The Great Mayo Escape

 

Ever wonder what happens when you run over a glass jar of $7 made-with-olive-oil mayonnaise on your new Novara Verita bike (just bragging about my new bike that replaces my 33 year-old (sniff) original owner Peugeot that was (sniff) evil-ly attacked by Iowa/Nebraska ice/salt/road chemicals and developed a malignant case of (sob) rust....waaah). ??? THAT was a run-on question. Just answer "yes". This was pretty up-there on the unforgettable scale (although I might forget it - see next sentence). It is possible that if you ask me in a few years about this incident, i might give you a vacant-eyed smile and be thinking "what the fuck are they talking about" - Meret Giacomini (2015). Because by then so many unbelievably amazing new things will be stuffed into my brain storage unit, on the "weird" shelf (see my first post called AMTRAK Savvy or Meret Giacomini, Weird Eye). I don't know though, this was a pretty awesome experience. A little background - I have this peculiar compulsion to carry too much on my bike in unconventional and potentially dangerous ways. Like it's this big challenge that I can be proud of myself for, or something. Sometimes even brag about - (like now. See next sentence) I once carried a 20lb bag of cat food on the handle bars of my Peugeot 10-speed (the one with advanced stage rust). I made it all the way from Easters (then became Econofoods, now is a True Value Hardware) to my house on 4th and Harrison. I'm not going to tell you how many blocks if you don't know, because not having done this yourself, you might not find this impressive, but i'll put it this way it was worthy of bragging about. That was lame. There must be something more dramatic to say than "it was worthy of bragging about" -Meret (2 sentences ago). Okay, so I bought my groceries that were carefully jammed into two separate thin, thin, thin, plastic bags and headed out along the sidewalk on Baseline to see my adopted (he and his parents don't know this yet) grandson, Luca who just turned one. I am hauling 3 chicken breasts, a carton of organic chicken broth, parsley, garlic, 2 cans of tuna, 2 cans of chicken (what's with all the chicken...) and a jar of mayo. I'm doing my usual, "this is not going to be easy, but I can do it" compulsive hauling stuff on my bike, when I heard a whipped egg and olive oil-muffled pop under my new skinny tire. Luckily, my new bike came with fenders, and I had decided to not be the used-to-be-cool strip-everything-off -your-bike-so-it-is-so-light type person and keep them on - they do good things!. Otherwise, my nice Paradiso T-shirt would probably have a mayo stripe up the back. As it was, just my bike tires had a lovely condiment adornment (a condorment?) of mayo. Expensive mayo, too. "So what happened?" - You (now). Well, I'm thinking the pointy corners of the carton of chicken broth slowly but surely (not really so slowly really, but surely for sure) made a rip big enough for a wide-mouth smart-aleck jar of mayo to slide right through. Ha! Like The Great Escape, except not really because unlike the GE there was only one hole instead of 3 and only the mayo escapes and only the mayo dies instead of 76 men escaping and most of them dying. The chicken broth only aided in the escape, but didn't make it out itself. In fact, as I said, only the mayo did. Anyway, It (the mayo) somehow...tell me how...landed under my back tire. At first (when I was younger, a few days ago) I thought I ran over it with my front tire, but now that I'm reconstructing the story, I'm thinking that if I had hit it with my front tire, I would probably not be telling this story as a funny story, and I might be writing from a hospital bed, or you would just be (sniff) reading my epitaph  "Tragically Killed By Mayo Bomb", or "One stunt too far". Anyway, it went like this - walk out of Safeway, get on bike, grab the top of the bags so they can't dangle into the spokes (causing rider to fly over handle bars in Evil Kenevil type stunt), ride, ride, ride, ride (2 minutes)------POP------(WTF)---- (shit)-----yellow glop with shards of glass on the sidewalk behind me. dead. Never to make a can of tuna into a tuna sandwich, as was its intended fate. Remnants of mayo guts on the clean shiney spokes of my new tires sticking up in little points like merengue (ooops that's the dance)...no meringue, like on lemon pie, like Denver Airport. Check it out. DIA has a roof of meringue. Lemon Pie International Airport. ----That was a distraction, so you wouldn't think to ask me if I cleaned up the mess on the sidewalk--- Ah, but now you will think of it. I'm still quite young in the head, you know. Do you care even? Well, the answer is no, I didn't clean it up, but my plan today is to go back to the scene and do what I can. It's been a rough morning. It's 11am and I've been in bed writing this mess for hours. I guess I'll take one of those clean-up-after-your-dog bags, unless someone has a better idea. Like what about the glass? Maybe a box. You know, there are no known-to-me signs or ordinances here that say I have to clean up after my groceries escaped from their "there will be no escapes from this [bag]" - The Great Mayo Escape (a few days ago) bag. Did you get that? There were a lot of words in there to confuse you. Try it again. Take it slow. Watch The Great Escape. That will help. Or just watch Eddie Izzard's rendition. It is shorter and WAY funnier. Ciao for now!