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Snapshots
   
Lake Merritt area, Oakland.

February 9th, 2002

Maybe Not
Wuss report (2): Never make an optimistic statement about your cat. He's leaking as badly as ever, most often when I get home and he gets excited about dinner. I ran the little throw rugs I keep on the chairs (Real "imitation lambs wool" as opposed, I suppose, to imitation imitation lambs wool as described on the label.) through the washer and they smell like cat piss. Light, aromatic cat piss, but cat piss, none the less, baked and set by thirty minutes in the drier.

I'm sleeping alone these days, the bedding finally crisp and fresh after much washing. I'm thinking of renting a rug cleaning machine and doing the rugs over this weekend, but only thinking, mind you. We'll see what the world and the rugs look like in the morning.

Grendel still sits against the wall, glowing less brightly now in the dark, a result, maybe, of time and distance from its home in the magic of Anglo Saxon myth. I'd be more excited, but it's a product of Medieval Industrial Sorcery, so it's big and heavy and tends toward rust and it makes psychic demands for your attention by its very presence. I'm getting too old for demands of psychic attention and I'm wondering if I couldn't snap a picture and sell it on eBay or trade it, maybe, for a new camera lens.

I realize my connection to magic has weakened over time, Medieval or otherwise (Industrial Iron and Magic?), gradually losing my connection to the cave and the Oracle within. Or is it to the sacred oracular Fagus oak of the ancients, gift of Zeus, truth hidden in its murmuring leaves? Or does it live in the condo down the street these days on the corner, the one with the weird paint job? You lose your focus for a moment, for a decade, and it's gone, reducing you to an occasional palm reader and the morning paper horoscope.

Work has been hectic and this week has gone like a shot. Monday was somewhere back there, I vaguely remember my thoughts on Monday going into work, Wednesday happened, I remember Wednesday, and now suddenly it's Friday and the weekend. The weather people claim we'll have sun and I'm thinking of going to San Francisco to shoot one of the Chinese New Year events, a flower show of some kind on Grant Avenue in Chinatown. That's another "we'll see", but I might, I might.

The camera bag I talked about came on Monday. It works as a back pack, I can fit a cameraRemembering Claudia L. Cassidy. "Run with the wolves". with a long lens attached, two or three other lenses and a strobe light or two into the main padded compartment. It rides up fairly comfortably on my back, more comfortably than my current arrangement, and it comes with a strap that allows you to fold the back pack straps into a zippered pocket and then carry it with another strap over your shoulder. We'll see how this works. It was designed by a nature photographer named Bob Krist, hence the ability to carry a camera with a really long lens, nature photographers need them when they're shooting Grizzly bears and such. So I've got another camera bag. Whoop.

Saturday. No way in hell I'm going out and shooting pictures. The mind is too fogged: listen to the radio, water the catnip plant on the balcony, take a nap, piddle with this, take another nap. Catch up, it seems, on my sleep; hit the recharge button on my life. The sun is bright. Maybe I'll go out later, maybe not.

 
The banner photograph was taken down the street from my apartment near Lake Merritt in Oakland and the second photograph was taken in Jack London Square.

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