It's been an evening of contrasts.

After spending the day leading a series of work-related field meetings, I cleaned up and headed down to Oakland to meet Elizabeth for coffee. The coffee house is sort of a white intellectual counterculture haven, an island in an otherwise overwhelmingly black neighborhood. Very urban.

Then on the way back north, I stopped for dinner in Petaluma. It was late enough, after 10, that none of my regular places there were open, Denny's was about the only choice. After driving through the upscale downtown, the restaurant... located right next to the Rt 101 ramp... looked like something out of an old and slightly frayed postcard, not remodeled in decades, and inhabited mostly by truck drivers stopping for a bite to eat.

Next, a detour through Santa Rosa's courthouse square to stop at an ATM. Dodging drunken yuppies walking back from some club, I looked around at the cute but over-designed and sterile suburban surroundings... and here I really need my camera instead of words.

I need to get back to documenting this crazily diverse country of ours, this place where some have it all and don't quite know what to do with it, while others hang on to their dignity by the fingertips, and some gave up a long time ago. I need to capture images of the decay hiding behind the sterile gentrification, the places we can't maintain even as we build more places that we someday won't be able to maintain.

The pretty girls are a nice distraction. The surrounding absurdity is a little more difficult to render into a two-dimensional image. But it needs to be done.