Hel-lo, sailor!

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 6 Comments
“All hope abandon, ye who enter here!”

Well, I’ve done it again.

I filled out the paperwork and trudged that long mile between El Rancho Pendejo and our neighborhood Vote Center to begin the process of tossing out various rascals and installing others.

The hope is that in the end we will have elected some folks who will have the common courtesy to sell us out in private, where we don’t have to watch over our coffee and Cheerios. The no-holes-barred, open-air whorehouse that reopened on Jan. 20, 2025, has not been a boon to the Republic or the digestive tract.

In point of fact, it’s been the shits.

I persist in voting because it’s the only real alternative to armed insurrection. There’s always staying home on Election Day, but that helped get us where we are, so, nuh uh. And I don’t have a passport, so running-away is off the table.

What worries me is the suspicion that if we ever reach the “up with halberd, out with sword” point, we may find that His Excremency King Piggy the Sticky-fingered and his gombeen men have deployed a band of A.I. brigands to empty all our accounts before we can armor up at our friendly neighborhood boom-boom rooms.

“Up the rebels!” and all that, but if we’re going after them for keepsies I’d like to be packing something with more authority than my 72-year-old teeth and toenails.

Beam me up, Scotty

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 9 Comments
Got ourselves trapped again, eh, Thucydides old chap?

I see King Piggy the Sticky-fingered has covered himself with glory again. Doesn’t smell glorious, but then his snout is probably ruined from decades of horning fat rails of Adderall. His handlers should’ve maybe slipped a little more Thorazine into his Panda Express before letting him anywhere near a hot mic. Or his phone.

While Xi Jinping was making sly references to an Athenian historian’s musings on the Peloponnesian War, Piggy was squealing about how Sleepy Joe is to blame for — well, for everything, including the sinking of Atlantis, the crucifixion of Christ, and the 2008 real-estate bubble — and how “hot” the United States is now after he drove it into the ditch. “Hot” as in “on fire” and with nary a firefighter in sight.

The feeble old fool probably thinks “The Thucydides Trap” is a “Star Trek” episode, the one where Captain Kirk boinks the green gal.

Or maybe he thinks Thucydides is the antibiotic that saved him from one of the venereal diseases that constituted his Vietnam.

Shit, I’ll bet he can’t pronounce Thucydides, much less tell us anything about him. Probably never read any Barbara W. Tuchman, either. No Helen of Troy foldout.

36 and counting

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 22 Comments
“Is there a bus ticket and some fake I.D. in here somewhere? Goddamnit!”

On this date in 1990 Herself and I embarked on the perilous journey of discovery that puts divorce lawyers in next year’s Maseratis.

They said it would never last, and after she got the LASIK surgery I was certain they’d be proven right.

Nevertheless, here we are, 36 years down that rocky ol’ road of marital blisters and with hardly any scars at all. Visible to the casual observer, that is.

Only half of the happy couple is showing the years and mileage, which is odd, because he’s the one who spent all that time palling around with the Devil. But the dumb sonofabitch was never worth a damn at wealth management — the kind of chump who thought a CD was something by Tom Waits that you slipped into the player of an ’83 Toyota longbed between bumps off the back of one hand and stealthy nips from the bottle in the other while steering with the knees and one bloodshot eye on the rear-view mirror — so whatever he got for that beat-to-shit 1954 soul has long since been pissed away.

And knowing him, chances are it wasn’t eternal youth and beauty anyway. More like another 8-ball and a case of Pacifico. Talk about your cheap dates.

Ol’ Nick probably doesn’t even want to take possession at this point.

“Holy hell, clock the state of Himself, would ye? Looks like the south end of a northbound ghoul. Make a freight train take a dirt road, that would. Shit, he even scares me. Maybe I’ll delay collection on this one, take Stephen Miller for practice.”

So, sorry, Toots. Looks like you’re stuck with me for a while yet. Next time you’re playing blackjack with the gang down at the animal shelter, maybe check your cards before yelping, “Aw, what the hell! Hit me!”

Mother’s Day +1

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
“Squatters’ rights, yo.”

We’re generally light on mothers around here come the second Sunday in May. Herself isn’t one, and neither is Miss Mia Sopaipilla.

But for this Mother’s Day we have a robin sitting on a clutch of eggs in a fine, strong nest built in the Chinese pistache outside the dining room.

Two feeders, no waiting.

We’ve had doves cobble together some half-assed homes under the front overhang that mostly turn into fly-thru eateries for the neighborhood raptors. Hummingbirds tuck their teensy little bide-a-wees into the pines out front. And a variety of little cheepers have grown up in a dead limb of the backyard maple, holed at top and bottom by a ladder-backed woodpecker. A tree dude accidentally sawed it off while pruning the maple a while back, but he reinstalled it and it’s been home to at least one more family since then, so, winning, etc.

None of these little mothers ever pays any rent, but we don’t care. We even provide free feeds at our BB&B (Bird Bed & Breakfast). From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs, as the fella says.

Sink o’ de mayo

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 10 Comments
Take that, A.I.

Yesterday being Cinco de Mayo I made the usual magic in the kitchen — guacamole and Lazy Gringo Posole.

This is not exactly a forced march through The New York Times Cooking section. You th’ow the ingredients for the first into a bowl and mash ’em up, and you th’ow the ingredients for the second into a pot and simmer ’em up.

One more day on the counter and this avocado would’ve been a goner.

Shit, a Republican could do it, if someone kept an eye on him to make sure he didn’t stick his dingus into the grub or try to bomb it onto the table. You know how those guys cook.

Soups and stews were among the first dishes I learned how to cook, and when the sloth has got me with a downhill pull I will fall back on them at the drop of a chef’s toque and drop the fucker myself.

The posole takes two hours to cook and about no time at all to prep. I toss three cloves of garlic into a small food processor for a quick, coarse chop. Next I add four or five dried red chile pods, seeded, and a large yellow onion, chopped into chunks the processor can swallow. Zoom, another round of push-button chopping. Toss the results into a 6-quart pot.

Drain and rinse a 25-ounce can of white hominy and add that to the pot. You can do the whole dried-hominy thing if you like, but I told you I was lazy. Add a pound and a half of pork or boneless, skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch bits, two teaspoons of Mexican oregano and one of ground cumin, salt to taste, and 6-7 cups of water. Bring to a boil, lower to a simmer, and go watch the hummingbirds for a couple of hours, returning to the pot now and then to give ’er a stir.

Caution: Posole in progress.

The guac’ is even easier. To a bowl add one large avocado, a light drizzle of fresh lime juice, a couple-three teaspoons of finely chopped tomato (optional), a smidge of minced white onion if you like it (Herself does not), and salt to taste. Mash with fork, leaving it a little chunky just ’cause. Serve with corn chips.

You want some nice warm flour tortillas for the posole, along with some class of crunchy garnishes — minced jalapeños, chopped radishes, green onions — and a scattering of cilantro. Watch the BBC’s “Lord of the Flies” on Netflix as you dine and be glad you’re not a castaway kid trying to get that pig in the pot you don’t have.