I Voted Green

            On Thursday morning I was in a bitter mood because I was pissed off about the day I was facing as opposed to the day I’d planned. I was essentially crying over spilt milk. I’d gotten all caught up on my writing the day before and planned to work on some projects that I haven’t managed to get to in quite a while, like my book cover and editing videos of my songs for YouTube, but since I had a flat tire I would have to go to Bike Pirates later instead. To make matters worse, when I turned on my computer, the Windows updates that I’d agreed to install before shutting it off turned out to take an hour and so a lot of my regular morning projects, like writing and translations were swallowed up.

            I went to wait in front of Bike Pirates half an hour early. I was the second one there as a tall, middle-aged guy with an accent, named Sasha was there ahead of me. We chatted a bit until he started smoking and then I moved upwind of him.

            Den opened up the shop. I took stand number 5 and removed my back tire. At first I couldn’t find where the hole in my tube was, I guess because I hadn’t inflated it enough before submerging it in water. Once I pumped a little more air in though I saw that the bubbles were coming out of the side. I marked the spot with chalk and it was about an index finger length from the nozzle. I was advised to take some sandpaper to any rough spots along the inside wall of the rim and so that’s what I did. I especially focused on the general area where puncture might have happened but to avoid this happening again I smoothed the rim all around. I also felt around the inside of my tire but only found a couple of small protrusions that were just probably flaws in the rubber and not glass.

            I bought a new tube and this time they had a 700 X 32 whereas last time they’d only had 700 X 35. I was told that it was fine but I wonder if having a larger tube might have been the reason I’d gotten the internal puncture. I put my tire back on, pumped it up and hoed for the best.
            I gave the shop a little less of a donation than on Monday because I’d been pretty generous before and wound up coming back with the same problem.

            I went home and put on my voting clothes, stuck some super fries and a couple of pre-cooked chicken legs in the oven and then went online to see who was running in Parkdale. There were only five choices but the Green Party candidate, Halyna Zalucky was the cutest, and so I headed up to the polling station at Parkdale Public School. On a table beside a voting box near mine someone had forgotten their cane. I called out to see if it belonged to anyone and a short, bent over old man came over to get it. I passed it to him and then voted Green. The only other choices were the three main parties, plus the Libertarian Party and the Communist Party. I handed my ballot to the guy at the new tabulating machine and he fed it in. I had to wait a few seconds before it gave the signal that my vote had gone through. The signal should be a recorded belching sound for each vote.

            When I got home my lunch was ready.

            Late that afternoon I took a bike ride. From time to time when I was stopped at a light I would reach back to give my tire a squeeze to make sure it hadn’t gone flat.

            Between Main and Victoria Park an elderly cyclist commented that my bike looked like an old one. I told him that I think it was built in 1969. He said that his bike is a 61 and he declared that he loves old bikes. His looked like a vintage CCM and its green paintjob looked fresh. I'm not going to slut my bike up with "come steal me” paint.

            I rode to Stamford Square and took the north side of it this time to get to Pharmacy.

            On the way back I stopped at the light at Coxwell and another cyclist pulled up beside me with his girlfriend on a bike behind him. He said to her of me, “Now this brother here is a guy that knows how to ride around traffic in the city.” Then he said to me, "I’ll just follow you, how about that?” I had nothing to say to that, so I just smiled.

            I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought a chicken, some raspberries and three litres of milk.

            When I got home my back tire was still firm, so maybe I did something right at Bike Pirates.

            I watched the final episode of the first season of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. Dobie and a girl named Jenny fall in love and start talking to Dobie’s parents about eventually getting married. The couple start a babysitting business together but when Dobie’s father sees Dobie take a bunch of baby care products from his store he assumes that Dobie and Jenny secretly got married and now have a baby.

            I watched the first episode of the second season of what was now just called “Dobie”. They improved the intro by getting rid of the stupid animation of the guy looking through a hole in a fence at various girls. Now it just begins with part of the story, leading to a punchline and then kicks in with a new scat sung theme song that includes “dobie” in the scat: “Dobie! Badabadabadaba Dobie …”. The still have the dumb old theme song at the end, but who’s listening then?

            Another new thing is that Zelda Gilroy has become a regular character that helps Dobie out like Maynard does even when not part of the main story.

            In this story, Dobie has joined the school band because he wants to be near the flute player, Esme. But she doesn’t want to have anything to do with Dobie because he’s two heads shorter than she is. But when they practice the William Tell Overture, suddenly Maynard breaks into a bebop jazz trumpet solo that causes Esme to fall for Dobie’s friend, even though he’s no taller than Dobie. One stupid thing is that when Maynard plays the solo he doesn’t even work the valves with his fingers. The teacher disapproves but when told he’s a square he declares that he has the largest collection of The Kingston Trio, Fats Domino and The Coasters in the entire city. He decides to hold a song-writing contest for the students. Zelda decides to help Dobie win Esme by writing the prize winning song for him because in the long run she thinks it will help her win Dobie. She teaches Dobie to play the song and it’s really Dobie singing but he’s lip-synching his studio recording of “I’m A Lover, Not A Fighter” by Joe Allison. It sounds very much like the kind of song Elvis did in his movies. Everyone is impressed and Esme agrees to go steady with Dobie but he confesses that it was really Zelda that wrote the song and he asks Zelda to go steady instead.

            Of course though in subsequent episodes there is no indication of Dobie and Zelda going steady.

            Esme was played by Kathe Green, who was probably the first actual teenager to ever play a teenager on Dobie Gillis, as she was 16 at the time. She was the daughter of Johnny Green, who won several Academy awards for his film scores and wrote the song, “Body and Soul”. Kathe became a model and singer and also appeared in Blake Edwards’s The Party with Peter Sellers.