BACK TO:

[Journal Menu]

[Home Page]

[email]

[100 Books]

[Other Sites]



Here In Oakland

Art & Life


   


Under here.

November 1, 2011

Don't You Think?

Tuesday. To bed last night early, to breakfast and back at the usual time doing the usual routine, a haircut appointment coming up at ten in the City Center next to the Occupy Wall Street encampment. We'll take a peek at them earlier than usual, but that's about it for unusual excitement for the week.

Actually I have a number of follow-up doctors to see this month, the annual visit with this one and that one to check the gas, oil and battery acid. Best to do this they say, as your old car gets older, and this old car is getting older, although I think it complains too much. We can still get out on the highway in traffic, even if we more often than not avoid the prospect.

Later. A bus down to the ATM on Broadway, a walk then to the City Center for the haircut. A nice morning in a t-shirt and a long sleeved shirt, no jacket, thirty minutes to have the hair trimmed and to be turned back out on the street. A swing through the Occupy area, not stopping to take any pictures, really, other than a few of the new signs as I passed by. A cup of coffee and a raspberry shortcake cookie in the Rotunda building because, well, why would I not?

I bitch more than a bit about the focus of the Occupy pictures, the signs and slogans rather than the people, but I am impressed by what I find. There's a reasonably serious discussion going on that seems to dominate the place, special “art” sections for making signs, a media center, an education center and a long list of seminars and conferences that go on all the day long. So I'll bitch about the preponderance of signs in the photographs, but I'll take the pictures and enjoy them. I will.

Later still. Another trip to the downtown to walk through the Occupy encampment with camera in hand, the second camera never coming out of the backpack. Probably should have stayed home, a few pictures of signs I haven't seen before. They change quite quickly, some I'm sure are born, live and die between my visits. Which is nice. Wouldn't be a whole lot to shoot otherwise. Some potato salad in the City Center, something more in the Rotunda building and then a trip on the bus back.

Still, it's been a really nice day, I've gotten a haircut and some pictures and there's a bunch of stuff planned in the way of demonstrations and marches on various places (including the local Wells Fargo bank) scheduled tomorrow, so there should be something to shoot. They've called for a “general strike” which will be interesting. I'm not sure how many people will actually skip work and participate, although they have some union support and, I suspect, they'll turn out their members.

Other than that, a Korean soap later and then early to bed. A guitar lesson and then a doctor's appointment tomorrow, the ocular neurologist down at Stanford. The double vision has been getting better and better, I'm not sure it won't have gone away in another couple of weeks, but then I have no idea how these things play. You have this, you have that: take a pill. You have this other thing: make your will. Complex, don't you think? Here in the back alleys of Old Oakland?

The photograph was taken Sunday at the Oakland Occupy Wall Street with a Nikon D3 mounted with a 24-120mm f 4.0 Nikkor VR lens.


LAST ENTRY | JOURNAL MENU | NEXT ENTRY