I thought about feeling guilty but decided, since there was no one waiting for a table, I was absolved. Mostly absolved since there were tables populated outside on the patio. Perhaps some of them would have preferred to sit inside. It was overcast and cool out on the patio, after all. The hell with it. On to read the papers and eat breakfast.

I noted another gas price increase, four cents this time, fifteen cents in this last week and my thought was: “so what?” Gas prices increase, life goes on. One hopes.

Nothing planned for the day, yesterday's entry could have easily used more editing this morning, but I posted it without a second thought. Third thought. Don't feel like a nap, but we'll continue that particular debate. Again, overcast, not overly warm, the weekend ahead. Is a weekend that follows a Friday the 13th any different from the others? I suspect it is if you work at it hard enough. Just a thought. We're not into that kind of effort, never were, never was.

Later. Another weird day in Waziristan - excuse me - Oakland. Weird not in the sense of feeling punk, as such, just a little off kilter with all the ambition of a peanut waiting to go out and meet over lunch with an elephant.

That makes no sense. If you're going to go this route, at least try to be clever.

It just sort of rolls out. A walk over to the lake passing a group of what looked to be dancers forming up, a class of some kind, although when I returned they were behaving more like an old EST training during graduation. I have no idea what they were up to other than it seemed uplifting. Nothing against uplifting, but we've done our EST thing way back when it started, no thought of looking back.

Anyway, ice cream and lemonade out at a table at the usual place, the sun finally breaking through the clouds around two in the afternoon. A walk back passing the group doing their uplifting (graduation?) ceremony, home now at three. We'd experimented with a nap earlier with some success. Felt good, anyway, with or without sleep. Another one now? Maybe. A sign I can't think of anything I'd otherwise try.

The Autumn Moon Festival is running in San Francisco at the moment and I hope my current funk is up and gone and I'll head out to photograph it tomorrow. This not so easily described funky feeling doesn't lend itself to photographs. Doesn't even lend itself to naps for that matter, although it doesn't work against them.

You did have that sake last night.

I thought of that. Two drinks. If two drinks are too many, I have little hope one is any better. Doesn't seem to take me more than twenty or thirty times making the same exact mistake before I, well, before I start working toward forty. One thing they talked about at EST: the difference between a human and a rat trapped in a maze. The rat will eventually give up the route that doesn't work and find one that does. The human will repeat its failed route forever.

Evening. A slow afternoon gliding into what is now a better evening. Feeling incrementally better? Is it just that, things move a couple of clicks up on the scale and then all is well?

Be happy there is a place left to call well.

The second half of the Swedish detective series they started last Saturday at six, so I watched and played along on guitar, the feeling incrementally better thing doing its incrementing. Closing now on eight.

A movie starring Steve McQueen at eight that I saw when it was first released in theaters. Ouch. How long ago was that? Maybe there's something on later, although there wasn't last week (from going back and checking the journal), so maybe there isn't and we'll get to bed early.

Couldn't but help after today's blank slate.