On Saturday at noon I went over to Bike Pirates because I’d noticed while riding the day before that my back wheel was precariously close to the left side of the frame of my bicycle. I was hoping that this would be a quick fix, but I suspected that it wouldn’t be just a matter of adjusting the wheel, but rather also the brakes. I was right. The wheel problem had a simple solution, but the brake problem took several different approaches before the solution was found. At first we just tried loosening the nut, then moving the brakes to the center and then tightening them, but they kept snapping to the left. Then we tried adjusting the spring. Finally, my volunteer discovered that the problem was that the brake cable didn’t have enough slack, and so I had to remove the three zip ties that Dennis had had me put on. I was glad to be rid of those because they had cut my hands a few times while I was carrying my bike up or down the stairs. I had covered them over with electrical tape to soften their edge, but that had made them annoyingly lumpy. The brake line apparently needs a proper curve leading up to it, so we gave it that and then I secured it with a bit of yellow electrical tape. I was glad that the whole repair had taken only 45 minutes, so my study time wasn’t shot this time around. I donated five dollars on the way out. At the counter, someone was asking about a reflector for his bike and the guy behind the counter told him that he could make one for himself with the 3-D printer at the Fort York library. One can only use the machine after taking a short orientation course, but then one gets certification and can either design things to create or else download designs from a database. He said that he’d scanned his own face and made a chess piece that looked like his own head with a crown on it. It sounds pretty interesting, though I can’t think of any plastic crap I need to make right now. There are three Toronto libraries with 3D printers available to those who get certified: the aforementioned Fort York Library, the Toronto Reference Library, but the third one is questionable. It’s reputedly in a place called the Scarborough Town Centre, if such a place actually exists. I’m pretty sure that there is no electricity in Scarborough, so I don’t what this “3D printer” they supposedly have in this “center of the town” could possibly run on or even what materials such a "machine" would be made from.
I finished making notes on Jacques
Derrida’s idea of proximity. Man belongs to being and being belongs to man and
I guess animals don’t have being, as opposed to existence, because one has to
be able to think about one’s being to have it, or something like that.
I also compiled notes on Emmanuel
Levinas’s thoughts on the Face from his essay “Is Ontology Fundamental?” Maybe
he’s saying that the Face is the part of the Other that you can’t kill. He also
talks about the face in “Meaning and Sense”, so I still had to make notes on
that.
There was some kind of altercation
across the street late that evening. I heard women shouting. I looked out and
saw a cop standing over a young woman that was down on the sidewalk. He pulled
her up rather roughly it seemed to me, by her clothes, but it seemed that she’d
been a victim of somebody that ran away who she said she didn’t know. She and
her girlfriend waited while one cop got in his car, put the siren on, made a
u-turn and headed west on Queen. I went out to buy two cans of beer and the car
was just returning when I was on my way home. I don’t know how it was all
resolved or really what happened in the first place. Just another night in
Parkdale.
I made a salami and cheese sandwich
and had it with a packaged organic tomato bisque. The soup wasn’t very good,
which is often the case with prepared organic foods. I had half of some grape
gelatin I’d made. But I made the mistake of having it with cream cheese because
I’d had it in my mind that it might be a good combination. Maybe yogourt would
have been better.
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