Spontaneity

I showed up home at 9pm today… sometime before that, between 5PM and 8PM I managed to purchase a flat screen television… an idea or expense that I had no idea I was about to incur at 430PM of the same afternoon… how does this happen? And how does this happen specifically to me? I don’t know… I have a knack for the random, spontaneous and completely unprovoked action…

For example… some two, or is it three, years ago… was heading over to zone 3 in London… on the west side… to attend the world famous school disco… where lads and ladettes dress up in boarding school outfits… get insanely drunk… and either have random sex or fist fights… so in summary, if you take out the first point, its an average night for a british youth… on the way there I was listening to my now deceased Ipod… I don’t remember what I was listening to but it must have been good for by some stroke of fate I managed to get off two stops early… how this is possible as my stop was the last stop on the line – I don’t know… but out I go… and as I walk a block down from the wrong station, I start looking around and scratching my head… finally it dawns upon me that I got off early and right as I am about to go on a cursing fit what do I see before my eyes… but a nice looking mountain bike… parked in front of a coffee shop… and being sold for a princely sum of 35 quid – quite cheap mind you…

Now the question here is what should happen here? A normal person gets back on the tube, rides out the two extra stops and goes on with his night trying to get lucky with some drunk English whore… but me… I am not normal… I see the phone number on the sign and I dial it… a very eager woman picks up and informs me that she’ll be right there… literally two minutes later she appears, with an addition of an eight year old girl in hand and the subtraction of a few of her teeth and a couple of ribs… sometime later I figured out she was a heroin addict... though the little girl seemed quite happy and well adjusted nonetheless… anyway… the woman saunters over to me and in great blabbering rush explains that her and her husband… and probably daughter too… are moving to where else but Australia tomorrow… and that this is quite unexpected… like most moves to the other side of the world to the old penal colony… and that she really must get rid of this wonderful bike… me and my moral sense disassociate from each other at this point and in an almost dreamlike state I find myself handing the woman over 35 quid for a bike that’s clearly not hers, removing the chain off the bike which the woman assures me was cut because her husband, silly lass that he is, lost the keys... waving good buy to her sweet daughter… ignoring the angry, piercing stare from the coffee shop owner… and off I go… riding my newly acquired bike to the school disco… with no idea what I will do with this thing while I am at the disco nor how I will get it back half way across London to my flat at Russell Square…

The bike survived school disco by being parked amongst 50 other bikes near the tube stop (really dying to remember its name)… I wrapped the ripped lock around it to disguise the fact that it was in fact free to take… and now to think of it, that would have kind of been kind of a just turn of events… but anyway… I left the bike at the bike rack… went to the school disco… waited for my Argentinean comrade (who shall remain nameless) for over an hour…. Paid 5 quid for the ugliest tie on the face of the planet…. Got insanely drunk at the festivities… didn’t get laid though got into a fist swinging match with some drunken idiot… left the party drunk and irritated… talked two of my classmates into agreeing to share a cab back to zone 1 with my ‘new’ bike… and spent a night twisting and turning in guilty misery over being an accessory to what was clearly bike theft…

the spontaneous story ended well… I rode back and forth from school on the bike… I didn’t wear a helmet but lived to tell about it… the 35 quid I spent on it plus another 20 I spent on a real lock paid for itself in reduced commuter costs… and I got compliments from quite a few classmates for being very cool… something that I always thought, I was with or without my bike in tow… but whatever… ill take all the help I can get…. And at the end of my school career I sold the bike on for 80 quid to an Israeli student… the proud jewish glee glistening in my eyes when I closed that transaction… yes… my mother would have been proud… profit… profit… and more profit… though with an unfortunate moral disclaimer though…

the story didn’t end perfectly though… the bike broke a week later and being that I was already on the short end of my immorality quota, I had to refund most of the bike money back to the Israeli for repairs… the deal still ended up being profitable based on commuter savings alone…. Though not as profitable as I dreamed it to be but again… given the fact on what confluence of sheer luck and scummy principles this happened… I should be happy I wasn’t run over by one of those psychotic black cabs…

and in the end… when I finished reciting this story to my friend Pranav… probably the foremost business brain I know… all he could muster to say was ‘Eugene, I have no idea how you pull this off!?’…

But now back to 2007… to my apartment and perpetually sore throat… I am now 400 bucks poorer… and one flat screen TV richer… why I need this fancy thing all of a sudden… I don’t know… but shit… a good deal is a good deal… so who am I to question…