On the Sunday morning of September 18th,
after my initial warm-up exercise for yoga, I gradually felt an aching on the
inside of my right leg, near my groin. I later noticed that I was also tender
in the lower right side of my back. I haven’t felt that limited while doing my
yoga since after the last time I got knocked off my bike. I don’t know if I
strained something during the sun salutation or if it was just the extreme
humidity digging into my rarely active arthritis.
The
humidity certainly affected my guitar that morning. I started practicing ahead
of schedule, but I spent so much time tuning that I ended up finishing later
than usual.
During
practice, I was watching the people on the street as I usually do. There was a
guy wearing a wide headband and carrying a stick. Judging from his movements I
would say that he was mentally ill. He stopped to go through the garbage bins
that line the side wall of the building directly across the street from mine
and adjacent to the Dollarama parking lot. Suddenly a car came into the parking
lot and went right towards him. It wasn’t an accident, because the car wasn’t
trying to park there. It nudged him against the garbage. He shouted, “Fuck!”
and ran. He went down Dunn Avenue, but the car went to the back of the parking
lot, through the alley and then onto Dunn. When he saw it and started running
in a panic back up to Queen and then west. The car, a light blue station wagon
or SUV turned in the same direction. I don’t know if this was a spontaneous
attack, as in, “Hey look! There’s a hobo going through the garbage! Let’s scare
the shit out of him!” or if the driver of the car actually knew the guy and was
punishing him for some small time underworld indiscretion. Either way, it made
me angry. I have a couple of fossil bearing rocks that my daughter and I found
north of Toronto. I would have sacrificed one of them and put it through the
person’s windshield if he or she had stuck around.
I
spent most of the day studying and writing. In the early afternoon I wrote the
first of the weekly writing assignments that we are required to do in response
to one of the weekly readings. I responded to David Davies’s “Categories of
Art” and then I posted my paragraph online.
Here’s
what I wrote:
David
Davies’s essay, Categories of Art, argues that we can only understand the
intention of an artist that has produced a given work of art, and qualify the
success of that work’s realization of its producer’s intention, when that work
is perceived within the context of an established category of art. I would
explain Davies’s view of categories of art as being analogous to different
spoken languages. For the listener to understand what is being communicated and
to further understand if that communication has been well articulated, one must
first know what language is being spoken. In the case where an artist’s work
spans more than one category of art: continuing with the above analogy, the
artist is then speaking in more than one language, and must make it clear
beforehand that this is the case in order for the work to be understood within
the context of such a hybrid category.
By
the time I’d submitted the paragraph it was after 17:00, so I decided not to
take a bike ride, because by the time I’d gotten ready to leave it would be
after 18:00. I decided to just do the assigned Canadian poetry reading for my
other course instead.
I
watched two episodes of The Honeymooners. There seemed to be a lot less
continuity in that show than in other sitcoms of the time. Anything new that
happens to the characters within a story doesn’t carry over to the next. For
example, the Kramdens got a telephone in one episode, but in the next they
didn’t have a phone. In the one I just watched, Alice got a puppy but then
Ralph took it back to the pound. Then he found out that if the dogs aren’t
adopted they get destroyed, so he took the puppy back, plus two more dogs. I’m
sure though that in the next episode I watch they won’t have a dog.
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