Where'd that come from?

How many ways can you say you've had breakfast and your mood is good before, you know, you have to explore innovative alternatives?

I lit up a bunch of votive candles last night, very romantic, just me and my cat. The candles are a little smaller than I was expecting, but they seemed to burn just fine and with two gross of the damned things sitting in the corner I'm not going to run out any time soon.

Last night, reading Spain Rodriguez's graphic novel/book Che, I got to thinking about the pair of glasses I'd lost some time back and hadn't been able to find after pulling the bed away from the wall and the bookcases and thoroughly looking. If they really were lost in the area of the bed, what would be the least likely place I might find them, a place I hadn't checked? Between the bookcase, the wall and an electric heater along the baseboard there's a small space, a hole really, not much larger than the spectacle case itself. Could it be? I carefully put my fingers into the space and found a solid object. My, my. There they were. Glasses found. No complaints.

The foot still aches, by the way, so I'm probably not going to San Francisco this evening to hear Mr. S's band. The toes are better, but I still walk around like Chester in a Gunsmoke episode on TV (does anybody remember Matt Dillon, let alone Chester?). Chester at least would run (shouting “Marshall Dillon! Marshall Dillon!”), but that aside, the toes will come together one of these days or weeks, but together, none the less, so no reason to fret. Write about it, yes; bitch about it, yes; but come on. After all. And all that.

The foot-toe will probably rule out the Dia de Los Muertos (Day of the Dead) Festival coming up this Sunday afternoon in Oakland. I've made a couple of attempts in the past to photograph it, but allowed inconsequential things to get in the way. Mr. A did a brilliant podcast built around a Dia de Los Muertos in Hollywood, well worth the listen. But we'll see. With or without an ability to walk I've been very good about skipping out on things. I would like to shoot some pictures. No, really. I need to shoot some pictures if only to see if I still know how to turn on the camera, bring it to the eye, press the little button, pull things into focus.

But none of this is on my mind. Not much is on my mind, hasn't been for years. I talk about the sinus-head ache and the ache is a problem, let me tell you, but not a problem next to the lack of focus, the lack of mental acuity I've been experiencing. A product of age or a product of some kind of cranial disintegration? Generally, when I've found myself cutting ties and moving on to another chapter, it's been easy for me to hook onto something else, find a flicker of interest and let that flicker turn into a conflagration. Well, “conflagration” is too much. A living room full of votive candles burning away into the evening.

Am I worried about having reached a dead end? I don't think so. There's still a brain in there and even if it's only useful daily for, say, a few hours, a few hours of acuity is more than most people muster. You don't need focus and acuity to go shopping (although I'm discovering it helps), to keep the apartment together (dust is dust). You need it to say write anything more complicated than a journal entry, for example, but four hours in a day is considered hard core. So what's my problem?

You're able to pay the rent and cover breakfast everyday without going to an office where your brain had to be engaged enough to avoid fucking up in front of the vice presidents.

I was always better at fucking up in front of the vice presidents and as a vice president when I was at my sharpest.