Seem About Right
Saturday. I walked rather than took the bus downtown, had a Chicken Caesar salad at a Quizno's in the City Center. I don't know if you have a Quizno's where you are, but think Subway, think submarine sandwich, think, in this case, not a bad Chicken Caesar salad. This gives you some sense of what is available for lunch in Oakland. Well, actually it doesn't. There are better places around, it gives you an idea of where my penurious palate is at on a Saturday noon in Oakland, camera in tow, walking. I then walked a different route back to the apartment. Three, maybe four miles. Feet felt pretty good, sitting here trying to make yesterday's "let's not invade Iraq" rap coherent, then I got up and "ouch!" Life as a series of foot vignettes. My foots. I really really gotta get to that podiatrist before they take the prostate. Get whatever it is they recommend before I'm locked up here to hobble around.
I rented two movies this evening, Taboo, a Japanese movie that starts in a dojo, young men practicing with wooden swords, a Cannes Film Festival winner of some kind. With a title like that I was hopeful. Sex and the Samurai code. Then the VCR quit. I've had it for a long time, this VCR, and I think it has died, just as the FM tuner died last week leaving me to listen to public radio over the Internet. It's playing now through my computer. Lo fi. The occasional buffer under run silence.
So, as I said, I'm sitting here with my two movies, one of which is hiccupping instead of playing, hiccuping instead of playing, and I am thinking, well, maybe it's time to get another VCR. And maybe it's time to get that Sony TV set so I can hook up the DVD player I bought a year ago, sitting: unused, unplayed. I think I'll buy one tomorrow. A TV set and maybe another VCR. For my recovery, you understand, when I'm sitting here. Writing entries. Recuperating. Watching movies. Why does this seem so, um, banal? Empty words, empty head? Television sets and VCR's? Then again, maybe therein lies the key, somewhere among the TV sets and Jeeps, auto zooms and radios, the key to writing this instead of, instead of....
Three drinks this evening. Three drinks seem about right.
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