This was an easy way to have the car washed in Berkeley on the way home, no more avoiding the task (having someone wash your car is a task?), here now at the apartment just after ten to edit before posting yesterday's entry. It still needs more work, of course, but coherence and lack of rhythm aren't everything. Except in writing.

Hi, ho.

Hi, ho.

Later. A bus to the Tribune offices, where I picked up a flier on their “classes”, discovering later, when I got home and read the thing, it described a Twitter class for sports fans. Oh. Well, there's an email address, I suspect if I ask they'll let me know if the class I was wanting - how and where to track down and request data from the city and the state governments - is still being offered.

Silly you.

Silly me. Are you surprised I said I'd do it and then actually went out and did it?

Speechless actually.

A walk on from the Tribune up Broadway and over to Lake Merritt on Grand, passing two pelicans and three cormorants preening and drying their feathers in the sun. Two pelicans.

I remember seeing my first pelican up the coast near Jenner in 1969 - 1970 when they were beginning to come back after the banning of DDT had stopped the thinning of their egg shells and allowed their eggs to again hatch and their chicks to survive. An unexpected thrill, just one lone pelican flying high above the sea, a ghost come back from the past. And here now are two of them sunning themselves after a morning diving for whatever it is they eat in all that less than wholesome looking estuary called a lake.

The bus then on to my morning café for a grilled cheese sandwich, strawberry ice cream and coffee. I suspect you may have figured out my eating habits and haunts by now on any given day in the week. Routine? Rut? I would think. A fellow needs routine in his life, but it is a rut and not a ditch.

Walking back home I passed a small group of Lakeview school protesters who'd set up tables again in Splash Pad Park, the police still sitting across the street blocking any entrance to the school. Who knows how this will end? Well, actually I suspect we do, it has ended, not with a bang but a whimper and a lock on the parking lot.

Back now, still cruising along, the attitude good, still messing with the Fates by saying it out loud. It's warm out there now, too warm to be wearing more than a t-shirt and they're saying tomorrow, without the morning overcast, will be even hotter. My, my. Maybe we'll be suffering the weather the rest of the country has been suffering for so long. Nah. What am I saying? Not the left coast. We're much too cool for that kind of heat.

They're saying eighty-seven tomorrow, not one hundred and seven or (hard to imagine) a hundred and seventeen. Bite your tongue.

That was a trick I avoided when eating that grilled cheese sandwich.

Evening. Back from sushi and sake down the hill. Tasted somehow better, different, more wholesome than it has in the recent past. I'm wondering if that's a sign it's been my system causing all the problems rather than specific foods and alcohol. We'll know the result of this dinner soon enough. By tomorrow afternoon at the latest, I'd guess. I still believe these ocular migraines are well on their way to leaving and that I'm not doomed to a life without an occasional splurge on sushi and sake on a summer evening.

I watched another Maigret at six while playing along on the guitar. We'll need more time on the guitar if we're to make our time today, keep the fingertips popping, the callouses in shape.

This begins to sound like the sake talking.

We'll start to have suspicions, if suspicions are to be had, about my rationalizations for having sushi and sake soon enough. Spicy mussels and sake together will usually signal their displeasure by about nine, if they're to have an effect, and it's now close to eight.