Sunday, Sunday
Sunday. A cold, crisp morning. Cold and crisp for Oakland, anyway. Breakfast at the usual place, back now to see what the day may hold, the sun poking through the clouds. There's a Dickens Fair over at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. I've thought about going, plenty of opportunities for photographs one would think, but I give it less than a fifty-fifty chance. Hell, make that twenty-eighty. I've been thinking of visiting Wilson again for these last few days, see how he's doing. At least call to check on visiting hours, see if there's parking at this rehabilitation hospital they moved him to on Monday.
Maybe do both?
Maybe do neither. “None” and “neither” seem to get a lot of play here in ProprietorLand.
Then again the attitude is reasonable even if the energy is missing. Laundry to do. No. Rug cleaning needed. No. Adjustments to the camera insurance mandatory after reading an editorial piece in today's Chronicle by a woman who's been chased out of Oakland by the local crime wave that seems to be a permanent aspect of Oakland living. Maybe.
She described things going on in my neighborhood I wasn't altogether aware of, getting me to think my walking the sidewalks with a camera over my shoulder for these last ten years hasn't been such a good idea. I'm pretty careful of my surroundings, my experience isn't her's, but reading it in print blindsides you to some degree. If it's in print, it must be true, right? Or are we being naive? I've lived here in Oakland for ten years. That should be enough time to get the lay of the land.
Well? Are we up or are we down this morning? Crime on the streets? All this on a Sunday morning?
Actually, I just took a look at robberies and murders on the map. I'm in one of the no-robbery, no-murder zones north of the lake, although I walk and ride the bus through the corners of Broadway and 13th, 14th streets fairly often. Every time I go downtown, in fact. They're listing forty “incidents”, four of them involving guns, at Broadway and 13th, 14th in 2008. Is that a lot or a little, when you consider the number of people who've passed through those intersections in the past year? And what time of day did they occur? Midnight? I wouldn't walk through that area at midnight in my worst nightmare with or without a camera. My car getting vandalized? Hell, that happened a whole five blocks farther on down the street.
And you're thinking of buying a condo in downtown Oakland?
Hell, with stories like these, they'll be giving them away before long.
Later. The sun has pretty much disappeared as the afternoon evolves and any thought I had of leaving the apartment seems to have evaporated. You'd think, well, given I'm here, why not take a picture or two here in the apartment? Read a book? I'm watching Wall-E at the moment, the scenes of the three hundred pound passengers on the spaceship scooting around in what look like living room chairs experiencing their lives through computer screens, instructed by robots, fed by robots, tickled by robots, is all too close to what I seem to be doing right here at this very moment. Worse yet what I'm doing right at this very moment is often what I'm up to at any given time on a given day, what with the computer, the journal, the various flavors of Facebook, the online ordering of stuff done with a click. Click! Click!
Later still. A run over to Safeway to buy a big box of the canned cat food Ms. Emmy will eat (now and then), some sake (which I've consumed), some white clam spaghetti sauce (since they didn't have red), crackers and apples. Best I got but the two small flasks of the sake, as I'd have a third if it were here. Sunday, Sunday. Here in Oakland.
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