Knuckle Sandwich

           

            As I rode east on the Sunday evening of August 28th, the clouds were organic and speaking a silent written language composed of smaller narrow puffs that were bent and turned in various ways.

            I rode to Plains Rd and Coxwell, where at the corner was a shiny new Starbucks. It was so brand new that I dared to drink from the tap in the washroom. Across the street was a restaurant called Knuckle Sandwich.

Back down on Danforth there’s a place called Big House Pizza. The joint has obviously been there for a while because there’s a faded sign with the image of a monkey behind bars. Is the pizza good enough in prison to warrant a restaurant on the outside that models it? None of the many ex-cons I’ve met have ever said, “Man, I wish there was someplace where I could get the kind of great food that I had in prison!”

Further on was Alex Farms: “An Adventure In Cheese”. They have a stall in St Lawrence Market, so I’ve seen that phrase before, but it’s hilarious. “Cheese” is one of the two funniest words in the English language. “Hey baby, let me take you away to an adventure in cheese!” The other funny word is “pants”.

I watched the first episode of the fourth season of I Love Lucy. After Lucy’s mis-management of the family budget got the phone and the power cut off. Ricky hired a business manager, who, after paying the bills, left Lucy with only five dollars to spend on groceries for the month. When she told him that she couldn’t feed her and Ricky and the baby for that much money, he told her he would open up a charge account at the market for her. Lucy decided though to turn that charge account into a money making scheme. She began doing the shopping for everyone in her building. They would pay her cash and then she would charge the groceries to her account. Ricky couldn’t figure out where Lucy was getting all the money. Fred told him that he’d heard Lucy and Ethel whispering about “the market”. Ricky concluded that she must have successfully been playing the stock market. Then he found a note in the kitchen that read, “Tuesday buy can All Pet”. Ricky looked in the stock market page of the paper and saw that Can All Pet was an abbreviation for Canadian Allied Petroleum, so he bought the stock. He ended up making a thousand dollars and then he fired the business manager because with what he thought was Lucy’s sixth sense, he thought they didn’t need him. When he told Lucy, he gave her half his winnings. She knew that her scam was finished without the business manager and $500 was just enough to pay off the grocery bill that she’d run up.