Jay rode up to the school on a stark white bicycle. He was wearing white pants. Were it not for the oily, gray bicycle chain and his red sneakers he might have ridden through a deep puddle of bleach on his way to work.

            “New bike?” asked Gabe, but he knew better.

            “I just bought it. Used. I bought it from a guy on Craigslist,” Jay said.

            “No you didn’t,” I said.

            “What are you talking about?” Jay asked, almost as if he really didn’t know.

            “You stole that bike, Jay,” said Gabe. “Where’d you get that, Houston? Delancy?”

            “I told you, I got it from a guy online.”

            “The West Side Highway?” I asked. “Near the ferry over by the Lincoln Tunnel?”

            Jay was caught. “How could you possibly know that? Were you following me?”

            “That’s a ghost bike, Jay. Somebody died there and you stole their memorial and by the looks of it you probably stole somebody else’s chain.”

            He had, finding the white-painted chain unusable, and he had ignored the sign on the pole above where the bike was locked that indicated for whom it memorialized.

            “Well, it’s not like he was going to be using it anytime soon, then, was he?”

            Gabe and I stood in shock.

            “You’d better bring that back,” said Gabe. “You can send an e-mail to the ghost bike people saying you saw that it was vandalized.”

            “I can’t bring it back now, I have class in fifteen minutes,” Jay whined. “Fine.”

            Jay took off. I assumed he would ditch the bike on an empty side street, returning in a few minutes with a coffee in his hand.

            This was not an isolated incident. In fact, Jay has a long history of tactlessness.

            Gabe and I had been watching Cash Cab – Gabe doesn’t own a television, which incidentally does not affect his ability to watch TV, it means we spend a lot of time at my place – so Gabe and I were watching Cash Cab on Discovery and whose face should appear but Jay’s, along with some chippie, as my mother would say, whom neither Gabe nor I recognized and we easily identified her as not Jay’s wife.

            The girl gets in the van and Jay follows and they’re already kissy-face and Jay tells Ben Bailey, the host/driver, to take them to Serendipity, which is a really touristy place in midtown. Ben Bailey says something like “Getting some frozen hot chocolate, ay?” in a really thick Italian accent – frozen hot chocolate is something Serendipity is known for, whatever it is. And then the lights flash, Bailey turns around and says his line, “You guys are in the Cash Cab, a TV game show that takes place right here in my taxi. So what do you say, you want to play?” Far be it from Jay to refuse a chance at free money, even if his infidelity will eventually be broadcast on cable television, so they go for it.

            Jay’s answering all the questions, sometimes pretending to consult with the girl, but she’s no help. During the Red Light Challenge he was even able to name five of the six Nobel Prize categories, adding 250 bucks to the pot. To top it all off, he doubled their money at the end of the ride for a total of 1600 dollars by identifying the highest peak in South America.

            I couldn’t help but think how ironic it would be if Jay died on his way to return the ghost bike, tragically hit by a Mack truck riding the flat-tired bike he stole from the dead. But he didn’t. He came back in time for first period. Coffee in hand. Should I e-mail the ghost bike foundation? Surely someone else will notice.

Both presidential candidates love attacking Wall Street and its many abusers-of-the-system while defending Main Street, which is a euphemism for us, the American people, the laborers, the masses, the many, citizens, you and me. But I don’t know anyone who lives on Main Street. In my experience, Main Streets across the nation are generally populated by businesses, usually banks and Subway sandwich shops and auto repair shops and sometimes hospitals, but rarely residences. If politicians wanted to use a euphemism for us, regular people, the hurting, average Americans, Yankees, gringos, they should use Maple Street or Second Street, which is actually the most common street name in these United States, or Martin Luther King Boulevard, which would imply that the candidate supports black people, or Cesar Chavez Avenue, which indicates his support of Latinos, or Broadway, which is a very long street, stretching from downtown Manhattan all the way to Albany and has the added benefit of voicing the candidate’s support for the arts, which I have heard very little about in this election.

John McCain’s acceptance speech this evening was stilted, his smiles forced, and his fresh ideas non-existant. One thing he said, however, struck me, and that was, “I fight for Americans. I fight for you. I fight for Bill and Sue Nebe from Farmington Hills, Michigan, who lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market. Bill got a temporary job after he was out of work for seven months. Sue works three jobs to help pay the bills.”

Wow. Heartbreaking, no? They lost their real estate investments in the bad housing market.

What about the millions of people whose homes were foreclosed on because of predatory lenders? McSame is so out of touch he thinks the victims of the subprime mortgage crisis were people who couldn’t make a profit on their investment properties. Those poor, poor house flippers. If I weren’t cleansing my colon right now [read: shitting out the legos I swallowed when I was six] I’d throw up.

This childhood staple brings you back to a time when your mom cut your hair and you wanted to marry her. It never would have worked out, though, because she’s a lesbian.

For the more mature palate, use cavatappi with sliced kielbasa or those tasty Niman Ranch franks.

What these frozen delights lack in Life Savers’ bold flavor and fun-to-suck-on-icity they make up for in coldness. No, the Life Savers popsicle does not have Life Savers’ patented life-saving hole, so named because one time in junior high I choked on a Life Saver and was forced to breathe through the hole of the candy in my throat until it melted and I could cough it up. If you choke on a Life Savers popsicle, it will melt much faster than the classic candy, but without the life-saving hole, it won’t matter. Also, you can’t skip over the icky green-flavored section of the popsicle like you do with the classic candies.

My family, though never running on all cylinders, has always been there for me. Absent fathers never really made my radar, which tracks things I think this country needs to change before we collapse into anarchy – the environment, affordable housing, longer cell phone battery life, and whatnot.

I do, however, recognize that the problem of fatherlessness exists, especially in the black community, as brought to our attention by Sen. Barack Obama, close friend of T&S, in his Father’s Day speech.

By now you’ve heard the Rev. Jesse Jackson say on a hot mic that Obama be talkin’ down to black folk. I could not disagree more.

Obama highlighting the issue of deadbeat dads to blacks is the opposite of talking down to them. It’s treating them with enough respect to talk to them like adults, addressing the issue head-on, and applying it directly to the forehead.

Obama said yesterday he would not back down from the issue, a position T&S finds most laudable.

Sen. John McCain, good friend of T&S, told a group in Pittsburgh that he gave the starting lineup of the Steelers to his captors in Vietnam when pressed for information. That’s funny; I was pretty sure it was the Green Bay Packers. Some great reporting from this douche.

Her only weakness? Kabbalah

In 1997, at a Titanic-themed party in San Luis Obispo, Madonna tried to seduce me. She asked me what I would do if she put her hand down my pants. I said it depended on what she planned to do once inside my pants, then I asked her to stop fingering my asshole. She told me she wanted to make pasty, socially awkward, freakishly strong babies with me. That’s when I brought out the Zohar.