I went over to the pizza place and had a slice of pizza and a bottle of Beck's. I haven't been to the Purple Onion for pizza since the operation and although it's still clumsy to eat, I can handle it if it's cut into pieces and eaten with a fork. I haven't had a Beck's in a while either. It was once the beverage of choice of my San Francisco friends. This was before the advent of brewery pubs so the general consensus was it was "wet and good" and that was that.

I had an urge to buy a six pack and bring it home, but I realized I wasn't going to get very far with the journal if I did. Twenty years ago I tried writing drunk, writing drunk and stoned and writing stoned to see the results. There were one or two experiments with cocaine (before they started smoking it), but I couldn't afford it then, even if I could afford it then, so I kept it to alcohol and marihuana. Alcohol didn't work. You could write, but only if you had a real broad definition of what constituted a sentence. Or a paragraph. Marihuana was generally considered OK. I talked with some of the writers at the San Francisco Mystery Writers dinners when I was attending them with a member friend and they admitted experimenting. The consensus was you wanted to do it long enough so your stoned writing read pretty much like your straight writing, not the words and the rhythm so much, but the connection to the core, the place you were writing from. Once you'd done that, it didn't matter. Whichever worked for you.

I tried it for about a month before I felt I had that sense, straight or stoned, and then I went back to writing straight. Beck's tonight would have made things hopeless.

I did get the self portrait contact sheet back from the shop. They were overexposed and in most of them my still swollen cheeks made me look like a chipmunk, but I sent one to Archipelago and now it's up on the photo page. I'm going to shoot more, if only to get the exposure right. Same with the description of my journal. I'm going to change it now and then as new ones occur until I think I've got it right. I think my journal needs to take a step up and I'm not sure where I'm going to get the energy. In the past I've made myself write against a deadline until the weasels started screaming and the changes came. The downside has always been, well, the weasels. The weasels are not your friends. And I'm tired. And I'm lazy. And I like to procrastinate.