I lost four
minutes on Monday morning. I zoned out thinking about something while doing my
leg exercises and when they were done I didn’t remember having done them so I
did them again.
As usual at the end of July the application form for the Noah Meltz
grant for part time students was posted online. I downloaded it but I didn’t
have time to fill it out because that involved printing copies of a lot of
financial records and I had a bunch of other stuff to do that day.
I washed three pairs of shorts in
the sink and hung them to dry on the railing of the deck. It was another very
hot day so I expected them to dry fairly quickly.
I went to the Bank of Montreal at
King and Dufferin to take out my rent and phone money, and then I rode to
Freedom Mobile to pay for my service.
It was too hot to cook anything for
lunch so I made a salad with the green parts of the lettuce that I’d gotten
from the food bank, a tomato and a can of tuna, with a poor man’s French
dressing made from some mayonnaise and ketchup.
There was a good chance of rain in
the late afternoon so I didn’t know if I’d be taking a bike ride or not. After
my siesta it looked like it wasn’t going to rain after all so I took a pair of
still damp shorts from the railing, put them on and headed out.
There was a guy with a fast bike who
passed me and he seemed pretty desperate to stay ahead of everybody. I was the
second fastest and so I stayed not too far behind him as we pedaled east. There
was a line of cyclists on Bloor between Yonge and the viaduct and lots of
traffic to our left. After passing the cyclists he turned his head to the left
and called out something that sounded to me like, “Blob, blob, blob, blob,
blob!” I thought he was speaking to the people in the white car to my left, but
a female cyclist to my right said, “Oh!” as if she thought he’d been pointing
out something to her that she was doing. Maybe he was for all I knew.
At around Pape I passed him, but at
around Donlands he whizzed by again, moving his little legs as fast as he
could. We got separated by a traffic light shortly after that and so that was
the end of our relationship.
I went to St Clair and Victoria Park
then rolled south. I finished exploring all the streets south of St Clair and
west of Victoria Park, north of Massey Creek. The first street was Ripon, which
I guess is a word meaning the opposite of Ripoff. When someone suddenly and
unexpectedly gives you something, like if they break into your place to put
beer in your fridge, you’ve been ripped on.
Back on the Danforth, when I stopped
at the light at Woodbine, there must have been a rainbow behind me because a
woman was talking to herself about it joyfully as she thanked “god” for the
blessing and started singing a hymn. Some people just have to blame “god” for
everything nice.
After Donlands I could hear thunder
behind me and started feeling a few spits of rain. I stopped at the first
Starbucks to use the washroom and while I was locking my bike I was looking at
the clouds moving west. A guy who looked East African noticed and said to me,
“I don’t think it is going to rain!” He was right. After I’d peed I continued
on, hearing the thunder in the distance and feeling tiny bits of rain, but
nothing more than that broke through.
Between Sherbourne and Church my
chain jammed again like it did the day before, so I ended up with greasy hands
again after stopping to fix it. I think I have to adjust my derailleur and that
it’s maybe something I can do myself without having to go to Bike Pirates.
That night while I was out on the
deck checking to see if my shorts were dry, my upstairs neighbour Greg was out
there too with a blanket slung over the railing and pouring a bucket of water
over it. A couple of minutes later he came to my door to ask if I had a water
hose. How many apartment dwellers would
own a water hose?
I watched a pretty good episode of
Maverick, even though James Garner wasn’t in it. It featured Jack Kelly as Bart
Maverick and co-starred Richard Long as Gentleman Jack Darby. Maverick had gone
into partnership with Darby in a business of auctioning goods to silver miners
in a New Mexico camp. Maverick met a beautiful Mexican Spanish dancer when they
were both on their way there. Being both the only woman at the camp and a great
Spanish dancer she was very popular there and made lots of money from the
miners. The local cantina was owned by a man named Wilson who fell in love with
the dancer and wanted Maverick and Darby out of the way. Maverick was winning
against Wilson at poker and Wilson put his mine up as collateral for $5000,
saying if Maverick could prove there was no silver in the mine he would buy it
back from him. Maverick won but the joke was on him since the mine turned out
to be flooded and it would cost Maverick $5000 just to drain it. The next day
we see Maverick and Darby in a bitter fistfight in the street, apparently
fighting over the dancer. Darby pulls a knife and finally threatens to kill
Maverick if he doesn’t leave. In a day or so though, Darby has disappeared and
the dancer reports that she saw Maverick dumping something that looked like a
body down the flooded mine. There is a trial and Wilson, wanting to prove that
Maverick is guilty so they can hang him sets about to drain the mine. It turned
out to be an elaborate scheme on the part of Maverick, Darby and the dancer to
get their mine drained. They have a big celebration with all the miners but
then they hear an explosion and it turned out that Wilson dynamited the dam to
flood their mine again, But the final joke was on him again as the explosion
had opened up a vein of gold.
Later when I went out to check on my
shorts there were some young guys hanging out on the roof. One kid said hi. I
was suspicious because I knew they didn’t live here. I thought they might have
somehow climbed up there. Later though I heard the landlord’s voice and I
figured the one that had said hi was Raja’s son. It looked like the guy in the
apartment down the hall had moved out and the landlord had hired his son and
his two friends to do the clean up. I thought it was interesting that Raja’s
son’s pals were both white, since in all the years that he’s owned this building
he’s never hired a white person to do any work around this place. It was almost
midnight when they started working. The noise didn’t keep me awake though.
Raja’s son looks about college age. It would be interesting if he were the new
tenant.
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