On Friday, July 22nd, I had to return some books to the OISE library downtown, and since they close at 17:00 on Fridays, I had to take my bike ride earlier than usual. I left a little after 16:00 and ventured out into the hottest day of the year.
After returning the
books and then checking them out again, I continued on through the oven into
the east end. I went north on Donlands and then across O’Connor to Don Mills Road.
I was nervous about travelling on Don Mills because it’s a fast moving road and
I didn’t see any other cyclists on it. I rode for a while but got cautious and
walked along the shoulder for quite a while. I rode where the shoulder allowed
it but walked most of the way up to Gateway. I went west on Gateway and then
dipped down Thorncliff Park Drive that goes south, west, then back up to
Overlea, which took me to Millwood. That whole Thorncliff Park area is a jungle
of high-rise apartment buildings. I would find it to be a lifeless environment
to live in.
I went across the Leaside Bridge,
relieved to be on a bicycle friendly route again. I rode down Pape and back to
Danforth.
When I stopped to
use the washroom at Starbucks, I could see in the mirror that I’d gotten a
little too much sun, though it didn’t feel like a major burn.
I stopped at
Freshco because I had no fruit at home. I spent the $9.50 I had on some apples,
a bag of cinnamon-raisin bagels and a container of plain yogourt.
It was way too hot
that night to use the stove, so I had some tortilla chips with salsa and cream
cheese and a piece of cold chicken.
I watched two
episodes of The Honeymooners.
In the first, Ralph receives a ten dollar
prize at bus company where he works for putting the best suggestion into the
suggestion box. He said that there are too many buses on his route and so they
should hire a traffic expert to look into it. The expert concluded that they
should lay off some of the drivers and Ralph was the first to go. Since he was
laid off though, it was impossible for him to get another job because employers
do background checks and so they would find out that he already had a job to
which he’d be returning. Despite Ralph’s protests, Alice dusted off her
secretarial skills and got a job to support them, but since employers didn’t
tend to hire married women as secretaries, she told her boss that Ralph was her
brother. When Alice’s good looking boss came to pick her up, he kept making
references to how attractive Alice was, thus driving Ralph into a jealous
frenzy that he had to repress.
The second episode
that I watched was less interesting for the story than for the mood at the end.
They had gotten a telegram that Alice’s mother would be coming to stay with
them for a while, and because Ralph and his mother-in-law did not get along, he
was determined to not live there while she was in his home. This of course
caused tension with Alice. When the visitor finally arrived though, it turned
out that they had misread the telegram and that it was Ralph’s mother who came.
Alice welcomed her with open arms, thus making Ralph feel like a piece of shit.
Instead of the usual reconciliation between them at the end though, Ralph left
the apartment to walk off his shame and the camera closed the scene with a
close-up of Alice’s sad face.
Exhausted
from the heat and from my longer than usual bike ride, I went to bed an hour
and a half early. I turned the fan around to face my room and it made the
curtains gently caress my feet all night.
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