on the inappropriately clothed

It is obviously spring now. There are teenagers in flipflops smoking on parkbenches outside my office window. But nobody is falling in love or anything, in fact there are a number of cases lately of falling out of it. Still, I hang my hopes on the inappropriately clothed. I love the inappropriately clothed. If I didn’t work in what counts as an office tower in this diminutive city, I’d be inappropriately clothed and smoking on a park bench.

When I was stuck in suburban Quebec City, extremely sad and extremely lonely, I coped by disappearing underwater at the Laval pool everyday (Olympic sized. Simply incredible) and counting laps, breaths, anything. This is exactly how I coped with being extremely sad and extremely lonely since I was twelve years old. That summer though I was out one morning at 5am walking off sad lonely steam in the neighbourhood when I found not one but two immaculate rusted over 1975 bronze CCM commuters. A hers-his pair of ‘em. I gripped each handlebar stem in a fist and shoved those beauties up the hill. I scavenged rags and cleaners out from under my then-boyfriend’s-parents’ sink and set to work. By 8 the household was awake and scandalized that I had dumpster-dived in what turned out to be the bf’s uncle’s driveway. I was beaming. I had my ticket out of suburbia.

When you don’t know how to drive, and I didn’t then, a bicycle is the power of a room of your own (something else I didn’t have then) times about a billion. Somebody pissing you off? LEAVE!!! Get on your vehicle and get the hell out of there. Shove a pump in your handbag. That’s it.

I learned how to drive about two weeks later. And driving is wonderful. You can, most importantly, cart crap around with you when you drive, like poodles and cases of wine. Even still though, I do not own a car and there are so many bikes in my house right now it's Brest at the beginning of the Tour.

Spring comes and the last dark crusts of snow melt into the gutter and yet all that can cure the sad loneliness of winter is a good long bike ride. Everyday 'till the November blizzards. Even though cycling is as pleasurable as sex while driving a convertible in Europe, it is not that popular among women. I have never understood this. Women need to take over roadie culture. It’s physiologically obvious. Drawbacks include hard breasts and enormous legs, but whatever. Swimming causes hard breasts and giant shoulders.

Dr S reminds me that side effects are sometimes entirely necessary, even partly curative, depending on what you are trying to treat.