Nietzsche observes somewhere -- I'm going to paraphrase without citing, but I'm sure you can find it if you like -- that there are no moral phenomenon in and of themselves, only moral interpretation of phenomenon.
Or, remember that Simpsons episode where the punchline, when Homer is asked to draw a moral conclusion about the things that have transpired, is something like, "it's just a bunch of stuff that happened?"

...For moralizing purposes, the story begins yesterday, on the way up Main Street. I noticed that, coming out of the Skytrain Station, a rather desperate-looking, grubbily-clothed guy had pulled up the grates that separated two sections of pavement, and was digging in the ground beneath them quite fervently. This wasn't, say, the usual behaviour of your ordinary crack addict, poking at crevices, hoping someone had dropped a rock -- a tragic thing, very sad to witness, but minor by comparison: This was more like an archaeological dig, or maybe like the guy thought there might be buried treasure to be found -- years of dropped loonies and toonies, perhaps? Whatever he thought he was doing, he had piled two large mounds of dirt up, using sections of grate he had removed as a shovel to scoop up more dirt, which he would then sift through with his hands. He was being very thorough.
I sent Erika a text with an uncharitably terse description ("some crackhead is digging up the dirt beneath the Skytrain grates"), along with a photo I snapped. I don't want to get the guy in trouble, so I have cropped him out, but here's just a tiny portion of his handiwork -- this is about 3/4s of the area he had dug out, when I saw him:
Then the bus came. I elected to do nothing, because what can one do? Offer to help him dig? (file that under, "What would Alejandro Jodorowsky do?"). Call the non-emergency "report unauthorized excavations" number? Or just saunter over and say, "Whacha diggin' for?" to help determine the best approach...? I wondered if, maybe, he might actually be in his right mind, and had just lost something very important to him...? This will be germane a bit later.
Carry on down the street. My first of several stops is Neptoon, where I congratulate Rob on his newsworthy find and I buy an album by the Wainwright sisters -- Martha and Lucy Wainwright Roche -- called Songs in the Dark. I had glibly referred to Lucy as "Roche or something" in a recent post, not remembering her name and feeling a bit exasperated at the number of talented musicians in the Wainwright clan. I was excited by the promise of dark lullabies, of gorgeous voices harmonizing on the songs of, among others, Townes van Zandt ("Our Mother the Mountain"!!!), Richard Thompson ("The End of the Rainbow") and their shared dad, old Loudon himself ("Lullaby," one of several songs on the album with the word "lullaby" in the title. I like lullabies!).

I get where I'm going, a book and record store where I'm doing a favour, filling in for a sick friend; I sit at the desk and spin the record on the store turntable. It truly is marvelous; okay, I don't really need any version of "El Condor Pasa," ever, which has been done to death, but it's more than made up for by the true gem of the album, which one of the sisters (not sure which) describes as a "hostile baby-rocking song." But wait: "Our Mother the Mountain" has a skip in it! It was the song that my eyes first grabbed in scanning the back cover at Neptoon, a favourite tune of Townes' that was marred in the studio version by the fact that the album it is on is not well-produced (people had not quite figured out how to present Townes on his first two albums. For the Sake of the Song is worse; It's only on his third, self-titled record from 1969 that an appropriately stark sound is settled on.)

What do I do about the skip? The store's record cleaning solution doesn't seem to work, and when I read a review of it online, I search out a bottle of water and some sort of soft cloth, to try to clean the residue of the solution off, since it is notorious for leaving a film, apparently. There is a pad for cleaning records that lacks bristles to go into the groove -- it's just a pad, maybe good for dust, but not a deep cleaning. I try various things and succeed in making the skip a bit better, so only one word is missed, but then I try another trick, of putting a coin on the tone arm, and manage to undo what good I'd done; now three words are missed. Fuck! It's the song I bought the album for! Can I get Rob to replace it? (I hate to do that, besides which, the album is from 2015 and may not be that easy to get in; very possible that it has sat in the store for ten years, waiting for me!).
Hmm, maybe if I had better cleaning equipment...
There are no customers, so I put a "back in fifteen minutes" sign on the door and rush down to Red Cat, where they have record-cleaning kits; I try, on Nen the Sunday guy's recommendation, a Vinyl Cat kit that has a better solution (supposedly) and a microfibre cloth. I make it back to the store -- nursing a cold, in fact, and maybe getting a bit obsessive -- and set to cleaning the record anew, or trying to.
I am unable to improve it. I can actually see the mark on the vinyl that's causing the skip, but I can't get it out. I'm deep in my work, working the damp cloth along the grooves, when Nen pops his head in the door: I had somehow forgotten my wallet in the store!
He hands me my wallet, which in fact has a wad of cash in it. I thank him and feel very lucky. I go on about my business, spinning the other sides of the record, hoping that maybe my needle at home will be more charitable. How could I have lost my wallet? I sit there, chiding myself and shivering -- it's cold, and I'm sick -- and intermittently masking when I have to speak closely to customers, though everything about this suggests it is just a cold. I wish I were home in bed. But slowly, time passes; I make a trip to McDonald's for a large coffee. I spin other records (there's a new Sipreano album of Jamaica-to-Toronto soul and reggae on Light in the Attic records that I happened to snag while I was at Red Cat; it's the next album I spin after the Wainwrights, and it's terrific).
I realize that this starts to seem like one of those online articles that go on forever, designed to drag you past as many ads as possible, but I assure you, I'm just long-winded. There are no ads on this page. I am not monetized. I did shoot Kevin an email about how great the comp is, though!

Finally, Al Mader, the Minimalist Jug Band, arrives at said bookstore to relieve me, starting the evening shift, and I head back to Red Cat to look at the $5 bin, where they have a Members EP and LP both featuring my favourite song by the band, "Offshore Banking Business," which is left off the pressing of the album that I have at home. It's kind of like the Fall's "Cruiser's Creek," a single that only is on some pressings of This Nations Saving Grace, or, like, "God Bless America" by Toxic Reasons. First I buy the EP, then I remember that some versions of the LP have the song I want, too; when I see it's on the LP version, they let me swap the EP for the LP, since they're both from the same bin. Now I'm thinking I might go back and get the EP too!
The $5 bin at Red Cat has some real gems lately.
So I'm basically done for the day. I've stuffed my records in my backpack and zipped up my raincoat when, on the way out the door, I get a text from my wife telling me if I want bread, I'll have to buy some, she wasn't able to get it on her grocery run (the bread she wanted had had an open bag; it was the final one of the brand she wanted and the store wouldn't sell it to her).
Here, I have, after thinking the word "crackhead," being slightly dismissive of the Roche among the Wainwright/ McGarrible clan, the third uncharitable thought which I will later contemplate as a possible reason for my forthcoming karmic payback: I grumble inwardly about how if my wife had been sick, and I were doing a grocery run where I was supposed to buy her bread, I would have bought her some come hell or high water, even if it wasn't the brand I myself wanted. I go on runs for cottage cheese for her all the time, and I don't eat the stuff at all!
We are, in truth, a bit different that way, but maybe she has her own inward grumbles (I did just get her to drive me all around Vancouver, picking up and dropping off stereo equipment -- I'm giving an old turnable, amp, and speakers to a friend and had no other way of delivering them, and Erika was very very helpful in this, despite losing a day to it).
Anyhow: grumbling inwardly, I trek to Nesters, grab the Silver Hills Little Big Bread that we favour, and pay for it (seven bucks!!!). I'm on the way back to the bus stop, also griping to myself that now I've missed a bus or two because of the added trip, when I happen to look at my left hand.
There is no wedding ring on it.
I had had the wedding ring at the store. Surely I would have noticed it otherwise? I scroll back to a photo I took for Erika's benefit of me sitting at the desk, warming my hands on the heater/ humidifier. My ring is on clear display.

This is -- along with needing to get new pants -- one of the downsides of losing weight. With my cancer surgeries, various meds I'm on, and even a wee bit of exercise, I have dropped from about my all-time peak of 385 pounds, which is roughly what I weighed when we got married eight years ago, to my current weight of 295, which is about the threshold where my ring starts falling off my finger. I have been here before, immediately post-surgery, a couple of years ago, though my weight rebounded a little in the year that followed and it stopped being an issue. Understand that I like wearing my ring, and don't want to go through the hassle of getting it resized, but recently, I have occasionally put it in my pocket when I go to gigs, for instance, since I don't want it flying off in a mosh pit. Easier to just let myself not drop below 295!
But it's finally happened. Ring lost, I panic. My mind races, as I search the crevices along the sidewalks, retracing the route from the bookstore to the record store to the grocery store, and finally going in the McDonald's, then repeating my route. Did it fall between records in the five dollar bin at Red Cat? Is it under the lip of their counter? No. Did the clerk at Nesters find it? Is it buried in my backpack, from when I stuffed the Members record in it?
The Nesters girl eyes me skeptically when I try to explain myself to her: I'm speech impaired, my voice additionally rough because of my cough, and I'm obviously agitated, looking desperately under shelves in the bread section, near the till, under the sidewalk out front, pacing around like some sort of nut. She's clearly an immigrant, and I know from experience that, if you come from a conservative Asian society where people are simply not allowed to fall so far between the cracks as they do here, it is hard, at times, to tell whether someone in Vancouver is damaged/ a potential threat -- to distinguish, say, between addicts excavating Skytrain Stations, looking for buried treasure, and people with funny voices telling you their ring is missing. I can sympathize: if I were her, I'd probably regard someone behaving like me like a possible problem, too (because white people are crazy, y'know?).
Eventually, at my suggestion, she takes my name and phone number, and I head to McDonald's to ask if anyone has turned in a ring, there: this time, my interlocutor is a blank teenaged female, actually from here, who thinks telling me no one has turned in a ring will placate me.
"But if someone did turn in a ring, and you didn't see it, what would the staff do with it?"
"I don't know." Said with slight exasperation.
"Do you have a lost and found?"
"No." She looks at me emptily, like she doesn't know what I expect her to do.
Another staff member (an immigrant, in fact) overhears and weighs in: "We'd give it to our manager."
"Can I speak to your manager?"
I do (the manager is an immigrant too, but I don't ring her "crazy" bell; maybe she's married and has been in spots like I'm in, but she treats me very politely. Still, there's not much to be said: I give her my name and phone number with the words "lost wedding ring" and run back to Red Cat, eyes in the gutter left and right. Nen and the girl have closed up, but I knock on the glass. Nen, sweeping, looks up and shakes his head: no ring. I rush back to the bookstore, explain the situation to Al, and look up and down the aisles, in case I dropped it there. I had looked in this bin of used CDs: maybe it fell in there? I had looked through this rack of records: maybe it fell in there? I used the toilet: maybe it fell off in there?
I do not find the ring, and increasingly frantic, jot back outside to search areas of sidewalk where the ring might have fallen off (it's actually quite difficult to remember the exact route one took, in such situations; we move about on autopilot, storing no memories. Did I use this crosswalk or that one? Was on the left or the right?).
I feel utterly defeated. I head back to the store. Al -- who knows Erika, as well -- is scouring the aisles. And here I begin to seek moral meaning of the events: did I lose my ring because I bought records when I should be saving my money? Because I thought grumpy thoughts about my wife offsetting the bread purchase onto me? Because I was unfairly dismissive about Lucy Wainwright Roche, before having heard her mavelous music? Or was it, indeed, cosmic payback for having kind of judged the "crazy crackhead," or however I inwardly thought of him, who was so desperately digging in the dirt?
Al says something about having checked the garbage, and that reminds me of something: I look in a garbage can outside the store that I threw something in on the way by, earlier. There is an inch of standing, brown water, with floating cigarette butts in it: what if the ring flew off into the bin and it's concealed by the water? If I knew it were actually in there, I'd reach in and start feeling around, but it could be anywhere on the block: I really, really don't want to grope in the garbagewater. What would passerby think?
I feel defeat brewing. I've now missed four buses, am nearly an hour late for dinner, and I'm starting to accept that I'm not going to ever find my ring again. It's gone. I'll have to tell Erika. What do I do?
I return to the desk in the bookstore and make one last search of the desk where I'd been sitting, while Al looks about the aisles. Suddenly he says, "Aha!"
He's always been lucky at finding things, he tells me. (Erika will observe, when I show her this photo, that Al "looks like a magician").
That was my day. The only certain meaning I can get from any of it is that I shouldn't have gone out at all this weekend; I've been sick, and should have stayed home and rested. Losing both my wallet and my wedding ring in one afternoon is not good.
But that's not quite the end of the story. I snap a photo and say, "Hang on one second." The McDonald's and Nesters people don't merit a heads up -- they weren't particularly sympathetic -- but I run back down the street and knock on the Red Cat window again, where Nen is still cleaning the floor. He looks up; I show him my ring through the glass door, now back in place on my finger. He grins and gives me a thumbs-up.
Then I take the ring off and put it in my wallet, where it's safer... unless I lose my wallet again.