Saturday. To bed last night quite early getting up this morning with the alarm. Not a bad morning even with the overcast sky. To breakfast and back, the papers read, the journal posted, the day ahead, Art & Soul starting at noon. Not the most productive festival for photographs, but satisfying if you work at it. I say “unproductive”, but that's a result of my level of experience, not the festival itself. You learn to find what it is you're looking for (he said clearly into his mirror) by time and effort and the way you do that is to keep shooting. And spouting off like an idiot.

Spouting off like an idiot?

Spouting off like an idiot.

Later. Oof! Close to three hours of shooting followed by a bus that didn't come. Two buses that didn't come. I don't know if the third was delinquent or not as by then I'd walked home. Which I've done many times, but not after running around shooting pictures for three hours. Still, not bad, the world has not ended, although I think my pictures aren't all that good. Sometimes it's hard to say (which means they're either very good or not very good at all, pick one according to your mood). How many ways can you photograph a singer at a microphone? Still, it is a portrait, I do like portraits.

Which is alright, we'll do better tomorrow. One bad day does not deserve another.

Art & Soul was (I think) less well attended this year. Hard to say as the crowd was growing as I left around three in the afternoon. Again, think over whatever it was I was shooting. How to make it better? What was I not doing that I've done with success in the past? Get closer, take (modest) chances, relax, sit sometimes and listen to the music.

Later still. I finished up what Netflix movies I've had sitting about. I cancelled the online option when they started charging for it and still have the three movies at a time option that I use, well, sporadically. Same with the Sirius XM. Why do I keep it when I listen to it so little? I'd like to say sloth, but I'd bet, if I had to bet, on stupidity. Stupidity is so rampant out there, don't you think it's nice that we've remained so perfectly immune over all these years? Hard to say that with a straight face when the evidence is so clear.

Where's this going?

Who knows? I had sushi and sake for dinner, the owner pouring me another serving of sake on the house, waited up until ten to watch my historical Korean soap, watched it for ten minutes and then said the hell with it when the plot became impossible to swallow, getting to bed then at a decent hour, writing this the next morning. Hup, hup. We'll leave the exclamation points for the morrow.