Mr. Jimmy pushes the ice in his whiskey with his finger, watching it turn round and round in the glass, seemingly thinking about the Indians and the brother and the short pour he's received from the girl behind the bar. He is not above creating a little drama when it suits him and I am a captive audience.

That was last night, Friday, running on empty, and this is today after breakfast with the sun shining and the air crisp and clear. Time, maybe, to get back to reality and the wider world.

Damiana's review of my journal has been posted on Diarist.net and she has been very kind in her comments and in the quote she chose from March 12th. I think some of the photographs I take are OK, but I don't think of myself as a photographer of any unusual talent or skill. I can spot a photograph occasionally and I can frame it and shoot it properly if I'm thinking, but I'm not thinking much of the time and in a world with real photographers resident, I'm still a kid in a Red Ryder wagon, sucking on a popsicle. But it's a nice review, thank you, and I'll sit here and drink some more of this whiskey from Scotland and make a toast to my health. If I had any whiskey from Scotland. Or toast. Or health.

Today I have already arisen, bathed, dressed, taken breakfast at the cafe I like in Berkeley, written the beginning of this missive, bought two bottles of god awful expensive Scotch Whiskey recommended by Mr. Post (who is an adept in such matters) and gone to a computer show. I was going to skip the show and just buy the SCSI cable I needed for my scanner at CompUSA, but I discovered they wanted $60 for the damned thing so I decided it was worth it to drive downtown. I bought three cables and would have bought four, but the last one was grabbed by a woman lugging a basket full of cables that were spilling out into the isle, obviously buying them for resale at $60 a pop and a smile. (Believe me, if you were she, you'd smile too.)

Time now to shut the computer down and set up the scanner. With any luck I'll get it to work. If there's a paragraph following this, well, then we'll know.

Ugly. It hiccupped, said it had discovered a plug and play compliant peripheral, assigned a SCSI address on the fly and booted. Those of you not familiar with SCSI chains on the PC (Macintosh people are allowed to laugh at this point, but once. You get one laugh, you understand?) should know that making a SCSI device work can be hell. Drivers are the problem, mostly, but there are other things, ugly things, hidden things I don't even want to talk about.

The book cover is a test scan of a book by Eve Babitz. Not such a hot cover, maybe, but a great book by an author who could have her way with me any time she might want. I'd even go to L.A., but that's another story for another journal kept by a different man at another time in a different cell.