music deeply effects me.

so much that sometimes it hurts

After a morning of tedium I decided to do something different..

2025 me here: Images of a fake climate change parking ticket used to be here. Check it out, Greta Thunberg. I gave a shit, while you were still in diapers.

They’re a little hard to read but basically it’s a spoofed parking ticket outlining the hidden costs of vehicle ownership. The liabilities listed include, Climate change, Conflict over oil, Depletion of non-renewable resources, Environmental clean up costs, Time wasted in gridlock, Hindering bicycles and pedestrian activities, Noise pollution and Smog-related health problems. The amount of the fine is $29,800. (I love the quote on the back too.)

The ticket was included in the newest Adbusters, a Canadian based social activist organization and magazine. I really liked it so I scanned it, made an acrobat file with 4 tickets per-page, e-mailed it to myself and printed it out at a University library. (a side note, I print for free through a secret process and tool). I had planned to churn out 80 to 100 tickets but through a miscalculation I ended up with 400+ of them.

So I spent a couple hours this afternoon sneaking through parking lots and planting those bad boys on hundreds of windshields. So tired now. I brought my camera with the intention of capturing a frustrated motorist discovering a ticket but I think better judgment prevailed. The last thing you want when you find a parking violation on your car is to look around and see me smiling, taking your picture.

I was confronted twice, one was a very positive discussion with someone who asked me for extra tickets. The other was a man in marketing who thought I was wasting my time, that I should have been doing it in a more positive way. He recommended a happy face. I could tell he was just upset I got his SUV though. He was slipping profanity in and I kept reminding myself to smile. I would have been thrilled to receive one of those tickets on my car. A happy face that says, “Smile! Don’t pollute!” just wouldn’t appeal to me in the same way. All in all, I really enjoyed it. I wrote on some of the tickets, “Especially bad offender” for the big trucks or V8 cars.

I’ve been lightly dozing all summer. Eyes half lidded. Lethargic body sprawled out on whatever’s softest and closest. Since graduation I’ve been completely sleeping. System on coast. No exercise. Foggy consciousness. Everything half assed. Creative tubes empty. Motivational bucket has a hole. Day to day drifting. I can’t be happy in this state. I need to be jolted. Stressed. Challenged. Or else I nap. get bored. stagnate. Last night I felt something shift though. Late before I went to bed, after I shut the TV off in disgust and unscrewed the cable. Some clarity and drive returning. Better perspective and perception. Today I can feel the difference in the inflection of my voice, the energy in my muscles. It feels good. I’m waking up again. Hopefully it lasts.

In a week and a half I’m going to Boston. Just for five days while I have some time off. I’ll bring Merle back though for a couple weeks. Three weeks with Merle… Ahhahaahaha. While I’m visiting I’ll gauge how her parents feel about the prospect of taking me in for September. I, who they used to love. Things have cooled substantially though. I’ve been with Merle for so long without proposing, took such a long time with school. Much of my luster is gone. And they desperately want to get rid of her. Merle gets along worse with her family than with me. There are too many strong, flammable personalities in that household. And one insane one. I would rather live in Southie or some run down ghetto than there. But I need a job.

So yesterday during the tail end of a seemingly infinite shift, still thinking through fog, I decided to do some pseudo-random commenting. It’s been a few months since I indulged in this particular procrastination exercise. So browsing the xanga blogrings, I saw and picked the animal rights category under “science and nature”. The following blogring piqued my interest:

!!!!!!MONKEYLAND!!!!!!!

people who are devoted to monkeys!!! I LOVE MONKEY LAND!!!

Well that looked promising. I mentioned monkeys in my last post and who knows, maybe I’d even find a qualified member for the Monkey Calendar Owners Blogring. So I jumped into Monkeyland and opened up the ten most recently updated pages, carefully scrutinized their last posts, and did my best to leave a good solid, relevant comment.

Next up I noticed, still in the animal rights section:

GEORGE BUSH ROCKS!!!

Hey, everybody! I couldn’t find politics in the list of categories so I picked animal rights just for fun. This blogring is for people who support George Bush as our president.

Yuck. But I chose it anyway, hoping it was a tribute to a presidential rock collection. I went through the same process. Except leaving comments on these pages was considerably more difficult. More than half of them were centered around personal relationships with God. I find it remarkably sad that Republican and Christian seem to be synonymous in America. It’s such a strange phenomenon. Do issues like abortion and gay rights really trump the problems of homelessness, racial discrimination, and social aid? Admittedly, that’s based on some pretty general assumptions about Democrat and Republican values but that’s the perception. Moving on..

So while I was looking at these pages, a fierce, but sickly sounding German voice started yelling from somewhere in the back of my head, “It’s all slave morality!” “God is dead!”, “Overmannnnn!!!”. then I mentally squashed him. Shut up Fred, they’re trying to live good lives, trying to do the right things. Maybe they’ve got it right and people like us are inherently evil. Maybe they truly do feel a God. Maybe skeptical, open-minded chumps like us are fated to burn in their hell. I tuned him out enough before too much sarcasm seeped in. I think I got through eight of the ten pages. There were two I just couldn’t deal with.

At work.

I wasn’t looking forward to today, a tedious twelve hour dayshift. I went and hid in the break room immediately after taking over for the very haggard looking night guard. We’re supposed to be available at the front lobby desk as much as possible. I like to roam and hide though. When I tell residents that I’m quitting soon, they’re genuinely disappointed. Elusiveness is part of my appeal. Sighting me at the front desk is like spotting a rare…. black handed spider monkey. Which are the July calendar monkeys. But I can’t relate to these ones. Ugly, compared to the super cute mustached Tamarin who was yelling on the tree stump during June. There are two and they look like they bite. One is standing over another who is on his hands and knees. The standing monkey is gripping the shoulders of the kneeling one, gently guiding him down for what just very well might be fellatio. Or he could be holding him back from another monkey off camera, who just insulted him, “Let it go man, he’s not worth it.”

So anyway, I was down in the break room eating my donuts and listening to CBC radio when Seu Jorge’s version of Life on Mars came on. It was a nice way to start the shift. Mellow and rhythmic. I loved the Life Aquatic. Well, I loved the atmosphere of it, and that was enough. The music Wes Anderson chooses is excellent at adding emotional depth, a mixture of sweet and sad melodies. A minor spoiler follows (my favorite scene), where Zissou says to the interns, “Well, I’m not failing you. But you all get incompletes.”, after they all went though hell on his boat. I burst out laughing in the theater because he seemed to be seriously evaluating them, but you just know he didn’t give a rat’s ass about academia, he was just being mean for kicks. The line about being the leader of B team was good too. I have a Biology degree not just computer science. Maybe I should be looking for a job in Costa Rica or the Galapagos.

I hate TV. Mostly because of the commercials. I wish cable wasn’t integrated into rent here. While watching, I feel my soul drain out my left ear. It’s nice and warm just like water that comes out at night after swimming all day. It’s near impossible to form a complex or creative thought with this garbage on, too easy to vegetate. Fucking puns.

The July monkeys are a pair of black handed spider monkeys. Ugly, compared to the supercute mustached Tamarin who was yelling on the tree stump during June. They look like they bite. My Xanga sucks. Why does anyone comment here.

There are way too many students in the UCC right now that have skin the same pigment as a half ripened tomato. It’s absolutely comical. It’s the shade of red that comes after a week-end of tanning when you were fairly white before. 9-5 office working, holiday week-end tan guys. I shouldn’t make fun, this will probably be me in a year.

This place is packed again. I bought three donuts and a large coffee loaded with more sugar and creme. Beside me is a girl in a teal shirt having a lunch of strawberries, carrots, crackers and bottled water. She was alone until a tomato friend came over and sat down with her. And you know what he said? “You’re looking nice and tanned”. ha! Ha!!! She looks normal. You look like a lobster, I’m having considerable difficulty not staring at you. Your bright face has pushed all thought out of my head.

I’m at the University Community Center finishing breakfast at 1:30pm and I’m grateful that my student wireless access hasn’t been cut off yet. This place is pretty busy. The conversations that waft over are irritating. 80 averages. Internships. Grad school. Miscellaneous courses. Boring. I still look like I belong, probably couldn’t pass for an undergrad anymore though, maybe an unshaven philosophy grad, definitely not computer science. Well I gave my two month lease termination notice on the way over here. Whether I like it or not, I won’t feel like a student for much longer, even if I do still roll out of bed at 11. … and I just had a boring student conversation myself. Graduation. Career searching. Job opportunities in California and Vancouver…

Merle and I are fighting worse than normal (which is intermittent spurts of spectacular badness). Stress and uncertainty erode patience. She still hasn’t landed a teaching position for the fall, although has an interview with a Cambridge school this week. I hate how my autonomy is threatened by unemployment. It’s impossible to objectively evaluate our relationship under these circumstances. Yeah we’ve been together for a long time. With the exception of the first few months it has always been a rollercoaster. But just like Brian Shelby says, there’s no sweet without the sour right? The physical distance between us has kept us together. (ooh how profound!). It would have exploded long ago had we not had the buffer. All it takes is some time together to build resolve to escape. Merle Merle Merle.

…After re-reading my last post, I’ve come to the conclusion that I mangled the story. Dad does a much finer job with it, more effectively digging deep to evoke sympathy, really emphasizing how I ruined their night of fireworks, and what it’s like to be at the mercy of a mechanic a thousand miles away. For extra drama, I also should have thrown in that in Thunder Bay, the NBC, CBS and ABC affiliates are all carried in from Detroit. So growing up we were always exposed to news at 11 teasers about the nightly multiple homicide, drug bust gone horribly wrong or some other random violent horror story.

2025 me: As usual, the images that used to be here, are lost, sorry.

Here’s a Canadian goose enjoying Canada Day week-end.

And some shoes hanging from a telephone wire. I’ll stop being lazy and return comments later.

Welcome to a very special Canada Day post.

My dad has a story that he absolutely loves to tell about me. It’s probably his favorite because he gets to be the hero and it shows how much of a pain in the ass kids can be sometimes. It just so happens that today is the five year anniversary of this little adventure.

During the summer of 2000, I was planning a trip to go see Merle in Boston. At the time I was working in the major paper mill at Thunder Bay. It was 4 days on, 4 days off, shift work so I was able to trade with another student to get eight consecutive days off. I asked my dad if I could take our Jeep for the trip. He was reluctant but agreed to let me have it.

So I started out on the 25 hour trip, I had planned to drive to London, stay the night at my empty-for-the-summer apartment and drive the rest of the way the next day. It was all going well, I went around the north shore of lake Superior, crossed the border at Ste. Sault Marie and headed south to Detroit on Interstate 90. On I-90 I noticed everyone was going really fast. Everyone. Much faster than the 110 km/h that my dad recommended as my speed ceiling. So I sped up to 130 km/h (about 80 mi/h) to match everyone. Apparently the little Jeep couldn’t handle this and something broke. I was in the middle of the busy four lane Interstate when I noticed that I was suddenly coasting. Pushing the gas did nothing. So with panicked clarity, I escaped by drifting over to an exit ramp. Since I was coasting, I only had enough momentum to get halfway up the exit ramp. I parked it with two wheels up over the curb and got out.

Where did I break down? Why was the Interstate a busy four lanes? Because I was in Detroit. I supposed it’s a pretty good city for your car to break down in, but I could think of better places to be randomly be stranded on a Saturday night.

I tried and failed to get the Jeep moving. So I got out and walked with just my wallet to check out the neighborhood. The buildings were all pretty run down, it looked kind of like an old industrial area. It was near an exit ramp though and I was lucky to find a hotel a few blocks away. I phoned home just as my parents were about to head out and watch the fireworks to inform them that their little boy was stranded all alone in Detroit.

I described what happened and my daddy, the mechanic, suggested shifting the jeep into 4-low mode and see if it would move then. It did, but no faster than about 10km/hr. I got it to the hotel though. I stayed at the hotel and phoned Merle to get her panicking too. On Sunday morning I phoned about 50 garages before I located one that would take the Jeep (the mechanic, “Bob”, was actually out fishing but forwarded his calls out to his cell phone on the boat.) So I drove the Jeep to this really shitty looking run down garage, parked it in the driveway, slid the keys under the door and caught a taxi to the Greyhound station. I then took a bus to Boston leaving the Jeep behind. (It’s Pa and Bob’s problem now hehhehehe.)

So I had my vacation in Boston and took another Greyhound bus back to Detroit. (I was scheduled to arrive there at 3am.) Here is the sketchy part I’ve never told my parents, I got to the Detroit Greyhound station at 3am or so and went out to the cab area. A very large and intimidating black guy grabbed three of us off the bus and herded us into his cab. We all told him where we were going and he dropped the first two off. He headed out to where I was going and it took a long time. We had agreed on a fare of twenty bucks before hand and the longer we drove, the more he wanted. He said he wouldn’t go any further for fifty. I told him all I had was thirty (a lie), we argued, eventually he grunted and continued on in nasty silence.

When we finally got to the garage, I saw the Jeep and my heart lept with joy. I got out my wallet to pay the cab driver and he put the light on, trying very hard to see how much money I actually had (a lot). I hid it from his prying eyes, took out thirty and escaped.

I drove back 12 hours straight to Thunder Bay after 18 or so on the bus and had to work the next day. My dad was charged $2000 for a new Jeep transfer case and labour. My mom conviced him that since I was hard working student I didn’t need to pay them back. The End.

Home. Tired. Just got off my last of a block of nightshifts. Don’t have to do one for at least two weeks. I put MuchMusic on for white noise but it grabs my attention anyway. The videos permeate through well in this sleep deprived vegetative state. There’s one on right now with the chorus, “I remember the time you left for Santa Monica”. I like Local H’s, “No More California Songs” better. The Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has a new album out. So excited when I saw this cause their 2003 album,” Take Them On, On Your Own.” is one of my all-time favorites. I was disappointed with the new one though. They mellowed out and found Jesus or something. It’s ok I suppose but it’s stock emo rock just like hundreds of other indie bands do. Not raw, dark and bluesy anymore. The new, New Pornographers album is kind of a let down too.

I like in Grand Theft Auto San Andreas how you can set and play your own music. I’ve got twenty new rap albums that play on random. My neighbors probably aren’t as happy with that as I am cause I’ve been coming home at 7am after my nightshifts and blasting gangster rap and GTA sounds.  I like the fact that you have to play a black character even if he is a bit of a negative stereotype. I gave my guy a pink Mohawk to accentuate his red tinted shades. He struts around without a shirt because I’ve tattooed him as much as possible and maxed out his muscles at the gym. He’s wears his gangster green colors with track pants and green low tops. And he’s got a big ass Los Santos chain too. He’s the shit.

Ahhh I want to sleep but this little hot box apartment is unbearable. I haven’t been sleeping so well in this heat. I should have invested in some of those high power industrial strength fans five years ago. It’s an unjustifiable expense at this point. I’ll be moving out in 2 months heading out to parts unknown, forced to sell a bunch of stuff at rock bottom prices. IF anyone wants to buy some Ancient Undergrad memorabilia let me know.

Since I’m still waiting on my graduation photos, here are some random pictures that I took with my new camera.  Hopefully I don’t exceed the bandwidth limit on village photos.

It’s always a party on my scanner.

My exciting plants.

Maitland river mallards.

The metal greyhounds that keep me company on lonely nightshifts.

Taken from my Bayfield Hall balcony, Beaver Hall. I used to live there. This random image post was inspired by TheParkN8r.

2025 me here: Wish I still knew where these photos were.