Sherry Jackson

            Early Monday morning I had my first job of the new school year at OCADU. Because I had to leave my place by 7:45 I had to condense some of my songs during practice. As I rode to work I could feel that something is still wrong with my crankset that goes much deeper than tightening the lock nut on my crank arm. I’m going to try to hold out on repairs though until after my first essay is due on October 17^th. I don’t have three hours or more to spare doing repairs at Bike Pirates.

            I worked a full day for Greg Damery, who I’ve known since the early 80s but hadn’t worked for him for a couple of years. The first thing he wants to chat about is guitars, of which he has several. He said he’s got a retroactive cheque from the college coming up and he wants to make a new purchase. I assume he’s looking to drop a few thousand dollars on one guitar. I got mine for $200 with my last credit card just before it was cut off. He said he’s got his own recording studio at home and said something about driving up to Muskoka after class. I’m assuming that’s where he lives now.

            He told the class that when he was studying at the OCA school in Florence, Italy, he and several others almost died in their apartment because of carbon monoxide poisoning.

            He mentioned that Bob Berger, one of my favourite teachers to work with and who retired last year, went to art school in Alberta with Joni Mitchell. He still has drawings that he’d done of her back then.

            Greg offered that if we skipped both the morning and the afternoon coffee break then I could have a 40-minute lunch break and also get out twenty minutes early at the end of the day. That sounded good to me. I did two ten minute poses, took five and did two more tens. After that it just a single seated nude pose for the rest of the day. I took a nap through lunch to keep myself from being dozy during work. I got confused at the end though as to exactly when the class was over and so I ended up posing fifteen minutes past the point that Greg had agreed to let me finish. I felt kind of ripped off.

            I stopped at the bank machine on my way home to get the rest of the rent but I didn’t swing by the supermarket because I had some schoolwork to do. I had to write a paragraph to answer a question on Book 5 of The Consolations by Boethius. I had already read it but went through it again and then I copied the PDF text onto a text document and condensed the main points until I thought that I was finally getting it. This is what I came up with:

How does Lady Philosophy’s position that God sees all things as present solve the problem of free will and Divine foreknown. Is this a successful solution? 

If Lady Philosophy is right that there is a god that sees, from a timeless eternal perspective, all possibilities of human action as simultaneously present, this would conceivably allow for free will. This might be true because such an eternal being, unlike humans living from moment to moment within time, could perceive that every moment of choice may lead to actions that each have their own unique outcome, like a multi-pronged fork in the road branching out to paths that each lead to specific towns, or like an arrangement of pieces on a chess board with only certain moves possible for success and many for defeat. All of these reasonable outcomes would be seen at the same time from the elevated perspective that one might conceive to be possible for an omnipresent god with omniscient perception. This might cover the behind and the anterior of free will but it would not dispel the possibility that there is no god. It also does not disprove the chance that, even with the prospect that there are infinite possibilities and a god, there may still be no free will.

I watched an episode of Maverick that had an interesting story. Beau Maverick (Roger Moore) is riding in Montana in what is supposed to be winter, though there’s no snow. He stops to camp beside a cave. Inside the cave someone has painted the message, “This is the place”. Maverick settles down by his campfire to read a newspaper that he’d bought in the last town and sees on a full page a wanted poster for an outlaw named Buckskin Charlie King. Who should arrive seconds later but that same outlaw, who asks Maverick, “Is Jess here yet?” To play it safe, Maverick simply answers, “Ah, no, Jess hasn’t arrived.” Then a mean character named Wolf McManus (played by Lee Van Cleef) shows up. He refers again to “Jess”, who had sent him a letter with a map to the same place. The next people to come is someone called “The Kid”, with his new wife Erma, played by Sherry Jackson (who had been a child actress on the Danny Thomas show and was now a gorgeous young woman. Her career didn’t go past 1980 because all they wanted to put her in were “sexy” roles, usually of bad girls like biker chicks. She played Andrea the Android on an episode of Star Trek called “What Are Little Girls Made Of?”). The final arrival was “The Judge” played by John Carradine who announced that Jess had been killed but that he wanted to lead the group in a big job. Beau figured out that there was never a job but that the judge and not Jessie had sent the letters to lure all of these people with prices on their heads to one place so he could turn them all in and collect the reward. This was Roger Moore’s last episode of Maverick. He said that if his scripts had been as good as those that James Garner had gotten, he would have stayed.