Thursday. You can write about your head in a bubble and joke about it a bit, but when your head really is in a bubble, to various degrees in a bubble, you notice it. Going over the writing, odd typos and spelling errors of a kind you don't remember making in the past, the copy choppy and at times at the edge of coherence. Makes you want to settle down with a nice glass of sake and watch something soothing and mindless on the screen. We haven't gotten there quite yet, but we're flirting around the edges.

The decision ranges from allowing it to envelope us, have the sake, cheese and crackers delivered by the local supermarket rather than taking a chance on driving oneself out there on actual streets, or buying an RV and heading out to cover the world with a camera, the RV outfitted as a mobile photographer's studio complete with computers, gasoline powered electric generator and solar panels affixed to the roof.

That seems a rather extreme range of alternatives. Couldn't you maybe, narrow them down a bit? Make them more, um, realistic?

I suspect. If they were to tell me I've got but a few months left on this earth- no one's ever hinted at such, but the way - maybe the sake solution would be nice. Getting out on the road on my own, I don't know. I wouldn't do it to socialize with fellow travellers in roadside RV parks, that's not where my head is at. Being on the road in a cosy little mobile environment with the necessary camera stuff does sound nice, honestly, but how long would that interest last? A week? Parked on a dark street at midnight posting pictures to the web? In an RV park? Given how I've handled something as simple as driving up the coast in the past?

So we look for a happy mean in between?

I'm not a happy mean in between kind of guy. Haven't been, anyway . For all my decade long chapters of living as a bump on a mossy log, I tend to make reasonably extreme changes when changes need to be made. I haven't made a change in a situation where the brain is becoming fogged as it is now, less able to react than it once was, and maybe that will slow me down to a stop, but something may one day come up. Hup! Hup!

To breakfast and back at the usual time and place, the day overcast with some sign of sun. Doesn't look like there's any chance of rain, but it's cold out there, cold for a California kid. We'll get outside at some point, it's become too much of a routine to fight, but to where? Why do I even ask?

When I first started taking pictures I'd routinely take a camera to a number of places I'm familiar with from the past. Don't have those urges anymore, haven't gone by any of them now in a long time. Get over to Telegraph by the University in Berkeley? Depressing thought. Same with a number of other places I once visited with some interest. Drive up the river, any old river, to a small town, photograph the buildings, other subjects I might find? I could do that, say I could do that, have said that I could do that, but so far I don't. Haven't. Nada. Naught.

But we're doing our best right here to get some distance from our man in the bubble, looking for context, see what all this is really about. What's anything “really” about, since we don't believe there's an agreed upon definition of “real” anymore. So many definitions, so many what's. We are happy enough. If we are depressed, we don't seem to be overly aware of it. Depression in any deep sense hasn't been a major player in my life, not that I haven't been down, I have, but reading how it goes with some other folks who have really experienced it, whatever downs I've had or am having don't add up to much.

Later. A bus downtown and then a walk farther on to Jack London Square to photograph the Christmas tree, we have to photograph the Christmas tree along with Jack, of course, we can't bypass Jack, and then on down toward the container ship port. This one ship has been loading and unloading or whatever they're doing now for a month. Many weeks, anyway, I've photographed it enough times. A couple of building doors because they were there and I was there and there they are. A bus and a walk back to the apartment.

So, no rain today, but overcast. A series of decent pictures, I was somewhat surprised. Lunch consisted of a piece of pumpkin pie with whipped cream on top purchased at Bakesale Betty's and eaten out on one of their ironing board tables set up outside on the sidewalk, a place I've mentioned before. Boy howdy is their pumpkin pie with whipped cream good. Even my damaged taste buds took notice. Not just the whipped cream, although it was fine, but the pie, my, my. What good pie.

Do you own stock in Bakesale Betty's?

I'm tired and retired and I don't shill for restaurants unless I'm impressed. Excellent pie, though. I'll say it twice.

I'm thinking of sushi this evening. I'll talk myself out of it as I did last night. What's going on with me? I don't spend enough money as it is? Aren't they having news stories about it, the demon need to consume over the holidays? Am I hooked on the American disease? Better the American disease than the Bangladeshi disease, I would think. If there is such a word as Bangladeshi.

This is the Google era. You know you checked.