Another week of class in San Francisco starting Monday. Windows XP this time. Large companies don't go to the latest Windows offering until Microsoft puts a gun to their head and suggests they write the check. Millions a year to Microsoft. Microsoft shareholders have little problem with this and, if truth be said, it does provide a continuing need for idiots like me. Deedle-dee-dee. Here in Oakland.

You really do need to stop this repetitious “here in Oakland” shit.

In a perfect world everyone would live in Oakland and have Jerry Brown for a mayor.

Some people may take you seriously.

Some people take everything seriously; a poor choice, I might add, in a universe made of quarks and clowns. But I digress.

The photograph at the top is one of a series I've been shooting every day when I get home from work. The first few made me wonder if I were looking at someone I might find some early morning lying in the street on my way to breakfast. The eyes look wasted, more so in some of the others, but wasted, none the less; the mouth is turned down in a perpetual frown; and there are lots of wrinkles (a condition shared, it turns out, by many my age); and not much intelligence in the brow. Wow. So that's what people see. Odd looks on the faces of passing strangers now make more sense.

Still, looking over the first half dozen or so images last weekend, I began to warm to the idea. The Photographing People instructor mentioned she spent two years of her life shooting self portraits (or was it the Beginning Photography instructor?). Self portraits are evidently a common ailment among photographers, nothing that should cause any concern. Of course, in a sense, all photographs are self portraits. Who, after all, decided to take the picture? Who made the selection that went up on the wall or was posted to a journal? So I'm extending this class assignment to shoot a daily self portrait from a week to a month, not unlike what I said when I started the journal: “I'll try it for a month and see” (deedle-dee-dee).