People get sillier with age. Men more than others.

These last two days the blood pressure has gotten more consistently above one-twenty over eighty, many of the recent readings in the one-thirties over nineties, the occasional one-forty over one hundred, so I left a message with the nurse and asked if this was enough information for the doctor to make a decision. Some thought to go to another medication, something less potent than the stuff I've been taking. I assume I'll know this afternoon. Otherwise the lungs are wet and loose, the voice is raspy and two octaves lower, but I can tell it's getting better. They said two weeks for this Flonase stuff to show an effect, if it was going to have an effect, and I've been on it now for two weeks. A reason to be upbeat, I think. Get my monthly feeling upbeat session in before the month runs out.

I talked about going to see the Avedon exhibition at SFMOMA and did some research (when does it open, how much does it cost?) at the web site where they suggest buying tickets ahead of time with a specific date and time for the thirty minute walk through so you won't have to wait in line at the turnstile. I'm not good at waiting in lines. Not for Avedon, not for check out clerks, not for coffee and scrambled eggs with potatoes. So I haven't gone yet. But I have this suspicion, thinking about a destination while riding the bus, for example, I'll just get on BART one day and go. But you never know.

Later. A walk around the downtown between noon and two, taking time to eat an ice cream cone sitting on one of the benches in the middle of the Asian Cultural Center, more time later to sit and watch the band pack up after the Wednesday noon concert in the City Center, a camera wrapped and ready in my right hand, but with little or nothing to show for it. Felt a bit like an old man sitting out in the sun watching the world go by until I noticed the real old men twenty years my senior pushing their strollers. We will not have any more of this “old man” stuff from me. Not, at least, for another few hours.

The flower is something of a cop out, but I didn't get much else of interest. And it did cause me to stop and take its picture. That's the part you watch for, something gets you to stop and shoot even as your brain spins in little circles saying it's, well, too obvious, too trite, too tootle-tee-toot toot toot!

I think very few people would use that phrase and then never in public.

What the hell, it's still early afternoon and I'm allowed. I'm ready to take another of the pain meds, it's been something like seven hours, and that has me a bit freaked - pain pills, after all, you read lurid stories about people who take them in the papers - but that's just me. Otherwise the day is going well, the fan is blowing cooling air over my not quite cool enough body and I'm in a good mood.

Later still. So you take the additional pill and over the course of whatever time you notice the edges have been taken off the sinus-head thing and you're feeling better. Still have the sinus-head thing going on, but much reduced and the afternoon mellows. Well, I have an annual physical coming up, we'll discuss this with the doctor and the doctor will say, will probably say, what he's said before.

And he's said before?

Eat a peach, eat a plum; take three of these, get off your bum.

That's not very clever.

I'm happy with the pain relief, I feel I'm pushing it if I ask for clever.