Up early, however, over to breakfast, back now having read the papers, Ms. Emmy sitting on my lap. Hard to write with a cat on your lap. In the seventies, when I was writing every morning, my cat named Mouse kept me company curled up on a little bed I'd put together for her on my desk. I guess I could do that for Ms. Emmy, but then I'm not writing in the mornings anymore and I don't intend to start.

Oh? Then why bring it up?

No, no. Nothing like that. I learned long ago I like to write, but I don't have anything stuck in my craw that needs to come out. Or it's stuck so far down in my craw, so carefully buried, I don't know it exists. Is there a difference? If something exists, but you don't know about it versus something that doesn't exist at all? If it's buried that deep for whatever reason, isn't there some kind of effect? Your toes itch in the mornings? Fear of snakes? Love of beverages, pills, weeds and vegetables that make your mind go blank? That tends to be the literature on the subject, the popular literature anyway: buried is bad and it makes you do things sometimes you'd rather have not. I wonder if any of it talks about photography and an urge to take photographs?

Perhaps there's a book there.

Hell, there isn't even a paragraph there. We're struggling here for coherence and starting with something that doesn't deal with doom. All of this would be edited out as a false start in a larger work. I assume it's age and circumstance, but I have this feeling the world is changing rather rapidly at the moment, so rapidly it's even going to be felt by old guys like myself. Something like the Industrial Revolution only online with better coffee and 24x7 coverage.

They described the Industrial Revolution in school, I recall skimming over one or two chapters devoted to the subject myself. Just words on paper then, but in whatever period through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the ninety percent of the people who made their livings on farms became the two percent of the population that made their livings on farms, something similar perhaps to what China is going through at the moment. I suspect two chapters in a history book doesn't come close to providing an understanding of the sacrifice and change it put those people through, what drove my mother's parents and my father's great grandparents to flee Iceland and Denmark, a move I suspect made not without ups and downs.

Friday, isn't it, maybe that's part of my mood, a flashback to when it was the end of a work week and some nominal adventure was ahead. Nothing too extravagant, mind you: a drive up the coast, a party, a chance to meet someone or see something new. A brush with a bit of gun powder and a match.