Met with Mr. E and S for breakfast at the usual place, Mr. E picking up the tab. A drive over to a Berkeley cheese shop on San Pablo, then on to Oak Barrel Winecraft where Mr. E and S picked up the necessaries to start a batch of beer later this afternoon, I returning to the apartment to take a nap. “Whacked out tired” is as good a way, if an overly dramatic way, as any way to put it. Either way naps are nice (he is in the habit of saying) and they do indeed do the job.

Checked out the bank online, by the way. The camera insurance check had hit, the insurance now current, the cameras protected, which is good. Still some adjustments to make, adding the D3, for example, subtracting some of the older equipment to keep the cost in line. Cover the stuff I use on a day to day basis, sacrifice the rest should my number come up on the local B & E circuit. Unlikely where I live, the way the building is protected, but one of the things you think about.

Later. OK, later now in the afternoon, this debate between the candidates coming up pretty quick, I guess I'll watch. I'd rather take a nap. Well, we'd all rather take a nap.

So, the week is done. I see the How Berkeley Can You Be? parade is coming up Sunday in Berkeley (where else?) as well as The Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. I opted to shoot Folsom Street last year and found myself fumbling a bit what with all the naked, near naked, leather wearing people, young and old, walking around and about and I left rather early having taken, well, not very many pictures. I suspect I'll do Folsom Street again, but grit my teeth this time and bring back the photographs, every damned one. Get up close and shoot the way a old man should, now that I've internalized the visual aspects of the scene.

My perhaps overly sensitive constitution isn't ready to understand any of the other aspects of the scene, let me tell you. My friend Ms. T was one of the models in the most excellent and successful promotional poster they used last year for the event (the Vatican expressing its disapproval), and I suspect this is she in one of the posters they're using this year, but I'll have to ask. (Later: I asked, indeed it is.) The visual aspects, the opportunities for compelling and more than strange images, are legion. It's just the dark side that gives me pause, an artistic vision of pain versus the much darker underpinnings of real pain that runs through this jack boot and genital universe. Guantanamo Bay come to life in the privacy of your local leather bar.