Conscience

           

           

            On Saturday just before noon I took my ride over to Bike Pirates. They were already open ahead of the twelve o’clock start time and there were already about three racks occupied, but that still meant I didn’t have to wait. One of the nice volunteers who know my daughter guided me through replacing my spoke. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to do a complete trueing of my rim because most of my spokes had gotten too rusted from winter riding to either tighten or loosen, but my helper told me that it’s still rideable and advised me to ride it until the next spoke breaks and then just to replace the rim. That sounded okay to me.

I got the tire back on and pumped it up, but then the wheel wouldn’t turn. It turned out that I hadn’t gotten the whole tire tucked properly into the rim and so the inflated tube was protruding out from under the tire. My friendly volunteer corrected the problem. I donated ten dollars this time.

I started making some notes towards both my Short Story essay on Gabrielle Roy and my Philosophy essay on Nietzsche. For the former I’ll be exploring secretiveness and openness; and belonging and exile in the stories “My Almighty Grandmother” and “The Road Past Altamont”. For the latter I’ll write about Nietzsche’s idea that conscience is a culturally learned sense of responsibility.
            I watched episode 18 of the second season of Dragnet from 1953. If these shows are really based on true stories, the criminal they were after in this story was pretty impressive. He made several escapes from jail and prison. In one case, the guy knew how he was going to escape from custody before they put him behind bars. From the very first day of his sentence he started training his hands on his bunk so he could hang for a long period of time. When he was ready, on the day he was supposed to shower and dress for court, he steamed up the shower room tom conceal his movements, forced his way through the door, ran to the roof of the downtown jail and then climbed down several stories to get away. The names are changed, but I would think that an impressive escape like that would be on the records. I couldn’t find anything about it.