AUSTIN, Texas, May 15, 2005 — I am really having quite a pleasant sleep when something makes me get up. I stumble into the kitchen, get the dog some food and start the coffee machine. FFP gets up and goes out to get the papers. I sort out the ads and stuff from the Statesman revealing the skinny wisp of a Sunday paper it actually is.

While glancing through the Statesman I realize that I dreamt of picking a snack for a movie. And that makes me realize I dreamt of a youthful man and his older wife and the speculation surrounding their marriage. Neither fragment seemed to relate to anything.

I go outside and look at the bench I started oiling, shoot some pictures, go back inside and write a bit on yesterday. Later I will realize I should have mentioned that the food at the eventmade by Charles Mayes of Cafe Josie was the highlight: ceviche and focaccia with a topping, a sort of foccacia pizza.

I have, in the past, worried about the tense of my journal. I've gotten over that. The above, in the present tense, is fine. But if I fall into other tenses, drift into describing past action, I don't worry about it anymore. That is me evolving in journal land.

Today there wasn't really anything on the calendar. I tried to get a few friends to come other. I thought about getting my dad to come over. Dad calls just after I get up and says he is having a friend pick him up and take him to church. Later he calls to say he's going to a friend's house. The friend I was really trying to see, before she left town for several weeks, calls back in the afternoon to say she can't make it. I haven't really heard from the other friend. Well, one friend wants to get together and FFP is sort of up for it. Maybe we'll do that.

I keep trying to get away to the gym. FFP has already gone. I keep looking up stuff to link to that I saw last night, finding the article that was written about one of the people I met. Finally, I head out to the club. FFP is driving by the other way just outside the gate. I wave.

I do a long bike ride, finishing last week's The New Yorker (finishing up reading the review of the book about André Malraux and reading a fairly glowing review of the movie Crash) and reading a bit of an travel magazine insert from the Sunday issue of The New York Times. I do a few weight things for the arms, nothing much, not what I should do. I go order something from the poolside service just to see how it is, research for the food and beverage subcommittee of the club's House and Grounds committee even though I've vowed not to take this too seriously. I order a wrap. I think they forgot the promised sauce but it's OK. I sit inside and watch the help, see what causes problems, what's being ordered. I study the menu changes since the draft I looked at. They changed some easy things.

I go home. I get the call from my one friend that she won't be able to make it. I'm relieved, in a way, because it makes the day more open. Always a good thing. Tomorrow I have some responsibilities. My dad also has left a message that he'll be going to a friend's house. I'm sure that they are driving him.

I go outside with a sprayer of 409 and some old T-Shirts and clean the lounge chairs. When one is clean, FFP threatens to read in it but ends up trimming stuff, spraying poison ivy killer on suspect plants, cleaning off some little plastic tables that have been outside for a while. He has gotten me some more wood treatment and I finish rubbing some into the bench and work a little into one of the chairs.

I go inside and shower and watch a few episodes of The Simpsons and a Saturday rerun of Jeopardy. My friend comes and the three of us go to Hyde Park Bar and Grill. I eat a burger and a side of fries and feel full immediately. Later I feel way too full.

So now it's eight on a Sunday. What to do? I haven't read the Sunday papers really (nor several other days!). That seems like a good idea. But first I surf the computer a little, seeing what other people are up to by reading journals and such. What I don't do is read news online too much. Someone who gets over twenty dailies and weeklies in here in a newsprint form hardly needs to do so except when the news overtakes the printing press immediacy. They most of us turn to the TV. Nope surfing, for me, is for reading voices that aren't published and searching for obscure stuff that is not currently (or never was) in the news. Nobody is reporting on the reclusive bookkeeper in California who takes picture and picture of the sky from his backyard. Nobody keeps tabs on the young family in Austin struggling with a rare genetic brain malformation in their child in the press. The paparazzi is following Jen or Ben or something. The rags aren't wasting ink on a couple of gay men in England who move about looking for the perfect house or maybe just fixing up houses for a bit of profit. And while your average paper can help you learn a few new words or a little geography, you can take quizzes online or look up words in multiple dictionaries and hear them pronounced.

I finally turn to the newspaper pile. The TV gets tuned to Desperate Housewives and The L Word. But I'm not really tuned in. These shows don't do much for me. I like Grey's Anatomy a little better but not so much. It's BS is newer to me, that's all. Then we tune some of the other crime shows, Crossing Jordan has lost my sympathy when Henry Winkler shows up. Mostly I read the papers, do a couple of crosswords. That hamburger is sitting heavily on my gut. That's why I rarely have burgers. Sleep comes before the newspaper pile is reduced to empty. When I worked I had an excuse for not getting through the papers. Now they pile up while I do other things, but think I should be reading them far more thoroughly than before September 2002.

But it's late, after midnight. Sleep.