This morning. So, watching a DVD last night, a movie I've been watching in little five minute increments now for weeks, only able to watch so much before turning it off (I know, what a wuss, but I'm getting either too judgemental or overly sensitive in my advancing years) I drifted off into the ozone again, the movie puddling into some weird internal fantasy of blurred vision with LSD-like overtones. The old ocular migraine strikes again. It's interesting in that it takes a while to figure out what's happening, so you find yourself in this weird assed time and space continuum without any guideposts before your understanding returns. It's a bit like waking up to the fact you've gone to sleep while you're asleep. So I fumbled around turning everything off and crawled into bed.

Up this morning feeling fine, the sinus-upper palate thing, yes, but otherwise the world seemed OK. I skipped the various inhalers when I got up thinking I'd do them when I got back from breakfast, thinking maybe they had something to do with these episodes. I'd taken them last night just before the “incident” and one of the medications, the one that makes my mouth taste like the inside of an old gasoline truck, seemed to be working out in and on my lips last night making them taste like a new gasoline truck filled to the brim. Not really tasting like gasoline (no, I've not tasted gasoline to my knowledge, but taste is mostly smell I seem to recall), but in that category and on steroids.

So I'll do my inhaled medications now and see how the Rockridge Out and About Festival goes. I'm not really interested in having one of these things in the middle of a crowd. All that camera gear, all those people, reality suddenly going somewhere people don't usually want to go (without a tussle). I suspect I'd just sit down someplace and weather it out. I do want to get this thing fixed. I do. Really.

Later. A decent walk up and down the Out & About Street Festival, no unusual shapes or visions hiding in the shadows. I'd packed a camera with a long lens in the backpack and prepared another with a shorter zoom, my standard gear for a shoot, and then at the last minute I said the hell with it and grabbed the older D2X with the smaller and lighter 18 - 200mm zoom, thinking if things go south, best not to be lugging a load.

Again, nothing out of the ordinary. I did the one inhaler before leaving, one that I need to inhale four times a day at six hour intervals, so there was no putting it off until I returned and I wondered if I'd feel anything in the following hour. Standing, waiting for the bus, the eyes drifted into their double vision thing, nothing too severe, and they cleared by the time I arrived at the festival. This keeps me thinking one or another or all of these inhalers might be causing some of the symptoms and I'll bring that up with the pulmonary doctor at my appointment tomorrow. I'm probably grasping at straws, projecting, but I'd really like to pull them down off the shelf.

Whatever the circumstances, whatever the camera, wherever my head, I didn't get many photographs. One or two turned out, but I just wasn't “seeing” well. That's a little too artsy-fartsy: I'd blame it on the venue, but I think it was me not being sharp enough, aggressive enough or ambitious enough. Still, a decent affair: a bright sunny afternoon, a lot of people in attendance, I'd say the usual vendors you find at all of these affairs with perhaps the addition of one or two more exotic products.

If I were to go to one of these without a camera (hard to envision) I'd probably go to have a decent lunch with a cocktail or two, wander the area once, see who was performing on stage and split. As it was I stopped for a glass of lemonade and a strawberry scone (I realized I was getting dehydrated) at a café I once habituated when I lived in Rockridge, shot my pictures sparingly with much walking and left, taking BART to downtown Oakland to hit an ATM before catching the bus back to the apartment.

So what to say? Tired. I did walk more than a few miles today. Even the downtown trip to the ATM ended up in a thirty minute walk through the Old Oakland area looking for an outdoor café, knowing there wasn't one open on a Sunday, so whatever I was doing, whatever I was thinking, it ended up in a walk. Which is a little neurotic but good exercise I would guess. For a photographer. On a Sunday. In September.

A note: I did put up another page on artandlife. I didn't have enough photographs for a full section of Autumn Moon Festival photographs (I'm surprised I have as many as I do, although that may be the result of slipping in a few that don't really belong), but there were one or two left over from previous outings so a set was created.

Those and a couple of shots of a seagull running off with a piece of bread in his beak I'd shot yesterday morning when I was setting out for the downtown. I'd forgotten I'd taken them after the ocular migraine, but it seems I did and found them as I was preparing for Out & About.