This last weekend we travelled to the Marin coast to see my friend’s, Seth Dickerman, show at Bolinas Art Museum. I had a number of revelations.

I love his work even more than I thought I did. There is something genuinely mysterious and magical about the process that results in these deep, soft, obscure landscapes. I wonder if it can be achieved digitally. Seth both shoots film and is also a master printer, and so there is a physical process that occurs that produces special results. What I find particularly interesting is the simultaneous presence of both the blur and softness of hand-held long exposures, and some very sharp details that echo back into the depths of the image. There is also a way in which these images convey a tremendous sense of motion–not the motion of the photographers hands, but of a vast, wind-swept earth, sea and sky. I have experimented with my own handheld long exposures with the digital, but had only limited success. I am now more committed than ever to at it and someday learn to speak this wonderful language of unseen motion.

A more mundane but very important revelation I had was the this beautiful stretch of coast is so close to my home that there is no excuse for not visiting every other week. We stayed in Point Reyes Station, a mere 60 minutes from Berkeley. Somehow we forget how close it all is and how lucky we are to live in this part of the world. So, we are renewing our efforts to get out to Marin, Sonoma, and beyond at least a couple times a month.

Finally, a conversation I had over the weekend got me thinking again about how I regain the crispness of mind and energy that I used to have. That led me to two courses of action. The first is to get back to commuting by bike. I notice that really do have a better disposition and more energy when I do. The second more radical course of action is change my eating habits–in a way that will test my willpower like nothing has since I quite smoking many, many years ago. Basically it amounts to drastically slashing my consumption of high-carb food.

The problem is I LOVE bread. I mean I love it. I mean I could easily eat a loaf a day. In my Mediterranean culture, every meal is eaten with a fork in one hand and a piece of bread in the other. I eat several pieces of toast for breakfast every morning, with cheeses, yogurt, fruit, jams, eggs, whatever. How I am going to turn this around, I don’t know, but I have got to try.

I started today. Cheese, fake sausage patties, and fruit for breakfast. It was good and I somehow made until lunch time. For lunch I had, don’t laugh, a salad from Subway. It is one of the few places, and the only inexpensive one, to eat near my work in Emeryville. So, I have been going there on certain days for the six-inch special sandwich ($2.99) loaded up with veggies. So, today I had a turkey and cheese, hold the bread, extra veggies. It was actually pretty good and I made until dinner. At dinner I ate my first bread product of the day. I survived my first day with almost no bread!