The grand Wazoo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment
The old Wazoo.

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.

The Wazoo in cyclocross-bike mode.

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. …

Call of doody

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
To drain the swamp, one must become the swamp.
Or something like that.

Swamp Thing doesn’t want anyone (other than himself) peeing in “his” pool.

It wasn’t enough to flush $16 mil’ or so through the Lincoln Memorial Septic Tank and into some cronies’ wallets, only to see it mutate into a bubbling cauldron of goo that could dissolve Aquaman into a scattering of bleached bones.

Now he’s installed National Guardpersons, U.S. Marshals, and a couple of A.I. FinkBot 9000s™ to catch any passing “terrorists,” “antifa,” or “citizens” who happen to pause while passing the National Terlet to remark: “What is that hideous stench? Is there a dead raccoon on the premises or is Hair Füror dropping a deuce in his drawers behind one of those trees over there?”

Nope. Swamp Thing he does his doody in plain sight — it’s how he marks territory since he can’t win a war, not even the ones he starts — and then makes his knaves, varlets, henchmen, fluffers and fixers compose spontaneous poetry like “How shall we compare thy loaf-pinching to a spritz of Chanel No. 5 at Neiman Marcus?”

Reflect on that, if you feel so inclined. Me? I need some air.

The longest day

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 17 Comments
Tick tock, etc.

Hot town, summer in the city, as the fella says. Welcome to the summer solstice in the Year of Our Lard 2026.

It’s 76° at 15 minutes after the big hour of 9 a.m. here in The Duck! City, with a high of 95° expected — three degrees above normal but well short of the record of 103°, set all the way back in 1981, when “Bette Davis Eyes” by Kim Carnes topped Billboard’s Hot 100 as Ronald Reagan shredded the social safety net while bulking up the Pentagon.

Well, there you go again. … Good times. Maybe not. Better than now? Your mileage may vary.

Where there’s heat, there’s often fire, and it should go without saying that we have a few: Deer Canyon, south of Mountainair; Osha Canyon, south of Placitas; Rio, at Mesa de la Gallina; and Elk, in the Pecos Wilderness.

Rather than add my little flame to this hot mess I whipped up cool smoothies for breakfast: Mango, strawberries, banana, yogurt, honey, rice milk, and a sprinkle of Vietnamese cinnamon.

Up north my man Hal Walter was putting the finishing touches on his Substack series, “The Blur Goes to College,” which over the past two years chronicled son Harrison’s adventures in higher education. And I do mean “higher” — The Blur attended college at 10,000 feet, in Leadville, after growing up at 8,800 feet outside Weirdcliffe.

Hal’s plan is to transform the Substack chronicle into a physical book, with a cover by noted Leadville artist and old pal Craig Schreiber. Mine is to go for a ride before it gets too bloody hot.

The DBR Prevail TT.

I can’t go all the way back to 1981 for a bike — that year I had just abandoned a Seventies Schwinn when I fled The Arizona Daily Star and Tucson for parts unknown, shortly after my father’s untimely death in Bibleburg.

But I can time-travel back to 1994, when I bought a DBR Prevail TT from John Crandall at Old Town Bike Shop in that very same town.

Do you believe in magic?

The green, gobblin’

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 12 Comments
“Fuck … out of gas, and I don’t even have any quarters for the car wash.”

Best jokes so far about Art O’DeDeal pissing in the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool:

“It looks like they’re brewing Yodas in there.” — David Roth, Defector

“Some poor unsuspecting person is going to trip and fall into that stuff and become a @Marvel supervillain.” — a commenter unearthed by Tom Sullivan at Digby’s place.

Actually, it’s too late for that: Marvel Comics already has the Green Goblin, one of Spider-Man’s earliest adversaries. Dude experimented on himself with an unstable chemical and developed an alternate, evil personality that became the president of the United States — twice.

OK, so I made that last part up. But it would explain a lot.

R.I.P., Dave Mitchell

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 24 Comments
David Mitchell. Pic by Bob Albano, lifted from The New Mexican.

My last boss in the newspaper game, David Mitchell, has gone west. He was 90.

Dave found me roaming the streets back in the summer of 1988, about six months after I got laid off by a chain of weeklies in the north-Denver metro. I was one raggedy-ass mutt back then, but he must have seen some potential I didn’t realize I had, because he hired me to work the copy desk at The New Mexican and afterward gave me the run of the newsroom until he himself got the shove in 1991 for pissing off the big boss, owner Robert McKinney.

I was running out of options and unemployment compensation when Dave summoned me to Santa Fe for an interview. A job I thought was mine at the Ventura County Star-Free Press in California had gone to somebody else, and while New Mexico was short on ocean views, I was in no position to be picky about locale, or much of anything else.

So I was decked out in my best looking-for-work kit when I walked into Dave’s newsroom, coat, necktie, the works, hoping to make a good impression. He was clad in Santa Fe casual, gives me the up-and-down, and says, “You didn’t have to get all dressed up for us.”

Well. Shit. Lost dog comes home.

Dave wasn’t just a newsman, he was a “news” man. As in “Fuck a bunch of features, bring me the news.” Old school. Tough but fair, and hard to impress, especially when he had one foot on your chair and was leaning over you like a ton of bricks getting ready to fall, daring you to feed him some weak line of bullshit.

I think I managed to impress him exactly once, when I was still on the copy desk. A story about a potential school-superintendent hire seemed oddly familiar to me, and then I remembered where I’d seen it before.

“This is from a Marx Brothers movie,” I told the city desk. The city desk didn’t believe me. The library was just down the street. I was right. A school-board member was having our reporter on. Dave gave me a $50 bonus and another long look, the kind that you’d give to a little green man who just stepped out of a flying saucer parked on your lawn.

When the Ventura paper got back in touch to offer me that job I’d been so sure was mine, until it wasn’t, I said thanks all the same, but Dave Mitchell pulled me off the breadline when I had nothing in my pockets but a pair of hands, and I’ma dance with the one what brung me.

I eventually escaped the copy desk and just sort of wandered around the newsroom, working for Pancho Morris on the sports desk, and Denise Kusel at the weekend arts magazine Pasatiempo, dusting off my reporting chops to write some cycling copy, taking some snaps with a camera Pancho laid on me, even helping with a redesign of the newspaper that introduced me to the wonderful world of Apple products.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was slowly working my way towards a whole new career, as a freelancer. And shortly after McKinney sacked Dave over a series of stories looking into environmental hazards at Los Alamos National Lab, with my mom slipping into dementia up in Bibleburg, well … I got right after it. Herself and I had been married less than a year, the publisher had been asking pointed questions like, “Are you still here?” and I figured it would be best for all of us if I were not.

I was already freelancing cartoons and copy to VeloNews in Boulder. Bicycle Retailer and Industry News came next, co-founder Marc Sani being a Santa Fe riding buddy. These steady gigs lasted for a lot longer than they should have, and they led to other work too, like my stint with Adventure Cyclist, whose editor Mike Deme brought me aboard not for my touring expertise — I didn’t have any — but because he liked the way I wrote.

So, thanks, Dave. I don’t know where I would’ve wound up if you hadn’t taken a chance on me way back when. But it sure as shit wouldn’t have been here, happily married, safely retired, and with a couple bucks in the bank too, typing up some memories on a Mac in New Mexico.