The Existence of Truth Does Not Prove the Existence of God

            Thursday morning was the beginning of another warm day, so I wore shorts again to philosophy class. I got there about fifteen minutes early and did some writing on my laptop until the algorithm class got out.

            Professor Black told us about a medieval philosophy seminar that would be happening that weekend on campus. She said the part that takes place on Saturday would start at 10:00 because medievalists don’t like to get up early on Saturdays.

            Our lecture was on Augustine’s dialogue, “On Free Choice of Will”. Liberum Arbitrium – Free Choice. He wrote this right after his conversion to Christianity. It reflects discussions during his retreat in Cassiacum, Italy. His son and his mother appear in the dialogues as well. His work of this period is important for later periods. He comes back to some of it in his Retractationes – or reconsiderations because there were complaints that he had put aside divine grace in favour of free will and so he wanted to address the issue.

            His main concern here is the Manicheans.
            Do humans have free choice?

            What is the relation between “god” and free will?

            Augustine takes a detour in the middle to “prove” that “god” exists.

            At this point Deborah Black thought that she had stepped on a piece of chalk but then realized that her mic had fallen off and that she had trod upon it.

            Faith seeks understanding. Unless you believe you shall not understand. Leap of faith, or more accurately “leap to faith” is not Augustine’s language, but rather Soren Kierkegaard’s but that’s what he is saying. Augustine says one has to begin with faith and question it later in order to deepen one’s understanding.

            Meno’s paradox, as stated by Socrates is, “A man cannot search either for what he knows or what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows -- since he knows it, there is no need to search – nor for what he does not know, since he does not know what to look for.” So how can one learn?

            Aquinas differs from Augustine with the argument that one should believe until there is evidence and then there will be no need to believe.

            Augustine’s pillars of faith:

            Certitude in one’s own existence.

            Belief in the existence of god.

            It’s an anti-sceptical argument but scepticism gives the first principal:

            Si fallor sum – If I err, then I exist – a certain truth.

            The cause of evil is turning away from the good of eternity to the temporal good. Human sin seems to be the result of free choice. His vague premise is that if there is truth there is god.    

           

The hierarchy:

           

Intellect |

     ↓       |

            Life        | - Each can infer the one below.

     ↓        |

            Existence|

            Professor Black likes this because she is interested in medieval cognition theory.

            Compare the intellect to other powers of cognition.

            Augustine uses the Aristotelian idea that the senses only perceive objects that are proper to them. The senses perceive objects but not themselves. The inner sense perceives the outer senses and their acts. Augustine says this inner sense exists in animals. Animals look for food when food is absent. Her cat wakes her up half an hour before she needs to get up because her bowl is empty.

            Reason or intellect is reflexive – It looks at itself, life and existence. Augustine thinks this shows that since judgement is the mark of superiority, reason is the ultimate judge of that which is beneath it. The inner senses judge the outer senses.

            God, that than which nothing is superior is higher than reason but that which is higher than reason may not be god.

            Augustine thinks that which is higher than reason, unchangeable and has no superior has to be god. If you can prove that there is immutable truth, as in numbers, you can prove that there is god. He is setting the bar low here, as this is a vague definition of god.

            Rational truths are public but not private. You think it’s hot but I think it’s cold are two private truths. Only I can taste the cake that is in my mouth because taste consumes its object.

            Truth is higher than the human mind because the mind is mutable. Truth provides the standard for the mind’s judgement.

            Why did “god” give us free will?

            Deborah wished us all a great weekend and commented that it was supposed to go over 30 degrees. She said she’d heard that some large apartment buildings in Toronto have already turned on the heat. I learned later that this is true, but it seems crazy that they can’t have furnaces controlled by thermostats.

            Since I was down to one pen, after class I went to Staples to buy another pack of five. On the way home I stopped at Freshco. The grapes were very cheap, so I bought three bags. Watermelons had dropped by $2 since Tuesday and I figured that would be the last time this year they’d be that cheap. There were packs of Italian sausages for $2.50 and one lamb chop was marked down for $3. There were six-packs of yogourt for $1. I couldn’t pass up a large tin of Maxwell House dark roast for $6.99. I was getting tired again of eating bananas with my yogourt so I got three cans of peaches in pear juice. It had been almost a year since I ran out of black pepper pods and though pretty much every time I’ve gone to the supermarket since then I’d thought about buying more, I’d always forgotten while I was there. It wasn’t as urgent for a long time because I still had paprika, which is a pretty good alternative, but that finally ran out too. This time it occurred to me to seek out the pepper but I was very surprised at how expensive it was. $6.99 for a little jar. I got it anyway.

            I grilled the lamb chop, boiled a carrot and a potato for dinner. I tried to make gravy and my gravy usually turns out great but this time the liquid didn’t have enough fat in it. I tried to flavour it up after thickening it but it tasted wrong so I attempted to rescue it by adding a carton of Thai tomato and coconut soup. That improved it but I added some honey to take the edge off.

            That night I watched an episode of Maverick and caught an amusing inside joke. Roger Moore’s character, Beau Maverick was successfully posing as an Irishman in Dakota among a group of Fenian militants intent on invading part of Canada and exchanging it for Irish freedom. A cavalry soldier was also spying on them and claiming to have the last name “Kelly”. They saw through his disguise, beat him up and threw him out. Afterwards one of the Irishmen commented that he was too good looking to be a Kelly. Roger Moore smirked and told him he agreed. The joke was that Roger Moore’s co-star on that show, but not in that episode, was Jack Kelly.

            The previous episode I’d watched was nothing special for the story, but it featured a strange game of poker that Bart Maverick got caught up in with some old men, called “Pass the Buck” in Dodge City. Aces, black threes, the eight of hearts, and your lowest card are wild and you pass your worst three cards on to the man on your left. The hands had names like “St Louis Sleeper”, “Ring tailed gazafrance” (which is the equivalent of five aces) and a “Stuttering flush” (consisting of ace, deuce, three, king and eight of hearts. The same as a royal flush but every other card is black), which always beats a ring-tailed gazafrance). Another game was called “Eight Toed Sloth”, in which an “Apache Nightmare” beats a “Texas Tornado” as long as the queen is black but only until midnight, in which case it can be beaten by a “Woolly Mammoth”.

            

The Beast in the Jungle

            On Wednesday evening it was warm enough to wear shorts to and from lit class. There was a lot of weird traffic on the way though. A serpent of a long TTC bus was slithering along collage and blocking my way until I finally got around. Somebody was blocking eastbound traffic to parallel park and I had to edge into oncoming traffic to pass. Another driver ahead of me was looking for a place to park and she kept on crossing the bike lane, cutting me off, only to find out I guess that she couldn’t park where she thought she could and so she went back onto the street only to repeat the whole thing again. She did this three times before she finally fully crossed over so I could squeeze by.

            I overshot the Fitzgerald building by a few blocks because I didn’t recognize the landmarks from my bike. Last week I’d approached it on foot and found it by number.

            It turned out that there was no class ahead of ours this time. There were about seven people in the lecture theatre and all of them were women. I said, “I don’t suppose that any of you know where the men’s washroom is!” One of them said that she’d seen it last time on the other side of the main floor when she was looking for the women’s loo. I was skeptical because I’d walked all around that level and all I’d found in the direction that she’d indicated was a bold sign that seemed to have been put up out of annoyance, telling searchers, “Washrooms Not In This Hallway”. I gave her the benefit of the doubt though and found a sign I hadn’t noticed last time saying that the men’s washrooms are in basement and on the second floor.

            I went downstairs and as I emerged into the hallway I let out a quick tooting fart before I realized there was a young woman walking nearby.

            Back in the classroom, as people arrived I realized that there are actually quite a few middle-aged students taking this course. More than I’ve seen in any that I’ve taken so far.

            Scott Rayter arrived on time and took roll call. I didn’t have to answer when he said my name because he recognized me and checked me as present.

            I noticed that the chairs in that classroom are actually pretty comfortable for seats in a classroom.

            In this class we looked at a story each by Henry James and Edith Wharton, two major novelists in the early 20^th Century.

            Henry James pushed the limits of the short story. He was interested in how we think about and experience time. His brother, William James was a renowned philosopher and psychologist.

            Henry James traveled a lot but finally settled in England where he renounced his United States citizenship because of the initial refusal of the United States to enter World War I.

            Edith Wharton also traveled a lot but settled in France. She dedicated herself to helping her adopted country during World War I and the French loved her back. She received the Legion of Honour after the war.

Like many of the Lost Generation, James and Wharton didn't live in the States but wrote about it. They were both interested in U.S. Citizens living abroad and how they were perceived. Margaret Lawrence lived in England and wrote about the Canadian prairies.

            They all needed a critical distance in order to be critical.

            Wharton was critical of the destructive power of a frivolous, vain and abusive society. She was also interested in what women do to each other.

            At this time the United States was a cultural backwater. Authors from the States wrote for a European audience and any writer from North America needed to be successful in the U.K.

            James puts U.S. Citizens abroad under a microscope. His characters reflected the reality that people in the United States could suddenly become wealthy. Upstarts like that don’t occur in Europe. The US people abroad were often naïve and unpretentious but the people that treated them most viciously were other US people abroad. The Italian hotel in where the couple in Wharton’s story stay is occupied only by others from the United States.

            “Souls Belated” could mean they haven’t found themselves or soul mates haven’t found each other yet. The idea of lateness of trains and people recurs throughout the story.

            Is it them or is it marriage itself? Did women at that time have identity outside of marriage? Suddenly they have stopped talking because she now has a divorce. He has not yet formally asked her to marry him but commits the faux pas of beforehand verbally assuming that she will. “I thought that just at first you might prefer to be quiet after we are married”. As they travel they pretend to others that they are married but she considers actual marriage to be a trap that she has already just escaped.

 “I was free before”. What does freedom look like for a woman?

            Classic romances are made about couples that are not meant to be together. You don’t start a story about a happily married woman.

            It’s precarious for a cultured woman to not have money.

            This is called naturalistic fiction, where nothing ends happily. There are five sections to the story. The other literary form that is made up of five parts or acts is the tragedy.

            By focusing on Lydia, Wharton exposes him. A well-dressed middle-aged woman on the other side of the room described the other women she encounters as “old fashioned mean girls”. Scott liked that and declared that they are “bitches”.

            Lady Susan thinks that she knows the truth about everyone and that Lydia is perfect. Lydia wants these women to like her and is willing to lie to achieve that goal because if she admitted to having been an adulterous, to being divorced or even single, she would not be accepted. Why does she care about such horrible people? Wharton never answers this question, but to be an outcast is frightening.

            In part five we are suddenly in his head observing her. She is under his surveillance and is silent but in motion. He does not want her to see that he is watching her.

            The use of three dots of ellipsis in the text at the end leaves things open and omits what is next. “ … mechanically, without knowing what he did, he began looking out the trains to Paris …”

            Scott commented with relief that at least Lydia didn’t die in the end like most of Wharton’s heroines.

            We took a break, during which I told Scott that I though he was being unfair to Gannett. I expressed the view that his decision to not try to stop Lydia from leaving was noble.

            After the break we started on Henry James.

            Henry James’s writing changed over time. He was a Modernist writer but not as extremely so as writers like James Joyce or Virginia Woolf. Sylvia Plath had a nervous breakdown while reading Ulysses. Henry James was interested in consciousness and how we know what we know. He edited many of his own stories badly.

            Wharton was more successful than James. Later there was a revolt against female novelists but in this period they were popular. He saw himself as more experienced than Wharton but they were close friends.

            Of “The Beast in the Jungle”, can we really know the mind of another? Freud says we can’t even know ourselves.

            In Modernist style the story has no formal intro.

            We never learn what “the beast in the jungle” is. I said that my impression was that “the beast” was that he and possibly her were Gay. Scott confirmed that to be a common interpretation and that queer theorists interpret it as “the beast in the closet”. He offered the view that although the homosexual answer to the mystery is satisfying, it’s too easy. He argued that it is wrong to try to fill in the blanks at all in this story because the answer to the mystery is not the point. The secret of having a secret creates suspense.

            Marcher does not remember the horrible secret that May said that he had previously confessed to her and she never tells him what it was. Are they talking about the same thing? Maybe she doesn’t even really know the thing that he thinks he has forgotten. Who do we believe? Why do we believe some people and not others? There is so much ambiguity and there are so many gaps in the text.

            He is forgetful but she remembers everything. He has coldness about him. We are not meant to trust him and maybe not even her. She is described as being like the Sphinx. There is something almost sado-masochistic about their relationship. She has him bound to her by the secret she claims to know and controls it like a leash. She possesses him by never giving him the details and thus convinces him that she knows him better than he knows himself. We are in his head but never in hers. She is a reader and so are we.

            Deconstructionists love Henry James.

            I offered the theory that perhaps she doesn’t represent a person at all but the Freudian mind part that covers guilt. He said “the superego” but he didn’t seem satisfied, returning to his assertion that filling in the blanks is a mistake.

            Another student with what sounded like Liverpudlian accent declared that the story reads like a meditation on knowledge.

            Fear of the unknown is more terrifying than the object of fear revealed. Freud says that everything represents something else.

            Marcher is nothing with a secret.

            I didn’t realize until I got home that the professor had finished the class an hour early. My neighbour Nicky was having a party out on the deck. I’d never seen her out on the deck at all before that. She called to me and said “Hi!”

            I started making a quick dinner and it occurred to me that the liquor store was still open and that I had the money to buy a beer for the first time in a long time. I went out and a guy called to as if he knew me. Then he said he wanted to ask me something. Because of the way he phrased the question it was becoming obvious that he didn’t know me and that he was panhandling. I told him I didn’t have any money because I was used to not having money. What I would have told him if I’d thought about it was that I couldn’t afford to give him any money.

            I made a steak sandwich with cheese, lettuce and pickles and had it with a can of Creemore.

            

A French University is Coming to Ontario

After philosophy class on Tuesday, since I knew that my grant refund had come through, I rode to the bank machine at Dundas and University to take out $300 and then went straight to Topcuts for a haircut. The studio was busy this lunch hour and so I had to wait through one and a half stylings for Amy. I don’t have to tell her anymore how I want my hair to be cut and I like the way she does it. I think it’s because she’s a daughter, a long way from her parents in Thailand and a mother, on the verge of her own kids growing up and going away, that she always asks about my daughter while she’s cutting my hair. I told her that Astrid is learning French in Montreal, which led to us talking about learning French in general and I informed her that in 2020 we will be have the first francophone university in Ontario right here in Toronto. I said that I was glad they were building it but that it seemed strange not to build it in Sudbury, since it’s the center of the very wide region through which the largest Franco-Ontarian population is spread. Maybe they don’t think that Sudbury has the infrastructure to handle that much of an increase in population so quickly.

Now looking good, I went to have a good look for some of the books on my 20^th Century U.S. Literature reading list. I have almost all the texts that I need already on my computer but I’d rather not bother fiddling with my laptop in the classroom, so I wanted to have hard copies of each text anyway. The first place I went was Elliot’s on Yonge north of Wellesley. There I found a book of short stories by Henry James that included “The Beast in the Jungle”, a book of stories by Kate Chopin containing “The Awakening” and another of F. Scott Fitzgerald with “Babylon Revisited”. Next I went up the street to ABC Books and Magazines but they didn’t have anything I needed. I continued north to Bloor and then west to the bookstore in the building where Rochedale College used to be. They had the Norton Anthology of American Literature, but the wrong century. I stopped for a quick bite at New York Fries because I was starting to burn out. My last stop was BMV Books, which has a lot of Norton Anthologies. They don’t have the 9^th Edition, which is what we are supposed to get, but they had most of the 7^th. The problem is that this anthology is a package of several books covering different sections of the century. I settled for the short version of the 8^th edition, which doesn’t have any of the novels, but I could get those separately. It also didn’t have the Ernest Hemingway story, “Hills Like White Elephants” so I bought “The Essential Hemingway” which had it. Every bookstore I’d been before in had lots of Hemingway but not that story.

I decided I was done, having most of everything I needed, so I headed home. About three cyclists whizzed past me on the Bloor bike lane, which is a rare coincidence. On the way home I realized that I still hadn’t gotten Edith Wharton’s “Soul’s Belated”. I could have gone down to Ten Editions to look, but it takes hours to stand on ladders in that place. I decided that for Wednesday’s class I’d just print the story from my digital copy of the 6^th Edition of the short version of the Norton Anthology.
            Looking at what I had later I saw that I would also have to print Nella Larsen’s “Passing” unless I could find a hard copy somewhere. A lot of the material isn’t even in the prescribed anthology anyway and he would be posting it on Blackboard.

            

Believing to Understand

            

            On Tuesday morning I got up with the alarm and when I went to the bathroom I was greeted by a mystery. The roll of toilet paper on the shelf above the toilet was wet all the way through. That only happens every half a year or so when I accidentally drop a roll into the toilet. I would have noticed if I’d dropped it and then took it back out to dry on the shelf because I would have been pissed off at myself for the mistake. I don’t know what happened, unless I’ve started sleepwalking, which I’ve never done in my life.
I read some of Anselm’s “Proslogion”.  He argued that in order to understand “god” one has to believe in it. But the only way that two believers can understand “god” in the same way is if they share the same dogma. There are many opposing understandings of “god” that result from the same leap of faith. If “god” can be understood through believing, since to understand anything implies knowing the truth about it, there cannot be more than one truth about “god”. The fact that leaps of faith are all very similar to one another and yet result in different understandings of “god”, this disproves the argument that understanding results from belief. It also suggests that no understanding of god can even serve as evidence that god exists. By contrast, few of the millions of people that have studied gravity have a different understanding of that law. A leap of faith may simply be a jump into a non-rational part of one’s own mind, which is a good place to go if one doesn’t take too much dogmatic baggage along and if one doesn’t sever one’s connection to reality in making the leap.
Later that morning, as I was getting ready to leave for my philosophy class, I went out on the deck to check the temperature and it felt a little too cool for shorts. Half an hour later though, when I headed out, it was too hot for pants.
I passed a crew that was fixing a sidewalk on College. The youngest of the men was on his knees scraping old mortar from used bricks.
The front entrance was closed off because some workmen were doing some renovations, so we had to go in by way of the side door. I went to the lecture theatre and then looked for an outlet to charge my phone. I found one on the side wall near the left corner of the room. A student that sits in the second row behind me told me that there are several plugs under the long desks in each row. I checked under the front row desk though and found that while there are rectangles cut to hold electrical outlets, they haven’t been installed. I could probably run a cord behind me to connect to one of the second row plugs if the need arises in the future though.
Professor Black talked a bit about our tutorials that would begin the next week because some of us have been switched to other rooms so that the TAs have an equal number of students. She mentioned something about a third alternative but then corrected herself because alternative means a choice of two.
Our lecture finished up Augustine’s speculations about time. Genesis opens with “In the beginning …” What is the nature of time? What is creation? His arguments are similar to those of Islamic philosophers of that era. Creation is empirically evident because things cry out that they were created.

Beginning → Creation → Mutability of the physical world.

Mutability and flux points to the idea of changeability. That which is changeable must have been created. Where there is no stability there is a state of becoming stable and so there is no stable being. That which has no stable being cannot self-create and so it must have a creator.
Time is a manifestation of mutability. Time tends to non-being.
The difference between “god” and a creative human being is that the artist already has the stuff to work with in time. Augustine says “god” created the world ex nihilo, meaning out of nothing and outside of time. This is the hallmark of Abrahamic religions rather than that of ancient philosophy. The Greek philosophers would call the claim that something could be created out of nothing irrational.
         There are two models:
Plato’s model of creation was outlined in Timaeus and it resembles the big bang theory. He says that time is a moving image of eternity. The divine being or demiurge acts as an artisan on stuff to make things.
          Augustine drew his model from the Ennead. He says that “god” gives stuff being.
Emanation as eternal creation has its roots in Plato. Goodness is generosity pouring out from the source of goodness like light from the sun and water from a spring.
          The Greeks would say that creating a first moment is irrational. The skeptic asks, “If god one day created the first moment, what was it doing before that?” Augustine’s joking answer is that “god” was creating hell for people that ask smart aleck questions.
          Augustine says that the creator is immutable pure being.
          The idea of there having been a beginning suggests that “god” was being stingy beforehand and wanted to be alone.
          Eternity means all of time that is wholly present now to “god”. Eternity is the paradigm. Time is the image of eternity and not the other way around.
          Aristotle says the world is eternal and has always been here, so no need to explain what is there.
          A temporal question about an eternal event is improperly formed. Eternity is the ever presence of all time. Eternity is stable, while time is not. Time seems to be a process involved in becoming present. It is always changing. Aristotle says that time is the measurement of motion but Augustine argues that time would still exist without motion. He uses a special analogy with time. All times are modalities of the present. The present of things past is memory. The present of things present is observation. The present of things future is expectation. Time is stabilized through our awareness.
Augustine uses the analogy of singing a song. There are long and short syllables. We remember what we have just sung and anticipate the next lines. We stretch and prolong the song.
          Time is the act of pinning down moments as they pass. Time is a distinction of the mind that gives reality to time. Augustine identifies time with human measuring. The flux is not an illusion.

Hang-Drowning

            On Monday I got the official notice in the mail that I had qualified for the Noah Meltz Grant to pay for my courses again this year. The refund would probably be deposited at midnight. I still hadn’t gotten a letter from the Toronto Housing Allowance program, though I was told that it should have arrived today.

            I read a few more chapters of Kate Chopin’s “The Awakening”. Edna moved out of her husband’s big house into a little cottage not far away. She began selling her artwork. The man she loved returned to New Orleans but behaved indifferently to her until his resistance fell apart and they ended up in each other’s arms. He hadn’t felt he could be with her while she was with her husband. She hadn’t officially left her husband though, other than to move out.

            I decided to take a bike ride since I would have classes from Tuesday to Thursday and wouldn’t be able to spare the time then.

            There’s a country singer with a long white beard that always busks at the corner of Dufferin and Bloor. He’s not bad but I’ll bet behind that thick cowboy accent he sings with is a Canadian talking voice.

            I rode to Victoria Park, north to St Bede’s Rd, across to Pharmacy and then south again. There’s a cute little red house on Pharmacy at the corner of Penaire that looks like it might be the oldest one in the neighbourhood.

            On the way back on Danforth I heard a woman shouting behind me, “You stay away from me!” I stopped and turned. It turned out that she was saying it to the big guy that was walking east towards her. They started talking, I think in Greek and then she was walking and arguing with him. I moved on.

            I got home a little sooner than usual because I didn’t have to stop to pee.

            I watched an episode of Maverick that was directed by Robert Altman. It was well realized but, though it was funny, there was nothing outstanding about the story. The judge though, while riding from trial to trial always sang, “The Hanging Tree” by Mack David and Jerry Livingston 100 years after the time when this story was set –

“I came to town to search for gold
and I brought with me a memory
and I seemed to hear the night winds cry
Go hang your dreams on the hanging tree
your dreams of love that will never be
Hang your faded dreams on the hanging tree.

I searched for gold, and I found my gold
and I found a girl who loved just me
and I wished that I could love her, too
but I left my heart on the hanging tree,
Left my heart with a memory
and my faded dreams on the hanging tree.

Now there were men who craved my gold
and meant to take my gold from me
Where man is gone he needs no gold
so they carried me to the hanging tree
to join my dreams and a memory
Yes, they carried me to the hanging tree.

To really live you must almost die
and it happened just that way with me
They took my gold and set me free
and I walked away from the hanging tree
I walked away from the hanging tree
and my own true love, she walked with me.

That's when I knew that the hanging tree
is the tree of life, new life for me …”

            I finished reading “The Awakening”. The lover that had returned to Edna’s arms left again because he loved her. She went for a swim out into the ocean until she was too tired to swim anymore. One assumes she drowned. My impression is that her swim was not deliberate attempt at suicide, but once she was out there she didn’t care one way or the other.

Hunted in the Dark

            I was being hunted in the dark but I was also hunting the hunter with my shotgun. I caught sight of the hunter’s shadow and aimed my gun, but I woke up frightened as if there was still danger to my awake self. When the fear subsided I had an erection that wouldn’t go away for a long time.

I spent a lot of Sunday reading Kate Chopin’s novel, “The Awakening”. It felt like a boring day until I looked back on it and saw it as having been quite relaxing. The guy I thought Edna was going to become lovers with went away to Mexico. After that she stopped performing her wifely and motherly duties and decided to become an artist. Maybe the awakening is just her going against the grain of the Victorian era deep south of North America to find herself.  I was about halfway through when I took a bike ride. I was all caught up on my journal and I was ahead in my reading, so I took advantage of a nice day. It was a soft and warm afternoon. On Bloor Street after Ossington I passed two couples riding in a pedal cart. They were blasting music and having a laughing good time despite or because of the fact that they could have easily have walked faster than they were driving.

            On the Bloor Viaduct I came up behind another cyclist that was a little too far to the left for my to pass. I called out to him and he moved to the right, then put his left hand up to wave me by. I called out “Thanks” and his gesture changed to a thumbs up sign.

There were more cyclists than usual for a Sunday on the Bloor Viaduct and the Danforth, but none of them were particularly competitive. I rode up Victoria Park to Conroy and across to Pharmacy. It seems to be mostly a working class area with a lot of little single story cottage style houses.

            On the way home I passed Fixit Females, which is an all female home renovation crew. Another place has the interesting name, “Electric Perfume”. It seems to be a kind of community space for tech artists. There’s also a tattoo studio called “Inkuisition”.

            I was surprised when I watched an episode of the 4^th season of Maverick to see James Garner co-starring, since he left after the third season. It turned out that the episode was shot during the third season. Bret and Bart inherit a stagecoach line that is regularly robbed by a bumbling but loveable highwayman played by Buddy Ebsen, the future Jed Clampett of the Beverly Hillbillies. A landowner wants to buy their stageline and they want to sell it but the lawyer says their uncle’s will says they can’t sell it. The landowner hires a bumbling hitman named Shotgun to blow up their stage. Meanwhile they hire shotgun to drive them to her ranch because they find a loophole in the will that allows them to sell to her. The lawyer though finds a loophole that allows him to get the stageline if the Mavericks die so he hires shotgun to kill them. Shotgun figures he can do all three jobs at once but it doesn’t work out that way.

Drunken Babysitter

       On Saturday morning I had the sniffles, watery eyes and a slightly plugged left ear during song practice. It didn’t feel like I was getting a cold but the pollen levels were supposedly moderate. Maybe they don’t measure them from this close to High Park and the lake though.

I went to the food bank at the usual time on Saturday morning. My place in line was behind a middle aged East Asian woman who was behind the blonde woman that always sits cross-legged on her shopping bag. Outside of the line-up a guy in a baseball cap was sitting not far from the blonde woman. He asked me if I wanted a cigarette. 

My reading material this time was book five of the Consolation of Philosophy by 6th Century Roman senator and Christian, Boethius. He wrote the work while in prison under Ostrogoth rule and it takes the form of a dialogue with Philosophy personified as a woman. The section I was reading was about predestiny and was remarkably similar to another dialogue written earlier by Augustine. Neither one of them though convinced me with their arguments that predestiny exists. 

One of the volunteers that I hadn’t seen in a while, a well-built man in his 40s with prematurely grey hair, came and took a place in line. He explained to someone that he hasn’t volunteered there for a couple of months but that his birthday was coming up soon and he wanted to get some free food so he would have extra money to party. He said he didn’t want to let anyone downstairs know he was there because then he might get sucked into doing something.

Another volunteer left the food bank and walked along the line handing out a flyer about Parkdale tenants meeting at the Parkdale Library on the evening of September 27th. The purpose of the meeting is to help tenants organize against being pushed out by greedy landlords.

A very slim and pretty young woman came staggering up to sit on the steps of 1501 Queen beside the big, talkative woman that sits there during the line-up. Her knitting was sticking out of the large bag that she was carrying. She told the big woman that she was still drunk from partying on Friday night but she was on her way to a scheduled babysitting job. The big woman advised her to call the parents and tell them that she wasn’t feeling well. After a few minutes the young woman continued on her way. 

       Moe came by, saying that he was on his way to check his email at the library. He 

told me that he’s been going to the food bank on Thursdays but thinks he’s going to switch back to Saturdays. He complained they had nothing two days ago.

I saw Richard, who works as a receptionist for PARC on the second floor, on his way to have breakfast before work. He said he hadn’t eaten for a day and a half because he’d been in bed with a sore ankle. Richard only has one leg, so I would imagine a sore ankle is a much bigger deal for him. He said he just peed in bottles the whole time. 

The food bank opened surprisingly close to on time. I felt compelled to re-establish my place in line each time the line moved but then to move away again because of the smokers nearby. The woman in front of me was constantly holding her bag over her face, though I doubt if it served as a very good smoke filter. 

The guy in the baseball cap had been gone for a while and came back with a can of light beer because I guess one wants to take it easy before noon. He offered some to the blonde woman, who was now standing. She took a sip but said she needed to eat first. 

The ex-volunteer was telling someone that at the previous location there was a tremendous amount of corruption and theft by everyone, including the management. But at PARC he said, there are people more diligently overseeing things and looking at the books and so there is less chance of getting away with anything shifty. 

The new card system came up in one of his conversations and I asked why they don’t just have cards with magnetic strips so they don’t need people at the computers to copy down the numbers. The answered that they’d considered that even back at the old place but they’d decided that too many clients would lose their cards and then it would get expensive to replace them all the time. 

When I finally went downstairs the person working the computer was much quicker than the one the week before and I got number 23. 

Angie was not at the dairy and meat counter this time and Hazel was taking her place. She explained that there was no milk this time and so they were offering two cans of Nestea instead. There were two small cups of fruit bottom yogourt, the usual four eggs, and a choice between ground chicken, chicken wieners or a small bag of breakfast sausages. The breakfast sausages were temping but I took the ground chicken because it’s more versatile. She gave me a bag of bacon bits as well.

Sylvia’s vegetable section had two organic tomatoes that were perhaps too far gone to be edible, an orange pepper that was mostly salvageable, a good head of leaf lettuce, a net bag containing three heads of garlic, six potatoes, five carrots, an onion and a butternut squash.

My helper at the shelves was the older woman whom I’d thought before to be Polish but I overheard her tell someone she is Ukrainian. 

There were mostly children’s sugared cereals but among them was a box of Cheerios, which I took. Since the box was open I saved some space and took only the bag containing the cereal. 

I had heard there was pasta sauce this time but either they ran out or hadn’t put it on the shelf yet.

There were lots of canned beans and soup but I took my usual carton of chicken broth and a tin of chickpeas. Canned tuna was back for the first time in a while and I got the second to last can. 

She asked if I wanted any of the restaurant portions of jams and jellies. I said, “Well …” but before I could complete my sentence with “I think I have enough of that at home” she’d already thrown a couple of handfuls into my bag. 

I got a jar of sweet sandwich pickles, a bag of pita crisps and some Quaker bars: three smores bars, two chocolate chip and two strawberry squares.

There was a lot of bread, but not much besides just the white loaves, buns and baguettes. On the bottom shelf though there were a couple of specialty loaves. I took the one that had been made with roasted garlic. 

When I came out and started unlocking my bike the guy in the baseball cap asked me, “Did you see my woman down there?” I assumed correctly that he meant the blonde woman and I told him that she’d been ahead of me. He speculated that she must have been eating. He asked me about the food haul.

The dairy was a big disappointment this time around. I had been really depending on there being some milk. I suppose one could try putting lemon iced tea on cereal but I think it would be a bit of a disaster. The vegetable situation wasn’t bad, except for the rotten tomatoes and there was a little more protein on the shelves. 

I wonder how the drunk babysitter made out. 

After the food bank I didn’t go to Bike Pirates because I didn’t have any money. I guess if my bike had been noticeably misbehaving I would have gone and just owed them a donation. There are a couple of problems that could get worse though, so when I get some funds I should spend some more time in the shop, at least before the winter weather arrives when I’ll want my bicycle to be in good shape. 

I checked my U of T student account and saw that my grant had come through, though they had yet to deposit my refund. I was shocked at first to see my balance owing to be almost $7,000, but then I remembered that it was because they had charged me for a full program. It would correct itself in a month or so but I decided to go to another U of T site and request per-course billing so I wouldn’t have to look at the scary bill. 

I flushed my left ear out several times but it continued to feel plugged. I assumed it was air bubble that was causing the stuffed sensation. In the evening though the feeling went away.

I watched a silly episode of Maverick in which an Indian princess wanted to marry Beau. He agreed and had to go through several warrior tests, which he passed, but it turned out that part of being Pale Moon’s bridegroom meant that he had to be burned to death the day after the wedding. I guess they didn’t really consult any real Natives on their customs when they wrote that story.

I finished reading Boethius’s “The Consolation of Philosophy” and started reading Kate Chopin’s novel, “The Awakening”. I finished chapter six of the novel before bed. It’s set in a Creole community of Louisiana, but the main character is not French. It looks like she’s about to cheat on her Creole husband.