So why the hesitation, why not wait for the next bus? I guess I was more tired than anything else. I went to bed last night just after nine, got to sleep before ten, didn't get up this morning until nine. Ten hours? I'd say, deducting time here and there for tossing and turning and getting up to take a leak. The usual stuff. I realized I've noted days like yesterday in the recent past, writing them off to older age. Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep. We'll see. The morning has started slowly, going to breakfast, reading the papers, home now at eleven. I put off posting yesterday's journal entry until this morning, feeling it needed one last edit with a clearer, less tired head.

So it's Friday, quite cool outside, the sky overcast as the weather people forecast. Sun coming tomorrow and through the weekend. I suspect we'll see it this afternoon. So good, the weather is OK, we're relatively coherent, the head coming around. Something different, I think, even if it's only different in the sense I haven't done it for a month. Go down to Jack London Square, park, see what's up, buy that sake I talked about buying yesterday, make a run to a supermarket I haven't shopped at for a while. You know, excitement, shake up the day, pull the hat brim down low over the right eye, create a little danger on the sidewalk.

You really sure you got enough sleep last night?

I'm sure of little or anything anymore, Self. They say it's an aspect of enlightenment, losing your certainty. I'm more on the deteriorating brain side of the argument. Enlightenment is a concept best suited to the young as I look back on this life.

What did you mean by that?

I have no damned idea. “For the young?” Why, I have no idea why I said that.

“There is no truth, all things are lies.”

What I took from my EST training. All things. Including the statement.

Later. A bus downtown to sit out on the patio in front of Peet's with a cup of coffee and a bar of chocolate. Comfort food? If you only talk about the chocolate. Why I drink the coffee I don't know. So much for going somewhere I haven't been for a while, although the walk back turned out well for photographs. A picture of a fellow out on the patio at Peet's, an example of someone who has thin, but straight of of his head bushy hair. Not quite like mine, his is again a little thin with a great deal more grey gone to white than mine. Now what's my impression on seeing this guy? I'm not sure. A bit crazy but competent? Is this where I'm going? I don't think so. This may well go on for some time.

I could hear music in the distance wondering if they'd booked a band in the City Center for the noon hour, Wednesdays their usual days for bands. A walk then through the City Center to the City Hall where I found a concert of some kind in progress. Not a large number of people present, although I've run into and photographed the the Soul Line Dancers before. I took some pictures, walked here and there, took some more pictures, listened to the 300 pound guy on the Fender Stratocaster play. Not good to be a three hundred pound guitar man, better to be, say, a two hundred pound guitar man is my thought, but then I've just lost a bunch of weight and am prone to snarky thoughts. Not good to give in to snarky thoughts. Such do not a good life make.

A walk then by the Crucible gallery, sticking my head inside to take a number of photographs. Again, I like what this group is doing in Oakland. Basically, from what I can see, metal art. Blow torches and such. Maybe because it's new to me, but I've enjoyed an number of the pieces and taken more than a few photographs.

Passed this little truck on the way out and then down Broadway. Part of the marijuana legalization movement, although it's owned by a local what I would have called a head shop in the sixties and seventies and what they call a marijuana gift shop today. I've been to the shop recently, took a couple of pictures. No Freak Brothers comix for sale, just, you know, pipes and clever t-shirts and such.

A stop by the fountain near the Cathedral of Christ the Light church at Grand and Harrison, a picture or two I think turned out better than I had any hope they might. Hard to go to a place where you've shot a bunch of pictures and then come up with something you think both good and a bit different. I was starting to feel tired by about then, but the eye was working and the mood was good.

Back then taking the occasional picture here and the occasional picture there. This flower called out to me as I passed. Hard to make a picture of a flower work when you've taken so many pictures of them over time, but the color was nice. That is a picture of Muammar al-Gaddafi, I think. Not sure why a picture of Muammar al-Gaddafi is showing up on the side of a phone booth near my apartment, but the neighborhood, let alone the world, is a curious place.

So good. Photographs taken of interest. That doesn't happen every day. I think I'll plink away more on that guitar now, I'm in the mood for ever more plinking for some reason.