Up running a bit late, late enough to forget to shave (not something I do very often), but it's not life threatening, so off to breakfast and back on another cool, but sunny morning, the price of gas jumping back up by six cents a gallon. Background noise, that, the price of gas, watching it like this is probably another unrecognized symptom. Of something.

A playful attitude?

That would be nice, although I suspect it's more geeky and a great deal less sophisticated.

Later. A nap to get us to noon, although it was more a lie down for an hour and then get up again, allowing the tiredness to slowly dissipate. Still, the day looks nice out there, the weather warmer (we'll know soon enough), the day ahead. He said. Over and over.

Later still. It is warmer out there, in the low sixties the weather people say, so on a bus to head to the ATM on Broadway at noon, a walk then to the City Center because, well, that's all I ever do is walk to and through the City Center before walking on from time to time to somewhere else.

Anyway, hungry, no cafés calling out with anything I wanted to eat and, at half past noon, many I might have been willing to compromise on were a bit too crowded. It was, after all, the noon hour. And the bus home was due in another three minutes. So I crossed the street and caught the bus to the morning restaurant, where I had a chicken with avocado sandwich, potato salad and a lemonade. Hup.

No pictures but one, passing this on a Broadway sidewalk, something I could see writing myself on a day where I had a beer or two in the belly and a piece of chalk in the pocket. Not hard to understand why someone might write it here with the economy in turmoil. Nicely lettered, whoever wrote it might not have needed one or two beers to get it started.

You seem all beneficent, politically correct and clueless in the way you put it.

It struck me less as an expression of anger and more a description of my minimal understanding of my small patch in Oakland: the increasing prices, the gentrification, the political dysfunction and half a dozen other issues with the police and the local government and, if I were sensible, I wouldn't have touched it. Whitey Out, a play on White Out, though. I like it.

Back now, a bit tired, one in a long chain now of “a bit tireds”, we'll pick up the guitar and see if we can make it play.

Evening. Nothing on at the usual six o'clock time slot I wanted to watch so another Netflix movie to pass the time. Actually three Netflix movies, moving from one to the next in an attempt to find one that struck a chord. My taste in movies has become somewhat eclectic over recent years in the sense of almost all of them are subtitled and, of those on Netflix, at least, a large percentage of those seem to be turkeys, written for eight year old (primarily) boys. We've not sunk to that level yet, the brain is still operational, we'll leave that for our seventies. Late seventies.

And yes, I watched the Thursday night Elementary at ten. There are many things about it that only marginally work, the “fit together like a watch” plots, intricate, if off the wall, demonstrations of Holmes' deductive powers. I don't like the frenetic brain in hyper mode treatment of the Holmes character, more a medical aberration than a master detective, although the actor is quite good. The relationship between Holmes and Watson I like, the idea of Lucy Liu as Watson, something refreshing and original.

Still, all that said, I can see why many more discerning that I may not wish to stay up after ten to keep it company. Ah, well, to bed at eleven with an additional dose of the pain meds and some Jack Daniels under the belt to keep the sinuses and upper palate in order.