Wednesday, December 31, 2003: It's My Birthday And I'll Ruminate If I Want to!!

Turning 40 has given me pause to stop and think… Think about how I feel about turning 40. You see, I don’t really feel 40. Then I never really felt 30. Or 20. This may have to do with some one once saying that I was “18 going on 12”, (Does this mean I’m now 40 going on 34?) Or it may not. What is 40 supposed to feel like? Am I supposed to feel “old” now?

The worst thing so far about turning 40 is the dumb-ass remarks some folk will make to you about it. Remarks that are as cliché as they are stupid, and really only serve to show how absolutely terrified the half-wit who delivers it is at the fact that one day, yes, he too will turn 40.

The dumbest of all remarks I’ve had was something about “throwing me a funeral”. Considering I’ve had to attend over 5 funerals since 1998 for a variety of loved ones and that I myself have come uncomfortably close to following the light up the tunnel twice since 2000 this remark is not only dumb, its thoughtless.

As David Byrne once said, “We’re older than we realize, in some one’s eyes”

Now when it comes to Birthdays, and the celebration there of, I am no expert. This is largely due to the fact that my Birthday has always been overshadowed by New Years Eve. This may sound like an excellent opportunity to celebrate both at once, but anyone who’s Birthday falls around Christmas will tell you a tale of combination presents and cards and the feeling that you’re being some how ripped off. So there have been some really good Birthdays, and some really bad ones but mostly forgettable ones that I don’t really remember much about.

Last year sitting in a boat on the Mekong River, I was reminded of my 17th Birthday when I had fallen through the ice and was forced to walk home for 45 minutes in frozen trousers. This year though I am oddly reminded of the other BIG Birthday; my 20th Birthday. The reason for that is how unbelievable it seems to me that it was actually 20 years ago that I turned 20! I have lived as long since then as I had lived up until that point (THAT should throw the grammar slammer checker into a fit of confusion!). How can that be? What is even more striking is how my 30th Birthday (20-Alpha 4, 1061 at Tango Hotel) seems even LONGER ago than my 20th.

My 20th Birthday... That one was good. I went to work at The Pay and Save at 4:00 pm. Worked my shift until Midnight, then went home and watched David Letterman. I had no idea of all the stuff that was coming up in 1984 and how an amazing year it would be. I didn't have a party or anything. I didn't really care though.

Now its 40 years, 27 of which I have documented in a diary form… Oh my.

As for “being old”…

I don’t feel old. My shoulder hurts. Then it has hurt since 1992. It will always hurt. Everything still seems to work okay. Considering what this old clay jar has been through that is a wonder in itself. I look increasingly like my Father, which isn’t a bad thing. If anyone handled aging with dignity he did. He didn’t care. It didn’t bother him, despite the health problems he’d had, and he was completely unafraid of it. It was as if he knew the punch-line. So for all this “getting old” business I really only have him as a measure of it.

When I was 20, my Father had turned 65. From my boyhood I had listened to him groan in despair when some old geezer in wearing a hat driving at 5 miles per hour got in front of us and impeded our race to what ever church function we were speeding towards (got to get their before Mrs. Skillen eats all the cookies…). For his 65th Birthday I made him a special “Senior Citizen’s Driver License”. It was a drawing of him with a hat on and it listed special privileges such as driving old cars with small wheels, traveling 30 miles below the posted speed limit and not signaling until midway through the turn. He kept it in his car and on one occasion handed to over with his real license to a cop that had stopped him for speeding. Apparently the Mountie was amused enough that it got him out of the ticket.

So what is all this “getting old” stuff? Why the fuss? Do I feel nervous about it because I am or because I’ve been told I should be? Is “getting older” some sin the Me Generation thought up in their endless mistrust of people who spawned them? Has that horror of age been absorbed into the pop culture that has replaced all other forms of worship in North America? Am I NOW supposed to question “what I’ve done with my life”? Or would it be a question of what I haven’t done? Questions like that are very boring which is probably why they don’t seem to have much of an effect on me.

Would I want to be 20 again? It was a good year, but… No thanks. Would I want to be 30 again? Nope, not really… So in 10 years I’ll be 50… Then in 20 I’ll be 60, then 70, and maybe 80… Or maybe I’ll go out into the ocean like an idiot and get sucked out to see and that will be that. That is what it comes down to. Maybe in the past people looked at aging as a sort of “Beat the Clock” thing. When getting older meant you had survived another year. You would hope we could have evolved to a point where it had meant you had “lived” another year. Unfortunately something went horribly array in about 1967.

Perhaps the best thing to do when one turns 40 is take stock of what you have.

I am 40…

I live in a tropical country other folk have to go to for vacations. I woke up this morning to a smile and a kiss from someone who’s totally content with a 120 baht Christmas tree.

As my Father would (and often did) say…

“I wouldn’t want to be a day younger.”

Friday, December 26, 2003: Boxing Day

I had an excellent Christmas Dinner last night at TGWATOHA’s house. She lives over the hill and far away so I hired Kaboom to deliver me safely. I was feeling rather rough as I had spent Christmas Eve stumbling around with Superdry. Sandy had gone off to University but was to join us later on.

I made it to the House Christmas Cheer at around 2:00 pm. TG greeted me along with her dogs Killer and Timid. Her housemate John showed me the garden and his partner Chumporn got me some drink. Ceri and Khing were already there and relaxing in the front yard. Everyone was waiting for the arrival of Roger and Yusaf. I drank multiple “Spy” wine coolers (which the Thais pronounced “sa-pie”) and hung out. Eventually Roger and his girlfriend Jit, and Yusaf and his girlfriend El showed up as well.

We were all quite hungry so TG appeased us with some wonderful home made mince pies and sausage pies. Killer and Timid looked at them longingly but Roger and I ate most of them before they could snatch any.

Eventually we were called to the table, and though the Thais had broken out some Esan food John made sure they joined us. The table was set with a huge amount of food, including a big Turkey, some Lamb, and all the fixings. There were lots of proper vegetables and a variety of gravies. There were also Christmas Crackers which is an item I’ve never experienced in The True North, but the British seem to love dearly. I can’t imagine what the Thai’s made of us Farang wearing little paper crowns but I suspect the thought it meant more that it did. The reading of the unfunny jokes from inside of the crackers was followed by TG singing the 12 Days of Christmas song which (unfortunately) she knew EVERY verse.

We stuffed ourselves. I won’t need to eat for at least 3 days. But it was SO GOOD. Especially the Turkey.

After the feasting everyone sort of collapsed in the living room and John put on a James Bond movie. This seems to be another British tradition which I’m sure dates back to those dark days before satellite TV when the English only had 4 channels. Every year a James Bond movie is played. The movie in question this year was “Die Another Day” and confirmed my belief that 20 James Bond movies is 15 too many. Ceri was also a believer that Connery was the only real Bond, and Roger (when awake) seemed undecided. My biggest beef about the movie was that the computer generated effects looked… computer generated.

Some time during James Bond Sandy showed up. She had to be up for University at 7:00 am so we had to leave at around 8:30 pm.

Today I slept all day. It was truly wonderful. I think I do it again tomorrow.

Today is of course Boxing Day. Which I believe we got from the British although I'm not sure of the meaning of the name. I believe it has something to do with boxes full of hats. It seems to me someone told me it has to do with Hockey but THAT I am highly suspect of. In any event I celebrated it by doing absolutely nothing.

Thursday, December 25, 2003: The Quiet Christmas

In 1973 my Father became the pastor in the remote town of Windfield Alberta. The church was (and still is — the pastor now being my childhood friend Jeff Longard) located on what was in the 1960’s the Pentecostal Holiness Church’s Western conference Bible School. It was part of a large property in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by trees, forest, and farms and only accessible by red-dirt roads that turned to a quagmire during summer rain storms. I was familiar with the place due to the many trips to the annual summer Camp Meetings. These were huge gatherings where fire and brimstone was preached and the miraculous happened under the roof of the hanger-like tabernacle. Although leaving my friends and school in BC was difficult the appeal of having that entire property to myself was appealing.

Winter came much earlier than I was used to in British Columbia. The first snow fall was on Halloween. Snow was always a rare thing on the west coast so I was quite please with the prospect of a white Christmas. I was not disappointed. The amount of snow that came down was unbelievable. Each morning leading up to the Christmas holidays was one of getting up to complete darkness, eating toast and having a tea before bundling up like one of the Apollo astronauts and leaving the airlock to the frozen surface of the outdoors to wait for the yellow school bus. If the temperature fell below -40 degrees then and only then was school cancelled, but what the perceivable difference between –38 and –40 is I can’t say… It would be so cold that the air would sparkle as the sun came up. The last day of school was one of those weird half-days, ruined in part by some organized “fun” that I was glad to see end. I remember my Parents picking me up and driving back along to our house which was still under preparation for the big day. I was very excited because I knew that Dad had said we were going to get a tree that night.

I was 9 so the whole Santa business was over with, but there still remained some strange magical feel to Christmas. That magic was even greater there. The woods around the property where spooky enough in the summer, but in there was another quality to them for me that December. The brightness of the moon reflecting on the snow and the ice, the silence of the place, and that feeling the area seemed to have. In the summer I’d kitted myself up in old surplus military belts and packs, dawned a metal helmet and gone off to fight the imaginary Imperial Japanese Army in the jungles of Burma. With winter the comic-book Japanese charging me with fixed bayonets shouting “iiieeeeeeee’ faded and the woods seemed to be full of Tolkien-like Elves and watchful aliens standing around warbling saucers.

That Friday night my Dad and I set off to get a tree. I had expected to climb in the car and drive to some makeshift “X-mas tree” lot that would spring up in parking lots and at gas stations around Chilliwack. Instead my Dad had me get bundled up and bring my sled. Off we went together to find a tree. The prospect of heading into the spooky woods at night wasn’t so bad with my Father there. I wasn’t afraid of any mystical creatures or aliens with him along. Even the more real threats like bears didn’t scare me since my Brother George had shot a bear that had been intent on eating him, and as Dad was certainly bigger and stronger than George I was certain he could kill it with his bare hands. So there was absolutely nothing to fear.

I remember walking a direction I had never explored on my own, a direction away from what I called “Burma”. We crossed a huge field, went through a wooded area and came out into a less densely wooded patch that might have been cleared ten years earlier and now was made up mostly of young pines. Here we stopped for a moment to look up at the stars. My Father always marveled at them.

“Look at the sky” he’d say and always follow it with a whistle.

His faith was intertwined with things like the night sky. He would look at it and talk to me about how many stars there must be. How many planets must circle them?

We walked around among the pines until we found one that looked just about right for the living room. Dad got his little hatchet out of my sled and took it down, talking to it as he did.

“You’re going to stay in our house for a little while Mr. Tree”.

The tree was laid upon my sled and off we went Dad pulling it when I had grown tired. I remember how beautiful the walk back was; the silver of the moonlight on the frozen surface of the snow, and how we saw a big white owl. I remember the crunch crunch of our boots as we stomped along.

We returned triumphantly to the smell of Mom baking her outstanding and unbeaten short-bread cookies and after shaking all the snow and ice off our tree we set it up in the living room. The box of ornaments which we used as long as I recall was brought up from the basement and the decoration began. Decorating a tree was never as much fun with out my Sister Anne, but I did my best under the circumstances. Once the tree was up, and Mom came in to watch the placing of the star on the top the gifts were put under it. These boxes had been arriving over the last week and most had come from Ontario. There was a growing pile of them marked “To Lorne” from “Uncle” or “Auntie”. I inspected them, looking for the tell-tale signs of the much wanted “toys” and the unwanted and loathed “clothes”. I would then pile them accordingly. The possible toys on the bottom to be opened last.

I of course wasn’t the only one waiting for the big day. My G.I. Joe was as well. I had received him the previous year, and although I forget his name now, I do remember him clearly. He was one of the early 12 inch tall 1970’s G.I. Joes, no longer officially a “soldier” but a member of “The Adventure Team”. He was the blond “Air Adventure” featuring “life-like” hair and a beard although he predated “Kung-Fu Grip”. Joe had been alone since we’d arrived in Alberta. Over the course of the year he had lost much of his kit, including most sadly, his boots. Those were hard times for Joe. He was stranded, alone in the harsh artic conditions of Northern Russia. The Soviets had downed his jet and were at that moment searching for him. He had to hang in though. Using his survival training he constructed an ice fortress and using a make-shift radio comprised of a spool of thread and some bits of plastic he called for help… Help was on its way but not until December 25th! He had to hold on until then… armed with only a tiny plastic Luger that came with a detachable stock and rifle extension for the barrel and with feet wrapped in make-shift survival boots made of toilet paper, he held the Reds at bay. The cold war indeed!

Christmas Eve after my parents had gone to bed I crept downstairs. My Father was an expert in covert Christmas present distribution and I was disappointed not to find anything new under the tree. I remember looking out across our front yard towards the Church, secretly hoping to see something magical. Maybe Santa, or an Angel or at least a UFO. Then I went back upstairs to my room and fell asleep.

The next morning I was not disappointed. I had asked for three things, a second G.I. Joe, a 6 wheel ATV for him, and the G.I. Joe Command Center. I was thrilled to find that with the ATV came another G.I. Joe, and with the Command Center came two more Joes! Reinforcements and plenty of kit. Uniforms and best of all several rifles including some M-16s. More than enough gear to keep the expansion of the Soviet Union well out of our back yard.

My Mother always called that Christmas “The Quiet Christmas” because she hadn’t enjoyed the solitude and distance from her Grandchildren. I however consider that year one of the most amazing Christmas of all. No matter how meager or difficult any Christmas has been since, no matter how far away from home or how lonely I have been during this time of year, the memory of that Christmas has held me through. Even if I circumstances prevented me from celebrating Christmas at all, that Christmas would more than make up for it.

Merry Christmas!

Wednesday, December 24, 2003: Christmas Eve

There are significantly more Christmas decorations up around Bangkok this year than last. Then that would be in keeping with this year being a 100 percent improvement on last year. At first I thought it might only seem like there is more due to the black cloud that rendered me effectively blind last year. However others have noticed it as well. There have even been some sort of Christmas Carolers on the BTS trains, singing songs of which they have no comprehension.

The most impressive item though has to be the huge Christmas tree outside of the Emporium constructed entirely of white wind chimes. On the surreal side there were some ladies in blue Elf outfits doing some sort of dance while some European guy pumped out Christmas Polkas on an accordion. As the Thai’s view all white folk as “Farang” Christmas traditions from Europe, North America, South America and Eastern Europe collide here like so many motorcycle taxis and get retranslated into some bizarre Thai notion of what Christmas is.

Which isn't a bad thing... But it can be... interesting.

I went to Big C with Kaboom and picked up a Christmas tree for the Redoubt. It is a whopping 3 footer which was nearly toppled by the weight of the lights. It cost me a whole 120 baht. (Almost as much as the lights cost.) I took it back to the Redoubt with Sandy’s Christmas present and set it all up. As humble as it might be… It looks pretty good. The lights have a multiple speed button that changes the flashing sequence from John Denver mellow to frontal-lope Epilepsy freak out. It took a whole half hour to decorate. A far cry from the big trees we used to have in our living room.

So…

Now just a few of Bangkok Massive remain. Others have gone home for Christmas or gone to the beach.

Friday, December 19, 2003: In A Glass Eye

I found a Nash The Slash t-shirt for a mere 159 Baht. It is different from the one I saw on the BTS. So here I am at the tail end of 2003 wearing more or less the exact same thing I wore at the tail end of 1979; army pants (you call em' "cargo pants", we called them "combats") and a Nash the Slash T-shirt. Well if Walnuts doesn't have to grow up, why should I?

And now for the weather...

I never thought 20 degrees could feel this cold. But it does. The highs of 32 are great but in the morning and in the evening when it's 20 degrees I'm wearing my MEC fleece.

As Doctor Evil once said, "it's frickin freezing in here, Mr. Bigglesworth!"

Met up with Superdry at the Londoner. Cornish Pasties all 'round. Good food, good gossip and more chit chat about the old days when the Hot Knife Joe was king.

Those were the days my friend...

Saturday, December 13, 2003: Dreams and Nightmares

I had a dream that I was back in Toronto preparing to play a gig on Queen Street. In the dream I was preparing to play with Rhea's Obsession (this qualifies the dream for nightmare status). I had phoned Chris C to come down and join us on Chapman Stick which ruffled the feathers of the Rhea's Obsession folk. They felt Chris wasn't "cool enough" to play with them. I told them that dressing up like it was Halloween didn't make them cool. Then I insisted that if they wanted me to play he would have to play as well. With that I went off looking for breakfast (dream-logic; it was morning in the dream) so I walked west on Queen Street to Bathurst. I thought to myself well, if this is a dream I'll find out soon enough, I'll never make it to the Grape Fruit Moon...

Sure enough.

I was starving when I woke up.

Friday, December 12, 2003: Poipet Regurgitated

The only thing I dislike more than going to Poipet to get my passport stamped is having to report about it to you afterwards. It’s like alien abduction anal probes and childhood creepy church people experiences (if there is a difference between the two…); best forgotten if not blocked out completely.

However I know you all come here looking for some gossip and since you never really find any you hope to at least get some blood and guts. So here goes…

Kaboom showed up at the awful hour of 5:30 am. Both Sandy and her Sister Durian had insisted on coming along with me, so away we all went off into the darkness before the dawn. The girls promptly fell asleep in the back seat, and I watched the sun come up as we headed first north then east.

I saw half a dog on the highway. That was more sad than gross. It had been a big German Shepard (it was the front half) that had been hit by some kind of construction vehicle. I didn’t see the other half. I assume it was in the ditch. It looked like it would have been a good farm dog.

We got stopped at an Army Check point as we neared the border. There are several regiments posted around that area. One thing about the Land of Smiles is you know you are approaching a border zone when you start seeing lots of army bases. Apparently some Khmer bandits and ex-Khmer Rouge types still make incursions into Thailand for the purposes of kidnapping and theft.

We were stopped however because of the beauty and newness of the Zero. They wanted to see Kaboom's ID and take the engine block number of the car, in case his plan was to go into Cambodia with it and not come out. They were interested in everyone’s ID but mine. That took about fifteen minutes or so…

Because of the Constitution Day holiday the border was a nightmare. Bus-loads of Thai gamblers arrived at the Friendship Bridge at the same time as I did. Sandy and Durian had abandoned me for the market area besides the border crossing. Kaboom attempted to cross with me but the amount of people pushing and shoving into the customs hut gave him a change of heart.
No Spadina bus line up death match could match this. Asians have no concept of a queue, or the rules of a line up anyways, but add to that the siren call of the slot machines and roulette tables and you’ve got a problem. The customs cops eventually got annoyed by the queue-jumpers and the 17 lines trying to get into past 5 customs agents so they set things right. I was VERY glad when I finally made it out on to the bridge.

There were a bunch of Khmer guys standing outside the door all pitching to “guide me” so I chose one and went across to the Cambodian side. The idea is that you let them fill out the form and so forth pay them a little, which they probably split with the guards and everything goes through nice and neat. Some Back-Packers arrived at the customs zone at the same time as me and the guy flatly refused to let the local guys fill any forms out for him. His girl friend just looked travel weary and in need of some five-star hotel action. He was clearly all into the Lonely Planet experience. The Khmer were offended at his rejection of their services, putting it down as cheapness on his part. They were also amused to no end by his clothes.

Khmers seem to all wear floppy Gilligan hats, as well as a variation on a thick cotton work shirt. To a Westerner it looks uncomfortably hot, but one has to keep in mind they all weigh about 100 pounds and have no body fat at all. It was sunny out, but windy so I was wearing my blue fleece. Buddy however was wearing that weird flimsy elf clothing that I fear everyone on Bloor Street now wears. A collarless white cotton shirt with lace patterns on it and these flimsy “Peace Camp” brand trousers… and of course expensive space sandals with some ethnic looking pattern on the straps to make them more acceptable to the modern day traveling circus clown. In any event he would have no assistance and they were still sitting waiting to be processed when I was on my way back to the Thai side of the bridge.

The Thai entry was the most painless of any I have done. Stamp Stamp…

And that’s about all that happened. Except for the drive back… this took forever due to construction fouling up the traffic. We got back to Bangkok at around 3:00 pm. I was VERY tired and cranky.

Thursday, December 11, 2003: And You Thought You Were Normal

I'm always meaning to write about the weird t-shirts I see over here. The locals will buy a t-shirt from a market that often times has some brain boggling psuedo English phrase like "Happies Girl In World" or the equally mysterious "I"m Freshy". Other times they will have a long forgotten band name on them, or a name that clearly does not reflect the CD collection of the person sporting the t-shirt. So you will at times see elderly ladies wearing a t-shirt that was originally intended for the fans of The Hot Chilli Peppers.

Recently I saw the mother of all weird t-shirts. I was out on the BTS with Walnuts and TGWATOHA and lo I see a kahtoy wearing a Nash The Slash Fan Club t-shirt. I pointed out the t-shirt to Walnuts. We agreed that there was no way on earth this guy had any idea of who Nash was.

Walnuts seemed suprised when I told him Nash still played. What would he say if he knew I was at the Nash/Godo Riot in 1980?

Well as some of you do know Nash is the reason that I use a sequencer and a beatbox...

Tuesday, December 9, 2003: Old Timers Like Brian Creswell...

I ran into Moxy Superdry, the worlds biggest Super Tramp hater at The Bullshead. We hooked up last night for a chit-chat at the Londonerererererer which was fun. I haven't seen him since Tiny Water so I got the run down on what was what and what happened after that went all pear-shaped.

We spend the evening remembering the good ol' days when Stretch would yell at Mullet about his water-bill and the time we got all mangled up and stumbled around Makati... Those heady days when we raced down life's highway like a rented volvo going into tandori overdrive.

2000 seems like a life time ago.

Monday, December 8, 2003: Matrix Convulsions

The first thing Sandy wanted to know after we’d seen the last Matrix movie was why they bothered making 2 Matrix movies. I pointed out they’d made 3 and only then did I learn she’d never seen the first one. So we found the first one on Disc and watched it.

Now I haven’t seen the first one in a long time. The first thing that struck me about it was how little the second and third movie had to do with it. It seems to me the original idea was that the humans were batteries for the machines and Mr. Anderson could solve all that by waking up folk so whole power grid goes off line.

Did the Wotoosey brothers actually watch the first movie after they made it?

Apparently not. The sequels were like eating Pizza in the UK. It says its Pizza… It looks like Pizza, it … It sort of tastes like Pizza… But it’s NOT really Pizza.

They seemed to think that if they made more movies that looked like the first one it would be the same as the first one. They also seemed to conclude that if they just put LOTS more of the same kind of stuff it would then it would be better… So in the second movie we got endless yappy yap far too much CGI and I got a headache.

I thought the third movie was actually better that the second. Better in the same way that watching “The Hulk” was better than standing in line at the Poipet boarder crossing. I did like the big battle with the guys in the personal walking things. It reminded me of The Original Chris C. But it seemed to have so little to do with the first movie.

The progression of these movies takes some bizarre twists but it reflects the weird shifts in thinking over the last 5 years. The original was a good little “what if” tale with some nice X-file parallels. It was nonsense but that’s okay for fantasy eye candy. Somewhere between the first movie being taken far too seriously by all the Rage Against the Machine Paranoid McDonald Restaurant Window Smashers and the Islamaholics crashing planes into the World Trade buildings the Wyonna Ryder Brothers must have had either been overpowered by pure greed or pure stupidity.

I was baffled by the final ending of Matrix 3. Everyone is happy that it’s “peace” and the war is over. Okay, that makes sense. But if the population is still plugged into the Matrix as batteries… Then doesn’t it mean you’ve just lost? So maybe the machines aren’t squishing you anymore but wasn’t the whole point of the war to free the people from the machines? NO, apparently the programs are what we are worried about now. Those poor homeless “exile programs” like that annoying French guy. Clearly the Wankoffski Brothers’ original vision was too close to Ben Laudin’s point of view for comfort.

In the end Neo and Trinity and Scooby and the Gang should have just all chilled out a bit. They would have if they “knew” what I know…

The Truth, man…

That the Matrix can only exist in the 1990’s.

Thursday, December 4, 2003: Wimp Bizkit

Limp Biscuit who I endless confuse with the equally talent less Linkin Park was supposed to play Bangkok this month. This week however those hard-ass working class rock heroes cancelled their gig due to “security concerns”…

What exactly they are afraid of was unspecified. At least when the Rolling Stones cancelled due to the SARS scare it made a little sense. The Stones boast of a combined age of at least 1000 years so being senior citizens and all health issues like SARS and breaking a hip should be taken into consideration.

But security concerns??? They just had APEC here! If G.W. Bush can come in and out you’d think a bunch of tough hombres like the rock and roll fist in the air heavy Nu Metal studlies from Limp Blistex could brave the Land of Smiles.

Sure George W. had about 2000 secret service agents with him but certainly Limp Bluster has some bad-ass tough guy hommes who could make sure no one got out of line. Their token DJ must have some pals from the hood who could strike some intimidating gangsta poses with folded arms and such like.

“Yo, Muhammad don’t blow up my bros, word…”

Besides didn’t Limp Brisket automatically jump on the anti-war band-wagon with P.O.D., Rage Against The Machine Wash, and all the other angry suburban refugees? Wouldn’t that make them less likely to be bombed??

According to the Bangkok Post the cancelation was due to the US State Department's travel advisory warning to US citizens of increased security threats. Well I’d love to point out to these weenies that even with 12 million people Bangkok is safer that ANY major American city.

Perhaps though “security threats” is just an easy way to get out of a failing tour and it sounds so much better than “cancelled due to lack of ticket sales”. I’m sure there’s a tax advantage for those cash strapped record company types too. They can probably write off the loss this way.

Yes this makes much more sense. No one gives a shit about those whiney working class knobs over here anyways. F4 and Blue are the big stars in this town and come through here with what seems to be monthly concerts. The Red Hot Chilli Peppers where here last year, and Cold Play came through in the summer with out having anyone fire RPGs at them.

Limp Bizkit’s fan base is drawn largely from teenage suburban kids who are angry about the unfairness of life; furious that they have to take out the garbage and do their homework when they could be at the mall with their pals talking about “the unfairness of the system, man”. Those types are thankfully few and far between over here. Maybe there weren't enough to warrant a show.

Personally I hope that Limp Bizkit and all that Nu Metal nonsense is on its death bed. I rejoiced with a loud voice with that retarded pseudo-satanic heavy metal crap finally ran out of steam in the late 80’s, and I will be as equally pleased when Nu Metal finally sinks into the sea of time as well.

I think it was Linkin Bizkit or Limp Park that said "It doesn't really matter"...

Monday, December 1, 2003: Not Sick (I think)

I think I am better. I hope I am better. Last week was a write off.

I saw that Ontario had some big snow storm.

HAHA!!!

It is beautiful out today. Sunny with a nice breeze... It feels like early June...

Not much new. I came back to the Redoubt to find Sandy watching the 1970's Oscar winning movie "Patton". I had found it on sale for cheap. She would have no interuptions or distractions. I am amazed at how little the Thais know about a War that cost 63 million lives.

She picked up a movie on disc called "Mile Zero" which turned out to be a so-so Canadian moive. It didn't even pretend to be in the USA which is strange to see over here. It wasn't actually that bad. I think the weak part was some of the production. The boom-mic kept popping into frame. It succeeded in making me homesick though.

I have to make a visa run soon. I am undecided as to where.