On Friday morning
I looked online and saw that my September tax refund was in the bank, so at
midday I rode down to King and Dufferin to take out the $60. I then went
straight to Freshco because I was in dire need of fruit, meat and detergent.
The Ontario apple harvest was not
very good this year. Usually they are crisp and full of tart sweetness. Freshco
had Ida Reds at a good price so I took nine of them. They’re better than the
usual bagged apples but disappointing compared to previous years. The green,
seedless grapes were inexpensive as well so I grabbed a bag. The Ontario
peaches seemed to be almost gone but I selected four, since they weren’t that
cheap. I got a couple of bunches of bananas too. They had a pretty good deal on
pork sirloin halves so I picked one for under $10. They had a bag of little
boxes of Sunmaid raisins for $2 but I went to the baking section and found more
than twice as many raisins for less than twice the price. I got three
containers of zero fat yogourt and two of Activia.
The detergent shelf had a sign
indicating that the Sunlight lemon detergent was $1.99 but the shelf was empty.
I saw a box marked Sunlight on top so I pulled it down, tore it open and took
one.
I paid a little over $30 for
everything.
My next project was to do my
laundry. The day was not really warm enough to wash my stuff in the bathtub and
then to try to dry it on the deck, so I decided to sacrifice $5 and to go to
the Laundromat. I hadn’t been able to wash my sheets for about a month because
all I’d had was hand soap.
I finished typing up the lecture
notes from my first class and I started reading some of Augustine’s
“Confessions”. In book two he writes about having been part of a gang called
“The Destroyers” when he was sixteen that stole some pears just for the thrill
of stealing, since they were all from prosperous families. They ate some but
threw the rest to the pigs. The theft took place long before his conversion to
Christianity but he seems to be viewing this act through the lens of his
conversion and filtered through a lot of guilt. Geez! What kid hasn’t stolen
something at some point? They don’t go ranting on about it later in life. When
one grows up one tends not to do such things so it seems odd to be racked with
remorse over it in adulthood. When I was seventeen I was working as a janitor
in a fancy restaurant in Vancouver. There was a bend in the cage they pulled
down to lock the bar when the place closed and I sometimes would crawl under it
to steal an expensive bottle of wine. I think they might have eventually found
out about it because the janitorial service called me at my hotel one day and
said they wanted me to come down to the office. I assumed from my boss’s tone
that it was about the wine so I never came down and didn’t collect my last
paycheque. When I told this story to my girlfriend about eighteen years ago she
was very angry with me that I didn’t feel remorse about my actions. I still
don’t get why someone would think that one should feel guilty over something
like that from a long time ago. I guess Augustine’s theft was a bit of a dick
move if he didn’t need or want pears. It’s interesting that he specifically
pointed that out in a way that implied that stealing pears because of needing
or wanting them would have been less sinful. He gave the argument that when one
steals one is stealing from “god” because everything is god’s possession. He
gave them back to god’s pigs, which means that he did so rather than simply
tossing them on god’s ground, so what’s the big deal? Maybe they threw them to
the pigs to destroy evidence because under Roman law the degree of punishment
for theft was determined by how close to the scene of the crime the stolen item
was found. It’s interesting that a pagan society like Rome was already
civilized enough from the start to separate religion from law, whereas since
Christianity came into power the connection has been way too sticky. The Jews,
Christians and Muslims needed “god” to tell them not to steal while the pagans
just had reason.
I prepared my pork roast by rubbing
it with a mixture of salt, garlic, mango chutney, Worcestershire sauce, cayenne
and mustard, then I put it in the oven an hour before dinner. These roasts
always take longer to cook than is called for though, so once I’d taken a slice
off the end I could see that it was red inside. At subsequent meals I will have
to re-roast each slice for another half an hour to be safe.
I watched the first episode of the
fourth season of Maverick. It was nothing special but I downloaded this season
because I wanted to see how Roger Moore handled playing the cousin of Bret and
Bart Maverick. He was certainly more charming than Jack Kelly so it would have
been more interesting if they’d teamed him up with James Garner. Once I finish
the fourth season I won’t download the fifth since it doesn’t have Roger Moore.
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