Up with the alarm, to breakfast and back at the usual time and at the usual place to sit now at the computer wondering what I was thinking when I wrote yesterday's entry. Hepatitis C? I read a story in the paper and suddenly I'm thinking about Hepatitis C? Well, briefly, but why Hepatitis C when there are so many other immanent and very real dangers out there waiting to show their faces? Asteroids that have been hidden from sight for billions of years, deciding to strike just when I've reached my majority (plus a few decades); Ninja warriors hired by Eastern European thugs to come to California and kidnap old muttering photographers for their politically incorrect pictures; Sherlockians upset with my earlier comments.

Please stop.

You should see what I'd written earlier and replaced it with this.

Later. A drive over to the Honda dealer to have the car smog checked and, while it was being checked, to finally have that follow up Protime test I've neglected for the last week. I've been more than a little confused lately in small interactions. Last night I picked up a small pizza for dinner, becoming confused while making the payment. Just now forgetting “smog” test, calling it a DMV exhaust test and confusing the mechanic. Little things: drifting off into my own thoughts instead of focusing my attention, forgetting words (“smog”, after all) that get lost just when you want them.

I did spend four years writing every day in the 70's and that too tended to put me in a kind of scattered dream state, but writing this, although it takes time, is not the same kind of writing. I'm just, you know, letting it come out, not a lot of editing, not a lot of angst over this phrase or that, using adjectives in places where I'd have never used an adjective in the past. So I can't blame it on that.

Is this another old age rant?

Maybe, I've said this before, but more an observation, one that makes me wonder if I'm even close to the truth. I'm happy with this solitary life I'm living, but we can, from experience, kid our little self. Just sayin’. You know. Writing whatever comes.

And the car?

Still in the shop. The mechanic admitted the smog guy hadn't come in yet when I returned from the lab, so he'll call later in the day when it's done. Maybe three hours later in the day. Fine. A good excuse for a walk back to the apartment returning later to pick it up. We'll see. A somewhat rare break in the routine. We might find something different and useful to do in it. With it. Hup.

Later still. A walk down to the morning restaurant along the lake, my usual course, discovering the first goslings of the season. Seven of them (there's one hidden behind the goose on the left), their parents giving me the eye at the tail end of a browsing the grass gaggle of some thirty geese. I wish them well, bite size as they are for predators. It's probably genetic, you look at them, even as an old male without children, and think of ways to keep them from being eaten by hawks, a fox or the odd male teenage human.

Lunch outside at a patio table receiving a call from the Honda dealer saying the car was ready. A bus from the restaurant to Broadway and then a walk to the dealership remembering why it's best to go by one of the quickie smog shops and spend forty dollars rather than so many more dollars at the dealer's. Same with the ongoing maintenance, of course, more expensive, except I made that particular choice when I bought it and don't think about it anymore.

Evening. I went to bed at nine-thirty and then remembered there was an hour's interview with Paul Krugman on PBS at ten. So I listened to the interview before dropping off to sleep after eleven. Still, Krugman is a favorite, mirroring as he does most everything I believe I learned and thought rational studying economics in college back at a time when Keynesian economics wasn't so controversial and you could discuss it without lighting a fire. He's getting better as he repeats his speal on the road, promoting his book End This Depression Now.

That does seem to get you excited.

Depressingly so. I've lived through some of our past “recessions”, in the seventies after the war and in the early eighties, seen what they can do to derail lives in ways that leave real scars. I was affected, but not to the degree of others who had families to support, children to raise, people who had the burdens and responsibilities of most real folks. But do I go interminably on with this, best to stop.