No lingering effects from the sun yesterday, the face a tad pink, but otherwise in good shape. I've a haircut scheduled for tomorrow, have to decide on what to do with this longer hair business. Mr. E suggested it gave me a Leonard Bernstein look, saying this in a favorable way, but my response was I'm not looking for a Leonard Bernstein look. I've got as much ego as anyone, but if long hair is a projection of that - ego, ego, ego! - then that's definitely not what I'm looking to see. As a youngster just starting out, good, shake your rattle, rattle your tail, but for my age, one year away from leaving what researchers define as “middle age”, one year away from when most folks get seriously into various forms of deterioration of the brain that are not so funny anymore, I don't need testosterone hair.

So?

So sometimes, in the mirror, I like how it looks. Others seem to like it as well, although you can never be sure about that. People are polite and they're better at dissembling as they get older. You're supposed to say your friends look good, even when they've left the reservation and wandered off into the swamps. I wash it and it sticks straight out from my head. I look in the mirror we have here in the apartment foyer as I'm returning to the apartment and I'm thinking - good god! - I was out looking like this on the street!?

But there are still things you like about it.

I'll have my barber work it over tomorrow, see if it can't be both long and kept, to some degree, in check. Maybe she isn't used to hacking away at hair of this particular length, half short, half long. In the San Francisco business community in the late sixties, early seventies, there were many of us who wore our hair longer - hippies and all that, showing a certain sympathy for the culture without letting it all hang out - and the barbers and hair stylists knew how to thin and bend and crop to keep us from looking too incongruous in our Brooks Brothers suits. I need some of that old time thinning and bending and cropping. Or I need to forget the whole thing and just let it grow or have it cut. Life is too short to be thinking about such, let alone writing about it.

You're not out of character. Writing about it.

I know damn well it will find a way to come back and bite me one day. With any luck much later, when the brain is well into its slide, and I won't know or care.

Later. I went out the door about the time the sun came out around ten, headed down to the post office to post my mail in ballot for tomorrow's election (at bit late, but they'll get it in time tomorrow), walked farther on down to Noah's Bagels to find all of the outside tables full and so, since I wasn't all that up for coffee anyway, headed on back by the lake, sitting for a while, taking a picture or two. The lady silhouetted in the arch, how to photographer her? The two pictures side by side are worthwhile, but what if I'd done this or done that? Hi, ho. That particular question keeps reappearing.

A walk then farther on to the Coffee With A Beat café where I did have a cup of coffee. A picture of an open door beside The Old Place (a Chinese dim sum restaurant). I liked it and took the picture as I was passing. I doubt that it will win the MOMA picture of the century competition, but it gives an idea of what the streets look like today in Ray CK's territory around here in Oakland. Another picture of a flowering plant (no, I don't know what it is, probably never will) and then another cropping it closer when I noticed the spider webs, most of them in focus. Probably should be even larger. Probably, but the morning is only so long and we have a day to enjoy away from the computer.

What does that mean?

I have no fucking idea, I'm just here for the ride. It wouldn't surprise me if we were all just a gigantic computer simulation, the universe the creation of entities quite different as some physicists have suggested (probably after a bottle or two of sake....). Quite different from what? Quite different from whatever. As I said, there's a day ahead, let's get on with it.

Hup? Hup?

Hup. Hup.

Later still. It's two in the afternoon and I've spent the last two hours reading my various blogs, news sites and such. Just like that. We'll try something different from here on out. The day is bright, by the way, the sky clear, the sun doing what suns do in California near summer. That walk? I don't know. Maybe a run down to Beverages & More, maybe a run to the supermarket, maybe get off this keyboard and shut the machine down before it finishes feeding.

Feeding?

On me, my bucko. On me.