Today I'm doing another PhotoShop session, going through all of the techniques that the instructor demonstrated, showing me in embarrassing detail, how little I knew about properly producing a photograph. And I'm up for it. (Yes! Yes! hup! hup! hup! - I'm so predictable.) The time I've spent so far working on earlier photographs has been interesting, interesting in some of the results. I made Ms. R look about fourteen when I'd finished. I'm not sure how useful it is to make a woman in her thirties look fourteen, but we seem to live in a world where this is considered desirable. This from someone who's now thinking sixty is maybe robbing the cradle. But what do I know? What have I ever known? There are many uses for this retouching business that don't have to do with wrinkles.

Later. A walk back from the City Center thinking I probably should have taken that bath after, rather than before, I set out. Next time, next time. Turning the corner on Grand I noticed the used book store specializing in history, primarily war histories, a store that's been there at least as long as I have, was closed, the stock entirely removed in the last two or three days. Sad.

While I was standing looking through the window a guy I'd just passed yelled “hey, take my picture?” and I turned, raising the camera as I turned and took the shot before he had a chance to react. “I didn't actually mean take my picture!” he responded, surprised. “Always take the picture when somebody asks” was my reply and all he could do was laugh. And I believe that. It happens now and again, someone just out of the blue will blurt out “take my picture” and some of them turn out quite well. That, taken last month, is one I've always liked. This one less so, but none the less interesting. And I was able to apply my new PhotoShop training to the one today as the foreground-background exposure was not the best. Cheap thrills are still thrills.

The mood is good. Again, working with PhotoShop, I futzed with this photograph. Notice I look almost young enough to be hustling these (thirty years younger than I am happily married) women? More cheap thrills? I would think.

So much for the day now that it's three and the public television News Hour is starting. I go on here about skipping the news, none of it's good, a standard refrain, but there is stuff going on I have some passion about and passion, even if it makes you upset (or scares you a bit) is not to be disdained. How much passion is there left in this life after the age of, say, ninety-nine? Best to get as much of it in as you can before then, I'm thinking. Babbling. Running on.

Your mood is good.

Yes it is. Here in Oakland.