AUSTIN, Texas, August 14, 2005 — I wake up early but I don't get up. Still, it's not that late when I get up. It's just late before I do anything constructive. I get coffee and watch a little Sunday morning TV.

I make an e-mail up with a birthday greeting for a friend with a birthday next week and I call another friend to find out the exact date. I have a phone call with a birthday mate (she was born one year before me) about getting together with our husbands some time this week. I work on my journal for yesterday. I have an e-mail from my friend in Cape Town and answer that. FFP suggests a brunch but we decide against it and

he goes off to the club. I don't seem to be ready to get off my a--. Finally, when I do, it's after noon. But it's OK. Nothing on the agenda today but to find a spot in the house where the TV works and there is a VCR and watch a couple of films for AFF.

Even at that I wander around the house doing stuff like getting yet another cup of coffee (I'm so spoiled to one-at-a-time brewing with my aging Capresso) and putting away the dishes from the dishwasher that FFP had set up and ran. He called me before leaving the club to see what I was up to I'd been so long. I then fooled around longer thinking for some reason that I'd just wait for him to return and leave then. But he didn't come home and a few more minutes went by and so I set the answering service and left. He wasn't at the club when I returned, of course.

In the gym, I climbed on a recumbent bike and started peddling. I'm looking at mostly Friday papers. Even if you get to the papers in a couple of days you are sort of behind. A TV show that sort of sounds good played last night. When I first got a DVR I'd surf the guide for stuff and record it and fill the DVR with stuff I never had time to watch. I don't do that much anymore. I'm the epicenter of temporary enthusiams, I guess. While on the bike, I read yet another review of Broken Flowers. It's interesting to compare what the critics say with your own thoughts. I find I'm not a good critic...of food, movies, music, books, anything else. I would like to be. I'd like to have words that have punch and express the impression works of art (yeah, food is, too) make on me. I think I need to learn to use words like overwrought and wooden and others I can't remember at the moment.

Interested in something in the papers, I biked past my fifty minute goal. Something in me said that when I got off the bike I would just go home. It was nearly two after all. So I decided to just go on to an hour on the bike. When the hour flips over, these bikes say 'start cool down.' No one should go longer than an hour, I suppose.

I go home and figure out what the afternoon is going to hold.

First I eat leftovers. Then I decide to dig through a box of old journals to see if I can find any notes from trips to Europe in 1972 or 1975. I spend time reading through those and watching some movies for AFF.

I'm sitting there in our front room, still disheveled in my sweaty workout clothes watching a documentary submitted to the film festival when FFP comes in. He's showered up. He suggests we try to see a cabaret show he's read about that starts at 5:30 at a bar on 4th (Rain) which is ordinarily just a gay bar but occasionally has live music. I get a quick shower and get dressed and we go downtown.

We walk into Rain about 5:25. The air is tinged with just enough smoke to make it slightly uncomfortable. There are some instruments on the little stage but no sign of music about to start. The only places to sit are some ottomans near a wall. Still, but for the smoke, I think we would have perched on these and gotten a drink. We decide to turn around and leave. I suggest Halcyon across the street. "We can get a coffee, come back when she's singing and check it out maybe," I say, dispirited by smoke and a lack of seating standing in the way of hearing some music.

FFP looks toward Fado. I think it will be smoky. But we go in. There are ashtrays but not a whiff in the air. We decide to have a beer. I get a table and FFP gets a Harp and a Guinness from the bar. A waitress comes around and we ask her for menus. FFP gets some fish and chips which he pronounces good and I get a salmon appetizer which is fine. They serve it with some dense bread which doesn't enhance it but the pile of horseradish and red onion and capers makes it. FFP gives me a few potatoes, too. We finish up and step across the street. Nothing is going on in Rain at that moment except guys visiting (and a few women) and disco and that smoke.

"Maybe she's on a break," FFP offers.

"I guess."

We decide to go home. It's OK. We got out of the house. That's what counts. And we now know that you can probably have a Guinness and food at Fado on a Sunday afternoon without smoke. Of course, our new smoking law goes into effect soon. We voted against it to protest the draconian penalties towards the owners of establishments and the general anti-libertarian aspect of such laws. But we were torn, of course, because we'd love to go places and enjoy them without an allergy attack. (Cigarettes upset my allergies more than any other thing. I tried to ignore this fact as a youngster trying to do the bar scene.) In the last year I've sat in bars in New York City and Dublin and marveled at the clean air and exulted. It's such an odd thing. (Speaking of smoking laws...have you noticed that whenever you see people sort of loitering outside a place you immediately look for the cupped hand holding the cigarette. If you didn't see that you'd think the person was a terrorist.)

At home we watch Six Feet Under. I'm less and less engaged with these people. Good thing, I guess, because the show has one final long episode and that's it. FFP likes The Comeback. I read the Sunday papers. When his TV show is over, FFP wanders off and I turn on some stuff about movies from the Independent film channel (on DVR). When he's ready to go to bed, I kill Fellini in the middle of an explication of himself and we go to sleep.