Monday. I did stay up to watch another chapter of my Korean soap last night. It doesn't really matter if you miss one, you seem to come up to speed easily enough with what's happened in the story line. I complain about some of the “soaps” that play earlier in the evenings as being, well, mindless to the point I'm not sure even small children wouldn't find them ludicrous, yet they run warnings at the beginnings saying they're not appropriate for children under the age of fifteen. I think they've lost touch with their children.

This soap last night isn't particularly realistic in the sense you'd recognize it, say, in one of your next door neighbors - this one's about kings and queens, palace politics and wars where everything is intense and over the top - but it's also a bit grinding in that it's at the same time emotionally realistic in some of its constructs, hits a little harder (I think older age makes you softer about these things) than you might like in a piece of entertainment.

This one is about an historically significant king, his two wives and their courtiers who are going at one another tooth and nail as they're putting the country together. “Dysfunctional” is a much too mild description, more like an emotional high stakes Kung Fu match played out in blood and steel. I mean two wives, after all.

I'm not certain, however, they aren't useful in analyzing how a plot might be constructed. Viewing a story written by and meant for a different culture gives you an outsider's insight to its emotional elements, it's not as well hidden within assumptions you yourself are unaware when you've been submerged from birth in your own difficult to see from the inside culture. They talk about artists being outsiders. A way to be an outsider, perhaps, when you're not quite outsider enough in your own life and experiences. Maybe. I think.

My days of worrying over plot lines are long behind me and maybe this is just a rationalization justifying my continuing interest (flagging now with enlightenment and increasing embarrassment).

But I, of course, digress. To bed at eleven last night, up this morning at a quarter to six, out the door and back from breakfast just before eight feeling clear headed and reasonably coherent. So, less than a proper night's sleep, but feeling as if I did. Nothing about a night's sleep seems predictive anymore of the mornings that follow, other than if you string enough of them together they'll come back and bite you, yes they will.

More work on the How Weird photographs last night, they do take time to process, maybe I'll get those two sections up and done today on artandlife. I still mumble to myself about harsh lighting on bright sunny days, but so do all the other photographers. You still get out there and take pictures.

Maybe there's much more I need to know. Keep to the shadows? Even where there aren't any areas all in shadow? Know more about processing them in Photoshop? But then I always wonder about such and do little to resolve them. I think self honesty lessens guilt. No reason to go through life carrying unnecessary guilt, leads to drinking, bad marriages and DNA matching children.

Later. I have a UPS delivery due later today, none of what's arriving necessary by any stretch of the imagination, but I've long ago given up on sense and my purchases. Still, I want to go out for a walk, don't want to end up staying inside waiting on a delivery that doesn't ultimately arrive until well after six. Which they will do from experience. And if I missed them would it matter? I'll be here when they arrive on hair cut appointment tomorrow. Or guitar lesson Wednesday. No, it wouldn't matter, but I'll stay here a while longer, still saying my life is still my own. Being owned. Stoned. Whatever.

Later still. An hour's nap after a short walk. No sleep really, but a lie down in a nice hazy space while listening to the radio. It seems we've finally killed Osama bin Laden. It's taken us ten years and, if it had taken another ten, I would have still assumed we'd have eventually gotten him. That's what's been on the radio today, anyway, in case you haven't been listening.

I have no idea what the effect on our various foreign adventures will be, but then nor does anyone else. Some of you are young enough you'll be able to know one future day when you read the history books.

Time for the guitar now. Chords against the metronome. Choppy sounding chords, I'm afraid, here in the salt mines of Oakland.