Bobbie Brown

            I couldn’t have coffee or breakfast on Friday morning because I had an appointment at 9:15 for my annual check-up and I needed to fast for twelve hours before going for the blood work and giving the urine sample to the lab down the street afterwards. I’d been feeling kind of groggy during song practice and while working out the chords to a new song and so I took a shower before getting ready to go. That really freshened me up and put me in a good mood while riding to Bathurst and Bloor.

            The waiting room was empty of patients when I got there and the receptionist still hadn’t logged on yet. She told me that Dr. Shechtman had an emergency and had to cancel all of his appointments. She said they’d tried to call me but I hadn’t answered. I saw later that they’d called two days before. The next earliest appointment they could give me was the following Friday 11:15. That will mean I'll have to fast for an extra two hours.

            I went home and had breakfast.

            That afternoon I was just getting up from a siesta when there was a knock on my door. It was my upstairs neighbour David. He gave me a container of chicken alfredo pasta and the sauce was leaking out of the container so he’d wrapped it in a newspaper to soak up the liquid. I put a plate under it and stuck it in the fridge.

            I took a bike ride an hour and a half later. On the Bloor bike lane I was passing a guy and the asshole tried to race me. Fortunately I was faster but when will these people realize they are putting people’s lives in danger if they speed up while someone is passing?

I went back out to Birchmount and Danforth like the day before. I took Birchmount to Highview, turned right and then took the next street north, which is Aylesworth. Aylesworth travels in a northeasterly direction but all of its side streets cut directly south and so each one east of another was longer until Aylesworth ended just before Kennedy. I would have preferred to just travel on a few of the streets and then head back but because of the weird angles I thought I might get confused and go on some streets more than once if I didn’t finish everything south of Aylesworth and west of Kennedy this trip. I found Haddon Avenue and it reminded me of my friend Brian Haddon because of the name but not because of its length, since it’s very short and he’s very long. It’s a quiet street with a fair number of small, cottage style homes where people without kids or with grown up and gone kids might live.

I uploaded some video that I’d shot with my Kodak camera, but each video was flipped clockwise by 90 degrees. I found a YouTube video that showed how to rotate videos in VLC but I was only able to flip them for my own viewing. The instructions for making the rotation permanent were very complicated and I tried to follow them but wasn’t able to permanently rotate the videos. I uploaded one of them to YouTube and then found another YouTube video explaining how to flip a YouTube video. I followed those simpler instructions and I got a message to wait, but it still hadn’t rotated by bedtime. The next day though my video was upright, so maybe it just needed a restart.

I watched an episode of the 1997 series, Mike Hammer, Private Eye. Velda calls Hammer, giving him the impression she’s in danger in the bar downstairs from his office. He comes into the darkened room with his gun ready and then the lights come on and everyone yells “Surprise!” because it’s his birthday. Hammer is presented with a giant cake, out of which pops a bikini clad entertainer who gives him a cell phone, which rings as soon as it’s in Hammer’s hands and when he answers it he receives a death threat. The number of the caller turns out to be the payphone at the local police station and the caller was a dirty cop that Hammer has been tailing. The stripper, Randi and her crime boss employer are also involved in the plot to kill Hammer.

Randi was played by Bobbie Brown, who was married to Jani Lane of Warrant, who she met when she was dancing and posing as the iconic eye candy for the video of the song “Cherry Pie”.