What brought that on?

I don't know.

Back from breakfast before nine, the sky clear, the sun bright, the air cool for another couple of hours before it gets up into what they're saying will be the seventies. I keep forgetting we can get seventy degree temperatures well into the winter. Silly thing to forget that I'd blame on age if it weren't for all those years I spent as a youngster being similarly surprised.

Some pictures walking back, of course, nothing to write home about (although I seem to be writing from home about it), but pictures I felt the need to take, none the less. They seem to be making progress on the road, some progress on the work around the lake. All to the good, I guess, our tax dollars on the march. It's good to see your tax dollars on the march.

Those pictures look like the pictures you took yesterday and the day before going back now how many weeks? You sure you're not just tripping the shutter in another of your ruts?

I'm aware. I'm making progress, even if it looks like I'm stuck. There is a certain excitement sparking and spitting under the hood. Remember Minerva: change will be revealed in twenty-ten? Rut breaking change for the better? In another two months?

Pax vobiscum. Little else can be said.

Not even a thought to attend the Dia de los Muertos event in San Francisco last night. I remember looking at the clock and noticing it was after seven, the parade having started. Still the reticence on my part to get out of the apartment at night, a reticence I definitely ascribe to aging and maybe this sinus-head thing, with or without the bubble I interminably talk about. Still. A little more gumption on my part. Keep the head clear, there are places you don't want to find yourself alone at night, but the world is still out there, even if you're hunkered here inside.

Isn't the big deal about that camera you ordered is it takes better pictures at night?

Later. Talking myself out the door and onto the bus was a struggle, let me tell you, arriving in the downtown to sit out at Peet's on the old APL building patio and have another of an unending line of introspective conversations with myself. Why am I sitting in downtown Oakland at Peet's? Where else might I like to be sitting? What else is there (in this world) to keep me occupied? One of these web site ideas I've acquired a name for and then put aside? You can submerge yourself in a project like that, but at my age? With the brain cells flaking away like some kind of memory dandruff year after passing year? Don't people just sit out on the porch at some point and watch, contentedly, the people pass by? With a long lens camera on their lap?

A brief walk then around the Old Oakland area and another bus back, the attitude suddenly better as I got off the bus and smelled the air, still not too warm, not too humid. It seems to be holding, this attitude, and I'm seeing what seem to be intriguing things I want to pursue as I sit. This is good. These same “intriguing things” drew a blank two hours ago sitting out on that patio. Maybe there's no way to avoid these “what do I do now” episodes, probably has to do with chemistry, not enough coffee the one morning, too much the next.

You were sitting out at Peet's.

A medium iced coffee to make up for the second cup I skipped at breakfast along with a thin one half dipped in chocolate cookie of some kind. We are winging (whinging) it here, playing by ear, no need to take it seriously. This is but a walk near the edge in this sliding into depression business, I'm nowhere even close enough to glance into that particular abyss. You wonder if you're the sort to sink into depression, whether you're in one or not, until you meet someone in the throws of a real depression and then you know stone cold whatever it is you've got, depression, real depression, it is not. It's just, you know, what do I do now? for a couple of hours and then up pops an opportunity to take another picture and, well, the day evolves in a totally different direction.