Doctors never tell you anything, but I've heard rumors they sometimes recognize the symptoms you're describing from previous experience. Then again, some things have no explanation and are just part of the deal and you adjust because that's the option: no pill, no “procedure” to cure your ill. But we'll deal with that when we absolutely must. Not today when, as I said, I'm feeling somewhat better.

Somewhat better.

Well, I've started thinking maybe a long weekend. That's a sign of improvement. I'm due to go up to Seattle, but not until the end of August. How would I feel out driving with fish swimming around in my head? Kinky, don't you think? It's usually OK when I'm sitting, but I wonder what the Department of Motor Vehicles might think of me out in traffic weaving between the cars and the sharks?

You're not really seeing fish, right?

No, but it conveys the scope of the problem. “Feelings” are not easily described. It teaches you something about communication and language, though: what really can you communicate through words? You can give a sense of something, I suppose, but how do you convey something someone else hasn't experienced? “I hit my finger with a hammer” you can convey easily as most of us have hit a finger with a hammer or something similarly hard. Whether the hammer on finger experience is “really” the same between two people, who knows, but we understand the concept.

But this “dizziness” thing, this “disorientation”. How to describe it to you doctor in a way that correctly synchs with his database of patient ills? I'm thinking fingers, he's thinking toes. We'll see. I just got a call from one of the nurses and they've halved the dosage on one of my pills. The ones with the cute little black skull and crossbones on each and every bright yellow capsule. The excitement builds.

You've gone off the reservation.

With me that's a good sign.

Later. Back from downtown: a quick hop on the bus, a walk across the street to the Rite Aid pharmacy, pick up the new pills, a walk to the City Center to sit for a while, a hop back on another bus and home. I wouldn't have wanted to do that yesterday, I wasn't altogether happy to do it today.

I'm having more thoughts about getting out of town. Downtown Oakland, even with all the bright faced noon hour office workers scurrying about, can be downright depressing, particularly in my current mood. And at the edges it has more than its share of the crazy and homeless, young and old, so I'm back to thinking maybe I'll drive up the coast. I'd say move up the coast, but I've said that many times to no result in the past.

So we'll see with the new pills. I take one in the morning, one in the evening, so the first of the smaller ones goes down the gullet tonight.

Some part of this is cabin fever no doubt, a reaction to all the time I find I'm spending inside. Too many bus rides, when I do get outside, to the same places. Too many same fleeting faces on the bus, on the street. I need new territory, a place away to stay for say six months and see if it works.

We are back to going north? Sung to the tune of Onward Christian Soldiers? “Marching as to war”?

I would assume housing prices are pretty good these days below the tsunami line up north along the coast. It's marked in Oregon: instructive, albeit nerve fraying I would think, for the locals. “What's that sign say, daddy? Daddy?” It gets my attention just driving through. Every time the road goes above the line you relax a little, every time it goes below, well, you look out toward the ocean, cool like, so no one will notice.

I take it we're no longer moving north.

Not below the line