A political post from someone who doesn't know anything about politics.

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This weekend is Hilly Hundred weekend and everyone is gone.  I am left here, alone, to defend the sense and mental direction of the common man.  And, as you can imagine, that is a very difficult thing in a time like this…which is to say, a very rotten time.  Rotten like a filthy, ten day-old dead possum rolled in Richard Nixon’s ashes.  

People like to say things like “I normally don’t like to make political posts.”, but they really do.  The problem with a common man or woman making a political post is that the poster cannot possibly know enough about the subject about which they are posting to be accurate or at least appear so.  Oh…when I refer to “common” people, I simply mean the regular folks you see walking or running or riding bikes with their kids around the zillion square miles of suburbs around Indianapolis.  Anyway…political posts are a vile and vain thing to do so please stop doing it.  Except for me, right now.  A person from either the Republican party or the Democratic party will win the election and life will go on as it has for hundreds of years here in the good ole’ U S of A.  

As it stands, currently, it appears that Hil-dog will be the champion in this grotesque race of ten-faced monsters.  It is inevitable.  Both candidates are cut from the same bloody cloth and both of them have armies of Disney Imagineers working twenty-six hours a day to come up with the ridiculous, yet highly entertaining sentences that they gut-squeeze from their putrid mouths.  Who would have thought that a so-called human being could both eat and shit from the same orifice?  I certainly didn’t think it was possible.  But then I heard that yam-colored wack-job wander like a punch-drunk idiot through that question about Obama’s birth certificate and I decided right then that only a highly-practiced freak-show manager could mumble that ineptly, yet supremely-confidently through something so important.  And, so, all Hillary has to do is be reasonably coherent when answering those softball questions from whichever neutered moderator is presiding and she will appear, at the very least, sane.  And that word has never much cared for the Donald.   

But sanity is not very important in a Presidential race, in case you didn’t know.  What really matters to me and most of the reasonable people I know is a person’s character.  True character (haha just kidding…what really matters is how deftly a candidate can sell false providence).  And that word, character, envelopes and gives depth to another word: honesty.  And one need not be sane to be honest.  That is the word that I wish I could assign to one of the candidates for President from which we currently have to choose…to lead our nation.  They are both nasty caricatures of the fading idea of the American Dream to which so many members of our country’s lower and middle-class desperately cling.  A snake-oil tycoon with the overbearing confidence of an enraged Silverback versus the quiet sort of scheming evil that would scare even an archangel to the core.  Rocky Infinity.  Shakespeare himself could not properly put this tragedy on paper.  Maybe something like “Much ado about a Whole Lot of Bullshit.”  Or maybe one of the newer writers would do it better.  Trump would make a great Frankenstein’s Monster with his soft intellect and ferocious appetite for human souls…due to the lack of one of his own.  And Hillary…

…I just spent about ten minutes trying to think of a character in modern literature who has similar characteristics to Hillary.  i failed.  She is so obviously vicious and filled with hatred toward anything which may threaten or stand in the way of her rise to Ultimate Power that you can clearly see a blackish sort of aura around her when she bumbles around the stage with those practiced little steps.  Maybe she is a little like Charon…ferrying people across the Styx to the underworld.  Yeah…that is probably the most accurate analogy you could cull from the past 5000 years.  And that should tell you something about what motivates her.  Give her a few coins and she gives you safe passage across the river and deposits you in the land of the dead.  And that is pretty much what the federal government does, right?  Death and taxes and all that crap…  Whoever came up with that phrase was pretty smart, I guess.  

Ahhh well…we’ll either have a transplant from the Hall of Presidents or the personification of evil  as our next president and either one will work feverishly toward the same goal, albeit in different manners: the procurement and retention of power.  I think that there are some politicians who are genuinely concerned about the state of affairs in this world (or country, or state, or city or county) but I believe they are few and far between.  The two buffoons who are running for president (actually three buffoons…let us not forget the CEO of Cannabis Sativa, Inc. who does not know what Aleppo is) are certainly not.  Power is the chief motivation of both of their campaigns.  It’s a very animalistic thing, this presidential race.  Hungry rats.  

Enough!

I sort of wish I had gone down to the Hilly.  I have seen a bunch of tweets and FB posts with cool pics of my buddies riding around B-town and eating fried chicken and pizza.  What did I do?  …a semi-long run today with my dog and then a bunch of lunges and pull-ups in the basement.  I think that maybe I will compete in the Crossfit games next year.  I do so love to rip out a bunch of clean and jerks as fast as possible and then run up a hill as fast as I can.  I may even go paleo while I’m at it.  Give up pizza and Little Debbies and Pringles and all that awful crap that makes me so happy at four in the afternoon when I’m starving at the bike shop.  Zebra Cakes.  They are the best.  Zebra Cakes are actually the same thing as any other Little Debbie cake-type food, only with stripes.  What makes them so good is the wax coating.  It’s like the wax they use in those huge, grotesque wax lips you see around Halloween-time.  I guess they flavor the wax with some sort of artificial addictive substance which causes you to eat an entire box of the things before you are even aware that you are chewing.  Zebra Cakes…the heroin of the retail professional.  They rank only slightly lower than Bob Evans biscuits and gravy on the grand scale of foods that I may or may not have eaten since I was five years old.  

And to hell with this blog entry.  I spoke too much about politics without actually stating a position and now The Deer Hunter is on and I need to concentrate.  The Deer Hunter is probably my favorite movie.  Very heavy stuff.  A brilliant study of character and the evolution of friendship…especially in the 1960s.  The final scenes always make my eyes wet.  I will do another one of these in a couple days.

One Shot,

C

Wedding season and moon-crazed coyotes

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I have not written for a while so I thought it might be time.  I am not sure I have anything interesting to say but let’s see here…

How about we start with some one or two-sentence scenes from a book that has never been written?  I was thinking about that on our way home from a wedding in Louisville.  So, Beth’s cousin was married at the Speed Museum on the campus of the University of Louisville.  It was a very, very cool wedding with a great ceremony and a kick-ass reception complete with wild dancing, huge amounts of loud music, and broken glasses…and just about the cutest little flower-girl ever, who also happened to be my wife’s cousin’s daughter.  I have no idea what title that gives Beth and I…second cousins?  second Uncle-in-Law?  No clue.  No matter, though.  Amelia was the bestest ever and we made some super-rad artwork in the kiddie art lab just outside the reception area, in the museum.  

Louisville is a pretty cool town, incidentally.  I did a couple of runs along the riverfront and they were very scenic and very humid and I was Very glad that I found a port-a-potty near Eva Bandman park, which was the venue for Cyclocross Worlds a couple of years ago.  The last time I was there (at Worlds) I was stomping around in the mud and yelling at madmen riding bikes around in the mud and trying not to become deaf from all the screaming and whatever was making that awful horn noise everywhere.  Also I was three or four sheets to the wind and my wife was not happy with that.  But, I digress.  Let’s get back on track with those scenes, shall we?  Here goes: 

The angry Swede muttered something ridiculous about getting a tattoo of Wonder Woman’s airplane on his left arm and then strode off like a drunken baboon in the direction of Tombstone.  I never saw him again.  

Remus had never seen a hot air balloon up close.  And why would he have?  He had lived in that stinking bog all his life and never had much interest in pointing his eyes skyward.  One must be vigilant in an environment like his.  Piranha are always hungry and Remus knew all too well about their vicious appetite.  He had lost his first toe when he was only three years old.  

For a leaf, Fall is always a very suspenseful time.

Banjo Fred had fished along the same stretch of river for nearly thirty years.  Sometimes he caught a fish…and sometimes he caught ringworm.  

“I told you not to do that!” said my brother.  He was always the careful one.  And I respect that quality immensely.  But there are times when you must override the conservative nature of a trusted companion.  And this was one of those times.  “You went too far!  You went way too far, JB!”, he said.  He was wrong though.  Well…he was right and wrong.  And my career as a giraffe trainer was about to take a very dark turn.

That was fun.  But I am tired now and in desperate need of a soft pillow and the drone of my fan.  And darkness.  So maybe one more stupid long paragraph.  

The moon is nuts this weekend, by the way.  Huge and brilliant and probably drawing out the crazies and the coyotes.  The crazies all descend on the bike shop and want to talk about how good they were at BMX back in the 80s and “Can you guys still get Skyway mags?”  Dingbats.  Sometimes they are fun, though.  But sometimes they just want to murder our bathroom.  The coyotes just eat all the voles and mice and poop all over the walking paths that criss cross the neighborhood.  Everyone hates them and wants to shoot them with 45 Magnums and shotguns (probably 90% of the population around here own a gun) but I sort of like them.  They control the rodents and generally just do what they were programmed to do, which is eat and make little baby coyotes.  I’ve seen them wandering around the county roads near cornfields and once i even stopped and watched one not twenty feet away from me.  He just sat there watching me for a few minutes and then lazily strolled off into the field.  They look like miniature versions of Soma, my shepherd-husky mix who left for the Happy Hunting Grounds three years ago.  That’s probably why I like them.  Soma was the best.  But I do wonder why they insist on pooping on the walking paths.  That part is annoying.  You have to constantly watch where you are running or walking or whatever.  Why don’t they just use the grass?

Right…that’s it for this one.  I am going to attempt to start doing these more often.  They will get better.  I need to write about the team soon.  Very exciting stuff on that front.  First IB Cycling just keeps growing and we are set to be a dominant crit team next season.  I’ll get to that very soon.  

Oh yeah…the Colts just shot themselves in the gut.  Nice giveaway, guys….