Stealth Recycling and Return of the Horse

Because we live in an apartment complex, the city refuses to pick up our recycling. This has been a major source of stress for me recently - thinking about throwing tin cans and milk cartons in the recycling gives me a stomachache, but I can't say walking 5 miles to the recycling center with my arms full of garbage appeals, either. I've been getting along okay without a car, and I can't say I wish I had one, generally, not even when I'm schlepping laundry six blocks to the laundromat or carrying groceries from the other side of town, but this recycling thing bugged me. K and I finally decided that, since the city collects our neighbors' recycling at no charge to them, we will simply slip our recycling into their bins each week. When I came back from my run yesterday I found that K had disposed of the month's worth of recycling we'd accumulated, and it was a great load off my mind. Moreover, it makes me kind of happy to get our environmentalism on stealthily like this. Recycling ninjas!

For today's class, the Horse had us read one of his own papers, although as he pointed out, we didn't know it was his - there are apparently three professors here with the same name.

"Of course, one's a violinist and the other's a cardiologist, but you never know, they might be men of many layers," said the Horse. "Anyway. I get their email."

Of course, we did know that it was his paper - it could have been written by no one but him. He writes exactly the way he talks - even in writing, he never finishes a sentence without one or four hyphenated asides and parenthetical clarifications. Possibly he meant that we couldn't know it was his paper until we had ruled out the possibility that our experience of the material world is all a dream, though this is not his position. I wonder what the violinist and the cardiologist would say to these questions.