Some things recent: I thought Pamie's Bowling For Love entry was pretty good, making me think Pamie may eventually master that exasperating and lonely art. She wonders about life as she approaches her first quarter century. I'd like to say it doesn't get any clearer at fifty, but she didn't ask. I was a good bowler at your age, Pamie, but I wasn't even smart enough to have questions, let alone answers.

Let's see, I mentioned my need to get a new car and renew my driver's license. The license expired on the 8th, as it happens, so I'm late, and I've made another appointment to get the car repaired so it will pass the emissions test and I can run with it until I buy a Jeep later in April. Or May. Or June. I may procrastinate, but that's the plan. A Jeep. Here in Oakland. I feel suburbanized.

It's weird, this interminable prattling. I've felt divorced from anything approaching reality lately, most of my life's transactions passing back and forth through a computer screen. Work is a series of emails and computer operations. Much of what I do at home happens here writing this journal. I get out and shoot pictures, but it's become a routine. Hmmm. I just realized. A person I met at the local cafe down on Grand Avenue is having a show of some sort this evening at his studio which he said was located across from the cafe. Something about projecting cartoons on the side of a building. If I didn't want to go out and see a movie then I wouldn't have wanted to go down by the lake and watch cartoons either, but you see the problem. Even when there's an opportunity to break a routine I either forget about it or I decide it's too much trouble. It's hard to get anything going when you don't go anywhere. The problem with growing older isn't that you don't know the answers to the questions you asked when you were younger, you do know the answers. The problem is getting off your butt and doing something with them.

Self: What exactly does that mean?

It means it's past my bedtime.