KARMA STIKES BACK 2: SON OF KARMA!
Take Five, the CBC radio show in the beginning of the afternoon, was playing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart all afternoon. Appropriately, Maxwell sang along with Papageno's song in the Magic Flute. No, that isn't the karma part.
Getting off the bus from the Living Closet meeting (next show on August 25th! Keep your eyes open for an open painting stage and a return of the dancers from Wreck Beach!) I am confronted a block from Hastings and Main by a large, muscular man with arms covered in tattoos. Am I about to be mugged? I ponder, avoiding eye-contact and trying to scuttle away from his path but he intercepts successfully. I raise my gaze and straighten my back to deal with this new turn of events with my full stature backing me up. I am not to be mugged; in fact, my thuggish-looking accostor just has been; he displays his cut pants, multiply displays his lack of track marks and bemoans his pot deal gone bad in which his wallet etc. was stolen by the vicious junkies who haunt the corner 24/7.
Rather surprised not to be coerced at the end of a fist to part with my material goods I instead donate the few dollars of change I have with me of my own volition to the man in front of me who seems a) desperate, b) honest and c) largely incoherent, the fight-or-flight adrenaline still pumping and baffling. Refusing multiply his offers to show me his ID so I can contact him at a later date for the return of my busker-fodder, I hustle down the street towards my house, wary of what predators might be out that one such as he would be lower on the food chain.
KA-CHING!
A half-block closer to my house my eye is caught on a flapping piece of paper and leaning over to the gutter I see a pair of $5 bills lying sadly on the pavement. Eagerly I snatch them up and scamper back to Main, but Curtis the tattooed victim is nowhere to be seen, so rather dejectedly I pocket them and head back to the house, where a pile of pants donated by a roommate's uncle waits for me to be Goldilocks (they were too big for one roommate and too small for another.)
It seems odd to me that my first impulse upon finding the money was to pass it on to the one who had just got the last of mine. Then again, money is dirty stuff. Makes me itch. I want as little to do with it as possible. This is not getting my Spinoza essay done (gotta bus out to my parents' in the morning - in seven hours - to print it out so I can hand it in. Ick) so the back logging will have to wait. Procrastination is making me more effective at everything else in my life except what needs to be done - I would elaborate on that but I'll let the words speak for themselves rather than proving it.
... I wonder if I can find anything in the Ethics to rationalize my not having written the essay. Hm. Unfortunately any ontological arguments about the modes of attributes of substance manifesting as finished papers can just as easily be applied to grades. Doh.
in our last episode... | p_i-logs | and then, all of a sudden...