05/09/2005 Deflated

My bike has been sitting in the car park at work with a puncture for the past 4 days. I can't make up my mind whether to attempt to fix the puncture or just buy a new bike. It's that tricky "back wheel puncture". Obviously, if it was a front wheel puncture there wouldn't be such a dilemna, and even someone with my limited practical skillbase could easily fix it.
I've been taking the bus. I ask for an 80p fare then put a £1 coin in the slot, making my customary 20p donation to the Edinburgh Bus Drivers' Xmas Drinks Fund. This is crazy as I have about 50 tons of loose change lying around in my flat. I have probably enough cash in loose change to buy a "round the world" flight, or even buy my own bus that I could drive myself to work free of charge, and maybe go on a holiday like Cliff Richard did and try to get off with Una Stubbs.
I'm mulling over when to get back in the stand-up saddle again. I think I might re-group, work on some new stuff and go for an October re-launch.
If someone asks me to do gigs, I'll do them but I won't go hunting them down...
I must drink less in September than I did in August. This won't be a hard objective to realise. A bit like Adolf Hitler making a New Year resolution to be "a little nicer" in future.
I watched "The Man Who Predicted 9/11" documentary. Very disappointing. I thought it was going to be about someone who had a weird, mystical vision of everything that was going to happen. Instead, it was just the story of a guy who was responsible for security in one of the towers who was very twitchy about the continuing threat to the buildings.
It wasn't exactly Nostre Damus stuff, as the towers had already been bombed in 1993 by someone taking a van into the underground car park, obviously with the intention of bringing the tower down.
What the programme was really about was using this bloke's story as an excuse to rerun all the 9/11 footage of planes crashing into buildings, people jumping from the buildings, the buildings collapsing, the panic on the ground etc etc
There's been an unwritten agreement in the past 4 years to not show these images any more on TV. At the time of the event, they were repeated over and over again hundreds of times. It became almost pornographic. I think most people felt after a while that they really didn't want to see these images any more, and the TV Networks duly obliged.
Last night was the first time I'd seen the images getting multiple showings again. I thought it was a fairly shoddy and sensationalist documentary, not worthy of Channel 4. But I still watched it. It's still all horribly mesmerising, and it reminded me of how I sat for hours gawping at the TV on the actual day, thinking that this was the end of the world.
On a more serious note, I've now decided to have a go at mending the puncture. I laugh in the face of adversity.