Hungry Reindeer

           

            On Thursday my upper arm and wrist had gotten back a small amount of their mobility, but I still couldn’t put much of my weight on my right knee. Sometimes I wonder if riding a bike in the city is worth it. I seem to have a couple of accidents like this a year and the older I get the slower I’m going to heal after each one.

            I’ve been listening to some recordings I downloaded of the 60s southern psychedelic band, “The 13^th Floor Elevators”. They were one of the first of the psychedelic bands and were an influence on bands like Zed Zed Top. Roky Erickson was a hot guitarist and a passionate singer but the most annoying part of their sound was probably the thing that really made them unique. That was the electronic jug played by Tommy Hall. It pretty much always made the same sound of “doodeloot doodeloot doodeloot” and that just gets tedious after a while.

            I listened to a couple of episodes of Amos and Andy. In one, Amos and Kingfish enter into a competition as a team against another competitor because a certain company was offering exclusive Harlem sales rights to whichever person or team sold the most of their fountain pens. They were so sure that they were going to win that they hired a secretary named Miss Blue, who turned out to be their competitor. In another episode, Kingfish was supposed to put some money in the bank that he and his wife, Sapphire had gotten from an insurance claim, but he decided to invest it because someone told him he could double it overnight that way. He put all the money into the brass mines of Brazil until Andy got “respicious” of the investor and called the police.

            That evening, rather than take a bike ride to Yonge and Bloor, I just went up to the Dufferin Mall to buy socks, since I was down to two pairs that didn’t have holes. I took six pairs of Kodiaks and while I was in line for the cashier I heard, “Attention Walmart shoppers! Santa Clause, if you are listening, your reindeer are hungry. Please go and feed them and have a great night! Shortly after that, the phone belonging to the woman behind me went off, and the ringtone was Bobby Helms’s “Jingle Bell Rock”. The cashier must have been new because she was slow and didn’t know how to price all the food items, but her supervisor looked about nineteen.

            I dodged two toddlers on my way out of the mall.

            I decided to go to No Frills before going home. The middle-aged guy behind me was vocalizing bass parts for Brenda Lee’s “Rockin Around the Christmas Tree”. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood.