The people were smart, except for the ones who weren’t, and you could try your hand at damn near anything unless you wanted to get paid more for it, in which case nix. The shift was basically hours of fuck-all peppered with seconds of cardiac arrest and/or stroke and we had to remake the entire fucking product every fucking day.

And no do-overs. Once your mistakes were off the press and soiling the readers’ greedy little paws they were yours forever, like misspelled tattoos.

God, it was fun. Except when it wasn’t. But sometimes even then, too. Plus it fed and housed me for 15 years, and set me up for the next three decades.

So fuck Jeff Bezos anyway.

‘Thank you for this new day. …’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 13 Comments
The Supervisor, the M-Dogg, and Your Humble Narrator gear up for a 63-mile ride from Santa Rosa to Hopland in August 2006.

Looking back over some old training logs I was smugly congratulating myself on what I thought was a strong start to this, the Year of Our Lard 2026.

“366 miles for January,” sez I to myself, no one else being handy. “Wrapped it up with the first 100-mile week of the New Year. Not bad; not bad at all.”

And then I checked in with a couple old velo-newsie bros. No, not fellow refugees from that once-storied journal of competitive cycling — rather, fellow refugees from the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph. Like Your Humble Narrator, they also ride bicycles.

The Supervisor and the M-Dogg both live in Northern California now, and it’s been nearly 20 years since the three of us last saddled up together. I’m the only one who’s fully retired, in part because I’m the only one who has a wife with a job of work, which for an old slacker keen to skip his pulls into the wind is like drafting a UPS truck on a summer day.

Anyway, there we were, chatting away via text, and the M-Dogg mentions that he just wrapped a 49.6-mile ride with 2,020 feet of vertical.

Yow.

I mentioned having done a leisurely 3-mile trail run, explaining that I got a late start and didn’t feel like kitting up for a ride.

“And here the M-Dogg is already cranking out the half-centuries,” I added.

“Mo, tell him your January mileage,” says The Supe.

“760 in January,” replies the M-Dogg, “only possible in a very dry January.”

That’s 760 miles. Not kilometers, furlongs, cubits, rods, or whatever the hell it is that Californicators use to measure the distance between organic vineyards and fair-trade java shops. And here I was, cackling over the little 366-mile egg I laid last month, which was even drier here in the Duck! City desert.

“Comparisons are odious,” they say. Ho, ho. When When John Fortescue wrote that shit he was probably on the short end of a miles-gobbling contest with Henry VI, who covered a lot of ground during the Wars of the Roses.

“Better luck next year, Forty old chum! Oh, dear, here comes Edward, with that ‘Oo’ d’ye think is the bloody king around here, mate?’ look on his face. Right, I’m off. …”

Which brings us to this poem from James Crews, “Winter Morning,” from which our headline comes. Unwrap your gift and be grateful for whatever it is you find inside.

Time and temperature

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Streetlight and moonlight in daylight.

Didn’t we just have a full moon? Is God overstocked with these things and blowing them out? Or has He finally run out of patience and put His foot to the floorboard on the road to the End of Days?

This latest celestial spotlight is the Snow Moon, which, ha ha, etc. Yesterday’s high was 61, 10 (!) degrees above normal. Today’s may be warmer still. What little remains from last week’s snow lurks in dark corners, like ICEholes waiting for women and children to push around.

But we were talking about time, not temperature, yes?

Lately it seems that the instant I’ve finished washing the breakfast dishes it’s time to make lunch. Then, with luck, a bit of exercise, and boom! Dinner and bedtime.

Not a lot of unclaimed space therein to, as Whitman put it, “loafe and invite my soul.” My soul won’t even take my calls. Straight to voicemail they go.

Now, some may say that I burn an awful lot of dawn’s early light slobbering around the Internet like an ADHD kid working out on a Tootsie Pop — the National Weather Service, The Paris Review, various and sundry purveyors of products that I don’t need and can’t afford — before finally biting into its center, the homepage of The New York Times, which almost always shares a deep brown hue with, but is very much not, chocolate.

That this drives me to lunch is only because (a) I no longer drink, and (2) I desperately need something to take the taste of the NYT homepage out of my mouth.

Having eaten my way through the fridge and pantry, I feel a pressing need for either sleep or exercise. And exercise it is, because Miss Mia Sopaipilla is in the bed, and if I try to share a corner of that king-size bed with that 8-pound cat she will get right out of it and stalk around the house, meowing at the top of her lungs. She’s deaf as a post and her voice carries.

So out the door I go. And sure, if it’s 55 or 60 out there I’m liable to stay out a while, because see “the homepage of The New York Times” and “meowing at the top of her lungs” above. Last week I got 100 miles in, plus one trail run.

When I get home I’m hungry again for some reason as Herself inspects a gas range atop which dinner is very much not cooking itself with that look on her face that says, “Some people have to go to work in the morning.” I strive mightily to swallow a cheery, “Not me!” And get out in that kitchen and rattle those pots and pans.

And soon dinner is served, as is something less toothsome on TV, and since some people have to go to work in the morning (not me) everyone is in bed by 8 and asleep shortly thereafter.

Tomorrow, as the fella says, is another day. That Tootsie Pop ain’t gonna lick itself.

Adios, January

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The Colorado River Basin states aren’t having much luck squeezing water from the rocks. Or each other.

January has finally wobbled off into the desert, sunburnt and mumbling to itself.

“55 degrees? Seriously?”

When last seen January was clad in short sleeves and knickers, with one half-full bidon, which will not be enough as the Colorado River Basin states squabble over how to divvy up the water that isn’t there.

I mean, shit, it’s already 46° here in Duck!Burg as February starts applying the SPF 70 and it’s all of 10:15 a.m. The Year of Our Lard 2026 looks like a long, dry ride for some of us. Maybe all of us.

In the Carolinas, meanwhile, my man Clyde DePoynter reports snow and wind and a lack of natural gas that has him feeding the wood stove like Casey Jones’ fireman shoveling coal, trying to get the mail to Mississippi. He was keeping toasty by watching the UCI cyclocross world championships in the Netherlands via VPN.

No spoilers here — but if you missed the live action and would like some recorded highlights, well, FloBikes and YouTube have ’em.