I Was Younger
It's been a warm and slightly muggy day. Not as warm and not as muggy as recent days, but warm and muggy enough. There is some possibility the hot saké I've been drinking has added to my discomfort, but I'm not willing to say one way or another. It is Sunday, there are two rolls of film drying behind me with two more going into the soup within the hour. They look good, but you can't really tell until you give them a closer examination. I'm going to give them a closer examination.
The weekend has been good, the head has been good, I got quite a bit of walking in yesterday, little or none today. I'm going into work late tomorrow, since I have a project to supervise that will go late into the evening. I say supervise and it's true that I'm responsible for planning and execution, but I'm also one of the technical drudges out shoveling with the rest of the drudges cause we ain't got so many drudges around I can just sit back and point anymore. Hi, ho.
I have been late in answering my email. I have been tardy in responding to my commitments. I have been, I have been. I'm not sure what this means, as life seems to be pretty good otherwise: the car having turned six hundred miles (the Honda specified break in period) and ready now for venturing forth on longer voyages; the photography is going reasonably well, what with the film I've finally developed and the contact sheets and prints to be made in class on Wednesday; the head is clearer than it's been in three years. Well, actually, what do I mean by clearer? I'm still fuzzy, but fuzzy in the sense I was fuzzy when I was twenty.
The aches and pains of the past, the vertigo particularly, seem to be receding. Maybe it's these little Zoloft tablets I've been taking. Maybe it's a shift from my now long grown stale set of everyday hallucinations morphing into a whole new set of everyday soon to be humdrum hallucinations. Perhaps it is a year to feel better, this last year a year to feel less well. It's all in the mind, baby cakes; in the chemicals coursing though your system. If you weren't drinking that weird noxious, they pay the newspaper people not to do reports about it, water; if you weren't drinking that Oakland water and breathing the carbon monoxide riddled Oakland air, well, you'd be a better person. OK. We understand. Here in Oakland.
The saké was probably not the best of ideas. Actually, the first small flask was a good idea, the second (small) flask was less judicious. It is late in the afternoon. I will be more coherent with the evening. Hot saké. My goodness. Best I didn't run into it when I was younger.
Later. Well, the banner photograph is one of the Tri-X photos I took at the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade. I'll look at them in more detail later, but this one, at least, has the same problem I've been experiencing with the professionally developed negatives. So it's not my lab guy, but me and this new scanner. Or maybe the scanner software. Or maybe the phase of the moon. You grasp at straws when your pictures start flagging. I'll work it out. Eventually.
I'll do contact sheets from these negatives in class on Wednesday. Maybe a print (or two). The negatives look OK dangling from the dining room chandelier. I stoppered the saké after two flasks. The temperature outside is better. An up week coming? Sure. Why not?
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