I'm out of photographs. I haven't shot much in the way of anything in some time. I've been going back and looking for things I missed the first time around, the photograph above is an example. It needed work in PhotoShop - skin tones mostly, the lady was too pale, the photographer having botched the exposure - and it's OK with the changes, but I'm down to the dregs and it's winter and I don't shoot much in winter and, well, you know the routine. Suck it up, my man. This is where we find out if we're made of more than stinky old cheese and whine. I me mine.

It's cold, it's been raining off and on so I guess it's December in California. I understand they've had snow in the Northeast. I remember snow. Sorta. I lived in New York once. They had snow in New York in the winter, they had it occasionally when I lived in Seattle. No snow on the California coast around San Francisco, we have appearances to maintain, but the temperature gets down, gets down as low as the high forties, let me tell you, and everyone is, well, wrinkling their brow. But we'll make it. One day at a time. I me mine.

I was hallucinating something or other as I was riding home on the bus the other day, so I wrote down a phrase: ...who's last words, lashed to the mast in the storm, "Laura, you bitch, you lied!"

Now I thought about that. I was thinking about the "l's" - last, lashed, Laura, lied - that didn't quite work, but could with a little massage. Now what's the "xxxxx, you bitch" business? What to do with that? What deep down underground chamber in my subconscious works in those terms? Not sure. The women in my life have not lied. Maybe the women in Larry's life have lied (I was thinking of calling him Larry, but didn't have the courage with all those other l's). Either way, lashed to a mast, is there a story here? They say start with something, anything, and I've always thought, well it has to be something more than Larry lashed to a mast particularly when I've always been a power boat man. (There, I've said it. "Power boat man." I also gravitated to bowling instead of golf. Hopeless. No recognizable ambition to rule the world. Dismissed. Next case.)

I've had my two whisky and waters, of course. Well, I've had one of them with another sitting to my right on the desk. Maybe that's where Larry comes in, the schooner and the mast. Still, the subconscious is the soil in the garden. You've got to water it (whiskey and water it) before anything will sprout. I know nothing of schooners or Laura's or Larry's, but that's often a good start. A book on schooners, read it over a schooner or two of beer; a review of the Larry's I've known - can't think of a one at the moment, but he's lashed to the mast, maybe he doesn't make it beyond paragraph one; and Laura, well Laura appears to have lied. I'll have to dig down and look. So why not start? Now. See what happens. A little ragged. Here in Oakland.