Saturday. I hadn't expected an ocular migraine after sake and sushi last night, not sure why. Silly in retrospect. You get to feeling rather good and the last episode fades rapidly over time and then bam! Well, last night around eight, not a super major incarnation, but nasty enough, so to bed before nine, up this morning at six-thirty rather than five forty-five feeling, well, OK.

To breakfast and back (where else?), a nap and then an hour or two working on getting artandlife in some better order and then another very light reoccurrence, lying down again for about an hour, dozing, before the brain and reality came back to balance. By then it was two in the afternoon. A long night and now most of a day sleeping.

One thing I did do before I went to bed (had to go to bed, felt good I could still get around to turn everything off, you're whacked but not that whacked) is put a tape I recorded in the early seventies into this new CD-Tape-MP3 player/recorder (it is a slick not expensive device I'd recommend if you have any tapes and no longer have a player), a live recording of a song by Tary Owen's band Spodeeodee (from the song Drinkin’ Wine Spodeeodee). Haven't played it in years.

The song is Tary Owen's The Lonesome Railroad, a fourteen minute lead guitar and piano dominated piece I've always really liked. This player is said to record CD's and cartridge tapes directly to MP3 on a USB connected thumb drive so I'll try it later this afternoon. Or tomorrow. (I'll need to read the manual, a chancy thing reading a manual anymore.) I am curious to see if I feel the same way about the song now that it's been some forty years.

It can't have been forty years.

No it can't, but I'm afraid we both should know as we did the time together. Thirty-eight years, maybe, back in the old days.

Best not to speak of time passing quickly. It's a cliché, too much an old guy's cliché, this time passing quickly by.

Maybe. This is our journal, after all, we can be as idiotic as we choose. But we'll get the song transferred to CD and MP3, track down Tary, who's still back home somewhere in Austin as I recall and send it along. It'll be a kick.

Later still. Still a bit tired, another early evening to bed I suspect. I did figure out how to record from a tape to the USB port (and connected thumb drive). This particular recording of The Lonesome Railroad is a jam. Tary and the rest of the band were there along with one or two of the old QuickSilver Messenger Service members (I don't think any of them were playing on this song), this at a performance hall up the coast on Highway 1 at, appropriately, about one in the morning.

An interesting night, that night. San Francisco to Bolinas (or thereabouts), two or three cars, two bands with us on the drive. Heading back finally over Mt. Tam at about three in the morning when we came around a curve and stopped suddenly in front of a car high earth slide that had blocked the two lane road. Let me tell you: a weird thing to find half blitzed at three in the morning, so we turned around and went back to take another longer way around to San Francisco.

So, of course, thinking I'd find a way to contact Tary, I checked on the web and discovered he'd died at the age of sixty of cancer in 2003, something I realize I'd heard at the time, something I, for this moment at least, had forgotten. You assume too much, maybe, out of sloth, out of forgetfulness, out of age, that people you knew pretty well are still around. We can blame it on age or we can shut our mouth and give the man a minute of remembrance.