They're winding up a two day Filmore Jazz Festival in San Francisco today that I've had marked on the calendar. Maybe I'll go, maybe I won't. Feeling upbeat won't necessarily lead me to the city with a camera, but I'm thinking about it, I'm thinking about it.

Oh, and I got my T-Mobile bill today. Something called “downloads” were added to the bill for a total of forty additional dollars. There was something called “downloads” for nine ninety-nine last month that I traced to some sort of Facebook related thing called PlayPhone that I contacted and cancelled, but here are three new ones looking for money. My whole T-Mobile bill runs twenty dollars a month, I use mobile very little, yet a twenty dollar monthly bill has been inflated to sixty dollars? If I can't get it fixed by say Monday I'm moving my mobile account to another company. I'm pissed. For someone who feels he's been frittering his money away lately on unnecessary stuff I'm still pissed. At least I've been doing the frittering, getting in return swell camera gimcracks and doozy-whistles. This pile on the Prop by criminals isn't part of the plan. Their plan, but not my plan. I wonder what in the hell it is they're talking about? Downloads? To a phone?

Welcome to the real world.

I think god wants us to kill these people.

Now, now.

And not just the bankers.

Now, now.

Later. Talked, after a long wait, to T-Mobile. They deducted seventy dollars from my account. Evidently if you give your mobile phone number to someone/anyone (Facebook is one of the sources) you can start being billed nine ninety-nine a month by these people without asking for their service. You cancel one and they give your number to another company and that company starts billing you and sending you text messages (play this game, download that ring tone, whatever). I think this is just another aspect of what we're seeing in the financial sector: screw the customer for every nickel and dime. Check charges, interest charges, charges to you phone from out of the blue. For all the damage these people have done to us through their elimination of laws and restraints, they still seem to own the Congress and get what they want from their (not our) state and national elected representatives.

You do go on.

Yeah, but this is ridiculous. Three different outfits charge me forty dollars through my mobile phone, people I've never heard of before? And this is OK? T-Mobile and the rest must be getting their collective asses kicked by irate customers.

OK, but are we finished with our upset?

With the credit they've just given me against my bill I won't be sending them money for months. And they were very very nice and very very careful in talking with me, which was very very politic of them given the situation. May you live in interesting time. To the power of ten, I'm thinking. Here in Oakland.

Later still. It's still only late morning and I have no idea if I'll head for the Filmore Jazz Festival later this afternoon. I mentioned I bought a bottle of sake last night and it's still sitting unopened on the kitchen counter. I ate some of the cheese (one was reasonable, as expected, the other took some “getting used to” - I guess I don't have much of a cheese palate) on some of the crackers and got to bed at a reasonable hour. Again, feeling better than I have in some many months. Maybe, instead of a jazz festival, I'll putter around the apartment. The bedroom could use a little work. More than a little work. Take another portrait or two, use the lights I've still got set up in the living room. Do what comes to mind, extend this feeling good business. And maybe stop writing so much.