Another 365

The calendar is funny. Well, our calendar is funny, since I’m not overly familiar with other calendars, but they do exist and this simple fact speaks volumes on the arbitrary ways in which humans break time up into smaller pieces. Existence is a much easier concept to grasp when one can think of their life in terms of a constant multiplied by a variable and different people and different cultures use different constants to achieve this end. Years, months, days, minutes, seconds and so on, in an infinitely decreasing trend which can never theoretically reach zero. But these are all words that don’t really mean much of anything outside the confines of our own skulls.

Until you die, at which point these units mean even less. Of course, there’s an endless birthday party in the sky waiting for you if you’ve led the good life and bought enough shit to keep the economy jumping during your stay in the temporal realm. If not, look out. Fire and other vaguely menacing things await.

Time is everything, though, isn’t it? Well, it sure is versatile.

It flies, it stands still, it disappears. It serves regret, wistfulness and debt.

It serves competition and greed, but is also the handmaid of sloth.

Time is a limited resource, which explains why time is also money — but that’s another waxy ball of constructs for another time.

More than anything else, though, time hinges on perception. When you’re happy it seems as though there aren’t enough hours in the day, but when you’re in the depths of a depression, time is a bitch goddess with extensive cosmetic surgery and expensive clothing, dangling a clock in front of your nose with one hand while shoving you back down with the other.

“Come on” she says, “why don’t you do something with your life? Anything. I don’t care. Just get off your lazy arse and move around once in a while. Hey! What do you think you’re doing? Back down with you now. Can’t have you getting up, lazy arse.”

Time is oppression, but I guess it’s all we’ve got.

Well, time and the weather.

In No Particular Order

Top tens.

This time of year, people love to take stock of things that have touched their lives or whatever over the previous twelve months and then arrange the results into digestible little chunks of data, usually numbered, bulleted or “in no particular order”.

I too like to engage in this activity, not that I really enjoy making top ten lists, but it really gives me something to do to take my mind off the New Year’s resolutions I didn’t keep last year and the ones I won’t keep in the coming year — which is pretty much all of them.

Ok. So here goes.

Top Ten Albums of 2007

Future of the Left - Curses; 2/3’s Mclusky, but 100%, uh, awesome.

Wire - Read & Burn 03; it’s Wire and it was released in 2007.

Baroness - The Red Album; further restoring my faith in metal.

Wu-Tang Clan - 8 Diagrams; best thing they’ve done since 36 Chambers, Raekwon and Ghostface be damned.

Black Lips - Good Bad, Not Evil; in a sea of boring, self-important indie-rock and watered-down Interpol clones, the Lips stick out like a sore thumb. Or a fat lip, even.

Ghostface Killah - The Big Doe Rehab; ok, so I don’t love this album, but it’s good. Not nearly as good as Fishscale or 8 Diagrams, but good.

Neil Young - Chrome Dreams II; Could have been a lot worse and “Ordinary People” really only feels like a brisk nine minutes if you don’t pay attention.

Queens of the Stone Age - Era Vulgaris; a lot of the appeal wore off after repeated listens, but a solid album nonetheless. Interesting for Josh’s reworking of post-punk guitar archetypes, if for nothing else.

King Khan and the Shrines - What Is !?; typecast as garage rock, but really a technicolour splash of power-pop, soul, r&b, punk and all that other good stuff. Plus, they’re sort of Canadian.

Pig Destroyer - Phantom Limb; I like to think of them as the White Stripes of metal, if Meg played blast beats and Jack was raised on a steady diet of Napalm Death.

Oh, and happy new year.