I was turning down an alley when a foreign shape passed my car with neither slowing nor aggression and the thing, (the spectre?), gave me a feeling like I was night swimming in a restricted area. “That spectre looks like its the part of something,” I thought. “But it’s moving on its own.”
It wasn’t a spectre, unfortunately, but it was the other two things and here’s how: (1) The part of the something it was a part of was a bike and (2) the way it was being moved was by manual human force. This human force, to be specific, was a unicyclist.
“Oh it’s a unicyclist,” I thought. “Huh, what do you know?”
“No,” I thought. “No. That does not warrant a casual observance. That warrants action. That kind of shit needs to be out there, and people need to know it. This guy needs to be known. This needs to be known … wait, I said that already. Anyway, but that doesn’t change anything of what I’m going to do or that nothing’s going to stop me from putting that shit out there — in the most outest of theres.”
Look, this is 11:30 p.m. on Wednesday by a major intersection and a unicyclist dressed in cyclist clothes is just pedalling along like he’s on his way to work in a world where people ride to work on unicycles at 11:30 at night.
Then I got mad at him in my head. “Ah! What are you? Like, the socially-conscious bachelor ex-president of an internet company who makes people feel awkward by doing dumb shit and playing it out as nonconformist? (Or something like that?) Get away from here, go on, with your elevated self. Get on, get on. Scat.”
I say he’s a bachelor because no woman, especially one who would go out of her way to marry a wealthy businessman, would let her husband ride a unicycle in public. If she saw him doing so, the unicyclist would be confronted immediately about the fact that he was riding a unicycle in public and, if he had a question of why that was a problem, she would return to her earlier statement that he was riding a fucking a unicycle in public or simply tell him not to do that ever again. Ever. “You just don’t do that,” she might add.
And I know this wasn’t his first time. My brother said he saw the unicyclist earlier this week riding around a couple blocks north of where I spotted him. But this time — oh-ho, this time — he was unicycling and reading a book at the same time. I understand that simultaneously reading and walking on a treadmill is difficult for me personally, but this is fresh fat stack of bullshit. “Me? What? … Oh, I’m sorry, what did you ask? Unicycling. Yes, unicycling … Ohhh. What am I reading. Sorry, I didn’t hear you at first. I was too engrossed in my book. The sound of a single wheel rotating through traffic just puts my mind at ease.” Fuck that. Not even the unicycling champion of North America — (how would you get to that level?) — could concentrate on a book and unicycle down the street at the same time.
Jesus, this city has the strangest forms of assholes.
(No, that’s what I said to your mom.)
