Monday. I did get to bed reasonably early last night, given the onset of the ocular event, and so up on another holiday morning without having had to set the alarm, this time maybe thirty minutes after six. So a good night's sleep. Feel fine, up and out the door to have breakfast and read the papers, home about eight-thirty to sort out the last two days entries and post them to the web. And then post again a couple of time to correct mistakes. We make mistakes. Not unusual after a day's excitement.

The morning is nice, the head is clear, we'll see what we can do on Martin Luther King's birthday. I remember being in the army when hearing the news of his assassination. Young, newly entered into the army looking to go overseas and experience war, wired together as we're all wired together at the age of twenty-five. A second lieutenant in the Infantry.

Anyway, how do you internalize an assassination like this one? And then the word that came when serving in Korea that Robert Kennedy had been assassinated? What in the hell was going on? Given my early years oblivious to segregation because I realized later I lived in a segregated environment - you don't question something you don't see - and then learning the truth of the matter as you grow older. I never really had African American friends that I knew and saw every day until I worked at the shipping company starting some twenty years ago now and still have no real idea what their experience has been.

We digress.

Not really. Given what's going on in the world at the moment, the fighting in the Middle-East (and elsewhere), the current political and financial structure in the U.S. - how do you sort all that out? - so much of what we see has proven over time to be only a small piece of what there is to see. Gets both better and scarier as we build a memory and history of events and experiences as they happen.

We wander.

But we wonder and wander. Maybe the real world is like one of these ocular events: you need to carve out a small piece and make it into your total reality to keep your sanity. But now I really do wander. Too much rewrite required to make this comprehensible.

Later. A clear headed feeling pretty good day all day.

A bus downtown to go by the ATM on Broadway thinking there's a #BlackLivesMatter march going on from the BART Fruitvale station to 14th and Broadway later this afternoon. I thought of going to the Fruitvale station on BART, but wasn't up for making the effort. Close, I put together the backpack and was getting ready to go, but marching all the way to 14th and Broadway from the Fruitvale station didn't seem feasible. Reasonable. Whatever.

Still, it's approaching noon and I'm a bit hungry, why not walk on to the City Center, see if anything was going on, see if anyone was open for lunch? Why not? So I did.

There was a motorcycle policeman blocking off Broadway at 18th, another blocking off Telegraph and I heard a crowd in the distance. Ah, people crowded into the intersections at 14th and Broadway, they probably started earlier (I assume) around noon and, although I was late, there was still time to take pictures. So I did. Not great pictures, I need to stop and clear the head, check the camera settings, go through the little mental check list before I start shooting (you'd think I'd have figured this out by now), but there are enough photographs for another section on the web sites.

A walk back to the apartment to spend the rest of the afternoon working on the photographs and post them to HereInOakland and artandlife. Still feel like a human being, even after the three shots of Jack Daniels. (We stopped at the 7-11 look-alike on the way back.)

Evening. Another couple of hours working on the photographs. Not bad, not great. We'll do our usual think about them for a while routine before deciding. That's a definite disadvantage to the short term memory thing if we can't remember to stop for a moment to think before we start shooting. Ah, well. I've said that now twice. Still, a good day, a good evening.