Promotional Poster
Thursday. It was warm yesterday, not as warm as they were projecting as we had some high cloud cover and that kept things to just below ninety degrees here in Oakland. Today they're saying in the high nineties which will undoubtedly cause most of us to hide in the basement where it's cool. Most people near the bay don't have air conditioning as we have days like these in any given year you can count on your fingers.
People are laughing out there. Ninety degrees and you're complaining?
Why of course. This is the end of the rainbow. That's why we came. It will be cooler during the summer and life will again be possible, but for the next couple of days we're having to tough it out.
Cyclones in Burma? Earthquakes in China? And you're complaining about ninety degree weather because you only have a fan to cool you down?
I'm an American. It's my right. Calamities such as these justify adding ice to the whiskey and refrigerating more beer.
What's got you so far off your feed?
Oh, I don't know. Now that I'm retired I can listen to all the interviews of authors flogging their new books on NPR, this morning by the author of Standard Operating Procedure (the book on which the movie was based) and it's a real downer to think how far we've fallen in these last few very short years. The people in our government just crumbled. Nine-eleven just scared them out of their wits and they threw morality and logic out the window. Not everyone feels that way, but most of them don't live around here. But I'll get over it. Maybe it's just a way to start the engine up, get something down on paper (up on the screen) that needs to be deleted once I'm up to temperature and I can begin again.
So, this morning, up early to breakfast at six-thirty, driving then over the way to have an annual eye exam. The eyes dilated now, the screen OK; a little fuzzy, but OK, the temperature outside rising, the forecast saying we'll be up in the nineties, listening to the California budget being discussed on NPR.
Later. It did get hot with a high of ninety-nine here in Oakland. I took a nap this afternoon, awoke later in a wet sweaty t-shirt, thought of ways to duck out on the G.L.B.T.Historical Society opening but tricked myself into the car and ended up driving downtown and getting on BART in time to catch the tail end of the show. It was nicely done, their offices next to Camerawork and the San Francisco Cartoon Art Museum. And an Irish bar I'm familiar with on New Montgomery. There were maybe a dozen of my photographs among the many photographs they had up on display and I was able to meet both of the women in my photograph used for the promotional poster.
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