Summer Hits the North

Yes, Fakiegrind Headquarters has moved, but our top secret ultra-new location is still within walking distance of Steeltown's ever-lovin', ever colourful north end. Just today, I was standing in the parking lot of the beer store, talking with an old acquantance whom I hadn't seen in a dog's age, when an overweight man approached on a mountain bike. He was wearing tight-fitting blue shorts and a matching tank-top, and had a large duffle bag slung over one shoulder. Approaching my friend and I, he slowed down.

Now, normally, a north end stranger weilding a large duffle bag and looking to make converstaion can mean only one thing: stolen merchandise available for resale at street-level prices. The only question in my mind was the particular nature of the hot goods being peddled (not that I was interested in procuring such items; my curiosity was purely academic). At any rate, the man was riding his (possibly stolen) mountain bike with one hand, and weilding a dinner fork in the other. Affixed to the end of the fork was a portentious chunk of what looked to be hamburger patty, it's pink innards gloriously exposed to the patchwork afternoon sunlight as it filtered through the overhead canopy of newly leafed trees.

The fellow did not keep my friend and I in suspense for long as to the nature of his wares, but, without dismounting his bike, inquired, his mouth half-full of beef patty,

"D'you guys wanna buy some meat?"

I should not have been surprised, but was, having never had meat solicited to me from a duffle bag in a beer store parking lot before. Though I had no desire to actually buy any of the fellow's product, I couldn't resist asking,

"Is it the same stuff you're currently eating?"

To which he replied, "Yeah!.." and there was a pause as the guy thought over my question, "...but raw".

And then the fellow was on his way, realizing from the tone of my inquiry, and with the sharpened senses of a street hawker to such things, that neither my friend nor I were seriously in the maket for discount street meat.

As he biked away, the guy's shorts revealed more of his posterior than modesty is generally wont to expose, and I quickly averted my gaze, wondering to myself at the colourful panorama of life that seems to burst into view with the first few warm days of summer. The whole encounter took less than twenty seconds, but the image of the short-shorted meat vendor is now burned in my mind: just another real-life Fakiegrind encounter unleashed upon the larger world via the magic of the internet.