Cycling in the Rain

            On the Saturday morning of September 17^th, I realized that I had forgotten on Friday to return my library books to OISE. That meant that, despite my intention of staying home to study and write all day, I would have to take a trip to St George and Bloor after all. I left a little after 11:00 and was lucky enough to get mostly green lights all the way there. I returned the French books, and then took them out again.

            On the way back, I went down Spadina, and just made it to Queen Street when the rain started. It let up about three-quarters of the way home from there, but by then I was soaked.

            When I got home, it took about half an hour to get myself dry and comfortable. I did some writing, but also read twice through the third reading for my Philosophy of Art course, which is an essay entitled “Categories of Art” by David Davies. We have to write a paragraph a week on our choice one of our three weekly readings and then submit our paragraph online the day before the lecture that corresponds to that reading. It makes sense for me though to just always write on the reading for the Monday lecture because that way I have all day Sunday to work on it, though of course I hope not to spend all day on one paragraph. The Sunday submission date just allows me more swinging room.

            Davies’ essay argues that if an artistic work isn’t placed in some kind of category, it can’t be assessed in such a way that its artistic intentions will be best understood.

            I went out in the late afternoon to buy a couple of cans of Creemore from the liquor store. That evening, my upstairs neighbour, David came by with two half-litre bottles of Bertolli extra virgin olive oil. Then he told me he was on his way to the beer store. A few minutes later he brought me two tall cans, one of Dab and one of Blue. I gave him one of my cans of olive oil spray, which also turns out to be made by Bertolli.

            I watched two episodes of The Honeymooners. In the first, Ralph was going to be on a quiz show called “The $99,000.00 Answer”. He’d already selected his category and was studying like crazy all the trivia about popular music. He rented a piano and had Ed Norton play songs for him so he could guess the name of the song, the author and all kinds of other info about each one. The only problem was that Ed drove Ralph nuts because he couldn’t begin to play any song until he’d warmed up by first playing a few bars of Stephen Foster’s “Swanee River”. He was always telling Norton to stop it. Then on the night of the game show, the hundred dollar question turned out to be, “Who wrote Swanee River?” but Ralph didn’t know.

            In the second episode, Ralph found out that an elderly woman that he always used to help on and off his bus had died. It turned out that she was worthy 40 million dollars and that she had remembered Ralph in her will. At the reading, Ralph was told that he’d inherited the old lady’s fortune, but “Fortune” turned out to be the name of her pet parrot.