But that's not getting me all that excited either. I don't think this is necessarily another symptom of having mentally shut myself down in a funk this Autumn of 2008, although I'm sure that's a part, but more a realization the old stuff isn't working anymore and I really do have to go out and find something else. Not something better, not something worse, just something different suitable for lighting a fire under an old fart. Not in the sense of something other than photography, particularly, but something else. To do. To shoot. How about I get in the car this afternoon and head up the coast?

Then again you could watch the Raiders game today on television.

It hasn't come to that yet. The problem isn't watching football, as such. It's just I've been there, done that. Followed a favorite baseball team, followed the college football team, once participated at the college level in a sport.

You call bowling a sport?

Well, no cheerleaders and such, but it had its attractions. A loner's sport, perhaps. An obvious choice.

Last night was my Japanese soaps night, of course. Actually, now that I've got my digital converter box there are a number of Korean subtitled in English soaps of a similar character, similar, unfortunately, in the sense that lately they've been unwatchable. Even dear little Princess Atsu is becoming tiring and I bailed after watching maybe the first third. The Korean ship building soap (and this really is a soap along the lines of Dallas) is both interesting and depressing for the characters: not a human molecule in the bunch. Well, one or two human molecules, but so far they're fighting a losing battle.

So there's nothing much on television anymore?

Yeah, but that's always been the case. More serious is my lack of sympathy for public radio and television, the constant drone in the background has become exactly that: a constant drone. Listening to the news of the world around me is causing me to become more depressed than even this change of life circumstance should allow.

So get off your butt and do something.

Indeed. Obvious. But always, for some strange and lingering reason: “not now”.

Well, there is a leather boy street fair coming up this afternoon in San Francisco. You could bring a camera?

Really? Leather boys and girls in San Francisco, you say? Opportunities for photographs? I seem to recall something like that coming up in the past, an aversion on my part to participate.

Ah, but at your age you easily forget. One of these days pretty quick everything you see and do will be new (and quite possibly exciting!). Don't you think?

Ah, yes. An answer to my quandary: my wretched relic of a brain. But still, I think, I'm not quite there yet.