AUSTIN, Texas, July 31, 2005 — One consequence of keeping a diary or a journal is that it's hard to ignore the passing of time. The calendar is a part of every day, either in labelling the entry or, in my case, checking it off the little calendar table on the left of this paragraph.

So even though I have nothing to do today and plan to really relax there is a bit of that time-passing tension that drives us so much of the time. Because it's the last day of the month.

Still, it doesn't get me out of bed. I get up once and let the dog out but I go back to bed. I'm

groggy, I was enjoying sleeping and I was enjoying the expansiveness of my dreams. They were in color. Things would happen like I would be in this meeting and observing the opulent surroundings of a meeting room and then the 'cameras' would swoop back as if on a boom and pull back to show the whole space and then the outside of the building and complex which had all these colorful panels.

Around 8:30 I get the feeling that I would feel better out of bed with a cup of coffee in my hand. So I get up and pull on shorts and a T-shirt and wander in to the Capresso and get one. I sit in front of the computer for a while, fooling with the my journal and other stuff. There is so much stuff on the WEB. I'll occasionally just start wandering, going to magazine sites or doing a geography quiz.

FFP suggests we go to Central Market. We go over there. I'm tempted to have a breakfast taco but they don't have them. Just pastries and muffins or a breakfast buffet at $5.99. So I have coffee and FFP has coffee and a muffin. Then we go to BookStop (which is really a baby Barnes and Noble with no music or coffee shop) and buy some sale books and bargain books and a couple of magazines. Like we needed reading material.

Then we put all the books in the car and go back to Central Market to shop for food. We see three people we know (including the executive chef of the local Four Seasons). We buy sushi, hot tofu dip, Salt and Vinegar potato chips, nonfat yogurt, Texas peaches, brocolli crowns, sunflower sprouts, mozzarella, tomatoes, basil, farm-raised salmon (we're cheap...do you think it's bad for us?), some other gourmet cheese, no-egg tofu salad, vegetarian barbeque, tortillas, a bottle of Eastside feta dressing, some salsa and a bottle of some other sauce (wasabi ginger). Oh, and some bananas. It's a fasinating place, Central Market. I tell the fish guy I'm just admiring the display and he says he sets up the display every day he works. There are whole fish and such attractively displayed with even a fishing rod and float and hook 'catching' one. "So, when you were growing up and wanting to be an artist you wanted to be creating a fish display?"

"Pretty much," he says. And I belive him.

"Whole Foods people and other people have tried to hire me away," he confides. I believe that, too.

We go home, unpack the groceries and books. We decide to eat the sushi for lunch. It will also be my breakfast since I haven't had anything but coffee and a couple of bites of Central Market bread samples. I tell FFP that I'm going to let my food settle and then go to the club later. He says he is, too.

I fool around on the computer. I fill out a survey for The New Yorker to enter a sweepstakes (I know, but the questions are sort of interesting) and then I get taken to the magazine's page (without knowing if I actually got entered in the sweepstakes) and get distracted by the article in the current issue which is, of course, around here somewhere. Then I follow a link where you can buy the contents of a The New Yorker issue to download to your IPod or similar device. That seems like a cool idea, too. But an IPod or MP3 player remains one of the best technological devices I've never owned. (Right up there with a camera phone, a GPS device and a portable DVD player.) So I just ponder what such gadgets (and one's ability to download the latest issue of The New Yorker) mean to our modern life.

FFP comes in my office to tell me that there is an article about Jim Jarmusch in The New York Times magazine. "Do you want to take separate cars?" He asks. He means to the club. It's wasteful, I know. But I say, "I'm not quite ready to go myself." I like to go when I feel like it. More than that even I like to come home when I feel like it. After he leaves I wonder if he took stuff to sit outside by the pool. I might go swimming myself. But first I'm going to work out. So I have to take stuff to shower up and my swimsuit and find the sunblock.

I would probably have delayed going to the club even a little longer but now that he is gone I feel a little guilty or rushed. So I go, too. He finishes his workout and goes outside to catch some sun and read a few minutes. Naturally he is ready to leave before I've finished my minutes on the recumbent bike and a few lunges and leg raises, taken a shower and put on my suit. I figure I'll swim some, he will move to the shade and we will sit around and read. But sitting outside in Texas sounds like more fun than it is. He is going home. I put on sunscreen, read a few minutes. I hate to get in the water, though, if I'm not going to do enough laps to get exercise. I mean the whole getting wet and getting dried off again is a pain. I give it up, slip on shorts and a T-shirt and leave, too.

At home I read and finish watching Jim Jarmusch's not much-acclaimed Dead Man. (In the coincidence corner...today's The New York Times Magazine had an article about Jim. Supposedly, according to this article, when this film was shown at Cannes it was greeted with a silence shortly punctuated with "Jeem, it's ....." The ellipsis, I assume, being filled with shet, or merde. ) We snack on a little of the gourmet cheese and some crackers. We decide to watch another Netflix pick, Britney, Baby, One More Time. We should hate it. I don't even have a clear idea of what Britney Spears looks like in real life and this should probably just be thrown in there with the self-indulgent young filmmakers claptrap but we laugh out loud at it. These two films remind me of what I'm looking for in the films I review: genres and themes that may seem tired on the surface but done so well that the movies stand out and stand alone. Movies you'd be proud to exhibit in your own film fest even if some people said they were scheisse. People would be talking.

FFP and I also watched a few snippets of The Simpsons and remember our delight as we perused the maps on our trip at finding Springfields and Shelbyvilles in proximity to one another and noticing that the Kentucky Springfield was actually close to a Simpsonvile! There has been endless discussion of this on the WEB, of course, among the die hard fans of the Simpsons. In any case, I think 'same name, different place' things are cool. On the trip, I pointed out to FFP all the Mount Vernons. I told him I thought a great documentary series would be to interview people in like-named but very different cities. Or, in the case of the Mount Vernons and Springfields, only a little different, in some cases. Ask them if they'd visited like-named places or knew where they were. A goofy way to connect people.

We snacked on some salt and vinegar chips and hot tofu dip and FFP opened a bottle of white wine. We tuned in to Six Feet Under. Attention those with DVRs who haven't watched it...spoiler coming!!! They killed off Nate. We know he's really dead because the tombstone-like birth and death dates came up. Of course, that doesn't really mean the character won't appear on the show. Heck, the dead are always appearing on the show. Nate's Dad (Nathaniel) died in the first episode and he appeared last night. Nate's dead wife showed up here and there. She may be less frequently needed without a live him.

So, after that surfeit of video stuff, and only light snacking, we decide to eat. I have a bunch of Spinach with onions, broccoli, sunflower sprouts, grated Mozzarella and that great Eastside feta dressing. FFP cooks up the salmon and has salad and some of it. I put the rest away for later and clean up. I read a little while and FFP goes off to his office to do a little writing or whatever. And then bed. We have to take the Accord back to the shop tomorrow to get a new computer. So we have to be there at seven and then share the car for a few other errands.