Very early on Friday morning I was visiting Mary Milne. She had a
run down bungalow in a shaggy part of town. I was lying in a lounge chair
outside of her place when her crotchety neighbour came along. He was a tall,
thin old man with a beard and a Russian accent. He approached me and showed me
his smart phone, in a leather case and asked if I wanted to buy it. I told him
mine was better and he didn’t believe me; so I took mine out of my pocket tom
show him. He took it in his hand to see but then wouldn’t give it back. I
followed him to his place two doors down from Mary and I kept demanding that he
give me my phone back, but he refused. I thought about punching him but thought
better of it because of the legal can of worms that a fistfight with an old man
would open up. I went back to Mary’s to call the police and she said that I
shouldn’t make a big deal out of it. I was about to use her old black dial
phone when I woke up.
It was 1:05 and I
was wide awake, so I started working again on my essay. I realized at around
that time that I didn’t agree with Nietzsche on as many details as I’d thought
I did. I was with him in essence, but on most of the causal explanations I’d
concluded that he was off base. That meant that I had to rewrite it a bit but
it also meant that I’d have more to say on the matter, which had been a problem
up till that point. He had suggested, without coming right out and mentioning
evolution, that conscience had been something that nature had bred into us.
Upon thinking about this I concluded that though the part of the brain where
conscience exists is obviously passed on, what it contains only appears
inherited because of the enduring culture into which we are born, without a
conscience. Our conscience is a matter of indoctrination during our formative
years. We tell a child to listen to its inner voice but it’s a voice that we
put there.
I worked until
5:30, then did my yoga, then I continued to work until 11:00, at which point I
went to bed for an hour and a half.
I was sitting at
the kitchen table with my father and mother. I was verbally disagreeing with my
father as I often had and he slapped me across the face as he often had when I
argued with him. I noticed that I was adult in my mind, if not in my body, when
I shouted out for him to “fuck off” and that he was “a fucking asshole”. My
mother said that I shouldn’t talk to my father that way and I shouted for her
to go fuck herself. It was me saying that out loud in my sleep that woke me up
at 12:30.
My essay was due in
less than eight hours. Other than to grab snacks or use the washroom, I worked
steadily the whole time. In the last three hours I got all my citations in
place, except that I’d wanted to cite Sigmund Freud on my mentioning the
superego as conscience, the libido as the instinctive impulses that can’t be
made to feel guilty and the guilt that the ego is made to feel by the superego
when it fails to hold the libido in the id. I couldn’t spare the time to
download any Freud texts from which to derive citations because I was still
making adjustments on the essay itself. At about ten minutes to 20:00 I went
online to upload my paper, but I was having connection problems at the last
stage. The deadline was about to pass when I realized I’d have to switch to the
Coffeetime’s network in order to have a signal strong enough to upload the
file. I switched, but found that I’d have to log off from the U of T Blackboard
site and start again in order for the upload to work. I handed in the paper
five minutes late, which was probably not a big deal, I hoped.
Having my essay
finished and handed in didn’t make me feel as relieved as I’d hoped it would,
but I’ve found in the past that it usually takes a night’s sleep for that
relaxation to kick in.
I watched a couple
of shows from the first season of Father Knows Best. In the fourth episode,
Robert Young’s character, Jim Anderson had two tickets to the big annual
college football game and he had a contest between his three children as to
which one would get to go with him. The competition, judged by the mother,
played by Jane Wyatt, involved them each stating in 26 words or less why they
thought they should go to the game. Princess won the prize and a few days
passed. Jim was about to leave his place of work as an insurance salesman to
take his daughter to the game when a long standing client arrived and bribed
him with a potential $20,000 endowment policy if he’d give him the spare
ticket. Jim gave in. What a dick!
Apparently on the original
father Knows Best radio show, which also starred Robert Young, the father was
even more of an asshole. He would actually call his kids “stupid”. I assume
that approach didn’t work for television and I wonder what Marshall McLuhan
would have to say about that. Radio is a hot medium because we take it at face
value and can therefore listen to it passively. Television, on the other hand
is cool because we have to engage with it in order to understand what is being
presented. This would suggest that we would be more critical of what is being
said on television, such as a father calling his children stupid.
So when Jim came
home to try to tell Princess that she couldn’t go to the game, even though he’d
promised her, because he’d also promised his client, his ever sensible wife
agreed that he would indeed have to keep his promise to the client but also to
his daughter, so she told him that he would have to let his client take his
daughter to the game and that he would have to stay at home.
The thirteenth
episode involved the family, on the day of their youngest daughter, “Kitten”’s
birthday, suddenly being imposed upon in their home by a very annoying man that
they didn’t even know but who had been briefly acquainted with a college buddy
of Jim. The family wanted to get on with Kitten’s birthday dinner, and cake and
then take her to the circus but they couldn’t get the guy to leave. In a
good-natured way, the man manoeuvred his way into being invited for dinner, and
because it had been his birthday the day before, he considered the cake to be
both his and Kitten’s. Jim finally tricked him into leaving by phoning him from
upstairs and disguising his voice to give him false information about an
exhibit of photographs of streetcars at a certain made up address. The man had
mentioned that his hobby was collecting pictures of streetcars. The man left
and they went to the circus, only to find it sold out. Who should show up but
the annoying man, whom it turned out was the manager of the circus, and got
them front row seats? Jim felt like an asshole.
No comments:
Post a Comment