Thursday. To bed before ten last night, up without the alarm at nine, some three hours more sleep than I've gotten in quite some time. Which I must have needed, I guess. Feel pretty good, back now from breakfast before eleven, the sky clear with a bright sun when I awoke, the day ahead looking pretty good. We'll try lying down just for a bit, all that sleep or not, but we'll head out again before noon I'd bet.

Another month gone by. What was I doing on the first of this month last year? Well, I can go back and look come to think of it, but does any of this stuff I've been writing on about really tell you (me) what in the hell I'm up to in any meaningful sense, how I'm feeling, which of several well polished neuroses I'm juggling at the moment?

You think you're neurotic?

Oh, who knows? The minute you think you're not, you are; the minute to think you are, you're at least being realistic. What's the definition and how do you tell? Other than through really obvious transgressions into the abyss? I majored in Political Science (along with a grab bag of most everything else), psychiatry was left to be picked up over the decades along the way by going to movies and tripping along to disaster in the company of one or two diagnosable friends.

Later. Not a good day, but then again, not a bad day either. Took the nap, the ten or eleven hours of sleep last night didn't slow me down a whit. I wondered, having had breakfast three hours later than usual, if my so called funky feeling might move forward by three hours, it having something to do with whatever I might have eaten. Might just as well compute the phases of the moon from the result.

I did go back and look at my entry for this day last year and in so doing remembered the day, remembered what I was thinking when writing it. Which is a good sign, I'd think. You always wonder about your memory as you age. Same old stuff, though: to cups of sake this, cranky old man that, drove over to the big Safeway that day to restock the larder. (I don't drive nearly as much anymore. Maybe I should wonder about that.)

A bus downtown to have a raspberry cookie (a very good one at the Rotunda building coffee shop) and a mocha coffee (with the whipped cream of course). I think my trip to the supermarket for salad makings is looming sooner than I at first thought after another sugar and chocolate lunch.

Getting out of the house, taking the bus downtown and then taking the bus back - not a lot of walking, I'm afraid - does seem to reliably clear the head. Whatever was left of the morning seems to have cleared itself up. The sinuses are still screwed, but nothing new there, the sinuses are always screwed, but the head is now clear and I suspect I'm coherent enough to attempt time on the guitar.

So we'll see. I mentioned there are a couple of things to photograph coming this weekend, the Art Murmur a third happening tomorrow, the first Friday of the month, and I'm sure there are things going on out there elsewhere to tempt me outside. I've been thinking about a small photo project revolving around the lake, a series of photographs that won't be all that hard to take (I've been shooting and putting some aside in this last month with this project in mind). I might follow through, you never know. I haven't really set out, let alone completed, a photo project of quite this kind yet.

Let's see, no real photographs today. A shot I've taken before, pulled back a bit to include the shadow and the feet. A stupid conceit, but it gives me some small pleasure every time I do it. Small pleasures are nice, here under a hot Oakland sun, hyperbole rampant, sense and sentence more problematic and meandering the more I write.

Evening. The new blues riff seems straightforward, I seem to have gotten it down without a problem. Still, we'll see what we remember of it tomorrow. Watched two Korean soaps, one I won't admit to watching because, well, even I couldn't do that. The other is, well, exactly the same set of brain dead characters as another that preceded it, but better written, more believable, which is to say it's bad without being totally awful. The things they get excited about in Korea, they're not nearly as far along as we are in the disintegration of the family, but I have every confidence they'll catch up.

Otherwise it's now nine o'clock. PBS is broadcasting La Boheme at the moment, an opera I've listened to some ever so many times, mostly when I was younger, although I did go see the Baz Luhrmann La Boheme in San Francisco a couple of years back and have a video of the Boheme production he first became famous for in Australia.

Not bad, the old thrill hasn't quite worn off. I know the arias, can sing along with most of them, have half a dozen or so of the complete recordings with various singers, most of them on l.p.'s, one or two on CD's. Something I wasn't expecting, that music might lose some of its impact as time went along. Of course I was surprised when I stumbled into it in high school: opera, after all. Such is life. At least I still get a kick out of the photographs.