I think I am getting too vain about my biking prowess. Last weekend I did the Schuylkill trail again and it left me overflowing with vanity. Luckily for me, I was able to release some of this vanity into the atmosphere by bragging about it to my friend zambezi who unfortunately for him, called me when I had just completed the trail and was scarfing sambal shrimp in Penang. But there was still some amount of residual vanity left because the call ended prematurely before all the vanity had a chance to be vented. The disposal of this residual vanity had to wait a couple of days.
So then the other day, I was in this furniture store that was having a going out of business sale and I was looking at this table and the Chinese saleswoman asked me if I wished to take this table home today. I said that I couldn't because I had biked to the store. She said really, where had I biked from? I replied that I had biked from home, which was off Bob's road, did she know Bob's road? Apparently she did know Bob's road and she Ohed and Ahed and she looked damn impressed with my biking abilities which fucking irritated me. My frustration was due to two things. One, I had just completed the Schuylkill Trail the previous weekend, a distance of thirty miles which had filled me with vanity. And two, here was this woman getting impressed and complimenting me for a stupid biking excursion from Bob's road to her furniture store, which might have been three or four miles at best. Her getting impressed at three miles of biking was an insult to my vanity. I felt like I had just invented a perpetual motion machine but been awarded the Nobel prize for my other invention of toothpaste.
So this created a combustible mixture inside of me, which was just waiting to burst out. Which it did. I said to the furniture woman, "Bob's road, oh, come on, Bob's road, no that's close, very close. Very close, for me that is. You see, I bike a lot. I bike thirty miles every weekend. So Bob's road isn't a huge distance for me. I love biking." There, I had said it. She was now free to legitimately explode in admiration for my skills.
She asked me, "So are you interested in this table?"
Actually I was, because it was a good-looking table so then we measured it and I went back home and found that it was the wrong size of table. Too wide. This weekend I will do the Perkiomen Trail and go see a different table.
2 comments:
If you were buying the table, she'd have Oohed even if you were biking from next door.
Come to think of it, I had to tie my shoelaces while I was in the store and she seemed unduly impressed by my ability to do that as well. She said it was wonderful how I did not fall even once.
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