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No one must know my terrible secret...

House of Noh!

Friday, January 13, 2006

I was on the sidewalk last night, squatting next to my bike locked in the rack outside Jim’s Fruit Round-Up on Kedzie, trying to stuff three bags of groceries into a backpack that already was mostly full with bike tools, binoculars, and the few UFO abduction books that aren’t mysteriously “missing” - (cover-up) - from the Chicago Public Library. The most terrifying part about the whole thing is that they (extraterrestrials, not the librarians) use this mind control device so you can’t even fight back. I mean sure, I probably shouldn’t judge all extraterrestrials by the few bad apples out there that are abducting people. All I’m saying is that if you try to beam me up into your ship from my bed through a closed window you’d better, (a) have my permission (why can’t we just talk about this?), or (b) keep your mind control device on the whole time – otherwise you’re going to get punched in your oversized black eye or your disproportionately large grey head, both I imagine would feel squishy on my extraterrestrial punching knuckles. I may have mentioned this before on this journal, but it bears repeating.)

So there I am on the sidewalk. I look up just for a second and I see this short elderly woman approaching me. It looks like she’s looking at me, and she’s smiling too. I don’t think much of it at the time, because who doesn’t look fondly upon some scraggly jerk squatting on the sidewalk trying to bicycle an impossible amount of groceries home? But I wish I would have given her a second glance, because her facial expression turns out to be important, after what happens next.

My shoulder is about at her hand level when she passes, and this is what she does, she reaches down and pokes me in the shoulder. So I spun around, and I was like, “why did you touch me!?” because I know a curse when I feel one. But she is already fifteen feet down the street, and I can’t believe it, so I look at her side that touched me, thinking maybe that she bumped me with the corner of her purse or something, but, looking at her, the only thing that could have bumped me were her stubby old lady fingers that curled out of her oversized black parka sleeve. And this wasn’t an unintentional bumping, anyway, it was a touch, then a push, I felt it all the way through my many not winter weight jackets.

So I’m like, “AARRGH! now I’m cursed!!” But then I remembered the old woman’s face, and wasn’t she smiling? So maybe it wasn’t a curse, maybe it was some sort of old woman blessing.

This is the subsequent good thing that happened to me: As I was bicycling with my impossible load of groceries, a fast food cup lid, sans cup, but with fast food straw halfway through the lid-hole, blew across my path and I totally ran over it with both wheels.

You see, Sharon P’s got this game when you get points for stuff you run over with your bike. For instance, chicken bone is 20 points (frankly I think that a chicken bone should be worth more. A flat cigarette pack is 5 points. Try looking for a chicken bone in the street – they really aren’t that easy to find. It’s Sharon P.’s game so she gets to do the point values, but I’ve been lobbying hard for the chicken bone for, like, months). That lid with the straw through it, it was twirling in the wind across the asphalt and it looked like a space station. I bet it was worth a lot of points.