Because I never have read any Kurt Vonnegut and today he died...

It happens this quickly, that there is nothing except the process of art, and the artist himorherself simply dies and that's it, like everyone else, except we somehow want to understand why that particular life seemed special and important and why so many people care. Sadly the amount of people who care about any death is always so unequal to the number who have no clue at all. Yet we strangely come to why we are human, because we know that no matter our feats or experiences, everything which we love and know and care about - everything, with no exception - will one day die and be gone from the present. Gone, dead, ceasing. And I always meant to read Vonnegut but now I feel like I missed out, I could have been a believer while he was still wandering the earth. He really wouldn't have cared either way, but now the decision has been made for me and it feels like something to mention.

When I awoke in Tanzania my first morning back yonder in the summer of '04 I had been asleep for twelve hours, following am unsleepable 15-hour journey from Germany via the Netherlands. That morning was the beginning of a three week exploration of hospitals, schools, wildlife reservations and Maasai villages, and I remember hearing on that first African morning the sound of bird literally perched above my slatted window, which filtered early light into my room, bird and light both alerting me to my surroundings: the pair of wood closets and wood desks and white paint on the walls, the soft glow on my backpack thrown over the opposite empty twin bed with it's top open and spilling its innards slightly out onto the brown army blanket. The bird, though, was like a stork bellowing its call into my eardrum and I swear it was talking to me, and I loved it and wondered if anyone else had ever awakened to the same feeling I had, laying there in my boxers thinking THAT was an AFRICAN bird saying hallo this morning to me, and I'm waking up and I'm in Africa, and I will be in Africa for a few weeks so I better get used to being in Africa because, yeah, I am in AFRICA!

I had a sweet day of indulgence. My brother Dave took me to the edge of Golden Gate park to sit in an airy restaurant with seats outside huddled near to the cypress trees. We ordered a french onion soup with a huge mound of gruyere cheese melted onto wheat bread floating atop the brown salty broth. Then we had a trio of prosciutto-wrapped scallops atop a bed of ziti and red peppers. Then came his sirloin steak and my ham-provolone-artichoke heart pizza on a thin crust. I had a homemade porter, Dave had a tall diet coke, and our waitress seemed to spend a lot of time at our table. We both agreed that, given our smiles and conversation and the way we didn't mind sharing our food, we must have been seen as the nicest gay couple of the day. :)

I put blinders on my Weight Watchers goggles today (and yeah, it's only the third day), because I have no idea really what all was in-and-around those scallops, pizza, steak, soup, dark beer, etc... so I'll call it a 28-point day and pretend for the first time in a while that I am a meat-gorging drooling glutton with a big smile on my face and no energy after. I ate so much I had to lay down for a while, my stomach is shrinking and it feels sooo gooood to know that. But I'm on a mission to get down to my fighting weight again, back to those days when I could run up a mountain and back down again and still feel like dancing on the porch in the evening. Call it Cascades Training. Who needs a well-intentioned but overweight sherpa, really?