All romantics meet the same fate someday
Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark café.
● J. Mitchell
Biking outside in the mid-seventies, I often break my own nothing-sleeveless-nothing-too-tight clothing mandate to don second-skin biking shorts and a tank top. Most occupants of my neighborhood remain indifferent whether I’m sporting jeans or an Elton John lime green track suit; but, when I hit a main road and thus encounter the snooty types of bikers who cram their oversized bodies into fruity little outfits with sponsorship names plastered on their butts, then I topple into trouble.
Take today. I’m twirling along, admiring the crystallized sorrow of a gigantic weeping willow (it seems to embody the abandoned dreams of all the skies) and enjoying “Heartache Tonight,” when a triad of the aforementioned fruity bikers clip past on my left, calling to each other over the wind. As I sport a mountain bike with the resistance jacked to the highest setting, bikers typically pass with a slight hand wave. But no; no pleasantries or concessions to decency today! One particularly clever one in the pack decided to pull right in front of me, his back tire about two centimeters from clipping my front, and then pointedly adjusted his seat positioning. They all shared a hearty laugh and glanced back at me.
Guys ought to gang up on these types of people instead of the gays, on the grounds that they give that half of the species a bad rap. What was I supposed to do? Swoon?
And just when I fear that between excessive ingestion of lawsuits, an abnormal fixation on abnormal psychology, and one too many court room appearances I have acquired a genuine apathy toward every other human on earth, I encounter someone who intrigues me, and every sprig of inherent interest I ever harbored reignites. There’s a bloke at the gym who speaks to me occasionally. He has this whole towering thing where he actually does not actively make any motion but his 6’-plus kind of boasts all over my 5’6” and I involuntarily relinquish the ability to think properly or feel my knees. It’s rather enjoyable, sometimes, to abandon your otherwise ironclad self-control.
In completely unrelated news, I passed a mirror today and almost recognized myself.
