Orange, Green, Yellow, Blue

I won’t give you a call when I get back into town. I will cover up the tracks that lead to my doorstep, pull blinds across the apartment windows, make myself naïvely unobvious and certainly inaccessible. The phone will ring until its final chime, a stiff sounding lady will interject and you’ll hang up. You might try your hand at it again later or in a few days, but I will win and you will give up. The hours will slip, the days will slide, and the weeks will fade. Locks will freeze up, snow will fill in the stairwell and ice will blanket and stain glass panes. In the glow of sunlight filtered through shattered patterns and irregular shapes I will wait, wait for you to break your word and call again.

Shipping Station

I laughed an uneasy laugh as humorous anecdotes got thrown around the room. My ignorance, no, my indifference to the topic of conversation making itself quite obvious. I find it puzzling that through supposed nonchalance to a situation, I still found myself feeling minuscule; a fly on the wall, the kid hiding beneath the table listening in on his parents, a ghost at the party. All eyes on you, your eyes on all but me. We broke the tension through colored blocks. The obviously limitless possibilities afforded by such materials offset by the alarmingly constricted set of choices I'm now left with. A blooming flower, a lit fuse; to walk away or to listen?

A ride down the Main, picking up speed, the cool night wind pinching my cheeks. Grateful for this sweater over my shoulders, annoyed at the drunks yelling at a passing taxi, anxious for the empty streets ahead. Passed through cobblestone roads, beneath highway overpasses, by dwellings either new or old. Trucks at the brewery loading up for their late night deliveries, the smell of fermenting yeast, of barley malt meshing with hops. A sprawling bridge to the South Shore, a decaying piece of heritage at its foot, a mangled coat hanger on the way out. My heart beating faster, my tonsils pulsing, the blood rushing to my head. By docked boats, by converging rails, the way out is up the Main.

It's a shame you'll never know what I told those silent walkways, those inviting dockyards, that unfortunately abandoned shipping station.

Cartoons + Hockey + Civic Pride = Looting

I grew up on television. The tube was an ever present entity in our household and without it I firmly believe that I would not have the ease with the English language that I now possess. I guess I have Big Bird, Count Duckula and Mr. Dress-Up to thank for my bilinguilism. What a strange thing.

I recall loving morning cartoons. I'd get up as bright and early as I could, which usually meant a short while before 6 am, and I'd watch my favorite shows all the way til noon hour if I could. Would it stop there? Of course not! I'd record that colossal 6 hours of goodness to VHS tape and give it another watch come evening, skipping over the not so good parts. Those were the days.

Since moving out of my parents' house, television has been filtered out of my daily routine. On the one hand, my interest in the thing had waned over the years as nothing managed to capture my attention like the cartoons of old, and on the other, a modest studetn's salary makes it rather difficult to afford cable. Lack of cable makes for lack of quality programming, but that goes without saying. As of now, I can tune into Radio Canada with a minmal amount of static, and the CBC with a considerably large amout of weird shadows, fuzz and wobbly lines. Nothing more.

So this brings us to this evening. I imagine you're all wondering what purpose this abnormally long diatribe about television has. It's Saturday night in Montreal and I find myself considerably bored, the result of being a jerk who alienates any new friends I make all too easily. I recalled that it was NHL playoff time, so I decided I'd try to see if I could tune in to the game on one of my two channels. Luckily, the CBC provided and I now find myself strangely enthralled.

Along with my interest in television, I somehow lost my interest in hockey over as I grew up. As any good Quebec boy, I played hockey for a brief while as a kid. My dad really wanted it, he even went as far as being assistant coach for a while. Unfortuntaely, my laziness (remember my obsession with cartoons?), my flat feet and my fate as a chubby kid all contributed to make me a pretty shoddy hockey player. I eventually quit the whole thing, telling myself that if I couldn't be the best at something, I might as well not do it at all (a way of thinking that still sticks with me to this day.)

My current interest in the hockey game has nothing to do with faded childhood dreams however. No, you see, it has everything to do with latent civic pride. I can't explain it. I haven't felt a thing such as attachment to a city in the longest of times, yet there's something strangely comforting about the sense of complicity with a large group that something like a home team participating in the Stanley Cup Finals can illicit. As the fuzzy, shadowy players glide across the glitchy, speckled ice, dodging oscillating lines and shifting between monochrome and colorful, I'm filled with a weird sense of excitement. Every goal offers edge of your seat excitement. The Ottawa Senators are leading 5 to 3 as I type this and I couldn't be happier about it.

Of course this is all ephemeral. Hollow, fleeting and base excitement in my otherwise tepid life. Though I can't help but think on a larger scale. What if the Ottawa Senators win the Cup? Will the result be similar to what happened in 1993 in Montreal? Will a large number of angry mobs take to the streets? Will there be rioting, looting, pillaging, plundering, senseless violence, piracy of all kinds, etc... ? If so I'd like to take this moment and volounteer as angry mob leader. I believe that my superior intellect and lukewarm charisma would allow me to rule over groups of senseless yet vindictive fools with an iron fist. No? I've always wanted to lead an angry mob. It's been a dream of mine for almost as long as I've loved cartoons, and that's saying a lot. This story isn't going anywhere. Cartoons suck now. Good night.

Tour Recap Part 1

It's the dream of every single kid who's ever picked up a guitar with the intention of rocking and rolling: to hop in a tiny over-packed van with 4 other dudes, to live in abject poverty for an extended period of time and to play loud deafening music to crowds of no one night after night. Wait, that doesn't sound that appealing all of a sudden. In any event, I'm getting ahead of myself.

So the tour. I went on tour. City of a Hundred Spires went on tour. I've been asked questions ad nauseum about our little trek since we returned and I believe I usually offer the same answer to most: that it was a great experience with great highs and terrible lows. I usually add some half-hearted sentiment about how I imagine that such an outcome is pretty much par for first touring experiences. Yeah.

The first show of the tour is pretty much the perfect synthesis of the great highs/terrible lows dichotomy. On May 5th 2007, we were set to play at le Troquet in Hull with our tourmates in Tunturia. Hull is our (my) hometown and this was meant to be the show to send us off with warm hugs and considerable applause (the memories of which we'd have to nibble on for the coming weeks as hugs and applause would come sparingly from then on.) The show proceedings started off in our traditional ricketty manner. We got to the venue, loaded our gear in and then proceeded to scramble to try and finish burning off our CD-EPs. Being the fiends of last-minute that we are, we'd managed to finish assembling the packaging for our records, but we'd yet to burn the actual music to disc yet. Sitting at the bar with our laptops, we managed to finish up the EPs by early evening. People started filing in and the night was about to begin.

As a small à côté, I'd like to talk about the Jagaton for an instant. The Jagaton was our drink of choice throughout the entire tour, yet it's a drink that is known only to a select few. Equal parts Jagermeister and Tonic Water, the Jagaton gets its name from an amalgamation of the words Jagermeister and tonic, with some slight Carribean flavor added for fun. It's to be pronounced with a slight Jamaican accent. More on the Jagaton later in this story.

I took care of door duties that evening, sipping on many a Jagaton (ha! also: it should be noted that Simon Guibord, friend and Troquet waiter, makes a fine Jagaton) and greeting the overwhelming amount of people that came to see us that night. We somehow managed to fill up le Troquet, there was barely any standing room left. This was a high point without a doubt. It was great to see all these people who'd supported us over the years, all of them gathered there to send us off. Friends, acquaintances, family (my whole family came, great aunt included!) stood/sat around waiting for the music to begin.

Tunturia took the stage before us and played a great set. To say I was impressed with them, especially as they were only on their second live performance, would be an understatement. They played great tunes and turned out to be great dudes. This was a positive omen for that aspect of the rest of the tour.

Our set was decent I believe. We played loud and proud, even getting demands for an encore. Once again, the performance aspect of the show turned out to be a success.

We even managed to sell nearly forty copies of our CD-EP as well as about ten t-shirts. More victories than you can shake a stick at, I tell ya. But unfortunately, the positive stops there (isn't that far enough, I hear some of you asking?)

If there's one thing that rock n' roll is vulnerable to, it's certainly the emotions of the very flawed people performing it. Without going into detail, the ensuing evening resulted in a string of events that damaged not only the emotions of individuals in the band, but some of the relationships between band members. Shit? Shit.

After a great deal more drinks and great tunes (Wilco, D'Angelo.. to name a few) courtesy of Simon, we all parted ways and went home to be greeted by the arms of the last bit decent sleep we'd get for a while. Things seemed uncertain, I was pretty fucking worried. Don't you love how I'm writing this like some kind of thrilling serial? More to come soon.

So many doors but only one key

Fall. Tumble. Roll. Spin around. Look up dizzied. Get up on your feet. Find sure footing. Compose yourself. Let your stomach settle. Sigh.

I'm having trouble even approximating these last few months through thoughts, so it'll be a miracle if I can make any sense of them with words. Where to start? No event served as a catalyst for the mess that is my last little while, so I really would not know where to start.

I went on tour with my rock n' roll band. That's interesting enough. I managed to accomplish one of my dreams. To drop everything that may or may not have mattered and just head out in a van with some of my friends and play music in far away places. It was a nice experience that wasn't without it's low points, but that goes without saying. It was an elating experience and one that I'd like to repeat, making sure to put to good use the many lessons that I (we) learned over the course of the trip.

I'll probably put together something of a tour recap in the coming days when I get the chance. It'll most likely be a diary short story type of thing detailing some of the potentially humorous or dramatic events that we encountered.

The tour itself really came at the most ideal of moments. My emotional life had been one of great tumult over the last year and I finally managed to put an end to something that occupied my mind quite abit over someone who meant(means) a great deal to me. Of course, on par with most of my other romantic stories it ends in rejection. Though it should be noted that it's always that much harder when the way in which someone rejects you reminds you of why you liked that person so much in the first place. Anyhow, what I meant to say was that the tour managed to distract me from bruised emotions, and that is no small feat.

Since returning however, I've been quite rudderless. I'm unemployed, my lease is up in a month's time and I have no immediate ambitions or goals to look forward to. I've been filling my days watching the Harry Potter movies, playing basketball (and subsequently getting my court stolen by unruly children) and going on unnecessarily dangerous bike rides through the Gatineau park. So where to? Hopefully the next few days will give me a clue.

On the scholarly front, I can't complain too much. After leading a frightfully ricketty winter semester, filled with extravagant moments of procrastination, tremendous loss of motivation and low expectations, I managed to finish up with some of the best marks I've had over my university years. I'm puzzled yet pleased. Next up, my final year of journalism school. How strange; I'm conscious that I've learnt tons, but I have no idea how to apply this know-how. Maybe that's what the third year is for. Maybe the third year is intended to mould this shapeless form you have before you and make something worthwhile out of it. Maybe? You'll hear from me soon.

p.s. thank you to max for the title

So long goodnight, forfeit any fight...

Strange how a simple color can lead to nostalgia. How a shade or hue can have some faintly recognizable link to events, to a feeling, to a state of mind. How yellows, oranges, dark reds and the like will remind you of being younger, comfortable, care-free. Of bad pop music performed by dudes with horrible haircuts, of tacky terra-cota cups bought at roadside artisan shops on the way back from the country, of yellow sweaters, airports and kids that aren't you. And what of patio screened doors, gigantic (or what seemed like gigantic to your tiny self) in-ground swimming pools complete with diving boards and buoys? What of renting b-grade japanese Godzilla movies at a video store bearing a huge crown-wearing elephant as its effigy? Do you remember buying those Dick Tracy collectible cards that came with a stick of bubble gum? They were sold at the corner store that seemed worlds away to your tiny legs. Outside the corner store was a small fruit and vegetable market were people gathered to buy rutabagas or whatever strange turnip you wouldn't dare eat, convinced it tasted terrible. The people also talked about the weather and exchanged stories, but you were too concerned with running back home to beg for another shiny dollar to buy another pack of trading cards to pay attention to them. And why does yellow have anything to do with any of this, you ask? I wouldn't know. The same goes for orange or dark red, but that link is invariably there, you cannot deny it. How could you deny such a perfectly obvious connection? Is that connection leading you to other thoughts now? Of how lovely a certain someone looked to you after not having seen them in a month, the first time you saw that someone wearing her lovely new winter coat that she insists isn't that great because "everyone" has one just like it? Maybe, just maybe, in your ridiculous little head this is associated to christmas lights and to Dio's Holy Diver. You know very well how that association was made don't you? Then please, don't fret over how a few colors came to be associated with a flood of ideas; you're just too old and far removed from it all to remember. This is just like how pretty girls, christmas lights and metal classics will be pretty thinly linked at some point down the line, though you may not want them to be. Colors are a peculiar thing.