That sounds depressing.

I'm not in the mood to be depressing or depressed. My mood is getting better, I continue to futz with the apartment - there are open patches of rug here and there - the cameras are charged, even if they spend their lives slung over my shoulder instead of in my hands. My intentions are good. There are those who say intentions aren't good enough, but they're good enough for me, deedle-dee-dee, this day when I've turned my sixty-fourth year, dear-oh-dear.

Man that is old.

Shit, isn't it? My father had been dead eight years at the age of sixty-four. My grandfather had been dead twenty-five years at the age of sixty-four. What was the line in the Beatles tune? “...when I'm sixty-four.” I'd rather think in terms of Neil Young's: “sixty-four and so much more.”

That was “twenty-four and so much more.”

Ah yes and twenty-four seems too young to wish for anymore. Twenty-four is a long time ago, although that was the age at which I graduated from college and entered the army: those last two quarters of college were something of a blur, but those first six months in the Army are still pretty clear. Ft. Benning, Ft. Lewis. I seem to recall my twenty-fifth year in the army was an adventure, maybe sixty-five will mirror something similarly novel. You never know. Here in Oakland. If I'm still here in Oakland.