Later, after noon. A walk down to the post office to mail my ballot for tomorrow's election. California has a broken budget mechanism, broken since I can remember, but it's come to complete deadlock with the financial crisis. There are six propositions on the ballot, five of them band aids to kick the problem down the road for someone else to resolve plus a proposition to limit pay raises for elected officials during a period such this. And I've been conflicted on which way I should vote. One side of me says they've completely screwed this up and their ballot fixes are all bad solutions to a problem that needs a complete overhaul to the system (so why encourage them?) and the other side says, yes, but there are a hell of a lot of people who are going to lose jobs, medical aid, financial aid - men, women and children - if I vote no. Conflicted or not, the check - excuse me - the ballot is in the mail.

A decent day, by the way, the sun out with the temperature just fine. T-shirt weather. Yesterday, for all their dire prognostications, stayed pretty much in line, so no complaints from Complainerville, here in Oakland. A couple of pictures along the way, nothing spectacular (how often is anything “spectacular”?) but giving a sense of how others are treating this first day of the week.

Why the defensive “nothing spectacular”? Are you ashamed of them?

I'm aware if I'm going to explore other photographic areas, I'm going to have to take a lot of less than wonderful pictures before I can sort out the head mechanism that's looking to see how it wants to put them together. It took me years to recognize and get my obsession with street portraits in gear.

Street portraits primarily of attractive women.

For some things no apology is required. There are many societal black holes I could have been genetically programmed to fall into, thank my lucky stars for mine. Diddle-dee-dine. And they're not bad pictures, the ones I'm experimenting with now, there are just, you know, a lot of things I might have done to get better results. Or worse results. You shoot, you learn, you go out and you shoot again.

Later still. Four in the afternoon, the day almost done. Drink the last of the sake in the bottle I started last night? Couldn't hurt. Not all that much left and we wouldn't want to go cold turkey in just twenty-four hours now would we?

That might go against you some day in a job interview don't you think?

Life is a gamble, in my case a ten year gamble in keeping an online journal. Hard to turn back now, don't you think?