Well.  Seems last night about midnight or so I came to a fork in the road and took Mr. Berra's advice.  Truth be told, I've never been very comfortable trying to live my life within the extremely odd confines of a calendar I had no say in the development of.  What better time to bug out of it than last night when the attention of my friends and neighbors was thoroughly distracted by a bright shiny ball in New York?
     I still don't think they've noticed I'm missing.
     No matter.  My cat, Jester, is at my side, and is likely to remain there no matter what I chose to call the day, month, or year provided it has time enough for deli treats and head rubs.
     If only Christie Brinkley had been so easy to please, I might have been happy to follow her into any millennium she chose....

     I must admit, it was a passingly strange experience, watching everyone else happily plunge into their so-called January 2000 while I hacked a path to Jesterary 40 A.B. (After Birth), but I soon got over it.  While happy nothing untoward happened to anyone at midnight, I also found their lemming-like en masse abandonment of the 20th century quite unbecoming thinking human beings.  Had the calendar makers told them to jump into the 19th century rather than the 21st, would they have done that, too?  I shudder to think of the probable answer.
     Of course the event was presented in a rather more positive light by the Powers That Be - even an incredibly futuristic light by many - but come now.  How futuristic is it for us to continue to labor under the yoke of a terribly old calendar?  The trend of the last 500 years towards ever greater personal freedom and choice will inevitably put an end to the entire concept of a single, dictatorial system of time measurement before another 100 years have gone by as we fall ever more deeply into a chemically-enhanced solipsism perfect for a cyberspace where the only time that matters is Now.  A truly appropriate, plausibly futuristic introduction of the 21st century would have involved our destroying all clocks using "Intel Inside" hammers and Dick Clark's parting announcement at 11:45 p.m. that we all may drop the ball within us whenever, wherever, and as many times as we want - whatever makes us happy.
     Now that would have been a new era worth staying awake for!
     Instead, I saw performances by Billy Joel, the BeeGees, Aerosmith, John Fogerty, and Barbra Streisand.  And fireworks.  In other words, entertainers who peaked 20 or more years ago interspersed with an ancient Chinese invention.  Perhaps the very freshest musical artist I saw was Gloria Estafan, whose debut LP hit the charts back in that ominous year known as 1984.
     Had people only thought to bring their Pong games and their Deely Bobbers to the festivities, the evening would have been complete.
 
     But enough.  Jesterary is now here and it's most unbecoming of its inhabitants to spend excessive amounts of time bad mouthing others or running things down when there's virginal happinesses to be embraced and ideas yet unthought to think of.
     And plenty of chocolate to munch besides (even if it is a relic first made in the allegedly New World way back in 1765 - one simply cannot abandon all one's tongue-friendly friends merely because of their extreme antiquity).

     Whatever calendar system others choose for themselves (or allow their minds to be impaled upon) I can only hope that they are as joyful as I intend to be from here on out.