Red Thong

            On Friday morning my legs were sore, probably from all the bike riding I’ve been doing. Sometimes I feel like I’m losing weight and it makes sense that I would be since I’m doing all this exercise and not eating any more than usual.

            I took a bike ride in the afternoon. On the way east on Bloor at around Avenue Road a woman with a short, butch, bleached blonde haircut passed me. Her jeans were low at the back as she bent over her bike, revealing a red thong. I passed her right away. A few kilometres later, around Main Street, she passed me again, but I passed her shortly after that. There were a lot more cyclists than usual on the Danforth.

            I rode up Victoria Park to Holswade and went across to Pharmacy, where I stopped for a few minutes to check on my bike. I’d just started on this ride to hear a bit of a rattle somewhere. I felt around all the spokes but they were all secure. The problem hasn’t affected my velo in terms of speed or manoeuvrability, but I assume that whatever it is will get worse until it does.

            On the way west across the Bloor Viaduct a guy ahead of me looked like he was carrying an animal in his tartan backpack but it was just his hair hanging over it.

            Yonge Street was blocked off to vehicles from Dundas to Queen for the free programming part of the NXNE festival so I turned west on Edward Street and took it to Bay, headed south to Queen and then back to Parkdale. When I was close to my place a car pulled out beside me and the driver called out, “Get over here motherfucker!” but he wasn’t talking to me. Someone a few doors back shouted, “Fuck you!” but the driver seemed to be talking into his phone so maybe it was an electronic argument that had spilled over into punching proximity.

On my way into my building I checked my mail and suddenly remembered that there were two envelopes in my backpack that I’d forgotten to post. I went back out and rode over to the mailbox beside the library.

That night I watched a couple of Dobie Gillis episodes.

In the first story Dobie is getting tired of Zelda interfering in his love life with her insistence that he is meant for her. When Chatsworth Osborn Jr. finds out that his poor grades may make him the first Osborn to not get into Yale, other than one uncle that died of stupidity at 93, Chatsworth decides to court Zelda in order to get help from the smartest student in school. She goes along with it and Dobie is relieved to have her off his back but begins to miss her and asks her to come back to him. She gladly obliges and Chatsworth gets into Yale anyway because of his mother’s influence.

In the second, Dobie and Maynard, while working for Zelda on the school yearbook go on an assignment to locate and write a story on the greatest football player in Central High history: Show Them No Mercy Appleby. They find him in old clothing inspecting a junkyard and assume the school hero has fallen on hard times. Dobie begins to rally the school and the whole town around helping Appleby out. It turns out though that Show Them No Mercy Appleby has grown up to be a ruthless businessman and he is extremely wealthy. He decides to sue Dobie’s parents for everything they have on the grounds of libel but when he goes to the school and hears Dobie give a moving speech about school spirit and charity he feels ashamed and instead donates a ton of money to the school to build a new gymnasium.