You'll notice the gas prices have gone up again at the local station across from my breakfast place. Is it because the economy is picking up, demand increasing, vacation driving kicking in? It's easy to track pricing, since I have breakfast there most every morning, and it's easy to take a photograph. Yes, I believe the price of a barrel of oil has been increasing these last several months, but I have a rock steady internal conviction pricing isn't being manipulated by supply and demand. Not in California. Not in the world. Too many oil companies with too many resources have had more than enough time to fix the pricing system over the decades without the world (certainly the political world) paying attention. It's too much in their interest to take the money and not look around.

Now I could be wrong, but how would I know? The banking business is obviously in control in Washington, it's too amazingly blatant to avoid the obvious, and there's no reason to believe the oil companies and related sheikdoms don't have similar control of the oil end of the energy market. But what can you do? I'd like to be proven wrong, but what sources of information would any of us trust? Who in a country who's elected representatives need their money to remain in power would call their bluff? Newspapers? Television? The web? It's not hard to see how empires fall. I guess the people in a “democracy” just give up, become numb. They have other problems on their plates and don't seem to notice or care as their pockets are picked and the world is falling apart.

Are you finished?

I don't wonder at these transgressions so much as the apathy I see around me. And, quite honestly, it's not even that: “the apathy around me”. “The apathy within me” is what makes me wince. If I truly suspect, if I truly believe any of this, what am I doing about it? Nothing from what I can tell. I'm retired. I know how to track information down. Who out there is doing something, looking around? I don't know and probably won't even try to find out. It's the “why am I not” in me I'd like to know about.

Later. I managed somewhat over an hour at the How Weird Faire early this afternoon. Not bad. Not many pictures, but one or two I like. Enough to add a page to the How Weird Street Faire section of artandlife (since I had some left over from 2008) We're not back in good form yet, but good exercise today that leads, one hopes, to better outings coming up.

Not at all hungry when I was there, the stomach or the esophagus, one of them, feeling pretty acid. Acid from whatever I had for breakfast? Hard to say, but I might have stayed longer if I could have sat in Kate O'Brien's for half an hour over a Guinness. Guinness, I've discovered, doesn't sit well with an acid stomach. The Weird Faire itself I thought smaller than last year's, the area blocked off smaller, the crowd not as large, but that could have been the time of day. Who knows how many people there are getting rowdy as I write?