I've been thinking about cleaning up my site for what seems like forever now, not so much a redesign, although it needs it, but a trimming of things I haven't touched in months, a "clean it up and make it fly right" reorganization. Consider my under $10 lunches in Oakland section. Poor Huynh, slapped together by an idiot designer (I know the designer), and Apsara Restaurant, sitting out there at the end of a broken pipe. For months now. Two lonely restaurants. And I have a prominently displayed menu choice on my home page linked to it. One poor stinking restaurant. Does this hint of sloth? Does this foretell an uneven future? Is this what a well read reader might term "a predictive indicator"?

I don't know. I do things in little pieces. I talk talk talk and then I take a step. I usually have a fairly clear goal, I just don't recognize it will take years to accomplish.

I suggest you recognize it will take years to accomplish.

Ah, self. Since it's you, I guess it's true: "It will take years to accomplish". Does this mean we have to get off our collective butt and do something about it?

There is precedent. People have changed their act and spoken well of it on Oprah, for example.

Self, I think you need a whiskey drink. Something old and smooth. I've been neglecting you this last month all tied up as I've been with this dented jaw. Perhaps we can negotiate.

You want us to continue to look like idiots? We're traveling in heavier company now and there are, after all, certain expectations. The Old Proprietor has to give way to the New. "Old fart" doesn't seem a particularly hip journal description. Perhaps something a bit more neoclassic with a nice decadent ring to it: "One lone photographer, shooting his way out of a dying Millenium." "Old fart in his mid fifties" summons images, well, of polyester suits on a bus ride to Las Vegas, Elvis ashtrays, and, pushing into the bizarre, model railroads in the basement.

(Actually, as an aside to an aside, what would it be like to photograph a package tour bus trip to Vegas? Do they have any rules about cameras in the casinos? Would people really care if I recorded their every movement? Thompson wrote it, Steadman drew it, why shouldn't the Sole Proprietor shoot it? Besides sloth, of course, and lack of ambition.)

You have the angst, Prop, but you don't have the finesse. Your life, I'm sorry to say, is boring as shit. How many times have you not taken the Collective up on one of their hot tub roll in the hay fuck in the closet party invitations? They've encouraged you to bring a camera. There were whole decades once when you made that scene every bit as fucked up and ready as the best of them.

Ah self, let me refill your glass, you're starting to ramble. The Prop is, I think, not paying attention. Life is a strange proposition and you can't quite be sure where you'll be or what you'll be doing on any given Saturday afternoon in September. And would it be so bad to find yourself building a model railroad in the basement, given some of the alternatives? Or writing your journal while listening to the paint peeling in the kitchen?

How ya fixed for ice, Prop? I could use a refill.