A decent breakfast reading the papers, the local Tribune describing the course the Oakland Marathon will take this coming weekend, a portion of which snakes around Lake Merritt. An opportunity for photographs. Something to think about. How to photograph it? For me, interesting stuff. Nice to have something photogenic coming down the street now and again, at my end of the neighborhood.

Mr. D, a college artist coconspirator who contributed much to the old Seagull magazine done in the early sixties, has extracted my commitment to write a monologue on the magazine and its times that he will produce in a small folio edition, part of a series he's been publishing now as a hobby since he retired. I keep an online journal, he maintains an old letterpress shop and, from time to time, publishes off the wall screeds he finds of interest.

This will require me to write something tight, well thought out and edited. Something I haven't done in years. I've made some preliminary notes, considered an idea or two, but I will need to actually sit down pretty soon and actually write it. None of this last minute deadline crap. Nothing overly long, nothing to fret about, but something that needs to be ‘real world’ done against an actual deadline as opposed to, say, these daily scribbles. I can do it, but (not unlike real writers) I'll procrastinate. But maybe not much.

I guess I bring this up because - I've repeatedly described this fuzzy “bubble headed” feeling, have I not? - lately it's taken me longer and then longer to write and edit these entries. Some days are easy - this one is going smoothly - but some days I get bogged down and extracting some level of coherence takes not only more work, but work done when the head is clear and I can read with perspective, it's not something that can be done in a “bubble”.

Is this my slide into darkness? No, I'm not worried about that yet, plenty of time for it in the future, but yesterday's entry was difficult in the sense I had to let it lie last night until morning for one last edit before posting. Well, I posted it last night, but I revised one of the paragraphs this morning. You don't have to change much, but one wrong word, one just off the mark word, throws meaning and rhythm off kilter and will ruin a paragraph. Nothing worse than a ruined paragraph.

So a piece on the old Seagull from long ago, a reminiscence written almost fifty years later, will be coming this spring for release, I suspect, in late summer. We'll see what's possible, here in Oakland.

Later. A bus ride thinking I'd pick up a couple of needed items at Rite Aid, Rite Aid out of stock as it turned out, a walk back then to the apartment after an espresso chocolate something and a small cup of coffee in the Rotunda building. I think the weight has found its bottom, found its floor, and the occasional chocolate whatever reminds me why I don't miss them anymore. The taste buds? Some different way of looking at things than I did in the past? Who knows, who cares?

I made it a point to pass the wooden soldier next to the Lakeside Park sign on my way back. A silly little conceit, not unlike my tracking of gas prices at the gas station across from my morning breakfast place, but something to do with a camera, a reason to get out on the street. In approaching I wondered if the figure hadn't been bent back against the sign, as if someone had been messing with it. I haven't tested to see how well it's anchored, how hard it might be to break it loose and walk off with it.

As I got closer, I saw the large, what looks to be a Christmas tree ornament made for a very large tree, something you'd see in the middle of the Oakland City Center or New York's Rockefeller Center during the holidays, sitting beside it. My, my. Where did it come from? So a picture, something to compare to yesterday's picture. As you can see the excitement never ends here in Oakland! Mysteries before noon!

My eye wasn't particularly wonderful while walking. The camera over the shoulder rather than held in the hand. I passed a work crew scraping some four inches of blacktop off Harrison, evidently repairing the exit that feeds into Grand. I took a picture of the track laying scraper as it fed its scrapings into a truck, a regular old picture that shows what I'm talking about, but nothing you'd post at your local amateur artist's show at an EgoLand Bar and Restaurant.

Something that goes through the mind, not a productive set of thoughts. If you're ambling down the street or if you're walking ever faster with the camera over a shoulder, it doesn't matter. Shoot the damned picture, don't think about it. Nice to get a better angle, I thought maybe framing the shot with tree branches might help, but if that's as far as you're willing to go then just go with it.

The picture of grass sprinkled with spring flowers (flowering weeds, I would think, weeds maybe you'd not like to see in your own lawn): take it, don't worry about aesthetics, enjoy the moment, you shouldn't have to remind yourself. What are you thinking? Always time for a more artsy-fartsy rendition when we're in artsy-fartsy mode. And we often find ourselves in an artsy-fartsy mode (click! click!), do we not? Seems to go with the territory unfortunately, and it's not quite the thought I wanted to end this on.

As in needs more editing?

Pruning, editing. A long list, I'm afraid, head in a bubble.