Mike Hammer

            On Friday at midday I had to work at OCADU. This time I was smart and didn’t wear my leather jacket, though it actually felt a little chilly as I started out for my ride downtown. I was pretty sure it would be warmer coming home later though.

            I was scheduled to work on top of the pencil box and as I was about to enter room 617 I heard a woman call “Christian”. I turned and a woman of about 30 whom I did not recognize repeated, “Christian, you cut your hair! It looks really good! It looks REALLY good!” “Thanks!” I said, though I still didn’t recognize her.

            I worked for Robert Akow posing for a portrait the whole time. The woman that had complimented my hair was also a student in the class. On my breaks I did some writing but during the fifteen-minute coffee break I took a little nap. I’d been drooping a bit before that but I was fine for the rest of the class. Robert isn’t much more than ten years older than his students. He was discussing gaming with one of them.

            When I was leaving the woman that had complimented me gave me another gift, “I don’t know if I’ve ever told you this but I have a painting I did of you years ago hanging in my home and it really Makes my living room! Everyone that visits me comments about how much they like it!” I asked when she’d painted it. She said that she’s been at OCADU a long time and that this was years ago in Terry Shoffner’s class. I thanked her for telling me about it. I should have thought to ask her to send me a picture of me hanging in her living room. Maybe if I see her again.

            On the way home I stopped to buy raisin bread and a couple of other things.

            When I got home I finished up my journal entry for Wednesday and posted it online.

            That night I watched the third episode of Mike Hammer and finally found one that wasn’t bad, though it was not a particularly plausible story. Hammer got a call warning him to drop the case that he was working on, which intrigued him, since he wasn’t working on a case. After that, for some reason he seemed to know that he was going to get a call in ten seconds and he counted down. He was off by one second. The call was from the woman who was supposed to be the client he was told to drop. She was so desperate to meet him at her apartment that he skipped his lunch to go over there. When he arrived the gorgeous woman had a steak dinner on the table and said she’d been about to have lunch. The food was driving him crazy so he told he’d have to leave but she said she wasn’t hungry and so he could have her lunch. He ate it with lots of steak sauce but it turned out that there was a mickey in the steak sauce. He felt woozy and collapses. When he woke up he was in a hotel room in his pajamas and when he called the desk he discovered that he’d somehow been transported from New York to Las Vegas. When he looked out the window the woman whose steak he’d eaten was lounging by the pool in a bikini. He went out to confront her but she immediately acted like they were lovers and started kissing him so he played along. After several days of fun in the sun together she thought she had him lulled. While Mike was out sleeping with his hat over his face by the pool, she met with her boyfriend in her room. Mike walked in because he’d only persuaded someone to wear his hat by the pool. There proceeded a well-choreographed fight scene. Mike was putting his jacket on while fist fighting with Frank at the same time. What he beat out of him was that they had wanted Mike out of New York because they’d thought he was about to uncover their large bookmaking operation there. The show ended with a good line: “I knew right from the beginning that anybody who could lie as fast as you could and be so pretty doing it couldn’t be all good. And that’s too bad.”

            

If You Think You Aren't Your Brain, Your Brain Is Lying

            I was just a little overdressed on Thursday. I probably could have gone without the leather jacket as I rode to and from Philosophy class because it was pretty toasty.

            I sat outside the lecture hall for a few minutes, doing some writing. As usual I chatted with James as we waited after 11:00 for the other class to break up. He said that he would be starting to study the Islamic philosophers that day. I suggested that it should be interesting but he warned that I might like it because it’s more dry and logical than the European stuff. He stated that it’s more up his alley. James has told me before that he does pure math without numbers.

            I had forgotten that our TA, Cilia was doing her lecture today. It occurred to me while she was setting up that maybe she makes her own dresses and skirts. They look well made and of quality material but they don’t look like something one would actually find on a rack in a store. They look somewhat out of time. They are somewhat feminine but comfortably conservative. I could picture her multi-tasking with her academics and a sewing machine.

            She gave her talk on the Islamic philosopher, Avicenna. He was born around 980 in Bukhara in what is now Uzbekistan. He was not only an Islamic scholar but also a mathematician, a doctor and an advisor to several rulers. Although he was the pet intellectual of many men in power, these were dangerous times and his employers kept getting conquered.

            Avicenna is most famous for his theory that the soul is separate from the body, referred to as “the Flying Man”. He is similar to Plato in that he speaks of an immaterial part of the soul and like Aristotle in that he thought knowledge depends on the senses.

            The soul can persist after death and the body is like a beast of burden. The goal of the body is to carry the soul to knowledge but after fulfilling that task the body is useless. For Avicenna, the soul explains why we are different from rocks. Plants, puppies and humans all have souls but the soul is not just life. It is the first perfection of the body. It is not necessarily separate from the body and it may be a kind of a body.

            Aristotle saw the soul as the form of the body. The soul as form is the arrangement that makes the body talk and smell but the soul is not wedded to the body.

            Avicenna doesn’t call it form but rather perfection. Perfection can give capabilities but it is separable. She showed an image of Captain Hook from a cartoon version of Peter Pan, but she called him “Captain Cook”. She said that the captain of a ship makes the boat capable of sailing and a car needs a driver. The driver gives the car capabilities but the driver can leave the car.

            Avicenna says that the soul is the nexus and the connection for the senses. The soul organizes experiences. We distinguish things by objects but with not just one faculty. One sees light and colour but one cannot hear with the eyes. The faculty that processes the senses is different from reason. The faculties of love, hate and desire are all in a different part of the brain.

            The soul explains why all of my experiences are mine and affect each other. Smell, desire and rational faculties are different objects. The self is at the center of a spider web and binds multi-faculties to my experience.

Avicenna says that rocks and the body are not self aware and so the nexus cannot be the body. He says that bodies receive and assumes that we know that the intellectual part is immaterial. The body can’t gather the material and the immaterial. The self is like a racecar driver. The driver is aware and in control of the body.

I am not my whole body. If the self were identical with the body then if I were to lose part of it then I would cease to exist.

Cilia said the Flying Man is like the character Eleven of the show Stranger Things in a sensory deprivation chamber. What if one had never had any experience before the sensory deprivation chamber? Avicenna would say that Eleven would still be aware of herself.

The key premise is that self-awareness is basic and primitive. If I know X but not Y then X can’t be the same as Y. Self awareness is baked into every experience. You never get confused if you are the one having the experience. You can doubt experience but not that you have them.

Avicenna says without the senses and body awareness I have persistent awareness of myself but not my body, so I am not my body.

I am not one of my organs. I perceive myself and my perception of myself includes perceiving that organ but I can perceive myself without perceiving that organ. Nothing can be both perceived and not perceived. So I am not an organ.

What if I am not my soul either? Avicenna thinks that if I say the soul is what does it all you would recognize it but you would not think of the brain that way.

Objection: The Masked Man Fallacy.

Lois Lane knows who Superman is and she also knows who Clark Kent is but she does not believe that they are the same person. Therefore Superman is not Clark Kent. The context is opaque because she doesn’t have all of the information. I may not know everything about me. Self-awareness does not penetrate far enough.

Peter Adamson suggests that in the Flying Man thought experiment we don’t just know That we are but What we are. Therefore, since I can know What I am without knowing What a brain is, being a brain is part of what I am. He says primitive self-awareness will extend so that we know. To be a self may mean to be aware of the self. If I know What I am but I don’t know What my brain is then I am not a brain.

Avicenna says that a necessary property may not be essential. What is essential to a triangle, for example, is that it is solid and has three sides. What is necessary to a triangle is that its interior angles equal 180 degrees. We know in kindergarten that a triangle has three sides but only later do we learn about the angles. So the body could still be a necessary property, and if it is the self might perish with the body.

After class I had a little over three hours before I had to be at work, and since I know that if I don’t sleep before working in the afternoon then I will be dozy while posing, I headed home to do just that. When I got there I had time to sleep for about an hour but I couldn’t sleep at all. Since I was wide awake after half an hour of resting I got up and had lunch, then I did some writing before it was time to leave.

I was scheduled to work at the Village by the Grange campus across the street from the main OCADU building. The instructor that was just finishing up was Sylvia Whitton, who I’ve known since the 80s. We chatted a while before Candida Girling, the teacher that I was working for arrived. 

Candida looks like she might be a bit of a hippy and she’s about my age or a little older. I learned from an internet search that she’s from South Africa but I didn’t detect an accent so I assume that she’s been away from there since childhood.

She had me pose clothed because she has some students that won’t come to class if there is a nude male model. At first she just had me pose without the students drawing me as she instructed them in lighting and the moods that different types of poses evoke. She asked me to pose as if I was watching a hockey game so I leaned forward with a certain amount of tension that she seemed to think really looked like someone watching a hockey game. She had the students walk around to find the best angle and then to explain why they thought it was the best angle. Then she had each student assume the pose that I was taking. The next pose was a standing pose and she had the students measure how many heads tall I was.

During my break I was sitting on the edge of the stage reading “Passing” by Nella Larsen and Candida said that it would be great if I posed right there with my book, so I got lots of reading done.

The story is set in the late 1920s and the main character is a Black woman named Irene, who could pass for White but has never really tried. She runs into Clare, an old friend who she has not seen for many years. She finds out that Clare has not only been passing for White all this time, but her husband, the father of her children, doesn’t even know. On top of that her husband is a hardcore racist who frequently talks about how disgusting Negroes are and how he would never want to even know one.

That’s as far as I got before it was time to leave. Candida let me go an hour early because she needed to talk to her class about a project. She told me I was an excellent model and got the class to applaud for me at the end.

On the way home I stopped at Freshco. I got a couple of bags of black grapes, a few Courtland apples, three clementines, a tomato, a pack of chicken drumsticks, a pack of Italian sausages and a box of spoon size shredded wheat.

I watched another episode of Mike Hammer. So far it’s not horrible, but nothing to write home about.

           

           

            

The Emancipation of Black Female Sexuality

            On Wednesday, as is usually the case the day after handing in an essay, I was in a good mood.

            At one point during yoga Radio Canada went fuzzy when a garbage truck was waiting at the light outside my window but came back clear after the vehicle moved on.

            I finished my journal entry about Tuesday just when it was time to leave for English class.

            It was slightly too warm to even be wearing my leather jacket over just a tank top, but I figured it would probably be cooler on the way home.

            I was twenty minutes early, so I sat outside to read Nella Larsen’s “Passing”. The subject matter is certainly interesting, about light skinned Black women passing for White in the 1920s. But Larsen was not a very good writer. It’s like she got a big bag of cheap adjectives at the Five and Dime and the instructions told her to stick one in front of every noun.

            While I was there, Steve, who sits to my left in class, across the aisle, came up to chat. He told me he’s been taking one course a year at U of T for a long time. He started when he was 19 and now he’s 37, but he said he took a few years off. I was surprised at how young he was because I’d actually thought he was closer to my age. Over all that time he had never known until this year about applying for the Noah Meltz grant to pay for his course but he said he was getting it this term.

            Class started about five minutes late. Scott announced, “I’m not feeling great. I don’t know how long I’m gonna last. You all make me sick … no!”

            He passed out copies of the United States slavery timeline.

            The Dutch started trading slaves in North America in the 1600s.

            In the 1700s the British were transporting 45,000 slaves to North America every year, mostly from West Africa.

            At the beginning of the Revolution there were 500,000 slaves in the colonies. Each side promised freedom to slaves that fought for them.

            One fourth of the original Declaration of Independence was on the horrors of slavery but South Carolina refused to sign it unless that part was removed.

            Jefferson compared slavery to holding a wolf by the ear, saying one can’t hold it or safely let it go.

            The international slave trade ended in 1807 but there were 1.2 million African slaves in the United States. One-seventh of the population was property. Female slaves were worth more. Imagine the wives of owners on a daily basis seeing slaves walking around that looked like their husbands. Some masters allowed slaves to choose their partners but marriage of slaves was illegal.

            In 1810 the Hottentot Venus debuted as a freak show attraction in London.

            In 1834, Britain and its colonies, including Canada, abolished slavery.

            Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass was published in 1945.

            The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself was published in 1849. These types of slave narratives were didactics in the cause of Abolition. Some were fictional and some were written by Whites either on behalf of or posing as Black people. Violence was spectacularized. White people had to verify that the work qualified as a slave narrative before it could be published.

            In 1850 the Fugitive State Law was enacted whereby runaway slaves were returned to their owners and it became illegal for anyone to help them stay free. Bounty hunters could legally cross into free states to extradite escapees.

            In 1854 the Republican party was formed, consolidating anti-slavery factions.

            In 1856 Booker T Washington was born.

            In 1861 there were 4 million slaves in the United States and one in every seven people was owned by someone.

            The same year “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs was published. Texts about women were meant to appeal to women. After abolition though they went out of popularity.

            The Civil War took place from 1861-1865. They fought with modern weapons and medieval techniques. By the end 620,000 had died. For every one that died in combat, two died from disease. The entire male populations of some towns were wiped out. At the beginning one-quarter of the GDP of New York State was equal to the GDP of all of the Confederate States combined. The Black labour force in the south kept the confederate war machine rolling. The north burned buildings and crops and slaughtered everybody because it wanted to demoralize it so it would never think of rebelling again. It worked.

            Scott declares the novel, “Gone with the Wind” to be a racist piece of shit.

            In 1863 Lincoln made the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves in Confederate states except the ones on the border which might switch loyalty and all or part of Confederate controlled by the Union. Lincoln was a great failed man. He didn’t want Blacks to fight at first. At first he was not completely sold on Black civil rights. He thought it might be best to send them back to Africa, but then he changed his mind.

            In 1864 one-quarter of the Missouri budget was spent on missing limbs. Walt Whitman got TB from visiting soldiers in hospitals.

            In 1865 the 13^th Amendment abolished slavery in the United States. 70% to 80% came back from Canada mostly to reunite with families but they were difficult to track down because there were no records since it had been illegal to teach slaves to read and write.

            After abolition the ex-slave owners were helpless because they didn't know how to do anything for themselves.

            There was more segregation in the north.

            Lincoln was assassinated.

            Reconstruction began.

            The Ku Klux Klan was formed.

            In 1866 the first Black universities were established.

            In 1868 the 14^th Amendment granted citizenship to African Americans.

            W. E. B. Du Bois was born in Massachusetts.

            15^th Amendment grants African Americans the right to vote.

            The presidential election of 1876 was too close to call. The south offered a compromise. They would accept the victory of Hayes if Union troops would withdraw from the South and end Reconstruction, which removed federal protection of African Americans. Jim Crow laws instituted.

            In 1881 Booker T. Washington establishes Tuskegee Institute.

            In 1883 the Supreme Court of the United States declared the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional.

            Du Bois (pronounced “Du Boyce) studied at Harvard under Henry James’s brother, William James. He went with his family to Georgia to teach and was shocked at the racism. His son died because a hospital refused to treat him.

            The self-educated Booker T. Washington gave his famous speech. He was a great orator.

In 1892 Du Bois began two years of study in Germany

            In 1896 the Supreme Court declared segregation constitutional.

            In 1901 Washington published his slave narrative, “Up From Slavery”. Scott read from the first chapter and I realized that I didn’t have it in my book. “I must have been born somewhere and at some time”. Slaves had no history beyond their mothers. His father might have been White. Out of nothing Washington built himself an identity. In autobiographies “I” is an effect of the text. He wrote about “White suffering” and the pitiful White owners to disarm Whites. He also declared that slavery had ultimately been a good thing because it exposed African Americans to Christianity. The book is a story of forgiveness. He was very powerful and influential in his day. Du Bois was his student until they split. Washington said that it was only practical to educate African Americans in the trades. Du Bois declared that Black people should be educated in every way the same as White people. Washington was trying to use détente to stop the lynchings and the rapes. Washington proposed that the races be separate as fingers but that they work in unison like a hand. This idea appealed to White people. Du Bois saw Washington's proposals as emasculating for the Black man. Washington may have just wanted to keep the power he'd achieved. But he also gave privacy back to Black people. Both Washington and Du Bois wrote about the definition and redefinition of Black American masculinity. Defining Black manhood says something about Black women. They thought women needed to be idealized and protected.

            .He wrote of Black people having a double consciousness. They see themselves through others in addition to seeing themselves. They internalized the dominant gaze upon them. It becomes a kind of second sight. Like a woman watching a rape in a film feeling objectified.

            In 1903 Du Bois published “The Souls of Black Folk”.

            In 1909 the NAACP was founded.

            From 1915 to 1925 came the great migration of African Americans to northern cities to work during WWI. Before this Harlem was White.

            In 1920 the 18^th amendment introduces prohibition (which made many Canadians rich) and the 19^th amendment gives women the right to vote. The same year saw the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. Harlem at this time was 90% Black. White people went to Harlem to get down and dirty with the exoticism of Black culture. Around this time as well the Republicans switched to being the conservative party and the Democrats became liberal. Prohibition gave women power. They were able to talk about what men do by talking about what men do while drunk. Queers went to Harlem where there were drag balls.

            In 1928 Nella Larsen's “Quicksand” was published.

            1929 was the beginning of the Great Depression. White patronage of Black writers ended. The Blacks were less affected by the crash since they didn’t play the stock market.

            Zora Hurston thought enough had been said about slavery. She got into fights with people like Langston Hughes.

            1933 was the end of Prohibition.

            1935 was the end of the Harlem Renaissance.

            In 1998 Angela Davis published “Blues Legacies and Black Feminism”. The big change after emancipation was that Black women suddenly had a choice of sexual partners because the finally owned their own bodies. The Blues was the music of Emancipation and the most widely heard purveyors of the Blues were women.

            Bessie Smith sang “Do Your Duty” by Wesley “Kid” Wilson and Coot Grant – “If I call you three times a day baby / come and drive my blues away / When you come be ready to play / Do your duty // If my radiator gets too hot / cool it off in lots of spots / Give me all the service you’ve got / Do your duty”.

            Alberta Hunter sang the Andy Razaf and Eubie Blake song “My Handy Man” – “ … He shakes my ashes /greases my griddle /churns my butter / strokes my fiddle … He threads my needle / creams my wheat / heats my heater / chops my meat … When my furnace gets too hot / he’s right there to turn my damper down / For everything he’s got a scheme / You ought to see the new starter he uses on my machine … I wish you could see the way / he handles my front yard / My ice don’t get a chance to melt away / He sees that I get that old fresh piece every day …” Meanwhile, White songs were about love and marriage. Black women were feminists before White women.

            W. E. B. Du Bois included musical notation in his writing.

             Scott mentioned the Brown Mother Figure. He said it’s not Aunt Jemima because she would be taking care of White people’s kids. Slave women would have been working in the fields till their water broke. They would give birth, their baby would be handed to old slaves to take care of and then she’d be put back to work.

            Race is a social construct.

            Freedom is different for men and women.

            A White person wouldn't have been arrested for raping a Black woman.

            Meanings shift, especially around sexuality. Sexuality allows fuelling of discussions around race. Race ideas are fueled through sex.

            Stereotypes allow power to function.

            The Hottentot Venus had her genitals in a jar until 1974. Mandela arranged for her remains to be returned to South Africa.

            We finished a little before halftime. I told Scott that I hoped we'd cover a little more of Zora Hurston before getting into Nella Larsen. He said that we might.

            That night I watched the first episode of the Mike Hammer TV series from the late 50s, starring Daren McGavin. I remember him from another detective series that he did in the 70s. I think it was called Night Stalker and he investigated the paranormal. But Mike Hammer I think is supposed to be in the 1940s and they set this version exactly when they filmed it, which was 1958. So far there's nothing special about it.

We Might Be Dreaming We Are Dreaming We Are Dreaming ...

            I was wide awake a little before 4:00 on Tuesday because I’d gone to bed an hour early the night before. I went through my yoga pretty slowly though so by the time I was done I was only 25 minutes ahead. I only practiced part of one song before getting to work on the final stretch of my essay. The lecture was from 11:00 to 12:00, but I skipped it since I didn’t have to hand in my paper until the tutorial an hour later. I worked for six hours, finishing up my explanation of Augustine’s argument against the skeptics and then I tried to come up with a convincing argument to disprove Augustine’s claim that we can know things. I said if there’s even the remotest doubt then it proves that we can’t have certain knowledge. I might have tried to be a little too funny though because, in response to Augustine’s claim that one can know that one knows that one knows into infinity, I said that he was growing beanstalks to infinity. We’ll see how it works out.

            My apartment had been freezing cold that morning and so I wore my hoody, my leather jacket and my gloves for the ride downtown. When I stepped outside though it was a warm day so I shoved the gloves in my pocket. On the way, while stopped at the light at Bathurst and College, a cyclist behind me called out and told me that my shoelace was untied. I looked down, saw that it wasn’t and then he said, “Oh, it must be your belt!”

            I got to University College about fifteen minutes early and sat outside the classroom to wait for tutorial. James always seems to arrive just after me. I invited him to share my window seat and I asked him about the lecture I’d missed. He told me that Professor Black finished up briefly with Abelard and gave an introduction to the Medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophers. Unlike Christianity, both Islam and Judaism are religions of law. Islamic philosophy resulted from the Islamic religion coming into contact with Greek philosophy. Greek thinking, including that of Plato, Aristotle and the Neoplatonists came to be used to interpret the Qu’ran and Islamic thought was used to understand Greek philosophy as well. All of the major works of classical philosophy were translated into Arabic and Syriac and it was through these translations that Jews and Christians first encountered Greek philosophy. Islamic philosophy began with the dialectical theologians, the Mutakalimun, which was divided into the Mutazilites and the Asharites. The name Mutazili means “to withdraw from”. Their founder withdrew from a certain prominent study circle because of a philosophical disagreement and formed his own study circle. There were Jewish philosophers who considered themselves Mutazilites.

            James recounted also that Deborah Black told them that most Jewish philosophers wrote in Arabic but some wrote in Arabic using Hebrew letters.

            The tables in the room where we had our tutorial had been previously arranged in a circle, but this time they’d been put into traditional rows with chairs facing the front. James and I agreed that the previous set-up had allowed for better group communication. I noticed though from my new perspective an ancient sign that read, “Smoking Not Permitted Here”. I think it was 1996 when smoking was banned in Toronto bars. I remember working at OCA in the 80s when students, teachers and models could smoke in the classrooms.

            After handing our papers in, the rest of the class was focused on how Peter Abelard localed moral work. We dealt specifically with killing the whole time.

            When is killing wrong?

            There are four possibilities:

1.      Deed plus commands (always wrong but not always).

2.      Desire (will) – want to kill or not – (also immoral)

3.      Character – what kind of person is killing? If it’s Mufasa (from the Lion King)

rather than Scar, a killing he does is probably okay.

4.      Intention – motive- why? Considered choice to kill (could be alright if either for self preservation or to further justice). Intention is the only reliable determinant of whether the killing is sinful. Intending to kill is a choice to scorn god, which is what makes it the most immoral.

            Desire for զ 

            Desire for զ  for ч

            I asked, “What if I have the intention to kill someone but at the last second, even as the killing blow is on its way, I change my intention to not intending to kill the person, but then kill them anyway because of momentum. Am I free from sin?” She puzzled over it for a few seconds and declared that if my intention were to kill someone or something else would have to stop me but I wouldn’t be able to stop myself. Intention is inevitable.

            Aristotelian rational choice says that choice is part of a deliberative process.

            There is no praise for not stealing what you don’t want.

           

            You can disobey god without moral blame if your intention in your disobedience is to serve god. Jesus told the lepers not to tell anyone that he’d healed them but they did so anyway.

            The Roman soldiers that crucified Christ are without blame because they were doing their job.

            Humans punish deeds but only god evaluates. The will of god is not rational.

            On the way home I stopped at Freshco where I bought the usual stuff, plus some raspberries and a pack of five chicken legs.

            I took a very late siesta. I grilled the chicken legs and had one with a potato and bland gravy.

            I watched the fifth and final broadcast of the first week of the Mickey Mouse Club from the set that I’d downloaded. On disk two there was a little tribute to Annette Funicello, though she was still alive, but very sick at the time. They showed a montage from her teenage years. Wow, was she ever beautiful!

Tom La Pierre

        Since I had to work early on Monday morning I rushed through my songs. I managed to eat some peanuts and drink a glass of milk but the coffee I made got sipped once before I had to leave.                                                                                                      It was surprisingly chilly outside and though I was wearing my fall gloves I would have been more comfortable with my winter ones and even a scarf. My fingers were almost numb once I’d gotten to OCADU.

            I was scheduled to work for Greg Damery and thought that I would be continuing a nude portrait that I’d started on the Monday before Thanksgiving. When he arrived though he told me that he hadn’t even known that I’d been booked for two weeks in a row. The class wasn’t prepared to continue with the same pose, so after three ten-minute poses and a twenty he had me start a different long pose, which I did for the rest of the day.

            He asked if I wanted to have the same arrangement as the time before whereby we didn’t take a midway coffee break so we could have a 40-minute lunch break and also leave twenty minutes early at the end of the day. I said that would be fine but asked him to let me know when it was time to leave because the last time I actually continued working and only ended up leaving five minutes early. He felt bad about that and explained that he never wears a watch and really hadn’t known. I felt bad for making him feel bad and told him that I hadn’t thought that he’d deliberately ripped me off.

The room was quite cold and so he got me an extra heater. I was feeling kind of dozy though and I was embarrassed that on two occasions that morning he felt that he had to call, “Wake up!” He bought me a coffee at lunchtime and I laid down on the stage for a while. I didn’t sleep but the rest seemed to help because I was wide-awake in the afternoon.

Greg told the story of something horrible that happened to a former OCA instructor named Tom LaPierre. I had worked quite a bit back in the 80s at the college for both him and his wife, Pat Clems. Greg said that a few years ago Tom and Pat were walking downtown on a windy night when a sign broke off and slammed him in the head, causing immediate brain damage and then death a year or so later. I had never heard about that.

Greg, who has a strong understanding of anatomy, while helping a student draw my left ankle, noticed there was something odd about it and asked if I’d ever broken it. I told him that I’d sprained it several times over the years and then finally fractured it.

Greg said his father had gotten shot through the leg during the war in an attack that killed his entire tank crew. The only reason he hadn’t been killed as well was because he just happened to be standing up in the tank at the time. Supposedly his dad was behind enemy lines for three days and killed 15 Germans.

I stopped at Freshco on the way home where I bought some ground beef and a few other items. After lunch and a siesta I spent the rest of the day working on my philosophy essay, which was due the next day.

                

Annette

            On Sunday when I made coffee I discovered that my last bag of milk was slightly sour and so it curdled in the brew. I sort of messily rescued the java by straining it three times and adding some almond-coconut milk and some honey but it was a poor substitute for milk. The sour cow juice was still okay for cereal though. In the early afternoon, since I didn’t want to drink nut milk with my bean squeazings I went out to No Frills to buy some real milk.

            Although I could have used a few other items from the supermarket, I just limited myself to milk because I needed time to work on my essay. Ahead of me was a horribly skinny woman in black, with a pentagram tattooed on her leg. She looked about 80 years old but I suspect that she was in her 40s or 50s and a drug addict. She was buying a pack of donuts with nothing but dimes, three of which she dropped onto the floor and had a hard time retrieving because her probably bitten-off fingernails nails were too short. She mumbled, “Sorry!” during the retrieval process. After this the woman spent a lot of time counting out her dimes and nickels to pay the cashier and in turn the cashier took some time counting them again. The woman got a nickel back. The cashier and the customer behind me seemed annoyed with the poor woman.

            I made Kraft Dinner for the first time in years. I never remembered it to be so disgusting. I doctored it up as best as I could with scotch bonnet sauce and cayenne but it still tasted like Krap Dinner.

            I watched the fourth broadcast of the Mickey Mouse Club. Annette Funicello finally got some screen time. She sang and she introduced the Mousecartoon. There was a performance by a troupe of very good acrobats because it was circus day. They have been running a series focused on a boy and girl that want to become a pilot and a flight attendant respectively. The flight attendant trainees had to get their hair cut above the shoulder and they were practicing squatting. 

Zora

            On Saturday I spent most of the day reading Peter Abelard’s “Ethics” three times so I could write my paragraph in response to the question that’s due on Tuesday in my philosophy tutorial:

Abelard’s example of the slave killing his master to save his own life is confusing. He first seems to imply that the act is not sinful because the slave had no choice, but then he declares that the slave has sinned after all because he has consented to killing the master. I think that Abelard means that it depends on what is in the slave’s mind at the moment of the killing. If the slave feels the urge to kill the master and then does so, even though he is saving his own life, he is nonetheless committing the sin of murder. But if at the moment of the killing he has not formed the intention to kill his master, then in doing so he has not sinned.

Once I got that done I was too tired to work on my essay, which is also due on Tuesday.

At 17:00 I went out to buy two cans of beer. Just as I was stepping out onto Queen Street I checked my pocket for my keys and realized that I didn’t have them. My foot caught the door before it locked and I went back upstairs to get the keys. It would have been just what I needed to be stuck for several hours outside my place when I have work to do at home on a Saturday evening.

I watched the third Mickey Mouse Club broadcast from 1955. This was the year I was born. I recall hearing about the Mickey Mouse Club show when I started watching TV in 1959 but all we got on one of our two channels was The Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights. I definitely would have liked it when I was a kid if it had been on.

            I read Zora Neale Hurston’s “What It’s Like To Be Coloured Me”. Some of the writing had a Beat feel to it even though it was written in the late 1920s. I was expecting it to be angry but it was actually quite funny. Her reaction to prejudice was, “How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”