I don’t honestly have anything deeply spiritual or intellectual to talk about today. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m tired (which is true, but was true before), or because I’m running out of philosophical things to say (possible but seems unlikely) or if it’s the grey weather that’s making my mind a bit slow (maybe) or the fact that I’ve been camping and thus haven’t really had a proper shower (could be), but for whatever reason my brain is running at a really prosaic and surface level. Donuts are good. Rain is bad. Biking on the flats is fun. I wish I could get going earlier in the morning. Etc., etc.
Canadian waitresses wear black yoga pants and it’s really sexy. I don’t know if that’s good or bad.
The area I’m biking through is incredibly remote, in a way. Of course, in a certain sense it’s not remote at all - the roads are lined with vacation homes, farms, and beaches, and there’s people everywhere. But there are no restaurants, very few places to stay (mostly small and very expensive bed and breakfasts), and no stores. So, for a cyclist, the effect is the same - it’s like cycling through Idaho; pack your own water. I haven’t seen a roof over my head available for less than $129.
In Canada, they never let their credit cards out of their sight. When you eat at a fancy restaurant, at the end of the meal, they bring you a little wireless device and you do the transaction right there at the table. I asked one of my waitresses what they used to do before wireless, and she said that you had to go up to the front and pay in person. I intimated that, in the US, it was considered part of good service to take care of that little errand without making the customer get up. She was alternately amused and slightly disgusted.
The northern coast of Lake Erie is basically an idyllic paradise. In several stretches, beautiful - or at least quaint - homes line the side of the road, while across the road at the lake are tiny little “resting spots”; benches, or docks, chairs artfully placed to suggest relaxation, with clear views of the water. There’s only one problem: it smells bad. Sometimes, it smells really bad. I tried to figure out where the smell came from and I couldn’t. It was mostly a serious barnyard smell. It may have come from the farmland; behind the houses would often stretch acres of planted fertile ground. But often there were no animals, only corn or wheat. I developed a sneaking suspicion that the Lake itself was the source of the smell, which really grossed me out and leads me to another realization:
In 37 years on this planet, I’ve only identified two things that I truly hate. And by hate I mean hate in a very immediate way. I suppose in some sense I hate Hitler and cancer and heart disease, but those seem so remote that it’s hard to get too worked up about them. But there are two things that can absolutely drive me nuts, every time. One is traffic, which is not too relevant for this trip. The other one is mosquitoes. I hate mosquitoes. I hate their buzzy little noise. I hate that they suck my blood. I really hate the way they make me itch for a week. If I could wave a magic wand and make them all disappear (without any even worse consequences), I completely and absolutely would, in a heartbeat. Years ago, one of my friends (I can’t remember who) made the following analogy about something else he hated: he said “If Wolfgang Puck made you a 5-course meal, replete with delicious sauces, glistening with all of his culinary skill, and then at the last second, he dropped trousers and took a little bit of a dump on top of it and then served it to you, you would not say it was 99% good. You would not brush off the poop and eat the rest. In fact, you likely would not ever eat anything in that place, or prepared by him, ever again. In fact, you probably wouldn’t eat anything that *reminded* you of what he prepared. You may, in fact, burn down the restaurant it was served in.” This is how I feel about mosquitoes, and I think it’s as good a definition of “hate” as any I can come up with: when I’m camping in the woods and get swarmed by mosquitoes, I want to not only kill every last one of them, I want to fumigate the whole woods, and then maybe firebomb it, just to make sure. I sort of feel the same way about bees, but since there’s a chance they could legitimately kill me, that somehow feels more rational.
