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Here In Oakland

Art & Life


   


September 17, 2017

Hand

Sunday. To bed before nine, lights out before ten, to awaken then at quarter to six. Ah, well. Took my time getting up to head out the door and drive to breakfast after six-thirty, the East Bay Times yet to arrive. Sundays often end up a two paper day.

The plain waffle with sliced bananas and strawberries, toast, fruit cup and coffee for breakfast, one or two seemingly more interesting articles in the papers this morning. They're usually interesting, but today's contained one or two that caused me to think. Overcast, but they're saying sun later, the temperature so far just fine.

Found this parked beside my car as I was leaving. We don't advertise our Zombie problem here in Oakland, perhaps I should have left a note to that effect under his wiper. I'm pretty sure it's a “his” wiper and not a hers.

Home now with some of the usual thoughts about ruts and habits and what I'm doing here. How to break out of one or two of the habits? Do I really want to make changes? Silly thoughts, but hardly unusual. Have them often in between memory glitches and the odd spellings I find looking over these journal entries.

And so you'll look at this tomorrow and find typos?

Typos that result in real words the spelling checker won't catch.

Later. Decided to lie down and read the East Bay Times, feeling a little rocky, and discovered I couldn't read more than a couple of paragraphs before the brain shorted out. So an hour's nap, the head clear afterward and the reading ability back online. No idea why that should happen late on a Sunday or any other morning, other than this early morning's writing came across more as babble than prose.

Better now in the mid-afternoon. Sunny clear skies, no interest in going anywhere, part of that not wanting to walk with a camera visible, even the small V 1. Life in the fast lane, except at my age I should be driving in lanes farther to the right.

There's always coming back later for a rewrite.

Later still. Some time on the guitar going through a couple of the old lessons in between watching various things I've seen before on television. A glance or two at the Emmys. The same old routine by someone who bitches about not doing anything around here anymore, as I've, of course, been sitting around not doing anything.

Going out not with a bang, but a whimper?

Life does have its own peculiar sense of humor.

Evening. No way not to watch The Vietnam War they've been promoting on PBS, the first of ten chapters. Kept our attention back when, let me tell you. The University of Washington had mandatory ROTC during your freshman and sophomore years and I dropped out of army ROTC when I became a junior as I had no thought to go into the military. When I was a senior, however, I lost my student deferment and, thinking I'd be drafted before graduating, I rejoined the Army ROTC in order to finish school and get my degree, the trade being spending two years afterward on active duty.

I've often wondered if I would or wouldn't have been drafted had I not rejoined ROTC, if losing that deferment in 1965 would have mattered. It would have made a difference in the course of my life way back when, I'd imagine. Changed all our lives and our trust in our government well before the terrible truth was revealed.

That hasn't changed: our trust in our government.

I still fear it was much more the draft that got us off our butts and not any defense of truth, justice or the souls of millions dead by our hand.

The photo up top was taken at the Oakland Pride Festival last Sunday with a Nikon D5 mounted with a 70-200mm f 2.8 VR II Nikkor lens.


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