Only a wuss goes on and on about his aches and pains and things in public.

True, but we live in a strange world where little is as they seem. A local governing city board here has recently refused to set limits on diesel exhaust particulates emitted by trucks waiting to pick up cargo at the port facility, even though it is agreed that recent studies have found the lives of local residents are shortened by an average of ten years from breathing the particulates emitted by those trucks. (The truck drivers don't fare very well in these studies either.) Is it because the local residents are poor, many of color who don't show up to vote in any number and therefore don't count?

You're becoming a damned environmentalist!

I guess I am in my own environment. I don't understand these decisions, particularly when my lungs appear to be involved.

Later. The street fair was crowded with lots of canvas covered kiosks selling this and pushing that, lots of tables to sit down and eat whatever people were selling; not so many pictures, but a good walk about with a trip back on a bus to the downtown for a hot dog and lemonade sitting at a table in the City Center. Hard to explain, but all of this seems to have worked out.

I realize I need to just find a likely place at one of these street fairs and wait, looking for the one or two pictures that might show up. I spent the time walking, always walking, and although this works at a parade that's forming up, I'm not sure it works here. A photograph that almost worked, perhaps if I'd stayed around longer waiting for the right pose, the right expression. I don't know if the lady is one of the sellers at the kiosk or a potential buyer with exactly the right attitude and dress to pull one of those rat tail boa things off. The subject can get nervous when some old camera toting fart is obviously watching from a distance, I'm not advocating that. Well, I'm advocating that, but without the subject realizing I'm there. One must maintain a certain surface of civility when one is out shooting inherently uncivil pictures in public.

Inherently uncivil?

Well, right on the edge. I leave it to those who view them to decide. This is not paparazzi work, shooting fame for fame and money's sake, but it's right there in the ballpark. I don't really expect to figure it out if I haven't figured it out by now.

I guess that's the crux of the question. I do go out and take pictures more often than not and this would normally be considered a proper attitude to the craft, but I know not so deep down I'm slacking off. Waiting for that one picture, for example, will I ever do it? Consistently do it? Half of my behavior these last years has been to get me out on the street, get some exercise in my declining years (or before my declining years begin - maybe inject a few more good years before the declining process really starts). I'd like to “get serious” one day about this photography stuff, but I've been a light weight, a dilettante, more a buyer of equipment than a producer of photographs. And then I have a good day and I say exactly the opposite. Life, in other words, and camera Art (in Oakland).