being back in the City by the Back Bay by Sunday for,

ah, the Safeway parking lot,

a ride around town

and Monday the Vallejo Ferry, which goes lame halfway to San Francisco

so takes an extra half hour to the dock.

Another half hour is swallowed by inoperative phonelines at Lenscrafters while Linda is fitted for new glasses but we are finally away, with ample time, relative to our relative energies, to SFMOMA for some excellent food in the comically twee downstairs restaurant before setting ourselves to the Tasks of Perusals; first the fine Matisse/Diebenkorn Competition,

with numerous surprises on both sides but generally won by M. Matisse, then

the Fishers’ vast holdings; an early Chamberlain above, Kellys galore below;

Martin Puryear…

Richard Artschwager

The wit of Lewitt, of which there were lots;

Anselm Kiefer and myriad Germans, finally ending seated in the furthest upper corner watching William Kentridge’s miniature light and shadowplay  production of “The Magic Flute”.

Ursula von Rydingsvard backed by a pink popup disco…

We detoured through Tomas Salcedo’s spidery constructions – some actually constructed by spiders – before descending to the photo floor for Larry Sultan’s “Here and Home”

and finally, eyeballs nearly fallen out from all the looking, hundreds of tiny-by-contemporary-standards Diane Arbus prints, where it’s a tossup as to whether her captions are trippier than her images and the sign “No Photographs” at the entrance to a long hallway of just that seemed somehow hilarious. But perhaps by then, drunk with images, I was just dopey.

Home on the restored Intintoli, same boat which we’d limped in on, to sunset and

Thai takeout.  Tuesday,

discovering to my sorrow/annoyance that California Law now Prohibits the Repair of Any Tire older than six years, necessitated a journey, with interesting sightings along the way, to find

some way to circumvent such a ridiculous [though obviously advantageous if you’re selling tires] ordinance and put an end to the miniscule leak in the ’45’s seventy-five month-old left

front tire. Done.

This was followed by an afternoon cooler [and windier]

than it looks here.