Got a lot of PhotoShop re-touching done yesterday after lunch with Ms. R, so things are staying on track, although I may take a nap now before heading downtown. Six thirty, after all. The brain still shows a certain slowness. Mostly memory related. I was thinking yesterday, now what was that old music venue called in the seventies? The Bottom of the Hill? Where we booked some of our bands? I got it confused in talking with Ms. R with the name of what we called “the trucker bar” across the street from the Press. Clearly “our trucker bar” had been bought by the Bottom of the Hill people and moved to this new location, but for some reason this had had me confused. Good energy combined with moments of obvious fogginess. Well, could be worse. I can live with the occasional lapse.

There were other differences in the Potrero neighborhood. The Bay Guardian now has a building just down the block from the old Bottom of the Hill. Bruce Brugmann, the founder and publisher, has always been famous for feuding with the mainstream press and it turned out he didn't much like our operation back then either when we had to coordinate the syndication of the Dr. Hippocrates column, taking on selling it to publications outside The Bay Guardian's market. Dr. Hip had kicked off writing the column again in the seventies for The Bay Guardian and we'd offered to do the syndication in the Rip Off Press syndicate. Maybe Brugmann didn't like or feel he could trust an underground comix publisher any more than he could the local newspaper establishment. Led to eventually moving the column (with the good Dr.'s permission) to the Chronicle when we received an offer: chapter open, chapter closed. An odd incident still remembered (since I was running the syndicate at the time).

Later. Five of us for lunch, a good lunch, a walk afterward to the City Hall area at Broadway where they were having a gathering against police street brutality. That may not have been the advertised name, but they were against police shooting down people for no reason other than they were scruffy or said something less than nice to someone in uniform. They evidently feel words should not get you wasted (an old journalist's plaint). Well, this is Oakland, we've recently had issues with the force and, as a long time ACLU supporter, I'm sympathetic. Who knows? Maybe I'll find myself taking a picture someday somewhere someone thinks I shouldn't and Pop! No more Prop! More likely popped by someone other than a policeman, but you never know with stories in the papers and such.

You're unhappy with the police?

I'm more than happy to have as many of them around me as I can, particularly when I'm carrying cameras in Oakland (or San Francisco or Berkeley, much less so I must admit in Mexico, Iraq or Somalia, only one of which I've ever visited in this life), but there are those who've had less luck with bad apples in uniform than White Anglo-Saxon Protestant I.

Home now to pay attention to what I learned Tuesday in PhotoShop. I worked over the set of portraits I took of Ms. R at lunch yesterday as a start - she's too young to be much of a challenge for eliminating wrinkles and such - but I know if I don't push, really push, what I've done will evaporate. I'm not going to have a problem, this no more bubble business is building a head of steam. Or steam in my head. I'm ready either one.

Later still. OK, progress. Tired and I feel I need another nap, but there's a clarity still that seems to be holding (hup! hup! hup!).

No more hup! hup! hup! I can only take so much hup! hup! hup!

I wonder about the hup, hup, hup! I'm suspicious of motives (hup! hup! hup!). Still, where's PhotoShop, where are those class notes? I have photographs to manipulate, knowledge (to fake) and a nap to take.