Sunday. Up without the alarm well after six, the day starting clear and bright, the temperatures projected to hit unpleasant highs. A walk (the car battery still dead) to breakfast and back, one or two pictures, but nothing to get too excited about. Another early morning begins, people walking, running and cycling the lake alone, with others and a few with dog or two in tow. Lots of folks walk their dogs on a Lake Merritt morning, yes they do.

I have to admit I'm no longer thinking of heading over to San Francisco to see what the Fillmore Jazz Festival is about. Maybe a bus and a walk to Jack London Square to see what's happening there, maybe remain here, hard to say. I got out briefly last night for a run to the local Seven Eleven look alike to buy what turned out to be a small package of pecans. Why pecans I have no idea. They turned out to have some kind of vaguely sugar-like coating, but there weren't all that many in the package and I'm not particularly avoiding sugar. Oh, and a bit of Jack Daniels to grease the wheels. Not a lot, but a compromise that allowed me to skip a sushi-sake run.

Still, last evening was spent wondering what I might do after finishing guitar practice, after rambling on aimlessly here, after having taken a flat and tasteless picture or two. Well, flat. We never get to the point they're tasteless, mostly because I have no idea what “tasteless” has to do with photographs, although I suspect you get the drift.

So it's nine-thirty in the morning and I'm sitting here beside an open balcony glass door, the fan set on low blowing a breeze up from the floor. Nice. Feels nice. Any urging to do this or to do that, with no idea of this or that, has yet to arrive. But we'll see, we'll see.

Later. I'm sure the exercise at least is good, a bus ride downtown to have a latte (this time) out in front of Peet's, a walk then about half the way back before catching a bus at Grand, taking a picture of a fellow taking a picture, nothing wonderful, but worth tripping the shutter. Otherwise the day has begun as most of my days begin although I've been going through a period at the moment where I'm wrestling with it.

A passing phase, a moment's indigestion, a time to shift gears, maybe actually start to do things I've had on my list since the beginnings of time. I thought to stay on the bus and get off at the supermarket, buying the usual cheese, crackers and sake for the evening ahead, but decided we'll do sushi and sake down the street if that's still my mood come evening. It is, after all, a holiday weekend.

I'm thinking two drinks in an evening is fine (little prissy passing neurotic thoughts that seem to end up here as often as not) but probably not every evening as I lately seem to be doing. But we'll see, we'll see. When I was younger I'd have a drink or five when I was out with similarly inclined friends, otherwise not. The adjustments of age. Geezer talk. I'd have been extremely embarrassed to have been talking such stuff back when.

And not now?

It's a daily journal, every day, it's fated to be full of piddly little conceits. We'll survive unless we learn we won't. There are worse things to become obsessed about.

Later still. Before I forget, the cousin's son has been messing around down south with some of his fellow travellers and putting it on You Tube: There's A Dead Body In The Trunk Of Our Car 1 and There's A Dead Body In The Trunk Of Our Car 2 the latest attempts. I can remember watching one of the local comedy groups one afternoon as they sat around a table writing their stuff in the early seventies, what wouldn't they have given for a mechanism like You Tube to experiment? Some jealousy I'd think.

A good guitar session, by the way. Not sure I sound any better after a couple of hours, but we've gone through the lesson many times, the fingertips are slightly purple and scored with indentations made by the metal strings. I suspect we're making progress. (hup, hup)

Evening The day is ending better than some I've had recently. Back from sushi and sake now at the usual place, while walking back to the apartment thinking maybe get in a few more of those swell barre chords, just enough to help me in remembering their names and their locations. The same problem when I started with open chords, all of which I can now play given their name. But it took time and it will take time again.

It's been up into the low eighties today, warmer than I like, but not warm enough yet to complain. We are on the edge of too warm for an old man with Viking stock. I'd puff out my chest and suck in the stomach, but my Viking line quite understandably fled to warmer climates when they were given the chance. Thank you grandfather and mother on my mother's side, thank you great, great, great grandfather and mother on my father's side, for taking the chance. Things were more than dicey in the old countries when they left.

And so?

And so we watch our Korean historical soap this evening at ten, get to bed at eleven and then start all over again.