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"Everybody knows there ain't-a no Sanity Clause."
-- Chico Marx
Happy holidaze: A Very O'Grady Xmas
"Everybody knows there ain't-a no Sanity Clause."
-- Chico Marx
Happy holidaze: A Very O'Grady Xmas
By Patrick O'GradyANOTHER YEAR IS PASSING
like so much rank gas atop windswept Mount Dog, and Patrick, Shannon and Ike the cat are all eager to see 2001. The Stanley Kubrick film, not the year, which is certain to look a good deal more like something from Ed Wood, what with the Subliminable Man in the Oval Office.Like the many newcomers infesting our nation's capital, we have interests in the oil bidniss. With four Toyotas in various states of decrepitude, dating from the administrations of Carter, Reagan and Clinton, it seems we are always waving a smoking credit card at some Texican's dysfunctional HAL 9000 gas pump.
Shannon drives a hundred miles daily to and from her job in Pueblo as an Assistant Deputy Associate Librarian's Assistant, Fourth Class, a gig that brings in dozens of dollars per week, while Patrick just motors aimlessly around, muttering to himself and praying that something funny comes out so he can write it down and sell it to someone.
Monied suckers are proving harder to come by, however, what with the stagnant bike market, various dot-com implosions and Patrick's eye-catching yet unsaleable penchant for imagery involving White House bathrooms with fur-lined glory holes, staffed by welfare moms and death-row inmates, for visiting oilmen.
As a result, Patrick has been spending less time writing and drawing, and more time selling plasma. The 2000 vintage was a deep black, with a creamy white head, and recipients have to show two forms of ID to prove they're over 21. Patrick has dubbed it Sangre de Crisco, or "Blood of the Fat Guy," in honor of the Sangre de Cristos Mountains to the west of Mount Dog, where fat people come from as far away as Silver Cliff to crash ATVs into one another.
Shannon, meanwhile, is working on her master's degree in library science at Denver University, a once-a-week Front Strange excursion that burns more fuel than a shuttle launch and costs more each semester than the court fight that established this Bush administration multipled by the savings-and-loan bailout from the last one.
When she finally completes her postgraduate work, sometime in the 21st century, Shannon will be qualified to work as an Assistant Deputy Associate Librarian's Assistant, Third Class, which boasts a pay scale rivaled only by Wal-Mart greeters, streetcorner lemonade stands and plasma salespersons. This is assuming, of course, that Dubya, who only reads the Bible (Classic Comics edition), doesn't announce a plan to decrease our dependence upon foreign energy sources by drilling for oil in the nation's libraries and shipping those superfluous books to coal-strapped power plants generating desperately needed electricity for California's latte machines.
When they're not working at their respective careers, Patrick and Shannon continue to enjoy regular, vigorous exercise, such as shivering in the dark between paychecks. Based on his last-place finish in the 2000 Colorado Cyclo-cross Championships, Patrick won an athletic scholarship to the Electoral College, but he failed the entrance exam when he wrote that the judicial branch, not the executive branch, interprets laws.
The other animal in the household, Ike, retains the physical and emotional scars from a coyote assault that left her looking like the offspring of Popeye the Sailor and Bill the Cat. Ack. More paranoid than a Florida Democrat, she spends her days on a wooden beam nine feet off the floor, and her nights under the bed, waiting for everything else in the world to die so that she may rule at last.
This column is exclusive to the DogPage.