Do I detect a certain ironic subtext here, a lifeless hup! hup! hup!?

A bit. I'm still up for a street festival. They're hard to shoot in that you don't get many pictures out of a day's shooting (although you can get better with practice), but I'm still feeling good about them. The benefit party will be interesting at the very least as it is a part of my life lived thirty years ago. Mr. W was a good friend and I'll know many of the people who show up (and won't know many more who show up), but it's a bit faded, those years, more a story in a book you've read and have up on your shelf, a shadow of a time rather than the time itself. Does that make any sense?

Not really. Anyway, sense is way overrated.

Ah, well. A street festival today and tomorrow, a two hour benefit tonight. The weekend is booked, the cameras are ready, the first entry for the weekend is dribbling off into puerile bunk.

Later. Heading out the door I said the hell with it, returned and picked up a second camera with a telephoto lens. They're a pain to carry, two over the same shoulder clanking together, but we're talking a bus ride downtown here, no big deal. Once there, one camera in the right hand, carrying strap wrapped around the wrist; the other over the left shoulder, lens pointed toward the back, carrying them is actually quite comfortable and I walked through the street festival shooting for about an hour (before having a too large lunch and four glasses of water at a Szechwan restaurant). I got one or two good photographs, I'll get more tomorrow, but right now I'm tired and I think I'll take a nap.

Back from S.F. Wow. Easy enough to get to, although I walked right by the place across the street (the Electric Works is large, facing on 8th Street, with a huge sign that says “Electric Works”). There was a lot of framed original cartoon art hung on the walls in a high ceiling open art studio serving the usual fare toward the back at a long table, most of the people milling about my age or older (who are these people? they look familiar but if I know them I can't remember any of their names!), Ms. C directing traffic, a band playing, my lungs turned into burning liquid (remember the trouble with the lungs? They brought me up to speed on their needs this evening.), the head now a bit wobbly, time to leave. So I left, got on BART and took a cab home. Here now after an hour or so, feeling better.

Sounds like there are things unsaid.

Nothing critical. It's been a long day, the outing in Chinatown wore me down more than I thought it might, the trip to San Francisco necessary, but maybe not the best of ideas in that condition leaving as I did before they'd gotten to the auction (I owe apologies), a chapter from a distant past, distant in the sense there have been other chapters, whole lives lived since and even those later chapters have faded. Those twelve years in Napa? When was that again? This isn't to say everyone from those times has gone, there are still some important ones I've kept contact with and have kept contact with me, but the planet spins, the cameras improve and the brain, well, the brain goes. Dimmer. Here in Oakland.