I noticed when I got home I'd been shooting at ISO 640 (instead of 100), something any photographer with a brain would have noticed. (I was wondering why the shutter speeds seemed high.) Life in a fog. Still, the color looks good, but I'm looking forward to the day after I retire when I have more time to prepare before I stumble out the door looking for pictures.

You're just getting old. And tired. The brain goes, you know, at your age.

Maybe. Interesting to experience the reality of the thing after having intellectually known you slowed down with age and that you not only didn't understand it, you didn't know you didn't understand it. Then again, you can't really know about something (baseball, for example) until you've actually played the game.

Should it have concerned you when you were younger?

Hell, I'm not sure it concerns me now. Life is a movie, you watch the actors on the screen. It just happens that you yourself are the actor at the center of this particular movie and so it remains interesting to watch, although there doesn't seem to be much of a plot (not enough sex, no hair raising car chases along San Francisco streets, no maidens saved, no medals won, nothing more exciting than the occasional sound of a gunshot in the distant Oakland night). You just lean back and eat your popcorn. Makes me want to re-read Plato, his “shadows cast upon a cave wall” conceit. Life but a dream, life but flickering shadows on a wall. Sounds like a movie to me.

Or is it odd to think about it that way, seems rather passive, but, you know, time marches on and stuff happens until it doesn't. We'll deal with “doesn't” when it arrives. For now, pass the popcorn while we ponder: is this a comedy or is this a tragedy and how many of the good parts ended up on the cutting room floor?