Earlier I looked around me and wondered how post-its and highlighters have managed to encroach my private space.

Sunday was our quiet day. After picking up our friend, we went to east Oakland, where we ate tacos from a taco truck in the parking lot of a thrift store. Here you can get toy accordions or speed, weed, you name it. Jimmy picked up an empty dime bag on the pavement, imprinted with a pattern of green alien schwas; white specks clung to its interior.

Then we ambled across a regional shoreline park embedded among industrial complexes near the airport. We spied a graveyard of smashed police cars and we also encountered birders at the end of a long deck mid-marsh. They were waiting for the clapper rail, wide-eyed behind binoculars and fancy cameras and spectacles. The other day, a lady sighed, We saw 60 different birds. You should wait till low tide. That's when all the birds come to feed. Then we heard a chattering in the reeds, and we all got quiet, listening to the call of an endangered bird.

Afterwards I painted an owl as tall as me in an abandoned factory in West Oakland. Machinery asquawk. Conveyer belts leading into dark cobwebbed tunnels. Chimneys so rusty they looked like they had been painted red. Rooftops buckling, cracks lichen-lined. Crisp light. A sky blue as the blue on a teacup and at the horizon, pink as a pink in a Dutch still life of flowers, knives, eggs, dead fowl. The pink of an Oakland still life.

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