And that’s when it hit me.

Market Street, that is. Some scumbag had laid tram tracks in the middle of the street without telling me. (Lois claims that they’ve been there for decades, but what does she know?) The bike wheels tried to be train wheels and failed, miserably. The bike stopped instantly, but I kept going.

Oops.

The experience wasn’t too bad initially, but gravity soon united me with the grimy asphalt of Market Street. I slid on my elbow for a while, long enough to remove quite a bit of skin.

I was pleased with the results. It never would have occurred to me to sand away a few layers of skin to see texture of the various epidermal layers. Once I’d done so involuntarily, though, I was quite pleased with the results.

Lois wasn’t impressed, though. “Personally,” she advised, “I think you’re one of those guys who looks better with his skin on.”

But what does she know?

Every Wednesday, Eddie brings a dozen identical Krispy Kremes to the office, puts then on a table near his desk, then carefully watches the order in which his employees select them. Eddie then interprets pattern using “kind of my own spin on the I Ching,” then makes his business decisions accordingly.

Eddie told me he started using the real I Ching, but thought Krispy Kremes were more relevant to doing business in the United States. Eddie makes a lot of money, and you can’t argue against that. At least not in the United States of America.

Too bad for them; what a treat for us!

We sat on the edge of the large, grassy field drinking copious amounts of beer and munching on tacos and sushi. And that’s progress. Even though the game of baseball hasn’t changed all that much in the last century or two, at least the food’s a lot better than the rubber hot dogs I savored when I was a child.

The best part about the game, though, was the excruciating boredom. It was like watching a painter who’d ingested a fatal dose of barbiturates painting the last canvas. Imagine dozens of grown men trying to hit a little ball with a stick: that’s America’s pastime!

I love baseball. It’s more useless than philosophy, and even more boring than art. Go team go!

(And the score? I think the San Francisco team was thrashed by opponents from a city of little consequence, but I’m not exactly sure.)

The discussion was going on and on and on some more with numbing predictability until some idiot came on to espouse a piece of lovely logic.

“Killing killers with a lethal injection isn’t cruel.” she maintained. “it’s just like permanent anesthesia.”

Perfect!

I’m never going to die, but at some point I’ll enter a state of permanent anesthesia. Sweet dreams indeed!

“The ideal photographic document would appear to be without author or art.”

I can say, however, that I’m certainly glad I abandoned photography before the medium abandoned me.

Charity tells me consciousness is overrated; she said that dreaming is by far the most rewarding state of human evolution.

Who am I to contradict her?