No need to feel any guilt as there were other empty tables available, so I had breakfast as usual reading but the one Sunday paper on a sunny morning on its way to a quite warm day, the Oakland Pride Street Festival coming up at noon. We'll arrive later this time, allow a larger crowd to assemble and my head to clear (dear, oh, dear).

Later. An hour's nap until noon. One of these funky psychedelic-like naps where the world loses its soft buffered edges and you wonder how far off the deep end you've managed to plunge. Yes it comes together again after a while, but I wonder why would something like Crab Cake Benedict for breakfast facilitate something like this? To say I don't feel like going out and photographing an Oakland Pride Street Festival with this at the moment is too obvious to state.

But you did.

I have wondered occasionally when a time will come when I no longer have the energy or the facilities to go out into the wild. Going across the street to the lake for pictures is no big deal, but I've noticed traveling to San Francisco and such with camera in hand (and in backpack) loom ever more onerous as the years have passed. Today, this morning, I wondered if we hadn't arrived. Not permanently you understand, but maybe now there'd be more days coming like this when I wasn't really fit or willing to go outside.

Still, finally, I did pack the cameras and head out the door, the head not where I'd like it but getting (I was betting) better. The entrance to the festival is on 20th near Broadway, so off the bus to pay the ten dollars and start taking pictures. I admit to not feeling like taking pictures. Too old warm, maybe, out there in the sun?

To cut a short story shorter I stayed for about an hour, kept to the shade, didn't shoot enough pictures to fill a web section, knew I hadn't gotten enough as I was leaving and so got home to sit here with another two hours still left should I go back and get those necessary pictures. No way. Feel better now than I did when I returned, don't feel well enough to other than carp. Carp! Carp! Oh, and a British whinge. Whinge! Whinge! (I've been misspelling my whinges.)

Later still. Better still, it seems, as we get further away from breakfast. Or from the night before. Five o'clock now, hungry but with no idea what I might be able to eat. After this morning I've kept it to cottage cheese and grapes. Mixed together they go down easily, although I don't believe non fat cottage cheese and flame grapes will satisfy an appetite. Maybe they will, but this is not the first time I've tried. No way I'm going to go with meat, fowl or anything on the “to be avoided” ocular migraine list. One day like this is enough to keep me on track. For a week. At least.

You do tend to rationalize your way into trouble at the drop of a hat.

There's spaghetti on the stove. We'll do the red clam sauce. Another set of disturbing thoughts clicking along just out of sight. Clam sauce. Probably dredged up just off Fukushima, one reason it's so plentiful and cheap. If it's cheap. Three bucks a can, doesn't seem so much when you buy them by the case.

From Amazon of all places.

Even our deepest and most embarrassing secrets do eventually leak.

Evening. Got through most of the red clam sauce spaghetti. Odd to see when I get hungry I often find I can't finish whatever it is I'm eating. A smaller stomach? I guess. Anyway, the thought of red clam sauce over spaghetti is more than somewhat nauseating at the moment, just as it was with that last bit of crab cake this morning. Interesting to go through the process, hunger to nausea or close to nausea in five minutes. I don't remember if I was this way in my two or three periods when I was at this weight when I was younger.

Anyway, a day of bitching in what I'm afraid has become a journal of bitching. Wasn't the idea when it was started, not that I started with a plan. Need to think about that. One of the odd useful aspects of these weird psychedelic episodes, they can put your, um, life in perspective.