I stood eating Blackberry ice cream listening to the band. Somehow all cares and obligations seemed distant, and I was someone who was wandering along on a whim, standing and watching, idly eating ice cream, wondering if I wanted to get the cameras and shoot some pictures after work and break my routine of driving straight home in the evenings. I need to do more of this. Walking without a plan, walking on a whim, finding this, staying around to look at that. I'd like to do it this weekend. Take a camera, yes, but not set out to shoot pictures. Just take the day and see where it leads. How do you plan to be "unplanned"? "And for these four hours, Mr. Prop, we shall be free and without a care, right up until 5:00 when dinner is planned out on the terrace." Chicken and egg: How do you start "not starting"? How do you do "not doing"? Maybe there's a book. Or a video. Or a spontaneity class.

Chuck Atkins paid a nice compliment in his chuck'stake entry today, more favorable than I deserved and I thank him for his courtesy. Chuck Atkins and Steve Amaya of Evaporation have been playing in their journals with a phone booth out in the middle of the Mohave Desert, a phone booth that has lost contact with the outside world and no longer rings when you call it. This is and was their project and I had no part in it, but I recognized the classic signs of a project taking on a life of its own: a project with no apparent purpose, no known payoff, nothing to recommend it but madness, ridicule and writer's cramp. A classic Don Quixote adventure of mind and spirit. And I wanted to add a little piece in my journal (I mean Barstow, in the desert, a quest. Classic Fear and Loathing territory, an eight ball match of spirit, sprite and craziness.), but there was an uninvited barging in by someone who wasn't invited to the party quality to it that made me nervous. This was their gig and although I'd exchanged some emails with Steve in the past, both these guys are professionals and don't need any banter from the peanuts. Still. Barstow. The desert.

I enjoyed writing it, a kind of "doing without doing" like today's late afternoon walk. I haven't had any urge whatsoever to write apart from this journal, but it gave me an idea for a book, not too long a book, that might be fun to write. I will squelch this urge, but it was nice. I burned myself out so badly writing in the 70's that I thought I'd never feel that urge again. So I thank them for their tolerance and the opportunity to have some fun on their ticket.

A last note. I had an email waiting from Viv of First Person Particular when I came in this evening asking if I'd seen ReEntry on Diarist.net. Woof, Mr. S.! You got the First Person Particular description right. And I have to admit you nailed my ego clean when you talked about my writing rather than my photographs. It's not good for a writer or a pretend writer or any other kind of writer to read things like that (Except now and then, of course, out here in the wilderness, this is not, after all, a complaint). Swells their heads and, in my case, my jaw still somewhat battered and unrecovered, that's not good.

Most of my entry today has been about journals, other's and my own. Kim Rollins would throw up.