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.

Album Review

Every so often an album comes along that defines a generation, an album that works well with every drug and every mood; an album that gets scratched into your soul. Man.

This album is not one of those albums.

Following the gradual maturation of the previous two releases, this latest disc promises a return to the rougher sound and fury of the late 70’s Sun Ra/corporate christmas party-era Beach Boys/early Morbid Angel-indebted self-titled debut. Or so the press kit would have you believe. In actuality, this album sucks just as much as its immediate predecessors — not quite so much as to replace this text with a youtube video of a chimpanzee drinking its own piss, but almost.

You know full well that your friends were just playing nice when you gushed on and on about Joe Frontman’s recent flirtations with both vulgar libertarianism and refined post-Marxist post-colonial post-structuralist postism and how he manages to reconcile his bruised former punk-rock ideals with his current chain-restaurant jingle writing gig by posting amphetamine-fueled screeds on his Myspace. You know they were quietly rolling their eyes beneath the stubby brims of their Castro hats and absentmindedly fingering the carabiner keychains in their left jacket pockets while thinking about their upcoming student loan payment and that last Shins album.

But on the second through twelfth listens, you start to realize that maybe they’re on to something. Everything is polished to an MOR sheen, compressed into oblivion. The vocals are the highest in the mix that they have ever been, but Frontman doesn’t have much to say — half the songs are designed for American Eagle in-store mix CDs and the other half really are about how the moon looks during the month of June. Sure, astronomy is cool and all, but where’s the piss and vinegar? The anthems?

The “I’m 32, but I’m still an angry young(ish) man” statements of purpose?

I don’t know, but they’re not on this album.

So you inexplicably go to the mall and buy some new clothes to pacify yourself, looking for that certain sweater to remind you of when Frontman first spoke to you, singled you out in a crowded dressing-room wait area and scooped out a chunk of your prefrontal lobe with his not-quite-catchy-enough-to-be-cloying musical scalpel while your girlfriend tried on graphic tees. You know, when you were young — pre-first sexual disease, post-Marcy Playground album ownership.

When the wind was fresh, the sky was blue and the moon shone clear in the month of June. Kind of like the way I feel about you.

Babe-uh.

So don’t buy this album — as a fictional music journalist, I implore you. Don’t even bother downloading it. And if you already have, sell it or delete it.

And apologize to your friends while you still can.

Nights

I’m a vampire, baby, suckin blood from the earth - Neil Young

I am a vampire — rather, a vampire in reverse. Instead of staying up all night and sucking blood out of my surroundings, I stay up all night as my surroundings get fat off my blood. I do it for the paycheque, see? Easy. I sit on my arse doing repetitive tasks for an above-average working-poor wage, like we all do sometimes. Right? I have responsibilities to keep me interested, but they’re always the same responsibilities, every single night. On cue, done mechanically. The clerical equivalent of being the foreman’s lackey on the factory floor.

Oh God. I’m turning thirty next week. For real.

People tell me “the thirties are great!” without really elaborating on the source of this greatness. I suppose it is the last pre-40’s decade of one’s life, that last vestige of youthfulness before the unavoidable reality of “this is who I am, regardless of who I thought I would be” sets in for good.

But maybe it’s all bullshit.

Maybe the old adage that age is nothing but a state of mind holds true. Even if the late-teen’s to mid-twenties are the sweet spot for personality molding, we still conceivably change as life goes on. Nonetheless, most of us experience all the usual groundbreaking firsts during this period: death, birth, devastating professional sports team playoff losses and sex (the less said about the lot of these the better).

After that it’s just more layers of bitterness, skin and wisdom (best case scenario). Hair and teeth as well, but they all fall off at some point; we cover them up with reasonable facsimiles, but it’s never the same as the original — doesn’t have that new-body scent we all covet. I don’t mean that in a perverted way. I’m pushing thirty, but not yet a dirty old man.

But I digress.

Turning thirty might not be so bad. I never became a troubled but gifted rock and roll musician so I had no worries of dying at 27. I’ve never had a dangerous job, with the exception of convenience store clerk, so occupational death has never been a big risk.

Heart disease? Maybe. Working nights, combined with laziness, can lead to less than heart-healthy eating choices. Gas station food is not part of the Canada Food Guide, but it keeps me fatted for my nocturnal surroundings. The sunrise is always at the back of my mind.

So bring it on, next decade. You’re not so tough!

(feel free to insert a dance number here, if that’s what you were expecting)

Maybe I’ll write a novel; maybe I’ll go to jail. Maybe I’ll get in a fight and not break my hand.

Maybe not, who knows?