Back in the day the essage “44. Code 44” came through landlines. It was a woman’s prerecorded voice. She would say “44. Code 44,” and then she said “Your call can not be commpleted as dialed. Please check the nummmber and dial again.”She may have next said “This is a recording.” I should dial some bad numbers and see if that recording is still in circulation.

Today Code 44 has a different meaning. Today I turned 44. I spent most of this birthday day entirely stressed out and on edge.

When I woke up I saw 2 text messages on this phone. I thought “awww, someone actually remembered my birthday.” I expected no one to remember. i sent out not even the vaguest reminders or clues to anyone i know, and sure enough, no one thought to send a text or email (boo fucking hoo).

no, those 2 text messages were from my RAID. they were automated messages informaing me that one of the disks had failed. no happy birthday message, no cheerful reprise, just the annoying news that this RAID had once againn brought fresh anxiety into my life.

the seemingly simple task of removing the bad drive and replacing it with a new one took on fresh dimensions of aggravation when it simmply did not work. the RAID is on the floor of my bedroom, in a rather inconvenient spot (this is by design, so i don’t kick it or otherwise encounter it in my normal traversals of the living space). as i tried ot read the litlte LED screen to see if the new drive was recognized i tilted my had at about a 55-degree angle. this made me dizzy to such a degree that i nearly fell to the floor. i stood up and recovered my balance but man, that was a nauseating way to greet the day. eventually i remembered that it helps to remove the bad drive and reboot the RAID. that worked, hte drive was recognized, and the rest of hte computer-related day was spent letting the RAID resynch/re-stripe/re-whatever that annoying thing does.

the RAID seems to lose a disk every single time i commence a large backup job. i decided to re-backup the ol magazine scans, which are something like 50gb, and about half way through one of the drives failed, the exact same thing happened last year.

blahblahblah.

so went to Costco to get some gigormous bags of coffee. i threw the coffee into a blender to “puree” it.

then i took about $120 worth of quarters to the bank.

then for no particular reason (except that i’ve been feeling a little light-headed at times, with especial feelings of inchoate discomfort at the “Godspell” performance on Saturday) i decided to try one of those in-store blood pressure machines. Rite-Aid has them. they’re free. i tried 3 different machines, just for kicks. i got my money’s worth.

all 3 of them seemed to say that i should be having a heart attack at the moment the BP reading was made. i forget the numbers but i think one of them said something like 177 over 90. according to the helpful chart on the machine that meant Stage 2 hypertension. at another machine, 10 minutes later at another Rite-Aid , i was down to 155 over 77 (or something, i don’t remember the exact numbers).

i had no realistic expectations of accuracy when i started using them, but these in-store blood pressure readers should really be labeled “for entertainment purposes only”. i imagine they *cause* high blood pressure with their baloney readings.

speaking of baloney i later deduced that i did pretty much everything one is not supposed to do before getting a BP reading: i ate a cold cut sandwich, i was having a very stressful day (with the RAID and other technical matters invading my ability to concentrate on work), i was depressed that not one human being on our shared planet contacted me on this day (but a computer process did) and i was anxious about the encroaching mortality that is served up in reminder format almost every single hour of every single day, not just my birthday. (i’m talking about timestamps, but i’ll talk about that matter another time.)

still, i have been mildly curious about my blood pressure and my heart and my soul and my aorta and my perinium. my head has felt strange at times these past weeks, my vision blurry, and my diet is not as it should be.

so just for gits and shiggles i bought an Omron blood pressure monitor. after a few high-anxiety readings in the 160 over 88 realm i was down to 146 over 77, and i suspect that in the morning i’ll be back to my usual low BP readings of 110 over whatever the systolic number was last time i saw a doctor.

i’ve always had low blood pressure so it’s sort of bizarre when any kind of device reports that my BP has blasted off into heart attack range.

(fetish alert: the squeezing tension of the BP monitor gives me a bit of a woody. sorry, tmi…)

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so it was a happy happy birthday!

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tomorrow it is Carnegie Hall, Philip Glass’ 9th Symphony. The concert bills itself as the “U.S. Premiere” of this work, which is, i assume, literally true. but unlike the 19th century, when local and regional concert premieres were influential, this work has been heard in the U.S. already via the WWW. i downloaded it via the Lynx web browser. actually, no i did not. i have not heard Glass’ 9th Symphony yet (though I use the Lynx web browser daily, and could access that work via that web browser).

more and more i use the WWW less and less, opting instead to see and experience things that interest me regardless of their less-than-1-star review on some less-than-1-star asshole web site.

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i fell asleep on the couch last night watching Godspell. the DVD, that is. the original more righteous version than the fiasco i briefly encountered on Broadway last weekend. Godspell is a show for hippies, not hipsters. the movie version of the show is true to the score. the current Broadway revival is only an annoyance to the fans of the musical.

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“The dissolution of the United States of America.”

I think it was the BBC that listed this as one of their predictions for the new year of 2012.

Hey, why not?

i could use a complete obliteration of human history, in particular the current spate of technological advancements that have turned everyday human lives into hives of self-referential mental activity.

we all could use an occasional and complete obliteration.

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holy crap, am i really 44?

44. CODE 44.

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oh, look, another happy birthday text message from the RAID.

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