What was that about?

An upbeat start.

Later. Clearly I have to add my morning walk to the morning set of habits. Generally I'll come home from breakfast, or breakfast and the supermarket as I did this morning (cat food, crackers and Merlot), sit at the computer and enter this particular set of facts (over and over and over) and then head out the door. The “and then head out the door” is like an autoimmune response, it's not a conscious decision but a physical need of some kind originating who knows where, the body just goes, mind ready or not. Oh, I do a certain amount of rationalization starting with “no way” and then rapidly ending with “where's the camera?”, we have to put an I'm in control face on it, but basically that's the story: home, journal, out for a walk.

So today I took the bus downtown thinking “do I go here, do I go there” as if I had some choice in the matter. I sat at a table at the City Center for a bit, got up, took the same picture I took yesterday without adding anything more to the mix; took the elevator down to the BART entrance where I bought a small packet of M & M's (I can still eat chocolate with some enthusiasm) before walking then back to the apartment; stopping to see the new Crucible exhibition at Broadway and Telegraph; snapping another picture as I passed the church at Harrison and Grand; buying a wedge of Swiss cheese at Whole Foods (something a little different in my usual route) and taking a picture of a cherry tree in blossom. My, my. Ambling to the point even I'm willing to say it might have qualified as exercise.

The Swiss cheese, by the way, was tasteless. Now, is it the cheese or is it something to do with my palate? I think the cheese. My suspicion is they don't sell decent cheese because it costs too much, even at Whole Foods Market, as I can remember when Swiss cheese had a distinctive flavor and these flavorless chesses appeared long before any of this weight loss or stomach business started. But I digress.

I'm meeting some of the usual crew this evening in the city to discuss a dinner party coming up at the end of next week. Something about my bringing a decent bottle of Scotch in lieu of bringing a dish since no one has any confidence in my cooking. Well, none of them have ever known me at a time when I was into cooking, but that's neither here nor there. I stopped doing anything other than occasionally boiling a little pasta or popping something in a microwave years ago and have no problem with bringing a decent bottle of Scotch to a dinner party. But again I digress and then probably not altogether truthfully. The foodies I knew in the Napa wine business really did know how to cook and, although I did my best, I suspect the skills I developed over those years were minimal, no matter the many cooking classes and all that high end cookware.

Later still. A nap and now it's four. I'll miss my Korean soap, of course, but who cares? They're up to something like episode one hundred and fifty, but the outcome is obvious, has probably been obvious since episode ten. Not that I was watching it at episode ten. Getting into one of these is a bit like skipping a stone over water. You turn to the station and notice there's a new one starting. You watch for five minutes and think, this is ridiculous, no one would watch something so stupid, so you change to another channel.

And then, on another day you go to the channel again and watch another five minutes, remembering whatever it was that drove you away and change the channel again. And again you turn to the station, this time it's episode twenty-two, you've only seen brief periods of two episodes, and again you watch, but this time for ten minutes before throwing up your hands (or your dinner), but the hook has been set. By episode fifty they've got you engaged and there's still another hundred chapters to run, five a week, every week, for twenty more weeks before you're done. It's turning to that channel the first time that you've got to avoid, don't do it again, OK? We're hip to it now, they'll never hook us again, OK? OK?