Later. OK, I'm pooped. Running around for well over an hour at the Rockridge Out and About Street festival is about all I can handle from the feel of it. I'm sure I arrived earlier than I should, if pictures were what I was after, but I always arrive earlier than I should (I understand the hour specified for a party is always at least a half hour earlier than anyone expects you to come) and I did run in to Ms. J at one of the booths, an old friend I've missed from APL, and had the chance, what with the somewhat lighter crowd, to spend the time needed to catch up on what she's been doing these last two years.

Coming back on BART there were a dozen people decked out going to the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, young men and women in leathers and not much else, some of it hidden under cloaks and some of it not, ready to shed most of it once they'd arrived. There was a certain twitch seeing them, a certain wistfulness with camera in hand, but again, I was tired after my running around and ready to go home and sit under a fan. I get my walking in most every day, but I suspect I need more and better exercise if I'm going to physically be able, over another ten years, to continue my street shooting. My light weight version of what real photographers call street shooting. Not that I'll do anything about it.

In looking at the images just now I am seeing potential in some of them if I hadn't been half asleep on automatic pilot and avoided following up with additional photographs from better angles. I'm seeing the shot, they're not hard to find once you've been doing it for a few years, but you need to be alive to the situation, to move, look at the composition, to think, to get focused and spend the necessary time to get an image that will jump off the screen (or, in the old days, the print). But this is all just me spinning my wheels. I'll do it one of these days or I won't, jump into the pool or grab my towel and head for the showers. Or something like that. I'm more writing than fretting. Getting the right word takes energy too, by the way: the right simile, the right sound, the right kerplunk. Life's like that. I believe people mention in in books, clever videos and such hawked at very low prices on late night television programs, operators ready to take your calls.

Later still. Cruising along now at four in the afternoon. I have no idea what to do with the rest of the day. A haircut tomorrow, my barber is going on vacation for a month so I figured I'd get in a little early rather than wait, but that and lunch on Thursday with some of the old APL crew is it for the week. Mr. S's band is playing next Saturday, but I've got a ticket to hear Chomsky at the Paramount so that's not going to work. The Hardly Strictly Blue Grass Festival happens on Saturday at Golden Gate Fields and I talked about going to that, figuring out how to find a bus or a trolley to take me from BART to the event, but I wonder what kind of shape I'll be in afterward for the Paramount performance. Talk. Whatever it is.

Then again we'll deal with that when the time arrives, take it as it comes. The Paramount show starts at 7:30, plenty of time to get back, wash my hands, hang up the cameras and scoot back downtown.

Downtown after dark? Are you going to drive and park?

We'll deal with that then.