my bicycle bell is loose.
it rings inadvertently whenever I cycle over bumps and potholes.
My street is especially bumpy, and quite busy. I bike down it during the day and everyone thinks I am ringing to get their attention. They turn their heads as I bike by.

The worst part is when it's friday night, the beginning of Shabbat, and the Hasidic Jews are solemnly walking home from shul...one long line of black hats and long cloaks and there I go, ringing like I'm the midnight ice cream truck of Outremont.

beautiful losers

“In Montreal the cafes, like a bed of tulip bulbs, sprout from their cellars in a display of awnings and chairs. In Montreal spring is like an autopsy. Everyone wants to see the inside of the frozen mammoth. Girls rip off their sleeves and the flesh is sweet and white, like wood under green bark. From the streets a sexual manifesto rises like an inflating tire, ‘The winter has not killed us again!’ Spring comes into Quebec from Japan, and like a prewar Crackerjack prize it breaks the first day because we play too hard with it. Spring comes into Montreal like an American movie of Riviera Romance, and everyone has to sleep with a foreigner, and suddenly the house lights flare and it’s summer, but we don’t mind because spring is really a little flashy for our taste, a little effeminate, like the furs of Hollywood lavatories. Spring is an exotic import, like rubber love equipment from Hong Kong, we only want it for a special afternoon, and vote tariffs tomorrow if necessary.”

-Leonard Cohen