January 2002 - A New Day Yesterday
RayzRealm (c) January ,2002

"It was a new day yesterday,
but it's an old day now."
-Jethro Tull

Tuesday January 1 Osama bin Laden in disguise

Well the world still appears to be here. I didn't sleep much at all last night, ruminating over the medical possibilities of this bleeding, which seems to come and go. I did manage to stay up until 11:30, then nodded off.

At least there were no acts of terrorism on New Year's Eve. Either bin Laden and his band of thugs have run out of ideas and resources, or they're laying low and will strike again when the world least expects anything. My hunch is they're playing possum...for now.

I took a ride into Boston just to walk around the city for the day. As cold as it was, a lot of people were out and about in town. I walked over to the Fenway and watched the bush bunnies scurrying around in the undergrowth in search of nuts and berries. It was too cold to spend much time outdoors so made my way back down Newbury Street and through the Prudential Mall and concourse.

One thing the whole world has adopted from America is blue jeans. No matter what race, creed, color or age, everyone wears Levi's or one of it's spin-offs. I sat in a cafe watching people walk through the mall, and just about everyone was wearing blue jeans of some sort, "Nuke the gay baby whales, pave the Earth and clothe the masses in denim". I stopped at a record store to browse and noticed a CD in the Indy section, "Dead Yuppies." and no, I didn't buy it. After having a late lunch at Clerys, walked through the South End and back to my car. Back to work tomorrow. It feels like a Sunday today.

This from the orbiting Area51 spy satellite news network...

OZ - January 1, 2002

Last night there was a truck bomb explosion in Munchkin land, which killed 100 local residents. The Wicked Witch of the West is the most likely suspect in the recent string of terrorist attacks around Oz. She is also behind the chemical warfare attack on the capital, where many residents merely fell asleep. Undercover agents intercepted a crystal ball communication where the witch stated, "poppies, poppies will make them sleep."

The Wizard, long thought to be a weak and ineffectual leader has ordered around the clock bombings of the Witch's castle. The Lion, tried catching a flight to Kansas to avoid being called up for military duty, but all flights in and out of Oz have been suspended. The Witch is believed to be hiding out in the Enchanted forest. The Tin Man, who has in depth experience in this locale has volunteered to lead a strike force into the forest.

The trouble began when Dorothy, a visitor from Kansas, piloted a house that landed on the Wicked Witch's sister, killing here instantly. The Witch released a statement that Dorothy, her little dog and that Wizard are all outsiders and infidels and there can be no peace in Oz until they leave. Agents have also uncovered the names of a number of suspected terrorist cells operating in Kansas, awaiting orders from the Wicked Witch.

Dorothy has not been available for comment and it is not known if she was killed in the attack or is in the Wizard's protective custody.

Thursday January 3

I watched "In and Out" with Kevin Kline last night, a very funny movie indeed. It takes a lot to coax a chuckle out of me but this one did, a number of times. I'll file it in the same section of my movie collection as "The Birdcage", "Priscilla" and "Mrs. Doubtfire". If airports were half as secure as the packaging on the average CD and DVD, airline acts of terrorism would quickly become a thing of the past. It took me a half hour to tear through the various anti-theft seals before I could get the disk out.

I'm sure that many people have those times when some song keeps playing itself in an endless loop in their minds. A song from early Jethro Tull has been playing itself over and over in mine, "A New Day Yesterday". The first time I heard the album was in a record shop in Piccadilly Circus in London while I was on Naval shore leave.

My first and last time with you, and we had some fun,
Could have spent a long time with you, and I kissed you once.
Oh I had to leave today, just when I thought I'd found you.
It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now.

I suppose I could have worse songs in my mental play list. After blowing the dust from the CD's, played "This Was" and "Stand Up" Tull albums.

I know that Pat Buchanan leans way to the right, but I found a link on the Drudge Report site interesting. The Death of the West sounds like it could be an interesting book, unless all copies are rounded up and burned. Inviting Future Terrorism is an article I found in Today's Alternet. Why do they all hate us so much, my my, why could that be? Also from the Online Journal, I found this article, The Prince of Peace and Dubya . Yeah what would God and Jesus think of all this? Where is God anyway?

Saturday January 12

Twas the end of the second season finale of the X-Files, Anansazi, where Mulder is lured to the Southwest after a secret was unearthed out in the desert. He's poking around in a railroad car that was uncovered after an earthquake, telling Scully about the bodies strewn about in the car on his cell phone. Smoking Man makes a bee-line to those coordinates. After military troops scour the car, they emerge.

Soldier: "Sir! Mulder seems to have disappeared without a trace!"

Smoking Man: "Nothing disappears without a trace!"

My penpal, Doug from Chicago seems to have pulled a Mulder. He had not returned my calls or e-mails (not like him), then during the past two weeks I got a recorded message that his line was disconnected. I sent him 2 e-mails this week and they came back "undeliverable". I guess I made such a great impression on him, he skipped town, or the planet. People drift in an out of my life like brief Summer squalls.

Well the bleeding seems to have stopped, and then there was a 4 day period where I didn't have a single bowel movement, not even a squeaking fart, then blood. This past week things seem to have returned back to normal, but I still saw my doctor, who did an occult blood test (negative) and one of those dildo-scope office exams. Only thing he saw was a couple of angry hemorrhoids, but still ordered a colonoscopy, since I am over 50 years old. As an added bonus, for no apparent reason, I've almost totally lost my voice. I sound like a cross between Joe Cocker and Janis Joplin. Stay tuned in February as PBS brings you a National Geographic special, "Colonic Journey".

Today I took a ride into Boston to roam around and picked up the new DVD "Special Edition" of "Buckaroo Banzai". I've been waiting for it's release for a while now and only paid $14.95. Tonight I'll probably crash by 9 or 10, another exciting Saturday night in Paradise. At least I noticed it's beginning to stay light out until almost 5PM.

Sunday January 13

The pounding rain woke me a couple of times during the night (we desperately need it) and when I turned on the radio this morning, the weatherman said we might get the first major snow storm of the year. No sooner had he said it, the rain began to turn to fat wet flakes, and within minutes, it was like some blizzard.

I needed to get gas, and did not feel like staying home all day, so set a course for Cambridgeside Galleria to play mall rat for a day. After downing a bucket of iced coffee at Au Bon Pain in the food court, browsed the stores in search of some 30-31" waist 501's, some nice plain rugby shirts, and a half dozen or so athletic fit long sleeve sport shirts.

Without a trace revisited.

It seems nobody knows what a rugby shirt is any more. What passes for sweatshirts are usually walking billboards for some brand name. I refuse to pay $50 for Levi 501's and will drop by Bob's Stores when they have their next sale for about $29. None of the sales clones knew what "athletic fit" meant. I have a 16+" neck, broad shoulders, chest and a small waist. If I buy a dress shirt with a16-16.5" neck it looks like it was tailored by Abdul the Tent Maker. Again I'll wait and shop at Jacques Penny (J.C. Penny) where they do (or did) carry athletic fit shirts.

I dropped by Best Buy and a record shop in further search of classic late 70's and 80's dance music on CD. It seems that all the Canadian, Euro and San Francisco music that kept dance floors packed in the big cities, Fire Island and Provincetown has all faded into obscurity. What passes for classic disco is stuff like Boogie Oogie Oogie, Ring My Bell, Stayin Alive and the other top 40 mainstream radio hits. The truly good stuff from the era has disappeared without a trace. Like all the "unsafe sex" porno movies from that time, the music of the same era has vanished. Now all there is that passes for dance is Hip-Hop, Trance, Rave, Techno. There were a bunch of hit Ibiza compilations that all seemed to carry some DJ's booth name, "DJ Sucks a Lot", DJ Butt Fuck", DJ Stoned a Lot". Since I'm not a globe trotter that hangs with the rich and famous, these Ibiza and other hot rave spot spin doctors don't ring a bell. There were even a bunch of collections that bore the stamp of approval, "As seen on TV!" If it 's been seen on TV, then I'll keep looking elsewhere. "Trance 2002, on 2 giant CD's - now with a free hit of Ecstasy inside".

By the way, how can CD's be giant? They're all the same size. This reminds me of the days of vinyl, when we played those licorice pizzas on turntables. There were TV ads for Zamfir and His Pan Pipe and Slim Whitman's Greatest Hits "on 3 giant LP's or cassettes". They supposedly outsold Elvis, The Beatles, Liberace and Jesus world wide. I never heard of Slim Whitman until I saw "Mars Attacks", where granny's Slim Whitman records were the only thing that could defeat the Martians by making their heads explode.

Even the one restaurant I always ate at when I ventured into the Galleria was gone. I left Cambridgeside empty handed, then headed over to Micro Center. The snow and rain had just about stopped, and now the weatherman was saying we were getting off easy.

It is tempting, a 1.9GHZ P4 box with 80 gig drive, 64Meg video card, CDRW, CD-Rom, etc, etc, etc, all for $1200....but I'll wait. I'm not really nutzo about Windoze XP, which from what I've been told, snoops around on your system, reporting back to Big Brother in Redmond. Geesh, a lot of the books they have are all geared toward XP, and Microsoft NET stuff. With a blink of the eye, everything you knew has vanished.

I left Micro Center empty handed, but managed to stock up on consumables at Trader Joe's across the parking lot; coffee, chocolate, trail mix and cookies. I had a pleasant early dinner at The 99, then stocked up on all the stuff I run out of at the same time at CVS. Between Trader Joe's and CVS I laid down $60.

Friday January 25

I know, it's been a while since I made an entry in here, but I have not felt much like doing anything, let alone pissing into the wind by writing in the Flight Recorder journal. I know that one or two people drop in from time to time to read my babblings.

I did manage to get hold of Doug in Chicago. I was beginning to wonder if he had been abducted by aliens, fled to Afghanistan, or just wrote me off as a curiosity satisfied by our meeting in November. His phone had been disconnected due to some billing dispute (you've go to love service providers), plus he was in the hospital for a week.

I was getting ready to visit Bob in New Hampshire last Friday night and was checking the battery charge level in my cell phone, which I usually keep turned off, when I noticed an awaiting voicemail message. Since I have never had an incoming mail message, listened to it, and it was Doug telling me he had tried to call my land line but the answering machine kept cutting him off, so he left a message at my cell number.

I called Doug on Friday night at the hospital number he left and had a nice long talk. He told me about some nightmarish (Tales From the Dark Side) encounters he had with hospital staff. I had my own horror tale about when I was an inmate about 14 years ago at Beth Israel for a week with a shingles outbreak on my face. I did not have a personal physician at the time and quickly learned that there are some residents (prison guards) that will go out of their way to intimidate and belittle a stranger who happens into their custody. The doc I had to deal with made statements in my record that I never said, and twisted my answers to his questions to fit his agenda. This moron had an ego the size of Texas. When I finally found my own personal doctor, he was as upset as I was upon reading what the attending keeper in the hospital had written.

I found an interesting article in Pugzine's, the Pugzine Secret Archive Mind Torture and Harassment , which was not exactly what I encountered, but scary enough to keep the most stout hearted man or woman from venturing into the ER.

Bob and I had the usual interesting visit on Saturday; catching up, talking techno-geek and recovery talk, shopping and dinner. I picked up a set of sheets and a few long sleeve dress shirts at Jacques Penny (J.C. Penny) which is one of the only stores I know that has a limited selection of athletic fit shirts. I wanted to pick up a couple of pair of 30-31" waist Levi 501's, but they were not on sale, plus the only sizes they had were 27-28" and 38-44" waist sizes. One of the sales drones told me that 501's were totally passe and not very popular. I have been wearing Levi's classic button fly jeans since way before the little tribal tattooed cherub was even a glimmer in his parents' eyes. Levi must have changes the fit of their jeans, since the 501's do not fit the way they did back in the carefree 70's to early 80's. I guess in the post Reagan/Yuppie and AIDS era, people no longer have butts, crotches (on males) or legs, or the assumption is every American has the body composition of Bobby Hill (king of the Hill).

There was snow in the weather prediction, which began during the late afternoon. Bob and I sat by the fire eating cookies and drinking tea. He said I could crash for the night on his new Futon couch if I didn't feel like driving back home, but I opted to leave early and head home.

I called Doug on Sunday after making a brief and boring trek into Boston. We chatted until the FOX Sunday night lineup began.

I found another interesting article in the Alternet archives about some people finding the layoffs and business downsizing an amusing change. Most of us (paycheck to paycheck) stiffs wind up suffering, but for the Biff and Buffy crowd it's the Recession Chic. Yeah right!

I stopped by to see my doctor after work for a lab follow-up visit, and am happy to say lab results are returning to normal (if there is a normal for me). The colonic adventure seems to be over for now and the Naval Observatory has requested the use of my bowel movements for setting their clocks/ I'm still scheduled for a National Geographic Tour of the Colon (colonoscopy) next monh, that is if I can find someone to take me, wait and return me back home after the ordeal is over.

Thus endeth the January journal, a few days early

Shalom, Ray