Today felt European, mostly because it was cloudy, almost blustery, except for a few noon-time rays, and in the afternoon it even rained for the first time since what - March? April at the latest. I wore the black jacket that I bought in Alaska, withdrawing it from summer closet-storage for its seasonal debut. In the evening, during a stroll, I smelled the wonderful autumnal fragrance of wood smoke - Californians light up their fireplaces when it's even slightly chilly.

I rode the Bay Area Rapid Transit to Berkeley, after the freeway drive up to the Daly City terminus. Since the trains are similar and their fare-paying systems are identical, here's a comparison of other attributes between the Washington, DC "Metro" and the BART systems.

	BART	Metro
Car Interior	Gray and Browns	Off-white and Oranges
Closing Doors alert-sound	One buzzer-tone	Two chime-tones <1>
Fares <2>	Constant	Higher during "Rush Hour" <3>
Station Design	Many are unique	All the same

Also the BART trains' windows have an aluminum bezel that's almost perpendicular, which I found comfortable resting for my elbow and forearm, unlike the Metro's thick rubber window gaskets which angle downwards. As you can tell, I favor BART, although I've heard the contradictory viewpoint.

Visited several of the Berkeley bookstores, mostly of the "used" variety, including Moe's which is quite good. In "Pegasus" I read the new last chapter of A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess. This was omitted from the original American printing, which ended at the same place the movie did: Alex saying "I was cured, all right" (sarcastically, because he's realized the conditioning of the Ludivoco Technique is gone). In this final chapter he's got a new set of three droogs, but he's getting apathetic about the old ultraviolence, and even more distressing:

I was slooshying more like malenky romantic songs, what they call Lieder, just a gloss and a piano, very quiet like yearny, different from when it had been all bolshy orchestras and me lying on the bed between the violins and trombones and kettledrums. There was something happening inside of me, and I wondered if it was like some disease or if it was what they had done to me that time upsetting my gulliver and perhaps going to make me real bezoomny... Perhaps I was getting too old for the sort of jeezny I had been leading, brothers.

But now as I end this story, brothers, I am not young, not no longer, oh no. Alex like groweth up, oh yes.

Elsewhere in Berkeley I

• had breakfast at "The Original Mels" (Mels being the burger chain best known from "American Graffiti" - that branch was demolished, but now they're popping up all over - N and I had a meal in an apparently phony clone in NC en route to the Outer Banks)
• visited the beautiful green art deco Berkeley Public Library across the street (a lucky thing, too; since it's closing real soon for years, for renovation - I must photograph it sometime or perhaps even draw a picture)
• bought books at Moe's (the brand new 2nd edition of Lonely Planet's "Slovenia" and Philip Kerr's all-in-one-volume Berlin Noir trilogy)
• had lunch at the "Manga-Manga Japanese Bistro", which is decorated with posters from Japanese cartoons and has comic books (manga) strewn about.

A main reason I made this journey was to join a "March Against the War on Drugs". This was a depressingly shabby, sparsely-attended affair, whose actual march (down three blocks of Telegraph Avenue, where that main drag ends at the edge of the UC-Berkeley campus) I missed since I got bored by the rambling speech of the apparent leader. Instead I drifted into "Cody's" books instead. This street has homeless street-freaks, just like Haight in San Francisco - one little knot of about four seemed to belong to two teen-aged kittens which were actually mating right there on the sidewalk at high noon - their humans did nothing to prevent this; watched with amusement, actually - the earth's Big Problem in microcosm.