Last night at about 9:30 I took a long walk, reading by flashlight. I like to do this a lot now, as it combines the normally sedentary activity of reading with the normally tedious task of walking nowhere in particular, which is oddly satisfying. At about 11:00, as I was just getting to the really good part, I took a right on Jagoe St. onto Oak St. and headed west. I had just passed Marietta St. when I saw somebody about a hundred yards up ahead. Unperturbed, I continued for a while until I was distracted by incomprehensible shouting. I didn't return immediately to my book, and as I walked and watched, I saw her (I determined by her voice that this person was of the female persuasion) sit down on the curb at the corner and stretch her legs into the street while lying flat on her back on the grass beside the curb. It was dark, and I don't think she had noticed me thus far, because when I was almost upon her, she suddenly sat up straight and hugged her knees to her body. It was then that I realized that... hmmm. It was quite shadowy where she was sitting, so I can say that her modesty wasn't completely compromised, but I was by then close enough to see that she just flat out wasn't wearing any pants. She was, however, wearing something on her legs that looked like leg warmers, except that they seemed more like regular pants legs that stopped at the knee. Imagine long shorts, or knee length knickers, but reversed. Maybe they were just socks... it was dark and hard to tell. It was a decidedly odd and surprising sight, and I stopped short for about a half a second before I continued on with my nose buried in my book. She didn't look up as I passed, and I didn't stop, intent on avoiding a potentially embarrassing situation.
After I passed her, I saw something about a hundred feet ahead that looked like a big jumble of shapes lying on the curb and partially in the road. My first thought was that the woman was the dazed victim of a car wreck. Or a dune buggy wreck... or possibly a golf cart wreck? I was close enough to see that it definitely wasn't big enough to be a car. I hurried forward to discover three large green city of Denton trash bins, all of which were knocked over into the street and spilling copious amounts of debris everywhere. Relief turned to irritation as I set about righting them and clearing the trash out of the road.
After all of the trash bins were lined up again on the curb, I became quite still as the Rube Goldberg contraption that is my mind kicked into gear. Two thoughts eventually congealed in my head... firstly, one doesn't normally find three large trash bins in a row knocked over and spilling into the street, and secondly, neither does one usually encounter a fellow pedestrian lounging on the curb sans pants in the middle of the night. Could these two unlikely items be connected? If I remembered correctly from high school algebra, when two negatives are multiplied by each other, the result is a positive. I considered that each unlikely situation represented a negative variable. If I multiplied them together, using this rule of algebra, then the resulting positive solution should be represented by a likely situation. Armed with this logic, I concluded that It seemed likely that the two unlikelies, when combined, formed a likely, and that it was likely that these two unlikely events were somehow connected.
I looked back to see if she was still sitting there. Apparently she had high-tailed it, so I shrugged and continued my walk. At about 2:00 I was nearing the end of the book so I went home. Once I was safely ensconced in my kitchen, rustling up some grub, I reflected briefly on the oddities of the walk I had just taken. I then sat down and finished my book and went to beddy bye with a full stomach and the satisfaction of a book well ended.
