About Igor:
I lived about a block away from Igor's shop when kiff and i got our bikes stolen. Everybody knew he was buying stolen bikes. When I spoke with him, his attitude was that if you didn't bring your bike inside your home every night, it was fair game. There was a madness about him. There were rumours about him being ex-secret police in Slovenia. Of being a strange anti-hero. And of hitting his ex girlfriend.
One day my mom was conducting an open house when she met a sweet concert pianist from a traditional Korean family. She had a boyfriend who ran a bike shop on Queen Street. "Not the bike thief!" said my mom, who recognized the location from my stories. "He is not a thief!" the woman insisted, although she conceded that some stolen bikes probably ended up in his shop.
The unlikely pair had hooked up when she walked into his bike shop one day and heard a rare contemporary classical piece coming from his CD player. It turned out that this lanky-haired bike handler had the kind of taste in music that made this Juliard-educated woman swoon.
Don't get me wrong, I think bike theft is vile and personal and that his alleged enabling of drug addicts is wretched. But I can't turn away from this story of the Fagan-like bike shop owner and his classical pianist girlfriend. Reminds me a bit of "The Beat that my Heart Skipped" (a truly great movie, btw).
About the greyhound bus killing:
A 22-year old man was stabbed and beheaded on a greyhound bus travelling through manitoba. I don't need to get into the gory details, but I found it impossible to look away from this story until all its horrific details were absorbed. Why do we do this?
The worst part of this story were the comments. I know there has been a lot of discussion these days about whether news stories should have comments, since they seem to cater to the most reactionary opinions. Once again, I was unable to look away and I noticed two things.
1) It seemed clear to me that this man with no record of violence had some kind of psychotic episode, but few people addressed his mental state. Perhaps admitting that a person can have that kind of episode with no forewarning scares the shit out of them, or maybe they think that acknowledging his insanity would take "wrongness" and outrage out of the tragic death.
2) So many people fantasize that they would have been able to save this young man had they been on the bus. I understand where that comes from. Every time a tragedy hits close to home, I dream about being there and taking decisive action and changing the past. Of course, we never know what it was really like to be there, or how our adrenaline and fear-charged body would have responded and it is insulting to survivors to imply otherwise.
That said, we should not be so hard on people who need to articulate these hero fantasies. It is truly human.
About the John Edwards affair:
He is not running for president. This is none of my business. Another case of "we weren't there". It still makes me a bit sad.
That said, why does it surprise anyone that someone who would run for political office would have difficulty with monogamy?
