Comic Books from the 1990s

            I spent a lot of Sunday finishing my journal entry about my trip to the food bank on Saturday.

            In the afternoon I started my bike ride. The homeless woman who lives between the Brock Avenue sidewalk and the Beer Store parking lot was sitting on her large pile of rags with her umbrella open to keep the sun off.

            I rode up Broadview and stopped to use the washroom at Whistler’s. The only problem with weeing at Whistler’s is that the people from inside that come out for a smoke always seem to stand right beside the bike post rings. There are plenty of other places they could stand.

            It seems to be quite a bit faster to take Broadview to O’Connor rather than taking the Danforth to Woodbine and then travelling north to O’Connor. I rode from Westview to Amsterdam Avenue, took that east, dipped briefly down Glenburn, then continued to Victoria Park and south to St Clair. I give myself a minimum of 52 minutes to explore each new section, but when I got to St Clair I was so used to being over that time at the end of a street that I didn’t look at my watch to see that I actually would have had time to do Holland Avenue as well. I felt like I owed it to myself to finish that whole area on my next trip.

            Riding west on St Clair I was almost back at O’Connor when I saw a couple of boxes across the street that looked like they had books inside. I stopped and crossed over. One box was full of comic books, mostly from the 1990s. There were a lot of X-Men and X-Men related books, several Image comics, including some Spawn related material (all of which I already have) plus some of the other characters of that comic line. The rest were non-X-men Marvel comics with a few DC comics and four Simpsons comics. Altogether there were more than 100 comics, though about a quarter of them were not in great shape.

            The other two boxes were full of books, mostly science fiction. There was a shitload of stuff by L. Ron Hubbard. I actually hadn’t realized until then how much that guy had written, including books from the Western genre. I wouldn’t be surprised if every non-Scientology book that Hubbard ever wrote was in these boxes. Whoever threw these paperbacks away was clearly into authors. There were a large number of novels by Robert Ludlum, including the Bourne Identity. Additionally there were a few books each by Philip Jose Farmer, Terry Goodkind, Frank Herbert and single books by various other authors. I picked The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain; You Only Live Twice by Ian Fleming; The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie and The return of the Black Widowers, which is a collection of detective stories written by Isaac Asimov of all people.

            I put about half the comics in the laptop pocket of my backpack, all the books in the main part, and the rest of the comics in one of the President’s Choice bags that I carry around, which I hung over my right handlebar.

            My ride back was heavier than I’d expected. I was especially careful on O’Connor at the rough patch where I’d wiped out before, jut north of the bridge over Taylor Creek. I stopped at Whistler’s to pee. There were a couple of young guys with guitars on the patio entertaining mostly three old guys drinking at a nearby table. They played “Squeeze Box” by The Who (perhaps the worst song that Pete Townsend ever wrote and Happy Together by the Turtles. The old guys were bobbing their heads and happily singing along.

            I watched the first episode of the third season of Maverick. It was kind of a silly story in which Bret and Bart went back to Texas because their “pappy” was about to get married to an 18-year-old woman. “Pappy” was played by James Garner with a lot of makeup.